Owlspotting

President Bush delivered a nationally-televised address Monday night trying to get congress to make some progress on immigraton reform. The most talked about part of his speech was the plan to send National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border for one year–6,000 of them. This was arguably the most important piece of news in the speech and the one almost every story I have seen has led with. Here is the Washington Post lead:

President Bush said last night that he will dispatch 6,000 National Guard troops starting next month to help secure the porous U.S.-Mexican border, calling on a divided Congress and country to find “a rational middle ground” on immigration that includes providing millions of illegal workers a new route to citizenship.

But that’s not the full story. But Bush’s proposal calls for 156,000 National Guard troops because under Guard deloyment policies, the 6,000 would rotate every two-three weeks. This is a huge number of troops (a third of the Guard) and raises serious questions about how they can be efficiently rotated or even brought in, with the war in Iraq streching troops thin and US states needing them in case of natural disasters. So the lead above is misleading. Very few organizations led with this figure, which is much more accurate. The Columbus Dispatch was one of them:

About 156,000 National Guard troops from across the country would each serve two or three weeks to support border patrols along the U.S.-Mexican border beginning next month under President Bush’s plan.

The New York Times Magazine ran a spectacular cover story yesterday discussing the future of books in the digital age. This was not at heart a debate over the fate of paper and the loss of tradition, but rather a discussion of technology, its impact on culture and the (potential) fullfilment of the human dream of having all the knowledge in the world accesible at our fingertips.

When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there? The universal library should include a copy of every painting, photograph, film and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercials too. And how can we forget the Web? The grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead Web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone — the ephemeral literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.

Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine writes about the raging debate regarding digitizing the world’s books and creating the modern equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. This is pretty much the quest Google has set its sights upon and which is lingering in courts for reasons having to do (mostly) with copyright law.

This is one of the reasons that Kelly’s article is fascinating. As a journalist creating content I’ve never really though of copyright law as something else than a flimsy protection of my rights. Kelly does a great job of explaining the evolution of copyright law, its role in the development of mass produced media, and the purpose it serves for the entities working to protect these copies (publishers, record labels etc.)

Another reason the article is great is the discussion of the the possibility of connections (think Wikipedia) such a library would create through links–not only from book to book, but from words or paragraphs–and then through tags.

These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or “playlists,” as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual “bookshelves” — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these “bookshelves” will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages.

Kelly also points out the enormous number of books that the world has orphaned. We are not talking lost scrolls or manuscripts–these books are still available in libraries–but they are in legal limbo because nobody know who owns copyrights for them. Kelly writes: “The size of this abandoned library is shocking: about 75 percent of all books in the world’s libraries are orphaned. Only about 15 percent of all books are in the public domain. A luckier 10 percent are still in print. The rest, the bulk of our universal library, is dark.”

Google or other companies willing to scan these books can’t do it because they can’t tell if it’s legal or not. Books in the public domain are books for which the copyright has expired. Project Guttenberg has over 18,000 free books available for download. It’s easy to identify the copyright of the 10 percent of books still in print (and most of these books are digitized although not available free). But what about the rest? Google’s idea was to scan them and then allow the authors and publishers to opt out of making the work public if they feel this is a breach of copyright. That idea is still being debated by scholars, publishers, technology advocates and lawyers.
Kelly argues technology will eventually prevail and the copy business model will fail.

What is the technology telling us? That copies don’t count any more. Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library.

But who cares about books, right? Wrong. More than 7,000 people posted comments on the Times site a day after this story came out. All of us are waging this battle for knowledge in some way. And it’s not a straightfoward answers as to who (or what) should prevail. But it’s a great time to discuss the issue.

Update: ABC’s “Good Morning America” ran a story today with video taken during MDRI’s visits. The story–with the MDRI footage included–is here. “I don’t blame the staff, I blame the authorities,” the MDRI official tells ABC.
It’s about time Romania’s orphans returned on the international media scene.

Today, The New York Times printed a story about a report issued by the DC-based nonprofit, Mental Disability Rights International (MDRI) on the state of Romania’s abandoned children–a well-known and somewhat deserved stereotype. “[T]housands of children in government-run institutions are still living in conditions that are little changed from a decade ago,” writes the Times, summarizing the MDRI investigation.

