Ben Greenberg

On Monday evening, I got a call from my friend Jesse who had been down at Occupy Boston earlier in the day. Mayor Menino and Boston Police were telling the protestors that they could not stay at the second camp they’d started a block away from the original Dewy Square site, on the Rose Kennedy Greenway; the protestors had till midnight to leave the second site at Atlantic Avenue and Pearl Street or they’d be forcibly removed and arrested. Jesse asked me if I’d go there with him to be unofficial observers and document the goings on should the police take action against the protestors. I’d been wanting to visit Occupy Boston to learn more about it firsthand, and this seemed important to do, so I said yes.

Jesse shot stills with his SLR, and though I brought one, too, I focused on posting in real time via Instagram and Justin.tv. But before I highlight any of that material, I want to direct you to this great 10 minute documentary about Monday night, by Michael Gill.

Gill captured many moments that I also witnessed and shows what it was like there very well. My iPhone video streams are much lower quality and, of course, unedited, but at various times I was broadcasting live to over 3000 viewers, after the police had made most official media leave the scene, so they served a function. One thing not shown in Gill’s film was how, after the camp was cleared of protestors, police and sanitation workers disposed of all items remaining—tents, sleeping bags, bedrolls, signs, chairs, supplies—in two sanitation trucks. Here’s some footage:

Watch live video from minorjive on Justin.tv

Here’s a small slideshow of scenes I captured with the the camer on my phone.

More information about night of October 10 and early morning hours of October 11 at Occupy Boston:

• Boston police move in on protesters on Greenway, scores arrested (Boston Globe)
• BPD Arrest Protesters From ‘Occupy Boston’ (WBUR)
• Mayor Menino Responds To Occupy Boston Arrests (WBUR)
• Statement from the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy (PDF)
• October 10, 2011: We Will Occupy (Occupy Boston)
• Mass Arrests of Occupy Boston Protestors (Occupy Boston)
• Images from the Takedown (Occupy Boston)
• Boston Police Brutally Assault Occupy Boston (Occupy Boston)
• More on Occupy Boston Arrests (Occupy Boston)
• Occupier: What Happened to Me in the Police Raid and Arrest of 141 Peaceful Protestors (Occupy Boston)

I started this blog in 2004 to write about things like this photo of my father and James Baldwin in Birmingham, AL in 1963 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

In time, however, blogging led to investigative journalism about unpunished lynchings and other violence from the civil rights era.

In the summer of 2007, I returned to Mississippi to look into violence that had taken place near Woodville in the southwest part of the state. After I interviewed an NAACP official, a black woman in her early 70′s who owned a shop in the town center stopped me on the street. “You a reporter?” she asked. Before long, she and her husband were sharing stories of violence against blacks in Woodville in the ’50′s and ’60′s. They asked if I had ever heard of Man Walker whose given first name was Clifford or Clifton. He was shot in his car on Poor House Road and they thought his children lived nearby in Louisiana.

Since I was on my way to Hattiesburg to do research in the McCain Archives at the University of Southern Mississippi, I couldn’t stick around to learn more. Yet at the archives, I found a number of Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol reports on the Clifton Walker case. The reports were riveting. I had to investigate.

I’ve located a number of Walker’s family members and have been working closely with three of his children since 2008. One daughter, Catherine, has joined me in questioning those with possible involvement in her father’s murder. On one occasion there was a surprising moment of reconciliation between Catherine and a member of a white Woodville family. Walker’s murder had allegedly been planned at this family’s truck stop, and at the end of the interview with the elderly business owner and his daughter, Walker and the other daughter hugged. Catherine had not expected to meet whites from Woodville willing to talk about the murder. This small but significant step toward the closure that she and her siblings need gave us a taste of what might be possible for her family and for this small backwoods Mississippi community that is still largely committed to silence and to protecting murderers.

I tell this story in the Fall 2011 issue of Nieman Reports, which is devoted to cold case reporting. The issue also includes stories by my colleagues from the Civil Rights Cold Case Project:

• David Ridgen, It Takes a Hard-Driving Team to Uncover the Truth of a Cold Case, The Bonds of Our Reporting: The Civil Rights Cold Case Project
• John Flemming, Compelled to Remember What Others Want to Forget
• Jerry Mitchell, The Case of the Supposedly Sealed Files—And What They Revealed
• Stanley Nelson, Who Killed Frank Morris?
• Hank Klibanoff, Here’s What People Want to Know: Why Do Journalists Tell These Stories?
• Robert J. Rosenthal, The Enduring Ambition of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project
• Paul C. Johnson and Janice L. McDonald, When Lawyers and Journalists Share Common Cause

The issue also includes stories by Simeon Booker, Bill Minor and Jan Gardner.

I’m honored to again be one of the photographers exhibiting photos of the HONK! Festival at the Inside/Out Gallery, in the windows outside the Davis Square CVS in Somerville, MA. The photos are on display now through the first weekend in October when the 6th Annual HONK! Festival of activist street bands comes to Somerville and Cambridge. Below are three of the photos I have on display, along with photos by Jesse Edsel-Vetter, Greg Cook, Chirs Yeager and Mike Dannenhauer. Stop by and see our photos, if you come through Davis Square. Visit honkfest.org for a full schedule of events and more information about the festival and bands.

New York Times reporter Shaila Dewan blogged yesterday that the Justice Department has declined to reopen the Malcolm X murder case.

“Although the Justice Department recognizes that the murder of Malcolm X was a tragedy, both for his family and for the community he served, we have determined that at this time, the matter does not implicate federal interests sufficient to necessitate the use of scarce federal investigative resources into a matter for which there can be no federal criminal prosecution,” the department said.

This was follow up to her reporting in the Times on new attention to the Malcolm X case and new calls to investigate on the heels of the late Manning Marable’s recent biography of Malcolm X and in light of the successful prosecutions of  decades old civil rights murder cases in the South.

I’ll explain why I think the funding issue is a bit of red herring in a minute. The more important question, which Dewan raises, is why isn’t the Justice Department taking up the murder of Malcolm X under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act of 2008? “The department, without elaborating, said the crime did not fit the parameters of that act,” Dewan reports.

If the Till Act is applied to the Malcolm X case, jurisdiction and funding would not be concerns. A House Judiciary Committee report (PDF) found that though federal prosecution may not be possible in many of the civil rights era crimes addressed by the Act,

Concurrent federal jurisdiction is necessary only to permit joint state-federal investigations and to authorize federal prosecution in those instances in which state and local officials are either unable or unwilling to pursue cases that adequately address the federal interest in fighting bias crime.

This Committee nevertheless expects the federal government to still play a vital role in these prosecutions. First, in terms of investigations, in 2006 the FBI began a comprehensive effort to identify and investigate racially-motivated murders committed during the 1950s and 1960s. The FBI has already started to accumulate information from outside organizations and to follow those leads. We expect this initiative to continue and to expand….

in terms of resources, the federal government has the resources and expertise to provide valuable assistance to state and local entities pursuing state prosecutions. In the Emmett Till case, although no federal jurisdiction was present, the Department conducted an investigation into a local matter because Till had traveled from out-of-state into the state in which he was murdered. The FBI reported the results of its extensive investigation to the District Attorney for Greenville, Mississippi. We expect such cooperation and assistance to continue and to expand into other scenarios. While maintaining the primary role of state and local governments in the investigation and prosecution of violent hate crimes, the bill would authorize the federal government to work in partnership with state and local law enforcement officials and to serve an important backstop function with regard to a wider range of hate-motivated violence than federal law currently permits. (Emphasis added)

Furthermore, FBI spokesperson Christopher Allen has insisted to me in an email that “No case” taken up under the Till Act or the FBI Cold Case Initiative “has suffered as a result of lack of funding.”

So if under the Till Act, the FBI is mandated to assist in investigations even where there is no federal jurisdiction, and there is no funding obstacle to federal involvement, then the real question is why won’t the Department of Justice consider the Malcolm X murder under the Till Act?

For one, it is not clear if the killing could be considered a civil rights crime because both the perpetrators and the victims are black.

[Historian David] Garrow said the definition of a civil rights crime should not be too narrow. “When a major civil rights leader is assassinated, I’d like the civil rights division to be interested, regardless of the color of the gunman,” he said, referring to the federal unit.

Some experts say the Justice Department’s participation is crucial because the F.B.I. and the New York Police Department had Malcolm X under surveillance at the time of his death, raising questions about whether law enforcement officials had knowledge beforehand of the assassination plot.

It would be a shame if the color of the gunmen became a convenient cover for not examining possible failures of law enforcement to stop a crime officials may have had foreknowledge of; it would also be a shame if avoiding a full investigation allowed a known, alleged perpetrator who currently lives free to evade prosecution.

Here also are two of the thornier obstacles to resolving any number of civil rights era cold cases: black involvement in and government responsibility—direct or indirect—for the crimes. Though the approach to these issues in southern cases has largely been inadequate, it may yet be more palatable to many to consider involvement of blacks who were more widely subject  to subtle and overt forms of coercion in the South and to call up stereotypes of racist southern law enforcement and lawmakers who participated in and/or fomented and supported Klan violence.

The Till Act is meant to address the very problem that most of the cases it covers were never fully investigated at the time they occurred.

David Garrow, a historian and a King biographer, obtained and reviewed the Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Malcolm X in the 1990s. He said it was probable that reams of wiretaps of the Nation of Islam had never been combed for clues. In 1980, the bureau said it had never investigated the assassination.

Without a full investigation, justice will not be done and the truth cannot be known.

(Cross-posted on Colorlines.)

Today and tomorrow in Neshoba County, MS is the annual memorial for James Chaney, Michael Schewerner, Andrew Goodman, and all civil rights era racial murder victims. I first attended in 2005. It is an important, meaningful event that is also an opportunity to meet and listen to famous Civil Rights Movement veterans and many unsung heroes of racial justice.

There’s an announcement with details posted on the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement website. Attached is a more recent and detailed press release (PDF) sent to me by the organizers. The event is free and open to the public.

The Alabama Senate joined the state House yesterday in passing a resolution for an official state apology to Recy Taylor, 91, who was raped by seven white men in Abbeville, Ala., in 1944. According to the AP:

The Senate gave final approval Thursday on a voice vote to a resolution that expresses “deepest sympathy and deepest regrets” to Recy Taylor, now 91 and living in Florida. She told The Associated Press last year that she believes the men who attacked her in 1944 are dead but that she still wanted an apology from the state of Alabama.

The House approved the resolution last month. It now goes to Gov. Robert Bentley, who said Thursday he’s not personally familiar with details of the case, but sees no reason why he wouldn’t sign it.

Taylor’s case has for decades lingered as an icon of the sexual violence black women suffered from white men in the South. At the time, her case became a rallying point for a movement to end impunity for that violence. Today, federal law enforcement officials have reopened dozens of civil rights era murders, but have not revisited the rapes and sexual assaults that went un-prosecuted.

Taylor, who now lives in Florida, is not well enough to be interviewed, but I spoke to her brother Robert Corbitt, who has been her spokesperson since The Root first reported in February that Taylor wants apologies from the state and from the county and city where the rape occurred and was covered up. Corbitt is currently a resident of Abbeville.

“I’m glad to know that it’s gone that far,” Corbitt said. “I’m waiting for the ink to dry and then I’ll feel like it’s official.”

Recent public interest in Taylor’s case has followed the September 2010 publication of Danielle McGuire’s book, “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance,” which tells Taylor’s story. AChange.org petition drive and coverage by Colorlines and others has spurred Rep. Dexter Grimsley and other Alabama officials to respond swiftly to Taylor’s request for formal apologies.

A month ago, Corbitt attended a press conference held by Abbeville Mayor Ryan Blalock with Grimsley and other city and county officials, who offered personal apologies to Taylor and discussed issuing official state, county and city apologies.

“Our representative [Grimsley] said from the beginning that he was going to push it hard; he kept his word,” said Corbitt. “I’m still waiting for the mayor to do whatever he’s gonna do.”

County and city apologies are also in order, Cobitt explained, because in 1944, in the face of a state investigation, the Henry County sheriff and an Abbeville policeman took part in covering up the rape.

Corbitt hasn’t heard from Blalock or any other local officials since the press conference last month. “A personal apology and a official one is two different things,” said Corbitt.

(Cross-posted at Colorlines.)

The Alabama House made an historic move Tuesday evening towards a state apology to Recy Taylor, 91, who was gang raped by 7 white men in Abbeville, Ala., in 1944. The AP reports:

The House on Tuesday approved by an apparent unanimous voice vote a resolution that expresses “deepest sympathies and solemn regrets” to Recy Taylor….

Her 74-year-old brother, Robert Corbitt, who still lives in Abbeville, said he was happy his sister was finally going to get what she wanted — an apology.

The strongly worded resolution said the failure of Alabama law enforcement and the court system to prosecute the crimes “was, and is “morally abhorrent and repugnant.”

It was introduced by freshman Rep. Dexter Grimsley, D-Newville. It now goes to the Senate, where Democratic Sen. Billy Beasley, D-Clayton, who also represents Abbeville, said he expects it to pass.

“The most important thing is to say we are sorry and we hope you are doing well. … It’s important we move on in Alabama,” Beasley said.

Grimsley’s resolution was spurred by revelations of Taylor’s story by Danielle McGuire in her book “At Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance,” published last fall, and by a Change.org petition to Alabama officials, launched in February after The Root’s Cynthia Gordy reported that Taylor, now living in Florida, and her brother wanted the state of Alabama and the city Abbeville to apologize for officials’ inaction and obstruction of justice. After Colorlines broke the news earlier this month that Grimsley was planning to introduce a resolution, signatures skyrocketed on the petition. Grimsley, Abbeville Mayor Ryan Blalock and other local officials held a press conference, where they made personal apologies to Taylor and declared that formal apologies were on the way.

Taylor’s case has for decades lingered as an icon of the sexual violence black women suffered from white men in the South. At the time, her case became a rallying point for a movement to end impunity for that violence. Today, federal law enforcement officials have reopened dozens of civil rights era murders, but have not revisited the rapes and sexual assaults that went un-prosecuted.

Grimsley’s resolution reads in part (scroll down for full text):

WHEREAS, this deplorable lack of justice remains a shame for all Alabamians; now therefore,

BE IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF ALABAMA, BOTH HOUSES THEREOF CONCURRING, That we acknowledge the lack of prosecution for crimes committed against Recy Taylor by the government of the State of Alabama, that we declare such failure to act was, and is, morally abhorrent and repugnant, and that we do hereby express profound regret for the role played by the government of the State of Alabama in failing to prosecute the crimes.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That we express our deepest sympathies and solemn regrets to Recy Taylor and her family and friends.

Grimsley “now vows to take the official House resolution to her Florida doorstep,” according to Change.org’s Alex DiBranco.

“I’m excited for the family,” Grimsley told Change.org following the vote. “I’m excited that I could have the resolution introduced and at least get it through the House, that I had the opportunity to do something for a resident of my district and a former resident of my district.”

“It’s not ‘justice,’ but a big step and all she’s asked for,” The Root’s Gordy tweeted this morning. I concur—though it’s not quite all Recy Taylor has asked for. There is still no news regarding an official apology from the city of Abbeville or from Henry County.

*This article has been altered since publication.

(Cross-posted at Colorlines.)

FULL TEXT OF HOUSE RESOLUTION (download as PDF)

EXPRESSING REGRET FOR THE STATE OF ALABAMA’S INVOLVEMENT IN THE FAILURE TO PROSECUTE CRIMES COMMITTED AGAINST RECY TAYLOR.

WHEREAS, on September 3, 1944, in the small Town of Abbeville, Alabama, Recy Taylor, a young Black mother was walking home from church with her companions when she was confronted by a car of seven white men; the men forced Ms. Taylor into the car at knife and gunpoint, drove off, and six of the seven men brutally raped her in a deserted grove of pine trees; and

WHEREAS, Taylor’s younger brother, Robert Corbitt, of Abbeville, said he remembers the day his sister was raped 67 years ago like it was yesterday, saying the police tried to blame his sister, and the family was harassed so that he was not allowed to play in the front yard; and

WHEREAS, an all white, all male grand jury failed to bring any charges for indictment; and then Governor Chauncey Sparks ordered a second investigation, and the grand jury again failed to indict; and

WHEREAS, the case got the attention of NAACP activist Rosa Parks, who interviewed Taylor in 1944 in Abbeville and later recruited other activists to create the “Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor”; and

WHEREAS, in an interview last year with the AP, Recy Taylor, who now resides in Florida, said she eventually gave up trying to bring charges against the men; and

WHEREAS, this deplorable lack of justice remains a source of shame for all Alabamians; now therefore,

BE IT RESOLVED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF ALABAMA, BOTH HOUSES THEREOF CONCURRING, That we acknowledge the lack of prosecution for crimes committed against Recy Taylor by the government of the State of Alabama, that we declare such failure to act was, and is, morally abhorrent and repugnant, and that we do hereby express profound regret for the role played by the government of the State of Alabama in failing to prosecute the crimes.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That we express our deepest sympathies and solemn regrets to Recy Taylor and her family and friends.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That it is the specific intent of the Legislature that reparations shall not be considered or made regarding past actions of the government of the State of Alabama concerning the lack of prosecution of the crimes committed against Recy Taylor, and that this resolution shall not be used or construed in any manner whatsoever as support for such reparations.

Yesterday, Abbeville city and Alabama state officials held a press conference at the Henry County Courthouse to express their sympathy for Recy Taylor, 91, a former Abbeville resident who was gang raped there by seven white men in 1944. But the officials made clear the apologies were personal rather than on behalf of the city or state. That leaves Taylor and her family still awaiting some modicum of justice for an assault that, then and now, has become a symbol for untold numbers of rapes southern black women suffered throughout the Jim Crow era.

Last week, I reported for Colorlines on a building effort, led by Taylor’s family, to win an apology for the failure to meaningfully investigate and prosecute her assailants.

Local TV station WTVY reports on Monday’s press conference:

Public officials are now giving the victim and her family personal apologies for the events of that era.

“I open my heart up and say that I am deeply sorry for what happened,” says AL Representative Dexter Grimsley.

“Anytime one of our residents whether past or present feels pain or feels victimized we certainly want to offer that apology,” says Abbeville Mayor Ryan Blalock.

Following the press conference, Taylor’s brother Robert Corbitt told me by phone, “While I’m pleased with the mayor’s apology, it’s nothing official. We were looking for an official one from the city, the state and the county.”

“I did hear the representative say he was gonna get a resolution in to the state,” Corbitt said, “but I never heard the mayor say that he was going to present it to the city council. He just said it must come from the city council. He never said anything about when he was gonna do it.”

State and city governments are often reluctant to issue official apologies for past injustices for fear that it will leave them vulnerable to civil suits.

Rep. Grimsley reaffirmed Monday his intent to introduce a House resolution calling for a state apology to Recy Taylor “before the session is out.” The current legislative session started March 1 and goes about another six weeks, Grimsley said.

Recent overtures by city and state government officials towards Recy Taylor and her family follow mounting public interest in Taylor’s case, starting with the September 2010 publication of Danielle McGuire’s book, “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance,” which tells Taylor’s story.

Recy Taylor and Robert Corbitt first publicly conveyed their wishes for city and state apologies in a Feb. 9 article about Taylor by Cynthia Gordy in The Root. On Feb. 16, after reading Gordy’s article, Change.org editor Alex DiBranco launched a petition asking Alabama government officials for city and state apologies to Taylor. Corbitt has since put the petition under his name.

After 12 days, the Change.org petition gathered 1,000 signatures. When Colorlines broke the news on March 16 that Grimsley is planning to introduce a resolution for a state apology, the petition was up to 2,100 signatures. Signatures more than doubled in the first 24 hours after the Colorlines article and additional coverage by the AP and the Root. At this writing, the petition has more than 7,100 signatures.

Grimsley has told the AP that he became interested in Taylor’s case partly because of the Change.org petition.

(Cross-posted at Colorlines.)

The Update

This morning in an op-ed at the Anniston Star, I reported that an apology to Recy Taylor may be forthcoming soon from the city of Abbeville and Henry County, AL.

Last Wednesday, I reported for Colorlines.com that state Rep. Dexter Grimsley, D-Newville, wants Alabama to issue a formal state apology to Recy Taylor, 91, who was abducted and raped at gunpoint by seven white men in Abbeville on Sept. 3, 1944.

“The circumstances merit it,” Grimsley said recently. “It’s something that should be done. Recy Taylor found herself in a situation that wasn’t responded to, the way that the law would respond to something today.”

Now it appears that an apology from Henry County and the southeast Alabama city of Abbeville may come as soon as Monday, but it is unclear whether the state will take part. In a follow-up interview last Thursday, Rep. Grimsley said he would hold a press conference with Abbeville Mayor Ryan Blalock and County Commission Chairman Joanne Smith and “present a formal letter to the family.”

Asked if the apology would also be on behalf of the state, Grimsley said, “We haven’t addressed that level yet.”

Henry County Public Information Officer Chad Sowell has told me on the phone that there will be a press conference tomorrow, Monday, March 21, 10:30 am Central Time, at the Henry County Courthouse.

Officials scheduled to be there are Alabama State House Representative Dexter Grimsley, Mayor Ryan Blalock and members of the Abbeville City Council.

Whether an apology will be issued to Recy Taylor tomorrow has not been verified. Abbeville Mayor Ryan Blalock and Alabama Representative Dexter Grimsley have asked Recy Taylor’s brother Robert Corbitt to attend the press conference, and he has told me that he plans to be there.

Margaret Burnham stated the importance of an apology.

“Clearly there should be an apology from the state here as well as the county,” said Professor Margaret Burnham, director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Program at Northeastern University School of Law. “Each failed to pursue the investigation aggressively and promptly, and more generally afforded utter impunity to white men who raped black women. Such a statement would not only honor Recy Taylor and her family for their courage and tenacity in seeking justice, but it would speak to scores of victims who similarly suffered in silence.”

Other Questions

Even if Recy Taylor gets her due from Alabama officials, many questions remain about how countless other cases of decades old racially motivated rapes will be addressed. There are some states where the FBI could play a role.

The FBI’s role

Though Alabama and five other Southern states have no statute of limitations on rape, only civil rights-era homicides of African Americans — mostly of men — have commanded the official attention of the FBI and other federal and state officials.

The six Southern, formerly segregated states with no statute of limitations on the crime of rape are: Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina.

Yet, local police and county sheriffs rarely have the staff or the budgets to conduct such investigations. Further, officials in small communities may lack motivation because they would be investigating their own relatives or the politically powerful.

When it comes to decades-old racially motivated deaths, the FBI can investigate cases even when there is no federal jurisdiction. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act of 2008 directs the FBI to investigate and do community outreach with the express purpose of supporting or encouraging state and local action.

Asked if the FBI could play a similar role in addressing decades-old racially motivated rapes, FBI spokesman Christopher Allen said, “The public is always welcome to report an allegation of a crime to their local FBI office, where it will be reviewed to determine if a federal violation exists.”

No special consideration would be made. “We would handle [it] as we do every other allegation of a crime: on its own merits,” Allen said.

Testimony of black women

In an e-mail interview, Professor McGuire says her research “covers about 64 cases of white on black rape from 1940 to 1975 and is not exhaustive in any way.

“I found black women’s testimonies of sexual violence everywhere I looked.”

Does Professor Burnham think the Department of Justice ought to address civil-rights era, racially motivated rapes in states like Alabama?