Romanian officials said this is part of a smear campaign to derail Romania from joining the European Union in January 2007. They also say the data in the report is old. MDRI visited hospitals in Braila and Timisoara over the course of the last year with the latter visit occuring in February 2006.

I don’t believe there’s an anti-Romania conspiracy (a conspiracy also at fault for having Steaua face Rapid in the quarter finals of the UEFA Cup).

After all, if the children are doing so much better and the hospitals are rising to European standards, why the hell does the President of Romania go to Austria to be operated on for a herniated disc?!?

The full MDRI report is available here.

In a world dominated by e-mail, there is little excitement over letters, unless they happen to be sent from Iran. And the attention grabs front-page headlines around the world when the author happens to be the Iranian president and the recipient the President of the United States.

In the ongoing diplomatic back-and-forth over Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s letter to George W. Bush reads like the opening salvo of an 18th century intellectual debate on religion, the values of the nation state and the role of its leader.

I’d give anything to read a response from Bush along the same lines. Imagine your kids 25 years from now reading the bestselling collection of letters exchanged by A-bomb and G-Dub (you know, like Henry Miller and Anais Nin).

The blurb on the back would read: “Two great men, two different cultures, two different attitudes towards facial hair, one wicked pen pal friendship. Their exchanges not only chronicle a nuclear standoff, but discuss the merits of religion, baseball, Iranian cuisine, the death of manners and the frat-parties of yesteryear.” A reviewer from the Times would exclaim: “Better than the Bible and the Qur’an put together!”

The text of the letter was released today and it provides for interesting reading. The New York Times does an OK job at summarizing it, but there is nothing like reading the whole thing yourself. If Ahmadinejad wrote this himself, it’s great insight into the mind of the leader of one of the world’s most interesting countries (it has been called a “land of contradictions numerous times“).

Below is an excerpt from the letter — read it in full here or here (*.PDF).

The people will scrutinize our presidencies.

Did we manage to bring peace, security and prosperity for the people or insecurity and unemployment?

Did we intend to establish justice, or just supported especial interest groups, and by forcing many people to live in poverty and hardship, made a few people rich and powerful – thus trading the approval of the people and the Almighty with theirs’?

Did we defend the rights of the underprivileged or ignore them?

Did we defend the rights of all people around the world or imposed wars on them, interfered illegally in their affairs, established hellish prisons and incarcerated some of them?

Did we bring the world peace and security or raised the specter of intimidation and threats?

Did we tell the truth to our nation and others around the world or presented an inverted version of it?

Were we on the side of people or the occupiers and oppressors?

Did our administration set out to promote rational behaviour, logic, ethics, peace, fulfilling obligations, justice, service to the people, prosperity, progress and respect for human dignity or the force of guns.

Intimidation, insecurity, disregard for the people, delaying the progress and excellence of other nations, and trample on people’s rights?

And finally, they will judge us on whether we remained true to our oath of office – to serve the people, which is our main task, and the traditions of the prophets – or not?

A friend of mine asked me a couple of days ago to give his new project a link: Flame.ro. He asked not because millions of people are reading Owlspotting (they aren’t) but because Google is a fan of outgoing links. So I thought I’d do him one better and take a page out of the viral marketing playbook.

My friend runs a web solutions company operating out of two Romanian cities (one of which is my hometown) — one of those all emcompassing names for a company doing web programming, design, marketing and other assorted keyboard-driven things. Pretty standard stuff. But what is not standard are two ideas I praised him. They are worth — for their workplace-humor alone — actually paying the site a visit (gasp!)

1. In their job openings section they post 50 reasons (*.PDF) why you should join them. Actually, they say it’s “50 reasons why would you join us,” but I’ll let that one slide. Any company who can list 50 reasons you should work for them deserves a chance. Some of my favorite reasons: you would fit well in the team (and if not, they’ll make sure you do), confortable chairs (10 percent of the work experience, trust me), free oranges in the winter, free apples (summer) from the garden (Romanians love free shit and they love it even more when they can pick it from the garden) and powerful hardware/office tools (27/7 acces to drills and other manly power tools).