“The Emmett Till Act itself only covers murders,” Burnham said. “But the animating spirit of the act is to encourage law enforcement and courts to redress the racial wrongs that locked black crime victims out of the justice system during the mid-20th century. Certainly, if opportunities for prosecution remain open, the Justice Department should play a role.”

(Cross-posted at the Civil Rights Cold Case Project)

Comcast, the Philadelphia-based cable company, was the fastest broadband service provider in the U.S. during 2011, according to Ookla, a broadband speed test company. Comcast recently announced that it had completed the upgrade of its entire broadband network to newer DOCSIS 3.0 technology that helps enable faster connections. Comcast was followed by Charter Communications, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable and Insight Communications, according to Ookla‘s Net Index. Multichannel News, which initially reported the news noted:

Comcast and Charter delivered average download speeds of 17.19 Megabits per second, followed by Cablevision at 16.40 Mbps, Cox at 15.76 Mbps, TWC at 14.41 Mbps and Insight at 14.22 Mbps. Verizon Communications fared better than its telco peers with an average download speed of 12.94 Mbps, thanks to FiOS Internet, its fiber-to-the-home service that provides up to 150 Mbps downstream. And overall, Verizon had the highest upstream speeds with an average of 7.41 Mbps. Still, the company’s legacy DSL services dragged down overall speeds.

AT&T delivered an overall average download speed of 4.40 Mbps, according to Net Index data for SBC and Bell South, which are the regional bell operating companies that now comprise AT&T. Qwest Communications, which last year merged with CenturyLink, delivered an average of 6.34 Mbps in 2011, the Net Index data shows.

Research firm Sanford Bernstein predicts that by 2020, cable operators will control about 70 percent of the U.S. broadband market. The research from Sanford Bernstein predicts that by 2020, AT&T’s U-verse will have 10.1 percent of the market, while Verizon’s FiOS will own about 7.9 percent. Given that Verizon has gotten in bed with cable companies, it doesn’t surprise me that they are not going to be a bigger portion of the broadband pie. Sanford Bernstein data also shows that there is not much competition in the U.Ss when it comes to broadband.

As an observation, these top speeds from cable companies are much slower than the top speeds in other countries such as South Korea, Japan, the Baltic nations and parts of Eastern Europe. Comcast and its cable brethren have to offer their higher bandwidth tiers — 50 Mbps or higher — at more affordable prices in order for those to become widely adopted.

When it comes to broadband, I am one of the fortunate “1 percent” — my average speed on any given day is between 60 Mbps to 95 Mbps (download) and about 75 Mbps (upload), thanks to a fiber-only ISP, WebPass.

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It appears that Zappos was the victim of a cyber attack today from a hacker who gained access to the company’s internal network through the company’s servers in Kentucky. While specifics of the attack were not revealed, Zappos says that credit card and payments data were not accessed or affected by the criminal.

CEO Tony Hsieh writes to employees, The most important focus for us right now is the safety and security of our customers’ information. Within the next hour, we will begin the process of notifying the 24+ million customer accounts in our database about the incident and help step them through the process of choosing a new password for their accounts. (We’ve already reset and expired their existing passwords.)

Affected Zappos users simply need to reset their passwords and create a new password, Hsieh explains. In Zappos’ signature quality customer service style, the company has already created a detailed page for any affected users to find out more information. And Hsieh says that in order to service as many customer inquiries as possible, all employees at Zappos’ headquarters, regardless of department, will be asked to help with assisting customers who have questions about the attack.

From the email sent to affected users: We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).

Hsieh adds that Zappos is cooperating with law enforcement on an ongoing investigation of the incident. Considering Zappos’ impressive customer service (and quick response), it seems that the company is taking all steps to help make sure customers are aware of which data that could have been stolen by the hacker, and encourages users to change their passwords.

Social media optimized and meme focused aggregator BuzzFeed has just raised a $15.5 million round of Series C financing, lead by New Enterprise Associates and followed on by Lerer Ventures, Hearst Media, Softbank and RRE Capital. In addition to the funding, NEA General Partner Patrick Kerins will be taking a position on the BuzzFeed board and Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer will be moving on up to BuzzFeed Executive Chairman.

Indeed, it seems like at least part of the Huffington Post band will be getting back together with this newest round of BuzzFeed expansion, as former HuffPost President Greg Coleman will also joining the board as an advisor. BuzzFeed co-founder Jonah Peretti was formerly CTO of HuffPost pre-Aol acquisition.

This financing comes after some major BuzzFeed milestones, mainly snagging Politico’s Ben Smith to run the company’s editorial efforts and more than tripling its traffic to 25 million monthly unique visitors in the past year. And also recently breaking the news that John McCain was going to endorse Mitt Romney, and posting this amazing list of “The 30 Most Important Cats Of 2011.” And also also this hilarious list of “25 People Who Thought Lil Kim Died.”

When asked about the company’s future plans, co-founder Peretti tells me, “The biggest shift for us is refocusing under Ben [Smith] as an organization that does real reporting and original content.” After all, scoops and breaking news are just as viral as aggregation … Peretti hypothesizes that most successful content sites in the future will have a mixture of both light-hearted and compelling images, videos and lists in addition serious and emotionally impactful content.

The company was accidentally profitable this summer before it started aggressively hiring and revenue has been growing more quickly than traffic Peretti says.  Buzzfeed eschews traditional advertising in favor of socially focused ads from brands like Disney and Microsoft.

Peretti also flouts the common wisdom that taking VC money is a risk for a content site, “It’s so expensive competing against major media organizations,” he says “And now we can do it.”

Ten years is a long time. Sometimes it is so long that one forgets a lot more than one remembers — like the fact that it I have been blogging for a decade. I would have totally forgotten about the amount of time that has passed, had it not been for (what else) a blog post from Fred Wilson, one of the more engaging and rigorous bloggers on the web. It just so happens he is a venture capitalist, but he would be a great blogger without the VC tag as well.

His post made me ask myself: how long has it been since I have been blogging? Not an easy answer. I have had a website for a long time — mostly as a repository for articles I wrote for Forbes.com, Red Herring and a bunch of other publications. It had my resume as well. In the heyday of the dot.com bubble, I started writing an email newsletter (dubbed dotcomwala) and saved the archives on my website. There wasn’t much to do on the site. I ended up using Blogger, but mostly as a way to manage the site more easily — well, easier compared to Homesite & Dreamweaver, two tools I used for managing my website.

Along the way I became a reader first of Dave Winer and then Doc Searls. Their engaging and pithy, rapidly-updated style of linking and writing was so seductive that I started mucking about with Dave’s blogging platform(s.) I was trying out Dave’s Userland software long before it all made any sense to me. In September 2001, Dave blogged about the tragedy that changed our world. It was pretty clear that Winer had laid out what was going to be the future of media — and it still is.

Today we differentiate between blogging on blogging platforms and sharing on social platforms, but that is just semantics. The essence of blogging is not defined by a platform but by what I learned from Dave and his blogging platform — that media now is raw, collaborative and instantaneous.

And this is how it began

Over the holiday break in 2001, having just moved back to New York from San Francisco, I spent an inordinate amount of time on the Internet looking for new things and new ideas. The dot.com bust and the end of telecom bubble had made me think about writing a book. And I, eventually did. However, during those hours spent on the Internet, I ended up encountering MoveableType. An email later, Ben Trott (one half of the SixApart founding team with his wife Mena Trott) helped me set up a Moveabletype blog and suddenly we were off to the races. (Related: How Ev, Dave, The Trotts and Matt Mullenweg changed my life.)

Initial posts were still some of my articles from the Red Herring, but eventually I summoned up the strength to emulate my blogging heroes. I wrote and wrote and I guess I am still writing. In the process I became less interested in the rote work of a magazine — I was addicted to the blog and the daily interactions. I wrote every day and every day traffic went up. More importantly, more people joined the community of readers. My blog became a collaborative whiteboard /sounding board for my book, Broadbandits, which I had just begun writing.

Being addictive in nature, I was quickly hooked. The idea that all these smart people were sharing all their insights with me was the greatest feedback loop of all time. With every blog post, I engaged and learned. Ten years later, that learning continues. Not a day goes by that doesn’t see one of our readers leave a comment that makes me re-evaluate how I look at the technology or a topic I just wrote about.

I shared my opinions, I linked to stories I liked and more importantly, I used the blog to write/break news. My editors — Jason Pontin, Blaise Zerega and Josh Quittner — didn’t mind because I worked for monthly magazines and all of them knew that I was a “news” guy pretending to be working for a magazine. When I was working for Forbes.com during the early days of the dot-com bubble, I learned a vital lesson – you had to write every day to be any good and to have a complete handle on the beat. There was no way around the plain-old beat the pavement reporting.

Somewhere along the way the allure of blogging became such that I had to go tell my boss, Josh, that it was time for me to go and embrace my destiny. I loved Business 2.0 more than I loved anything, but  I overstayed by almost 18 months before I could pull the trigger. Ironically it was a late night drunken conversation with Matt Mullenweg, Mathew Ingram & Paul Kedrosky in Toronto (where I was a speaker at the debut Mesh conference) that did the trick.

In 2004, Anil Dash, also an early blogger (and inspiration) had introduced me to Toni Schneider (now CEO of Automattic) who had then sold a company to Yahoo. I wanted to talk to him because I had seen that we were going to enter a “lean startup” phase where the model was to build a product and exit by selling out to larger companies who needed some quick tuck-in products to complete their line-up. That one conversation led me to the other Tony (Conrad) and the story, The New Road to Riches.

So when it came time to leave, I went and chatted with Toni and Tony who led me to the newly formed True Ventures. A small seed round later, we were off to the races, trying to turn what essentially began life as brochure for my writings into a startup and eventually into a business.

As Josh would quip, I ate my own dog food. Life changed, forever, with that one act. And I am better for it. I have gone from being a lone writer to being part of a team. I am still learning the social skills that go along with being a founder. But that is a story for another day.

3 Posts a Day Keeps The Writer’s Block Away

Given that there isn’t quite an exact birthday (though December 13 is when I opened moveable type-powered GigaOm.com to the Internet) I thought this long break is a good time for me to sit and take stock. Here is the report card for past 10 years (not including the posts from my personal blog :)

• 11,165 posts
• About 3 posts a day, every day for roughly 10 years.
• About 2.06 million words.
• About 215 words per post.

Analyzing the data further helped me get these additional insights. For instance:

• In 2002, my first real and full year of blogging I wrote 187 posts and 35,105 words. By 2005, the total number of posts was up to 2,685 posts and 429,595 words. In 2010, the total number of posts had gone done to 283 and the total number of words slumped to 109,794. Average words went from 199 per post to 160 to 388 words/post.
• 2011 has been much slower – 136 posts at 465 words per post and a total of 63,223 words,  year to date.) I think majority of my writing for 2011 has been focused on big picture stuff including my occasional newsletter, Om Says.
• My top three most productive months are November, December and August — I guess I like writing during the holidays as it gives me more time to think and write.
• November 2004 was the most productive month of my blogging life – 339 posts followed by December 2004 when I wrote 283 blog posts.

Who’s afraid of Twitter? Not Bloggers

The second half of my blogging decade was marked by the rise of Twitter and other social medium. However, Twitter was (and still remains) the most active social sharing platform for me. I wondered if I my Twitter habit was costing me some blog posts. So I looked at my Twitter stats.

• 22,596 tweets over 1958 days or roughly 11.4 tweets a day.
• Assuming each tweet was about 10 words a day, that was still about 110+ words every day in tweets, though in reality actual words being spent on “tweets” were far fewer since many of my tweets are simple transmissions about my photos or blog posts.
• According to Tweetstats, I average roughly 510 tweets per month, with a preference for tweeting at 7 am (PST), especially on Wednesday, my heaviest tweet day.

So from the looks of it, Twitter has only acted as an accelerator for my blogging role, allowing me the luxury of writing less but reaching far more people. If the first five years were of extreme frenzy, then the second half is reflective of changes that happened not only in my work life but also in my personal life.

• As the data shows, my starting the company and taking on the founder duties acted as a speed bump and slowed down my blogging pace.
• Starting in 2008, I started to cut back on my daily work load and focus on my health. So far so good. Since 2010, thanks to GigaOM team, things have become more manageable for me.

What does the future hold? 

It is a good question. I have actually been thinking a lot about that lately and wondering how to reinvent the art form that I embraced over a decade ago. I don’t really have an answer, except that it is somewhere in the past and in the reasons why I fell in love with blogging.

It is pretty evident to me that chasing faux-stories that are cloaked as scoops or exclusives are of little or no interest to me. Sure, there will be a story or two like Microsoft buying Skype that will help make the old reporter in me ready to work around the clock, but in reality what does interest me is the “big picture” stuff. And if I can do it with more rigor and regularity, I would be happier (and better) for it.

One of the most pleasant (and surprising) developments of 2011 was me starting to write, Om Says: What To Read This Weekend. I started it mostly because I felt that we are continuously being bombarded with short, near term news and in the process failing to think about the big picture. I thought to myself hat our business has to be about more than just a feature upgrade or funding, or some new app.

At the same time, thanks to two awesome apps — Instapaper and Evernote — I was saving articles I would find and read during the week, often as triggers for further ruminations. I decided to share the best of seven from what I had read during the week, and the response has been pretty phenomenal. Why? Mostly because curation and sharing of content has become as important as writing. By sharing videos, photos, links, or quotes we are all essentially editors and the sharing itself is an act of editorializing. It was as Dave (Winer) showed during the dark days of September 2001.

Ironically, it was a lesson that I forgot. In late 2006 I started writing a link blog, The Daily Om, but stopped doing it mostly because a yoga-oriented journal objected to it and I didn’t feel like working on it. Lately, I have started culling interesting videos, quotes and news snippets on my personal blog. I have found it invigorating and will continue to experiment with new ideas.

Here are my 10 lessons learned:

1. Blogging is communal: In 2008, I wrote that “blogging is not just an act of publishing but also a communal activity. It is more than leaving comments; it is about creating connections.” That is the single biggest lesson learned of these past 10 years. Every connection has lead to a new idea, new thought and a new opportunity.
2. Being authentic in your thoughts and voice is the only way to survive the test of time.
3. Being wrong is as important as being right. What’s more important — when wrong, admit that you are wrong and listen to those who are/were right.
4. Be regular. And show up to blog every day. After all you are as fresh as your last blog post.
5. Treat others as you expect yourself to be treated.
6. (In 2006 I wrote this and it is worth repeating) Doc Searls once told me, and it has been one of the guiding principles for me: blog if you have something to say and respect your reader’s time. If you respect their time, they are going to give you some time of their day.
7.  A long time ago, Slate’s Farhaad Manjoo asked mefor some tips on blogging and here is what I told him – Wait at least 15 minutes before publishing something you’ve written—this will give you enough distance to edit yourself dispassionately.
8. Write everything as if your mom is reading your work, a good way to maintain civility and keep your work comprehensible.
9. Blogging is not about opinion but it is about viewing the world in a certain way and sharing it with others how you look at things.

The tenth lesson comes from Kevin Kelleher when he was writing for us back in 2010. In his post, How the Internet changed writing he noted:

Many bloggers tailor headlines and posts so that they’ll surface at the top of search results, making them at once easier to find and less enjoyable to read. And this decade, a lot of other bloggers mistook a strong writing voice for caustic irreverence. But most eventually learned that writing with snark is like cooking with salt — a little goes a long way.

If anything, avoiding that trap Kevin mentioned is the biggest lesson of them all.

Disclosure: Automattic is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True Ventures.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Themes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap review
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Editor’s note: Guest contributor Eric Ries is the author of The Lean Startup.  Follow him @ericries.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t have missed the recent dust-up over race and Silicon Valley. Like almost every discussion of diversity and meritocracy in this town, it turned ugly fast. One side says: “All I see is white men. Therefore, people like Michael Arrington must be racist.” The other responds, “Silicon Valley is a colorblind meritocracy. If there were qualified women or minority candidates, we’d welcome them.”

I’d like to say a few words about this, but I want to do so under special ground rules.

I want to make an argument, step by step, that I hope will convince you to care about this issue, but that doesn’t presuppose that you already agree that diversity is important. And it will explain how it is possible for both sides to be mostly correct – and that we still have a problem.

So the rules are:

1. No political correctness. Let’s speak the truth no matter where it leads.
2. You don’t have to believe that diversity is an end in itself. In fact, I will argue that is important as a means to an end.
3. Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.
4. We should use science, whenever possible, rather than anecdotal evidence.
5. No hand-wringing. There’s no point discussing this problem if we can’t do anything about it.

So – no hippies, no whiners, no name-calling, and no BS. If you want to make Silicon Valley – and startup hubs like it – as awesome as possible, pay attention.

What accounts for the decidedly non-diverse results in places like Silicon Valley? We have two competing theories. One is that deliberate racisms keeps people out. Another is that white men are simply the ones that show up, because of some combination of aptitude and effort (which it is depends on who you ask), and that admissions to, say Y Combinator, simply reflect the lack of diversity of the applicant pool, nothing more.

The problem with both of these theories is that the math just doesn’t work.

It’s a fact that the applicant pool to most Silicon Valley startup schools and VCs is skewed. Could this be the result of innate differences between white men and other groups? The math simply doesn’t hold up to support this view. Think about two overlapping populations of people, like men and women. They would naturally be normally distributed in a bell curve around a mean aptitude. So picture those two bell curves. Here in Silicon Valley, we’re looking for the absolute best and brightest, the people far out on the tail end of aptitude. So imagine that region of the curve. How far apart would the two populations have to be to explain YC’s historical admission rate of 4% women? It would have to be really extreme.

There is some research on the differences between men and women, and it has shown some differences in both average aptitude and the standard deviation of aptitude (i.e. that men have more extreme outcomes in both the positive and negative direction). But these differences are extremely small, nowhere near large enough to suggest a region on this curve with all men and no women on it. If you’d like to examine the math involved, check out this excellent slide deck courtesy of Terri Oda:

What is true for aptitude is also true for interest. Some populations are more interested in science, in math, in business, and in taking risks than others. But all of the research I am aware of suggests that these differences are extremely small – not nearly big enough to explain what we’re observing in places like Y Combinator.

This is why I personally care about diversity: it’s the canary in the coal mine for meritocracy. When we see extremely skewed demographics, we have very good reason to suspect that something is wrong with our selection process, that it’s not actually as meritocratic as it could be. And I believe that is exactly what is happening in Silicon Valley.

There’s plenty of good research on the subject of team performance that shows that diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams on many different kinds of tasks. The problem is that this research doesn’t argue for demographic diversity, but rather for a diversity of perspectives. So, again, racial or gender diversity is not an end in itself. But we have to ask ourselves: if teams are consistently being put together with homogeneous demographics, what are the odds that they also will contain a diversity of perspectives? Shouldn’t we be worried that the same selection process that produces homogenous results in one area might be accidentally doing the same in the area that we care about (but that is harder to measure)?

Does that mean that the racism theory is necessarily correct? I don’t think so. I’ve certainly heard my share of sexist and racist jokes in Silicon Valley, but hardly enough to believe that people like Michael Arrington or Paul Graham are lying when they say that they are colorblind. I think that – in the absence of any counterevidence – we should take them at their word. Besides, we don’t need racism to explain these results. Now that we’ve clarified the question to be “how do we build a meritocratic selection process?” we can look at a wealth of research that has been done in this area.

And there’s good news here. Wherever selection processes have been studied scientifically, errors have been found. These errors are called “implicit bias” in the research literature, which causes a lot of confusion, because the word “bias” connotes malevolence. But let’s leave that connotation behind – we’re entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers, for goodness’ sake. We can talk about bias like grownups.

And what the grownups have discovered, through painstaking research, is that it is extremely easy for systems to become biased, even if none of the individual people in those systems intends to be biased. This is partly a cognitive problem, that people harbor unconscious bias, and partly an organizational problem, that even a collection of unbiased actors can work together to accidentally create a biased system. And when those systems are examined scientifically, they can be reformed to reduce their bias.

The most famous example of this comes from the world of musical orchestras. Until the 1970s, almost every professional orchestra in the world was all-male. All experts in the musical world agreed on the reason: male performers had superior aptitude to female performers. They gave all kinds of explanations for why, that had to do with men’s allegedly superior skill, hand-eye coordination, interest in music, and their willingness to sacrifice so much to become a professional musician. And yet, by the 1990s, these ratios had changed dramatically. No conductors went to political correctness anti-bias training camps. No hand-wringing was needed. They hit upon a solution – by accident – that practically changed orchestra selection overnight: they had performers audition behind a physical screen, so that the judges could not see their race or gender while they played. When rating performers anonymously, it turned out that men and women played equally well, on average.

If you’ve seen the movie Moneyball recently (or read the book), this should sound familiar. The whole premise of Moneyball was the triumph of science, data, and reason over the gut feelings and beauty contests of baseball scouts. Think of the famous scene in which the scouts are sitting around a table debating which prospects had “the right look” – and Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are calling BS. Which side of the table sounds more like the admissions process to a Silicon Valley startup school, where they are often “looking for people like us?”

According to the research on implicit bias, our selection processes are making some huge, obvious mistakes. The Y Combinator partners conduct short ten-minute interviews where they make snap decisions about candidates on the spot – sometimes in as little as sixty seconds. This process, while efficient, is the exact opposite of musical performances happening behind a screen. They are even moving towards video interviews – which would bring this visual bias even earlier into the process.

Now think about the countless VC pitch meetings and “get to know you” mixers and coffees and lunches. These are all opportunities for VC’s to use their vaunted pattern recognition to try and spot promising entrepreneurs and companies early. But pattern recognition is just a fancy word for bias. And if you look at the research on implicit bias, you will find that bias is a necessary consequence of using pattern recognition, it’s part of how the brain works. We literally think faster when we see something that matches the pattern, and have to slow down to process something that doesn’t match. I think Michael Arrington provided a fascinating first-hand account of this cognitive process in action, when he described his experience struggling to name a single African-American entrepreneur. He couldn’t come up with one on the spot, but not because he’s a racist.

None of this is meant as a criticism of Y Combinator, VCs, or anyone else. It’s meant to point out that even though our current selection process is pretty good, and pretty meritocratic, it still contains bias. We can do better. And, if we do, we will make all of Silicon Valley more successful.

So how can we do better? I believe there are several relatively simple changes we could make right away.

I previously described on my blog one simple change I made to the hiring process at my last company. I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates – even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process. If you’re screening resumes, or evaluating applicants to a startup school, I challenge you to adopt this procedure immediately, and report on the results.

Startup schools are an exceptionally good laboratory for testing these ideas. In fact, if anyone out there wants to put this idea to the test, I suggest the following experiment: for your next batch of admissions, have half of your reviewers use a blind screening technique and the other half use your standard technique, on your first screen (before you’ve met any applicants). Compare the outputs of both selection processes. I predict they will show different demographics.

Of course, this doesn’t address the whole problem. Remember, part of the defense against the racism theory is that the applicants are already skewed before any selection is done. Once again, this sounds like something you can only throw your hands up about: if it’s not a problem with innate differences, it must be a problem with our education system or some other “pipeline” problem.

So let’s take a look at this problem, too.

I once spent time with a promising entrepreneur who was not a white man. Because their startup sold a product that a lot of tech entrepreneurs buy, many of their customers were graduates of Y Combinator. So I asked if they were planning to apply. Their response: “oh, no, it’s a waste of time. Y Combinator doesn’t accept people like me.” Where did they get that idea? Surely not from YC’s partners, who as far as I can tell are scrupulously fair in their dealings with entrepreneurs. Rather, they got that impression by inferring that there is probably implicit bias in YC’s  admissions process, and that they’d be better off spending their time doing something else other than applying to YC.