2. People sick of googling for “Romanian computer experts,” “hot Romanian programmers,” “Romanian geek porn,” or “CTRL+ALT+HOT Romania” can find everything they need in the About Flame page, which features mugs of hot men who can fix your computers and program the hell out of them along with the woman that keeps them focused.

Office culture — and the mockery of it — is a mostly American sport. But as multi-nationals take over the world and corporations plant roots in every open field from Bangalore to Babadag (one day…) the culture of these hierarchical monsters will embbed themselves in unsuspecting youths who have not cried rivers of tears over a Dilbert cartoon or an episode of The Office that might as well have featured their own daily experience.

I have been fortunate to avoid an Office Space workplace and reading Max Barry‘s brilliant noir satire Company is making me pledge (to myself) that I will stay away from any place that aims to “build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.”

So, all you Bangalorians and Babadagans waiting to drive your cars every morning into the underground garage of a high-rise that looks like a putrid stick of butter, think again. Look at every floor of the building you work in as an extra circle of hell. Dante set the limit for those a long time ago. It’s nine! Now you’ll understand why it sucks if you work on the 10th floor and management is holding an audition for secretaries at the indoor pool up on the 39th floor.

Here’s more wisdom from Barry’s depicition of the corporate ethos. Below is a beautiful and concise explanation of why employees — you, me and all the others not managing stuff — are annoying and should be avoided at any cost (read: at the cost of outsourcing).

The problem with employees, you see, is everything. You have to pay to hire them and pay to fire them, and, in between, you have to pay them. They need business cards. They need computers. They need ID tags and security clearances and phones and air-conditioning and somewhere to sit. You have to ferry them to off-site team meetings. You have to ferry them home again. They get pregnant. They injure themselves. They steal. They join religions with firm views on when it’s permissible to work. When they read their e-mail they open every attachment they get, and when they write it they expose the company to enormous legal liabilities. They arrive with no useful skills, and once you’ve trained them, they leave. And don’t expect gratitude! If they’re not taking sick days, they’re requesting compassionate leave. If they’re not gossiping with co-workers, they’re complaining about them. They consider it their inalienable right to wear body ornamentation that scares customers. They talk about (dear God) unionizing. They want raises. They want management to notice when they do a good job. They want to know whta’s going to happen in the next corporate reorganization. And lawsuits! The lawsuits! They sue for sexual harassment, for an unsafe workplace, for discrimination in thirty-two different flavors. For-get this-wrongful termination. Wrongful termination! These people are only here because you brought them into the corporate world! Suddenly you’re responsible for them for life?

About a month ago, an editor turned down a story pitch I made. I believed (and continue to believe) that the story was indicative of today’s media landscape and the information consumption patterns of an Internet-addicted generation. Pitching the “Internet video” story to the editor (for the third time) I said:

I’m going to try and convince you once more. The phenomenon is huge. The one-year-old YouTube has 20,000 video uploaded each day and more than 25 million clips are watched daily. Two other giants are iFilm and Google video. This has exploded because of the expansion of broadband and the price drops for digital equipment. Some these videos are clips from TV, ads or movie trailers, but the most (and the most successful) are amateur videos showing people dancing, spoofing pop culture phenomena, singing, and doing other asorted weird stuff. What has made the popularity of Internet video soar even more are video blogs or vblogs. Some of these are actually daily shows of a few minutes with specific topics. For example, I am a huge fan of www.rocketboom.com, a daily video blog that “presents video oddities and animations, report on robotics and other technologies.” Despite being funny and well produced, another reason for the popularity of Internet videos is the Video Ipod which can play all these!

After the story was turned down once more, I decided to stop pushing for it. Wallowing in misery, I wondered whether I should post these ideas on the blog and chronicle their life as they are executed by other publications. I have had dozens of story ideas shoot down in the past couple of years because any number of editors didn’t see anything new or newsworthy in them. Sometimes they were right, sometimes I made an awful pitch, and sometimes they were wrong. I did have some victories). Just last week, Rocketboom was featured in Business Week, Wired and Rolling Stone. Give it a couple of months and it’ll be in the features section of every major metro paper in the United States.

I was right on that one.