We all know there is a huge gender gap in computer science. But that gap means that women receive only about 30% of degrees in CS. But 30% is a lot larger than 4% – and that’s a big math problem for advocates of the pipeline theory.

Imagine that you were a professional musician thinking about which orchestra to audition for. You have a choice between an all-male orchestra that conducts interviews out in the open, and a mixed-gender orchestra that conducts auditions behind a screen. Which would you choose to apply to? Wouldn’t your answer be different if you were a man or a woman?

I think thought experiments like this are helpful for suggesting an alternate hypothesis to the pipeline problem: that there are qualified minority applicants who are choosing – rationally – to invest their time and energy elsewhere. I am not aware of any scientific study that proves this hypothesis is correct. But I have seen enough existence proofs to believe it is likely.

For example, I have been a mentor for several years in the Founder Labs program, which was originally created by Women 2.0. It’s a pre-incubator program, that helps potential founders figure out if they should become entrepreneurs. They created it as a way of encouraging women to apply to startup schools and create companies. But they took a novel approach to this problem. They did not advertise the program as being about diversity. Instead, they adopted a minimal rule: each founding team had to have at least one woman, and they privately reached out to talented women in their networks and encouraged them to join.

I remember the first time I spoke to the Founder Labs teams. I kept asking: who are you and where have you been? It was unlike any other audience I’ve seen at any other startup school: 50/50 men and women, with a surprising amount of diversity. The participants included chip designers and hard-core engineers, the kind of people that have the aptitude but don’t apply to most startup school programs or pitch most VCs. I believe the reason they came to this program was that they believed its selection process would be more meritocratic.

Groups that make a conscious effort to become more meritocratic are able to make meaningful changes in the diversity of their participants. One of my favorite examples is the San Francisco Ruby Meetup, which spent a year making the effort to improve the number of women who participate. The steps they took required effort, but not rocket science. They didn’t have to get sixth grade girls interested in programming. You can read more about it here.

There’s one last piece to this puzzle that science can help us with. It goes by the rather unfortunate academic name of stereotype threat. But a confusing name doesn’t make it any less real. It turns out that when people are in a situation that defies stereotypes, reminding them of the stereotype diminishes their performance. In one study from NYU, students were given a math test. Asking men and women questions about their gender beforehand increased the performance gap substantially. “Priming” students with questions about other aspects of their identity, did not. This result has been replicated in many, many studies.

I think this helps explain why asking more minorities to apply to these programs doesn’t work. Consciously thinking about proving a stereotype wrong impairs performance. So it’s entirely possible that a completely objective assessment of the performance of candidates in an application process will show minority candidates doing worse, because they are literally cognitively impaired.

And this brings me back to the no hand-wringing rule. Most people interpret this finding as bad news, but I think they have it backwards. It’s actually really good news. If you look at the studies, what they show is that the performance gap between groups can be mostly erased, if candidates are primed in a merit-focused way. Explicit diversity programs have the solution exactly backwards. What we need to do is to build meritocratic selection processes, and then go our of our way to tell people about them. We should emphasize the objectivity of the selection process and our efforts to weed out all forms of bias. I believe this is why certain programs, like Founder Labs and 500 Startups, that boast of their meritocratic “moneyball” approach to admissions have more diverse applicants – and participants.

When it comes to meritocracy and diversity, the symbolic is real. And that means that simple actions that reduce bias, such as blind resume or application screening, are a double win: they reduce implicit bias and they help communicate our commitment to meritocracy. As a startup ecosystem we are in the meritocracy business. This is the path towards making Silicon Valley – and every other startup hub – even more awesome.

Photo credit: Daviniodus

Updated. With Skype’s sale to Microsoft finally sealed, one might wonder: What are Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the European serial entrepreneurs that have founded KaZaA, Skype, Joost and Rdio, up to next? The surprising answer: The duo is giving online video another shot – and this time, they seem to be gunning straight for Netflix.

Skype’s founders have apparently been quietly assembling an A-team of media and web technology experts to launch a site that seems destined to replicate the model behind their music subscription site Rdio in the video space. The new service called Vdio, which hasn’t publicly launch yet, has been kept secret for almost two years. Until now.

Here’s what I was able to uncover:

The mysterious Vdio.com

Vdio.com recently went live with a splash page that spotlights popular movies like The Dark Knight and Karate Kid as well as TV shows like Mad Men and The Tudors. The site comes with the slogan “Are You Watching?,” and invites users to log in via Facebook. However, visitors from the U.S. are being told that Vdio is “currently available in the U.K. only.” U.K. residents on the other hand learn that Vdio is “coming soon” to their country.

There’s no imprint, no link, no about page. Nothing tells you who is behind Vdio – with one exception: The Vdio logo comes with a small trademark symbol, and a search with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office reveals that the mark was registered in the summer of 2009 by a company called Pulser Music Services, Inc. The very same company was also behind the launch of Rdio two years ago.

There’s little else to find online about Vdio. Just three people on Linkedin list it as their employee, and no one has ever written about it. The company does have a very sparse Facebook page, which claims it was founded in 2010 and features one single comment, left by a Los Angeles-based web designer:

Enter Project WBS

How did Vdio stay below the radar for so long? By operating under a different name, which I stumbled across when I searched for the European trademark for Vdio. Turns out that the Vdio name isn’t owned by Pulser Music Services in Europe, but by a U.S. company called Project WBS Inc., which was founded in December of 2009.

Project WBS raised some $5.6 million in funding in October of 2010, and amongst the people listed as directors in the SEC filing is Mark Dyne, an old buddy of Zennstrom and Friis who was already on the board of Skype and Joost and also instrumental in getting Rdio off the ground.

The same SEC filing also lists a few more very interesting names: Semion Smushkevich appears as the CEO of Project WBS. Smushkevich’s Linkedin profile shows that he works for Europlay Capital Advisors, which recently helped Friis and Zennstrom with the sale of Skype to Microsoft. Then there’s Joseph Miller, who is managing director of Europlay and also director of Project WBS. Also listed as director: Ian Aaron, whose past includes a stint as president of TV Guide.

And if you had any doubt that Project WBS is simply Vdio in disguise, consider this: A site-specific Google search reveals that a copy of Vdio’s website is available at staging.projectwbs.com.

The killer team behind Vdio

Other people on the Project WBS team include its CTO Justin Erenkrantz, who used to be President of the Apache Software Foundation until 2010 and also worked as Chief Architect for Joost, Zennstrom’s and Friis’ ill-fated fist foray into online video.

Erenkrantz is joined by his Joost and Apache Foundation buddy Sander Striker, who doesn’t currently list an employer on his Linkedin profile, but recently made some publicly viewable changes to the otherwise very stealthy Project WBS website.

Speaking of Linkedin: The social network lists around ten people currently employed by Project WBS, plus three folks who have owned up to their involvement with Vdio. The team includes a few more Joost alumni and open source / Apache geeks plus people who formerly worked for TV Guide, NBC and the music subscription incarnation of Napster.

There’s also the former leader of Skype’s visual design team, someone who did content acquisition for Netflix, and, just for good measure, a former systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who’s experienced in “data management and modeling, data analytics, and statistical analyses of large data sets, including data mining, visualization, and interpretation.” Most people are located in Los Angeles, but there also seems to be ties to the Netherlands, Slovenia and Estonia, where previously much of the Skype development used to happen.

What does all of that mean?

When will Vdio start, how exactly will it look like, and how dangerous will it be to Netflix? To be honest, I don’t know. But researching this extensively, I feel confident to make a few educated guesses:

• Vdio is currently being tested with a small group of users. How do I know that? That’s easy: Vdio’s Facebook app, which is necessary to sign into the service, currently lists “200 monthly active users.”
• This is all about subscriptions. Fris and Zennstrom wouldn’t align Vdio closely with Rdio if the offerings weren’t somewhat similar, and they wouldn’t secretly work on a project like this if it was just another VOD rental property. It’s possible that Vdio will offer some free content, just like Rdio does now, but the end game seems to be to compete with Netflix, and not iTunes.
• Vdio is an international play. The site may launch in the U.K. first, but the company is headquartered in the U.S., with a subsidiary in Luxemburg, and it already has a SVP of global licensing. I think it’s only a question of time before Vdio launches in the U.S. as well.
• This will get serious. One of the biggest lessons of Joost’s demise was that you won’t compete with the big boys if you don’t have the right content. Judging from the content that’s currently teased at Vdio.com, this could be different this time around. The movies and TV shows displayed on the site come from Warner Bros., AMC, Showtime, Sony and Fox. That’s an impressive list. Sure, Netflix has tied up the U.S. rights to shows like Mad Men, but that doesn’t mean that Vdio won’t be able to scoop them up elsewhere.
• The timing couldn’t be better. Netflix has been in a crisis ever since its botched attempt to separate its DVD and streaming business, and Hulu’s future seems more uncertain than ever after a proposed sale of the company didn’t go through. Many wouldn’t have given a newcomer like Vdio a chance just six months ago. But now, everything seems up for grabs.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes
• Connected Consumer Q3: Netflix fumbles; Kindle Fire shines
• Managing infinite choice: the new era of TV user interfaces

Right-wing violence in Israel is always provoked by something, we’ve been told. The murders of Palestinian laborers and Israeli Arab bus passengers by two settlers during the disengagement from Gaza was provoked, of course, by the disengagement from Gaza. The drive-by murders of Palestinians during the second intifada were provoked by the second intifada. The Rabin assassination and the two-year hate campaign that preceded it were provoked by the Oslo accord and Palestinian terror attacks. The Hebron massacre by Baruch Goldstein was provoked by the Oslo accord and Palestinan terror attacks. The Jewish terror underground of the early 1980s, involving shootings of Palestinian mayors and college students, as well as an attempt to bomb a Palestinian bus and a plot to blow up the Temple Mount, was provoked by the pullout from Sinai following the peace treaty with Egypt.

There’s always a reason, supposedly. Jewish blood is being spilled by terrorists, the Left is giving the country away to the enemy, the settlers and their allies are being driven to extremes, they’re being backed against the wall, so they’re lashing out in desperation.

This is a popular notion in this country. So why has settler violence been going through the roof again, most recently in Sunday night’s “price tag” torching of a mosque in the Galilee Bedouin village of Tuba Zangaria? Life for Jews in Israel and the West Bank has never been safer than it’s been for the last few years. Palestinian security forces have been working with the Shin Bet and Israeli army to shut down terror, to throw Hamasniks in jail, to even keep big protest rallies from taking place.

Meanwhile, the peace process couldn’t be deader. The Israeli government could hardly be more right-wing. The administration in Washington could hardly be more craven, while Congress has become indistinguishable from the Yesha Council.

Yet here’s Yediot Aharonot’s Palestinian affairs writer Roni Shaked (a former Shin Bet agent) summing up the situation: :

“Arab terror is under control. The intelligence network in the West Bank is yielding good results. and the Palestinian security apparatus is also helping. While there are worries over Israeli Arab terror, it does not meet the criterion of a security threat. By contrast, ‘price tag’ terror is no longer the ideology of a few ‘wild weeds.’ It is a full-blown underground, a security threat that is liable to set off a new intifada and enflame relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel.”
“
Here is Ha’aretz military affairs correspondent Amos Harel:

“According to the Shin Bet, the right-wing extremists no longer appear to need a ‘trigger’ to take action, while the targets of the violence are also widening – military vehicles at an IDF base near Ramallah have been vandalized, and threatening graffiti has been sprayed onto the apartment door of a left-wing activist. Attacks on Arabs and their property are carried out when the opportunity arises, the Shin Bet officials add.”

What’s going on? What’s provoking the settlers in this underground now?

Nothing. They “no longer appear to need a ‘trigger.’” It doesn’t matter what the Palestinians, the government in Jerusalem or the administration in Washington do or don’t do. Nobody’s bothering them, nobody’s threatening them; they’re just feeding off the endless, escalating provocations in their own minds.

Is this an isolated phenomenon? Is it unconnected to the national political scene? I don’t think so. It seems to me that the rise in settler violence over the last couple of years is the crude, violent expression of the trend we’ve seen in the Israeli public at large: While Palestinian terror and political radicalism have steadily diminished, Israeli politics and public opinion have continually gotten more right-wing and hostile to Arabs.

There’s never been less terror here, the Palestinian police are doing much of our dirty work, we’ve never had a Palestinian leadership remotely as moderate and peaceable as Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad – yet the feeling here is that the situation’s hopeless, there’s no one to talk to, any minute all hell’s going to break loose, our backs are to the wall. If Bibi can’t save us, maybe Lieberman can.

Israelis used to say – and I used to believe – that if the Palestinians only stopped terror, we would be only too eager to make peace with them. If that was ever true, it certainly hasn’t been for many years.  They’ve stopped terror, and not for the first time – Arafat stopped terror for the last 4-1/2 years of the 7-year Oslo process, and it had no effect on Israeli opinion then just like Abbas’s efforts have had no effect on Israeli opinion now.

To be clear, the Israeli mainstream opposes these price tag attacks, it rejects the torching of mosques and olive groves. However, the Israeli mainstream remains deeply antagonistic toward Arabs, and this feeling has only gotten stronger in recent years, regardless of how subdued the local Arabs have become. The price tag underground is a violent, fanatic, superheated outgrowth of what’s happened to the Israeli political mind. On either side of the Green Line, we need no trigger, no provocation anymore. The provocation is inside us, and we just keep feeding on it.

As we noted in our recent profile of Crooked Still, the addition of the cello to the folk repertoire is relatively recent. Indeed, it would not be entirely wrong to credit founding member Rashaad Eggleston, who has since moved on to become a core member of stringfolk supergroup Fiddlers 4, with broadening these particular boundaries for a huge percentage of the folk audience.

But of course the much larger trend towards experimental expansion and genre-blur in the indie world comes into play here, too, making the rock violinist (or the rock cellist duo) a close cousin to the folk cellist in the post-20th-century marketplace of sound. And sure enough, we’ve posted singer-songwriter folk cellists before, like indie darling Ben Sollee and Falcon Ridge Folk Fest emerging artist Lindsay Mac, and found dozens more from all walks of folk on the radar, though arguably, the work of appalachian inheritor bands like Fiddlers 4, of orchestral folk and “chamberfolk” groups like Childsplay and The Folk Arts Quartet, of indiepop experimentalists such as The Portland Cello Project and their various rock-to-jazz-to-gypsyfolk members, and – more progenitally – folk-influenced pieces from the jazz-fusion Turtle Island String Quartet and others, better represent the larger systemic shift which has brought this unwieldy instrument, oft cited for having the timbre and tonal range most closest to the male human voice, into the canon.

Regardless of how it emerged, the willingness to accept cello music as folk is an interesting prerequisite for new discovery here at Covert Lay Down. And so we come together this weekend to explore the fruits of such discovery, in the person of one Kevin Fox, cellist and singer-songwriter extraordinaire.

Today’s post was almost a forgotten one-shot, based around a YouTube cover of Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes which got lost in the shuffle, resurfacing too late to make it into our recent set of Shod Coverfolk. But persistence paid off when I went looking for a studio version, on the off chance that Canadian cellist Kevin Fox had a larger body of work.

I’ve since learned much more about Kevin Fox. For starters, though in live-via-YouTube performance, his looped acoustic pop Paul Simon cover seemed pleasantly mild and measured when put against Ben Sollee’s more deliberately ragged, slipperier oveure, such comparison is unfair: Fox aims for something quite different, and achieves it marvelously. Instead, a closer listen – to this cover, and to Fox’s studio work as a set – reveals a preference for sparse, perfectly crafted, acoustic-driven contemporary soundscapes, and a particular talent for projecting darkness and light through the balance of the plucked and the bowed against his clear, breath-tinged singer-songwriter’s voice.

Fox’s stringwork is precise, his arrangements tight: there’s clearly a classical influence here, and mastery to match. But his larger body of work reveals a genuine eagerness to perform and write in multiple corners of the pop, rock, and folk spectrum. In addition to his solo work, the Halifax-born Fox is a frequent collaborator, arranger, and touring companion for a whole spectrum of talented countrymen and countrywomen, from Kathleen Edwards, Sarah Harmer, Danny Michel, Raine Maida, Stephen Page and Celine Dion, in and around his native provinces. To each, he brings the right note of atmosphere, just as he does to his original compositions, and their layered arrangements for voice, cello, and little else.

Finding Kevin Fox could not have happened without the turn of mind which looks for the folk in such instrumentation, it’s true. His tendency to stick to the provinces makes him harder to find; his chamelonesque history as a sideman and behind-the-scenes post-composition arranger makes him harder still to categorize. But once discovered, Fox outs himself as a soulful folk artist in every carefully constructed note of his solo pieces, even as his own larger body of work reveals him to be a major player in the grand contemporary genre-blurring tradition which continues to grow and spread north of the border. Listen; I think you’ll hear it, too:

• Kevin Fox: Diamonds On The Soles Of His Shoes (orig. Paul Simon)
• Kevin Fox: River (orig. Joni Mitchell)
  (from Set Right, 2011)

• Kevin Fox: Army Dreamers (orig. Kate Bush)
• Kevin Fox: Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This) (orig. The Eurythmics)
  (from Songs for Cello and Voice, 2007)

• Stephen Page w/ Kevin Fox: Halelujah (orig. Leonard Cohen)
  
  
  (live from Jack Layton’s State Funeral, August 27, 2011)

Want more? Kevin Fox has three albums in print through his website – a potent and easy entry to a highly recommended artist on the rise, especially for those who cannot make it to shows above the border – and each one comes highly recommended, though only the two most recent of these include coverage.

But since we started in a larger context, let’s end the lesson today with some bonus cellofolk from others mentioned herein, both for comparison’s sake and to pay tribute to the others whose careers support and legitimize today’s feature subject. I think you’ll find it a diverse set – but no less apt, given the myriad overlapping of sounds and sensibilities in the modern folkways, and our ongoing celebration of the vast and varied tent we call “folk”.

• Fiddlers 4: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free (orig. Nina Simone)
  (from The Fiddlers 4, 2002)

• Ben Sollee: A Change Is Gonna Come (orig. Sam Cooke)
  (from Learning to Bend, 2008)

• Ben Sollee: Extraordinary Machine (orig. Fiona Apple)
  (live from a 2008 HearYa session)

• Lindsay Mac: Blackbird (orig. The Beatles)
  (from Stop Thinking, 2008)

• Lindsay Mac: Use Me (orig. Bill Withers)
  (from Small Revolution, 2005)

• Childsplay: Love Me Tender (orig. Elvis Presley)
  (from Waiting for the Dawn, 2009)

• Folk Arts Quartet: Waterlily + The Joy Of It (orig. Karine Polwart / orig. Catriona MacDonald)
  (from Folk Arts Quartet, 2009)

• Portland Cello Project: Toxic (orig. Britney Spears)
  (from Portland Cello Project, 2008)

• Walking Home: Balm In Gilead (trad.)
  (MySpace capture, 2009)

• Turtle Island String Quartet: Crossroads (orig. Robert Johnson)
  (from Skylife, 1990)

Previously on Cover Lay Down: Crooked Still covers The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Gillian Welch and more.

Continue reading Sinch takes aim at headphone tangles, we go hands-on

Sinch takes aim at headphone tangles, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 12 Sep 2011 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

During the storm and for several days afterwards, several thousand men, women, and children as young as ten--many of them being held in pre-trial detention on minor offenses-- were effectively abandoned as floodwaters rose and the power went out, plunging the cells into darkness. As deputies fled their posts, prisoners were left standing up to their chests in sewage-contaminated floodwaters, without food, drinking water, or ventilation.

Once they were evacuated from OPP, prisoners were sent to receiving facilities around the state where human rights abuses appear to have continued. At one facility, for example, thousands of OPP evacuees spent several days on an outdoor football field where there were no toilets or wash facilities, and where prisoner-on-prisoner violence went unchecked by guards. A recent ACLU report examining changes made at the prison since the disaster concluded that "OPP remains dangerously ill prepared to handle a future emergency," with a revised evacuation plan that is "inconsistent" and "inadequate" to prevent the kinds of abuses that occurred after Katrina.

Everyone’s abuzz with the “nymwars,” mostly in response to Google Plus’ decision to enforce its “real names” policy. At first, Google Plus went on a deleting spree, killing off accounts that violated its policy. When the community reacted with outrage, Google Plus leaders tried to calm the anger by detailing their “new and improved” mechanism to enforce “real names” (without killing off accounts). This only sparked increased discussion about the value of pseudonymity. Dozens of blog posts have popped up with people expressing their support for pseudonymity and explaining their reasons. One of the posts, by Kirrily “Skud” Robert included a list of explanations that came from people she polled, including:

• “I am a high school teacher, privacy is of the utmost importance.”
• “I have used this name/account in a work context, my entire family know this name and my friends know this name. It enables me to participate online without being subject to harassment that at one point in time lead to my employer having to change their number so that calls could get through.”
• “I do not feel safe using my real name online as I have had people track me down from my online presence and had coworkers invade my private life.”
• “I’ve been stalked. I’m a rape survivor. I am a government employee that is prohibited from using my IRL.”
• “As a former victim of stalking that impacted my family I’ve used [my nickname] online for about 7 years.”
• “[this name] is a pseudonym I use to protect myself. My web site can be rather controversial and it has been used against me once.”
• “I started using [this name] to have at least a little layer of anonymity between me and people who act inappropriately/criminally. I think the “real names” policy hurts women in particular.
• “I enjoy being part of a global and open conversation, but I don’t wish for my opinions to offend conservative and religious people I know or am related to. Also I don’t want my husband’s Govt career impacted by his opinionated wife, or for his staff to feel in any way uncomfortable because of my views.”
• “I have privacy concerns for being stalked in the past. I’m not going to change my name for a google+ page. The price I might pay isn’t worth it.”
• “We get death threats at the blog, so while I’m not all that concerned with, you know, sane people finding me. I just don’t overly share information and use a pen name.”
• “This identity was used to protect my real identity as I am gay and my family live in a small village where if it were openly known that their son was gay they would have problems.”
• “I go by pseudonym for safety reasons. Being female, I am wary of internet harassment.”

You’ll notice a theme here…

Another site has popped up called “My Name Is Me” where people vocalize their support for pseudonyms. What’s most striking is the list of people who are affected by “real names” policies, including abuse survivors, activists, LGBT people, women, and young people.

Over and over again, people keep pointing to Facebook as an example where “real names” policies work. This makes me laugh hysterically. One of the things that became patently clear to me in my fieldwork is that countless teens who signed up to Facebook late into the game chose to use pseudonyms or nicknames. What’s even more noticeable in my data is that an extremely high percentage of people of color used pseudonyms as compared to the white teens that I interviewed. Of course, this would make sense…

The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people. These ideas and issues aren’t new (and I’ve even talked about this before), but what is new is that marginalized people are banding together and speaking out loudly. And thank goodness.