And I was right on another story — my personal favorite for more than a year — one I pitched a few times (yes, it got shot down) and one I wrote about a few times when this blog was born. This story was about indie-snobs, the phony elitism of indie rock music and the phenomenon of loving a band not for its music, but for the hipness associated with being one of the lucky few to have heard of it.

In June 2005 I directed my rants at what I saw was the driving engine in this re-organization of the music validation paradigm: Pitchfork. At that time, I had recently seen a Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah show. The band was still unknown and I happen to stumble upon it purely by accident. The next day I was reading some music blogs and realized I had seen the new “IT” band (the new Arcade Fire in the context of the time):

Let me return to my comments about musical condescension and musicitas. A friend who read my post directed me to Pitchfork’s official review of Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah. It was a predictable read that says less about the music than about the indie-rock climate the record is being reviewed in.

“There’s something really refreshing about stumbling across a great band that’s trembling on the cusp without any sort of press campaign or other built-in mythology– you actually get to hear the music with your own ears,” the review says.

So it’s not about the band’s music as much as it is about the band’s status. They are still relatively new, they are not that easy to come by and they haven’t signed with Sub Pop Records (The Shins, Postal Service and now Sleater-Kinney) yet. Yes, Clap Your Hands might make good music, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The review goes on:

“While a lot of bands view the promotional apparatus as a necessary evil, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah prove that it’s still possible for a band to get heard, given enough talent and perseverance, without a PR agency or a label. Indie rock has received a much-needed kick in the pants, and we have the rare chance to decide what a band sounds like of our own accord before any agency cooks up and disseminates an opinion for us. Damn, maybe this is how it’s supposed to work!”

That being said, Pitchfork takes it upon themselves to slap a 9.0/10 on the record and automatically become the PR agency that validates the band. But they won’t assume responsibility for pushing the band, because that would also imply assuming responsibility for reviewing the band’s second record (which will most likely see a larger release) by listening to the music first.

I’m not saying Pitchfork is the hypocritical deux-machina of the indie-rock game, but it’s another blade of grass in a field populated with music snobs, who would take status over music any time.

By then Pitchfork had become a player in deciding what makes it big and what fails in modern music. It was subtle, because it was hard to believe music consumers streamed to the site en-masse. Then, as I began discovering the ever-growing field of MP3 blogs, I understood how the Pitchfork verdict spread so fast and so far.

I attempted to do a story on the phenomenon and actually pitched it as one of 10 story ideas to an editor last fall. Here is what I wrote — something I elaborated on in subsequent conversations:

There is hardly a musical genre out there today that exudes the snobbishness and initiates-only feel of indie-rock. A genre dominated by mellow riffs and heart-on-your-sleeve lyrics offers the most brutal rises and falls in music. Most bands are a one record wonder because of fans who abandon them after a CD gains critical acclaim. For indie-snobs it’s not about the music, but rather about the state of being cool and supporting an unknown project. Once that band gains wide recognition, they are suddenly passé. Not because they sound different (most don’t), but because their initial fans don’t want to share them with the masses.

It didn’t work.

Then a couple months ago I felt slightly vindicated when Bill Wasik, the inventor of the flash mob, wrote about his experiment in a fantastic Harper’s article. Wasik’s experiment with the flash mob was based on his experiences with the hipster world, which provited the ripe climate for Pitchfork’s growth and the formation of the indie rock hierarchy.

The hipsters make no pretense to divisions on principle, to forming intellectual or artistic camps; at any given moment, it is the same books, records, films that are judged au courant by all, leading to the curious spectacle of an “alternative” culture more unanimous than the mainstream it ostensibly opposes. What critical impulse does exist among their number merely causes a favorite to be more readily abandoned–whether Friendster.com, Franz Ferdinand, or Jonathan Safran Foer–it inevitably will be. Once abandoned, it is never taken up again.

This is the phenomenon I wanted to write about and although it’s present throughout the culture, I wanted to keep the spotlight on music. After the Harper’s article I made another attempt to push my story, articulating my position more clearly and probably using more examples than I did the first time around. It didn’t work–and just like the Internet video story, I knew someone would come in and do it.

And someone finally did.