What’s funny to me is that people also don’t seem to understand the history of Facebook’s “real names” culture. When early adopters (first the elite college students…) embraced Facebook, it was a trusted community. They gave the name that they used in the context of college or high school or the corporation that they were a part of. They used the name that fit into the network that they joined Facebook with. The names they used weren’t necessarily their legal names; plenty of people chose Bill instead of William. But they were, for all intents and purposes, “real.” As the site grew larger, people had to grapple with new crowds being present and discomfort emerged over the norms. But the norms were set and people kept signing up and giving the name that they were most commonly known by. By the time celebrities kicked in, Facebook wasn’t demanding that Lady Gaga call herself Stefani Germanotta, but of course, she had a “fan page” and was separate in the eyes of the crowd. Meanwhile, what many folks failed to notice is that countless black and Latino youth signed up to Facebook using handles. Most people don’t notice what black and Latino youth do online. Likewise, people from outside of the US started signing up to Facebook and using alternate names. Again, no one noticed because names transliterated from Arabic or Malaysian or containing phrases in Portuguese weren’t particularly visible to the real name enforcers. Real names are by no means universal on Facebook, but it’s the importance of real names is a myth that Facebook likes to shill out. And, for the most part, privileged white Americans use their real name on Facebook. So it “looks” right.

Then along comes Google Plus, thinking that it can just dictate a “real names” policy. Only, they made a huge mistake. They allowed the tech crowd to join within 48 hours of launching. The thing about the tech crowd is that it has a long history of nicks and handles and pseudonyms. And this crowd got to define the early social norms of the site, rather than being socialized into the norms set up by trusting college students who had joined a site that they thought was college-only. This was not a recipe for “real name” norm setting. Quite the opposite. Worse for Google… Tech folks are VERY happy to speak LOUDLY when they’re pissed off. So while countless black and Latino folks have been using nicks all over Facebook (just like they did on MySpace btw), they never loudly challenged Facebook’s policy. There was more of a “live and let live” approach to this. Not so lucky for Google and its name-bending community. Folks are now PISSED OFF.

Personally, I’m ecstatic to see this much outrage. And I’m really really glad to see seriously privileged people take up the issue, because while they are the least likely to actually be harmed by “real names” policies, they have the authority to be able to speak truth to power. And across the web, I’m seeing people highlight that this issue has more depth to it than fun names (and is a whole lot more complicated than boiling it down to being about anonymity, as Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg foolishly did).

What’s at stake is people’s right to protect themselves, their right to actually maintain a form of control that gives them safety. If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously. Not everyone is safer by giving out their real name. Quite the opposite; many people are far LESS safe when they are identifiable. And those who are least safe are often those who are most vulnerable.

Likewise, the issue of reputation must be turned on its head when thinking about marginalized people. Folks point to the issue of people using pseudonyms to obscure their identity and, in theory, “protect” their reputation. The assumption baked into this is that the observer is qualified to actually assess someone’s reputation. All too often, and especially with marginalized people, the observer takes someone out of context and judges them inappropriately based on what they get online. Let me explain this in a concrete example that many of you have heard before. Years ago, I received a phone call from an Ivy League college admissions officer who wanted to accept a young black man from South Central in LA into their college; the student had written an application about how he wanted to leave behind the gang-ridden community he came from, but the admissions officers had found his MySpace which was filled with gang insignia. The question that was asked of me was “Why would he lie to us when we can tell the truth online?” Knowing that community, I was fairly certain that he was being honest with the college; he was also doing what it took to keep himself alive in his community. If he had used a pseudonym, the college wouldn’t have been able to get data out of context about him and inappropriately judge him. But they didn’t. They thought that their frame mattered most. I really hope that he got into that school.

There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.

Thus, from my perspective, enforcing “real names” policies in online spaces is an abuse of power.

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When you think about hacking laptops, it’s highly unlikely that you would ever consider the battery as a viable attack vector. Security researcher [Charlie Miller] however, has been hard at work showing just how big a vulnerability they can be.

As we have been discussing recently, the care and feeding of many batteries, big and small, is handled by some sort of microcontroller. [Charlie] found that a 2009 update issued by Apple to fix some lingering MacBook power issues used one of two passwords to write data to the battery controllers. From what he has seen, it seems these same passwords have been used on all batteries manufactured since that time as well. Using this data, he was subsequently able to gain access to the chips, allowing him to remotely brick the batteries, falsify data sent to the OS, and completely replace the stock firmware with that of his own.

He says that it would be possible for an attacker to inject malware into the battery itself, which would covertly re-infect the machine, despite all traditional removal attempts. Of course, replacing the battery would rectify the issue in these situations, but he says that it would likely be the last thing anyone would suspect as the source of infection. While using the battery to proliferate malware or cause irreversible damage to the computer would take quite a bit of work, [Charlie] claims that either scenario is completely plausible.

He plans on presenting his research at this year’s Black Hat security conference in August, but in the meantime he has created a utility that generates a completely random password for your Mac’s battery. He says that he has already contacted Apple to in order to help them construct a permanent fix for the issue, so an official patch may be available in the near future.

[Thanks, Sergio]

Goldman Sachs doesn’t have to tell you things are bad. I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. Unemployment is at 9.2 percent (11.4 percent if the official labor force hadn’t collapsed since 2008 and 16.2 percent if you include discouraged and underemployed workers.) Moreover, the economy grew at just 1.9 percent in the first quarter of this year and may have grown less than 2 percent in the second. Wages and income are going nowhere fast.

When will the White House signal a change of economic direction? Will cutting tax rates and regulation ever make it on the agenda? That may be the only way Obama can win another term. And time is running short.

... terrible growth prospects; low inflation; oh, and low interest rates, with no sign of the bond vigilantes. Ordinary macroeconomic analysis tells you very clearly what we should be doing: fiscal expansion and monetary expansion by any means we can manage; in fact, the case for a higher inflation target pops right out of just about any model capable of producing the kind of mess we’re in.

And what are we talking about in policy terms? Spending cuts and an end to monetary expansion.

I know the arguments — fear of invisible bond vigilantes, fear that 70s-style stagflation is just around the corner despite the absence of any evidence to that effect. But why do such arguments have so much traction, while everything economists have spent the last three generations learning is brushed aside?

One answer is that macroeconomics is hard; the idea that if families are tightening their belts, the government should do the same, is as deeply intuitive as it is deeply wrong.

But the susceptibility of politicians — including, alas, the president — and pundits to these wrong ideas demands a deeper explanation.

Mike Konczal ratchets up my rentier argument, arguing that what we’re seeing is

a wide refocusing of the mechanisms of our society towards the crucial obsession of oligarchs: wealth and income defense.

That has to be right. It doesn’t necessarily take the form of pure cynicism; it’s more a matter of the wealthy gravitating toward views of economic policy that make immediate sense in terms of their own interests, and politicians believing that only these views count as Serious because they’re the views of wealthy people.

But the upshot is terrible: more and more, this really does look like the Lesser Depression, a prolonged era of disastrous economic performance. And it’s entirely gratuitous.

A federal appeals court on Friday unanimously declined to block the government from using intrusive body scanners across airports nationwide, saying it is “not persuaded by any of the statutory or constitutional arguments” against them.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was deciding a constitutional and procedural challenge to the Advanced Imaging Technology “nude” body scanners, which began rolling out in 2007 and are deployed to at least 78 airports nationwide. The Electronic Privacy Information Center asked the court to block usage of the devices — of which 500 more are to be rolled out this year — on grounds that they are an unconstitutional privacy invasion, ineffective and unhealthy to airline passengers.

“The petitioners argue that using AIT for primary screening violates the Fourth Amendment because it is more invasive than is necessary to detect weapons or explosives,” the appeals court noted. “As other circuits have held, and as the Supreme Court has strongly suggested, screening passengers at an airport is an ‘administrative search’ because the primary goal is not to determine whether any passenger has committed a crime but rather to protect the public from a terrorist attack.”

The court said that, whether an administrative search is unreasonable, is a balancing test on how much it intrudes upon an individual’s privacy, and how much that intrusion is needed for the promotion of “legitimate” government interests.

“That balance clearly favors the government here,” the court ruled 3-0. The court added that an “AIT scanner, unlike a magnetometer, is capable of detecting, and therefore of deterring, attempts to carry aboard explosives in liquid powder form.” The three-judge appellate panel did not address limited research suggesting that the machines might not detect explosives or even guns taped to a person’s body.

However, the appellate court, which is one stop from the Supreme Court, said that the Transportation Security Administration breached federal law in 2009 when it formally adopted the airport scanners as the “primary” method of screening. The judges said the TSA violated the Administrative Procedures Act for failing to have a 90-day public comment period, and ordered the agency to undertake one.

Generally, under the APA, agency decisions must go through what is often termed a “notice and comment” period if their new rules would substantially affect the rights of the public — in this case air passengers. The Environmental Protection Agency often undertakes “notice and comment” periods for proposed pollution regulations.

The court did not penalize the TSA for its shortcomings. The TSA argued to the court in March that a public comment period would thwart the government’s ability to respond to “ever-evolving threats.”

Judge Douglas Ginsburg, writing for the majority, said the TSA must allow for the 90-day notice-and-comment period because of the new “substantive obligations” on airline passengers.

“It is clear that by producing an image of the unclothed passenger, an AIT scanner intrudes upon his or her personal privacy in a way a magnetometer does not. Therefore, regardless whether this is a ‘new substantive burden,’ the change substantively affects the public to a degree sufficient to implicate the policy interests animating notice-and-comment rulemaking, Ginsburg wrote.

“Indeed, few if any regulatory procedures impose directly and significantly upon so many members of the public. Not surprisingly, therefore, much public concern and media coverage have been focused upon issues of privacy, safety, and efficacy, each of which no doubt would have been the subject of many comments had the TSA seen fit to solicit comments upon a proposal to use AIT for primary screening.”

The court declined to address whether the TSA could have skirted the notice-and-comment under a so-called “good cause exception.” That allows agencies to bypass public input when it is “impractical, unnecessary or contrary to the public interest.”

Despite the TSA breach, the court would not stop scanner usage. Doing so, Ginsburg wrote, would “severely disrupt an essential security operation.”

Marc Rotenberg, the president of EPIC, the group that brought the challenge, said the decision means the “TSA is now subject to the same rules as other government agencies that help ensure transparency and accountability.”

He said “Many Americans object to the airport body scanner program. Now they will have an opportunity to express their views to the TSA and the agency must take their views into account as a matter of law.”

That said, the court acknowledged “the steps the TSA has already taken to protect passenger privacy, in particular distorting the image created using AIT and deleting it as soon as the passenger has cleared.” During oral arguments in the case in March, Department of Justice lawyer Beth Brinkmann said the government is moving toward adopting new technology that produces a broad outline of a passenger instead of a virtual nude image.

Regarding health concerns, “the agency has commissioned two studies of the safety of the scanners,” Ginsburg wrote. The judge added that the studies — which were not generally accepted in the scientific community — concluded that “the scanners emit levels of radiation well within acceptable limits.”

Ginsburg added that the scanners are optional. “More telling, any passenger may opt-out of AIT screening in favor of a patdown,” he wrote. Ginsburg’s ruling did not address accusations that passengers opting for a patdown are often groped or harassed by TSA security officials.

Joining Ginsburg were Judges Karen Henderson and David Tatel.

See Also:

• TSA Admits Bungling of Airport Body-Scanner Radiation Tests
• Court Unlikely to Halt ‘Nude’ Airport Body Scanners
• Feds Say Airport Body Scanners are ‘Minimally Intrusive’
• Airport ‘Nude’ Body Scanners: Are They Effective?
• Group Demands Immediate Halt of Full-Body Airport Scanners
• ‘Nude’ Airport Scanners: Are They Safe?
• Court Likely to Uphold Constitutionality of ‘Nude’ Airport Scanners
• Man With 4th Amendment Written on Chest Sues Over Airport Arrest

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As Lisa Guisbond quoted Fred Klonsky, "this is an amazing video from the Aspen Ideas Festival in which Stand For Children’s Jonah Edelman explains how he, with the support of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan’s senior advisor Jo Anderson (former Executive Director of the IEA) out foxed the CTU, the IFT and the IEA’s Ken Swanson and Audrey Soglin into agreeing to Senate Bill 7."