Journalistically, one might say I buried the lead. This post was inspired by an article in today’s Washington Post by J. Freedom du Lac headlined “Giving Indie Acts a Plug, or Pulling It.” A better description of the article is given in the headline on the jump page: “Pitchfork, Making Hay as an Indie Arbiter.” Du Lac has written the story I wanted to do for a year (it’s even illustrated with a photo of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) and he has done it well.

Now that the story has made the front of WP’s Arts section, it will trickle down to the more conservative press outlets (a group that includes most of mainstream media), which was probably waiting for an endorsement by the top dogs to tackle the subject. (As you can probably tell, a version of hipsterdom is alive and kicking in the journalism world.)

Here are a couple samples from du Lac offering a good summary of what the Pitchfork phenomenon has done to the music world: “(…) Pitchfork, the hilariously snarky, oft-elitist, sometimes imprenetrable but entertaining and occasionally even enlightening Internet music magazine, which may or may not be the new (…) Rolling Stone.” And: “Pitchfork has achieved a sort of mythical status, like an indie-rock yogi: Readers climb the digital mountaintop to see what wisdom (and written weirdness) its team of freelance wroters might dispense…”

So, I have lost another story today… I can’t wait to see what story I will lose next.

My brother proudly told me yesterday that along with his friends they discovered “asphalt sleighing.” “Ne-am dat cu sania pe asfalt, ba,” he said. I asked him if there was any visual proof (like other Romanian provide) and he sent me five videos that chronicle this new night-time Romanian practice.

How did they do it? Well, one dude in the group apparently has had this desire to have his sleigh pulled by a car for a while; he also claims it’s an original idea. So, they waited for night fall, drove up to a deserted road next to the Targu Mures zoo, took a metal sleigh (which down the a snow slope are more dangerous and faster than wooden ones), tied it to an old Volvo hatchback and rolled along.

Below is an screen grab of my brother in the “hot seat.” Click on it to see the video and click here to see the whole package. I circled the sparks that fly like crazy — although you have to watch the clip to get a sense.

Alright, alright… here is more proof:

I just saw my Steaua clobbered by Middlesbrough in the semifinal (Final Four) of the UEFA Cup and I’m pissed. I skipped work, drank vodka by myself in a DC dive that broacast the game and actually paid $5 to see 11 idiots huddle and tremble in their own penalty area like lost sheep. Steaua lost 4-2 after leading 2-1 at half-time. They had won 1-0 last week in Bucharest.

So, how do you define an idiot? An idiot is part of a team that allows three goals in one half. This idiot can often be found playing for a Romanian soccer team if not the national squad itself.

I know — I’m angry and I’m using hyperbole. But I earned my right to do both by having to watch this game.

It’s been three years since I’ve seen Steaua play a game from start to finish. When I left Romania in 2003 they’ve had a consistent record of blowing games at the European cup level. This season was different — something came over Romanian soccer and we had two teams in the final eight. Steaua itself came 45 minutes away from the final and then… as on command, they remembered their past 10 years of sucking.

They rushed back to their own half, waited there like sheep on crack and allowed the English to pummel them.

I guess I wanted to post something because apart from my anger at the way Steaua played, I’m trying to anticipate the anger that overwhelms me after soccer apologists in my country take the mic. These people usually say the grass was wet, the referee was against us, key players were injured or the beds in Steaua’s hotel were too soft. There is no one else to blame but the 11 terrified sheep that were on the field that second half and the coaches who thought that was a smart strategy. You can’t blame anyone when you lose a semifinal after being 3-0 up.

I knew there was a reason I switched to watching American football. No matter how many games the Redskins lost in the final minutes (and they lost a bunch last season) I was never as emotionally invested as to yell my heart out in anger.

Romania is heavily featured on YouTube, the immensily popular amateur video site. A search today revealed more results than I was willing to scroll through. Below is a compilation of some of the tings I’ve seen. The obvious thing to note is that Romanians like to shoot and upload videos of themselves and/or their friends.

The amateur videos range from funny to depressing to amusing to down right weird: singing, dancing, beating, ass showing, flashing, whatever. Click on any of the videos below for the full experience.

Three young women give props to “Romania ’06” and sing a compilation of American golden oldies.