For those who still believe that there is any way to trust, negotiate with, compromise with, or have any dealings with Ed Deform in any way that does not demand complete capitulation to the ed deformers, watch this video.  Play it at your next union meeting, share it with the world. 

We do know some of what goes on at the Aspen Ideas Festival besides getting a chance to smell and touch sewer rats like Rupert Murdoch.  Here is a great example of massive ego mixed with manipulative glee that was posted and quickly pulled from the Aspen site, but not before Fred Klonsky captured a copy for the world to see and hear.

In this Machiavellian masterpiece, we see Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children infamy (list of donors here) describe in great detail how great wads of hedge-fund and other corporate cash came to bear on the last legislative election in Illinois, how all the best lobbyists were bought up by Deform (including minority ones), how unions were outspent and how politicians followed the money, how teacher unions were lured to the table and how they were totally manhandled by the best lawyers and negotiators that money can buy, how union leaders became complicit, scared, weak, groveling. 

Hear how Karen Lewis, head of Chicago Teachers Union was made a fool of, how she gave up the right to strike with less than a 75% strike vote (something that has never happened, as Jonah notes).  Hear how Lewis gave the Deformer lawyers free rein to work out the details on a terrible agreement.  As Jonah swaggers, "We got to decide all the fine print."  In those details is the insurance needed to impose the same IMPACT teacher eval plan that DC has.

Hear Jonah, with eyebrows arched like Mephistopheles, brag that Rahm can make the school day and year as long as he wants in Chicago, how principals can hire and fire whomever they like, how seniority is history, how Jonah now wants to use the union capitulation in Illinois to inspire unions in other states--quickly. 

Sorry, Jonah, for having to post this again.  You arrogant twerp.



You can get to the entire video from here: http://preaprez.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/your-very-own-copy-of-the-jonah-edelman-tape/

Some quotable quotes:

"There's a high squirm factor" about the way they bought and paid for Illinois Democratic legislative leaders.

"We're already getting going. We're doing this level of work in every state. ..In Washington state, same goal. We could readily outspend the WEA. MA, very similar. It might be a ballot measure in WA. If might be we have a ballot measure on the ballot in MA, and we use it as a lever.

"By the end of this decade we're going to have ended seniority-based decision making in education in this country. It's not enough to ensure better outcomes, but it's certainly something that has been long overdue."

"If you have a longer day but terrible teachers, that doesn't do anything. It's about performance management. It's boring, it's not a silver bullet. Brizard has to hire a lot of really good superintendent level people. They've got to evaluate their principals rigorously and create pipelines of quality principals. More people would want to be principals because not only do they have the accountability but they have the authority."

"The Tribune was fantastic. They probably wrote more than 10 supportive editorials. Sun Times was good. We had a lot of downstate editorial support."

"Wisconsin was a problem, but we were able to do a side by side comparison to say the unions mantra that this was a Wisconsin style attack was baloney."

Mark Zuckerberg announced the Skype-Facebook collaboration yesterday and showed off a great product built by the Skype team. As he talked about the world, he amplified his long held belief that people love to share and sharing on Facebook will only keep growing. He’s held that belief for a long time and talked about it first in 2008. Yesterday, he equated what is being dubbed as Zuckerberg’s Law to Moore’s Law. It makes perfect marketing sense that he would do that.

For me, data is the plastic of the 21st century, something I have said again and again. My belief in the disruptive power of data prompted me to start writing about it long before it became fashionable and we organized a gathering around it as well. I am even working on a book around it. Thus, I was excited to hear Zuckerberg talk at length about data and its capabilities.

So I set off to write about Facebook and its data-centric approach to the web. To supplement my writing, I asked the Facebook public relations team if they would be kind enough to share a slide with me from Mark’s presentation — the slide you currently see in the post . . . thanks to my friends at Inside Facebook. (I wanted a higher resolution photo than the one pictured versus using a screen grab from the Facebook video livestream).

But the Facebook PR team decided that they didn’t want to share that slide. That answer did catch me by surprise. I mean, I wasn’t asking for a trade secret or an exclusive piece of information. I was asking for a piece of a document that had already been shared publicly. First I was annoyed; Irritated even. But I decided to let it go.

And then I thought about it some more. The answer from Facebook’s press team is reflective of what is Facebook’s corporate DNA of hoarding information. The company’s approach to data is that of a one way street: use any of its products — Facebook Connect, Facebook Comments, Facebook Likes — and you keep sending data into the giant Facebook brain.

When you want to take something out of the Facebook borg — well, that isn’t going to happen. And when you do get access to the data, it is in a limited fashion for a select few companies.

I have been around long enough to know that companies have a way of putting on a happy face. Just as I don’t buy into the “do no evil” nonsense from Google, I have been skeptical of Facebook and its friendliness.

On paper, it is a mere slide from a PowerPoint, but in reality it is the true reflection of a double standard on sharing by Facebook. I think next time Mark or his brilliant CTO Bret Taylor talk about sharing, they should also remember the age old saying — actions speak louder than words.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Flash analysis: prospects for Google+
• The Case for Increased M&A in 2011: Actions and Outlooks
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

Despite Andrew Cuomo’s admirable push for gay marriage, he is a horrible governor. As a “Democrat,” Cuomo has declared war on unions, on the environment, and on everything Democrats theoretically stand for, outside of gay marriage. And again, while his stance on that single issue is to his significant benefit, Cuomo is atrocious. After his pro-fracking announcement today, I was going to unload, but Steve M beat me to it and I’ll leave it to him and those Steve links to:

The Cuomo administration is expected to lift what has been, in effect, a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, a controversial technology used to extract natural gas from shale, people briefed on the administration’s discussions said on Thursday.

Administration officials are discussing maintaining a ban on the process inside New York City’s sprawling upstate watershed, as well as a watershed used by the city of Syracuse, according to people briefed on the plan. But by allowing the process in other parts of the state, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would open up New York to one of the fastest-growing — critics would say reckless — areas of the energy industry….

Hydrofracking has spurred intense protests from environmental activists, who say it threatens the cleanliness of ground water….

It isn’t just the fracking. There’s a lot more to dislike about the guy if you’re a progressive, as Eric Alterman recently noted:

The same liberal Democrat who fights for gay marriage is presiding over a budget agreement that will cost New York City schools 2,600 teachers, 600 more than estimated, and lay off 1,000 city workers, many of whom work in health care for the poor, at a time when the need for both could hardly be greater. Cuomo, who one must sometimes remind oneself, is a Democrat, also fought tooth and nail to ensure the death of New York’s millionaire tax, at exactly the moment when its proceeds might have been able to prevent exactly the kinds of cuts described above. In his willingness to play “bulldog for the rich,” as Michael Powell puts it, he is distinguishable from Roger Ailes’ favorite politician, right-wing New Jersey Governor Chris Christie only in degree, rather than in kind.

And if you can judge a guy by his friends, here are some of Cuomo’s:

“Looking for a tax-cutting, budget-slashing, fiscally conservative governor? How about Andrew Cuomo?” wrote the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner back in February.

“Cuomo’s performance thus far has advanced the cause of limited government in the Empire State far more than did his past three predecessors,” enthused Deroy Murdock in April.

Cuomo in 2016? Reihan Salam can get down with that. “Imagine a presidential election pitting a budget-cutting Democratic governor against a budget-cutting Republican governor,” Salam wrote. “That would be, in my view, an excellent outcome for fiscal conservatives.”

Even Carl Paladino has praised Cuomo.

So if he’s the 2016 candidate against Chris Christie, update your passport.

I’ll only add this: Cuomo has a clear vision–to be the ultimate centrist, thinking he can squeak through the 2016 presidential primary against other, presumably real Democrats who actually share the vision of the post-1933 Democratic Party and then triangulate himself into the presidency, where he will make us all long for the halcyon Clinton and Obama days, when a Democrat knew how to stand up to a Republican.

Except that I don’t think he can do it. I don’t think the bastard can withstand a Democratic primary, unless we let his single good and admirable position outweigh the fact that he doesn’t care about working-class people or the environment or essentially any other traditional Democratic issue. Certainly I would not vote for Andrew Cuomo for president, not in a primary and not in a general election.

Boingo Wireless is expanding its reach to the skies today with a new partnership with Gogo, a company that powers wireless internet connectivity on airplanes. With the new partnership, Boingo customers can now log in to Gogo using their existing Boingo account (as opposed to using or creating a Gogo account).

Boingo says that this Gogo internet access includes more than 1,100 planes. No on the Gogo home pages, users will be able to choose Boingo as their provider and log in with their existing Boingo username and password. Users who have Boingo’s Wi-Finder app can also log-in to Gogo as well by accepting the flight segment charge and entering a CAPTCHA validation phrase.

Of course, Boingo users (who pay a monthly or yearly fee for access), will also have to pay another fee for in-flight access. Users will be paid $4.95, $9.95 or $12.95 per flight based on the length of the flight. Smartphone users will pay $4.95 or $7.95, depending on the flight duration.

So the main benefit to Boingo’s million-plus users is that they can simply use their account to access the internet on flights, as opposed to creating a new account with Gogo (which I’ve had to do). The good news is that Gogo is powering wireless connectivity for most major airlines, including AirTran Airways, Delta Airlines, Virgin America, Air Canada, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Frontier Airlines, United Airlines, and US Airways.

Editor’s note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a health technology company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist.  Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture’s healthcare practice and was the founder of Microsoft’s Health business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave.

As reported on TechCrunch, Google shut down its medical records and health data platform. Since then, there’s been a lot of bits spilled offering explanations, but they all missed the most critical item. Money. Or in the language of healthcare—Reimbursement. I explain more below regarding why Google Health was doomed to fail in light of the legacy reimbursement model.

First, let’s recap some of the explanations offered up so far. These are all valid but miss the biggest point.

Adam Bosworth, who originally ran Google Health gave one reason: It’s Not Social. That’s true if one wants to create a weight management program or is simply interested in fitness-minded folks. Clearly that is important given the obesity epidemic, however there’s vast swaths of healthcare where being “social” isn’t appropriate or applicable in a doctor-patient relationship. In other words, being social is necessary but not sufficient to transform healthcare.

In the comments of TechCrunch’s original article reporting the shutdown, I gave my immediate take…

1. It’s tough, even for big companies, to focus on a bunch of different things. I’m sure they could have figured out how to be successful if it was as strategically important as Search or Chrome or Android or Social…but they have bigger fish to fry.
2. The Health space is a very difficult one. In many ways, it’s counter-intuitive for those who haven’t been in the arena from both the healthcare provider and consumer perspective.
3. As much as there’s a massive consumer-empowerment movement, in order to get ongoing and broad adoption of something in healthcare, one needs to lead with the clinicians.

If you are interested in more, I’ve written about this here.

One of the better analyses was done by John Moore of Chilmark Research.

Few consumers are interested in a digital filing cabinet for their records. What they are interested in is what that data can do for them. Can it help them better manage their health and/or the health of a loved one? Will it help them make appointments? Will it save them money on their health insurance bill, their next doctor visit? Can it help them automatically get a prescription refill? These are the basics that the vast majority of consumers want addressed first and Google Health was unable to deliver on any of these.

As much as we’d like to think it isn’t the case, the fundamental driver of most (not all) behavior in healthcare is the reimbursement scheme. As I described in an earlier piece on the “Do it Yourself Health Reform” movement, I spent much of my time as a consultant in the Patient Accounting departments of heatlhcare providers. The legacy reimbursement scheme can only be described as a Gordian Knot designed by Rube Goldberg.

I expanded on the insidious effects of the reimbursement model in the U.S. in my overview of The Most Important Important Organization in Silicon Valley No One Has Heard About. For those who would like to be optimistic about the reimbursement model changing, read about Health Insurance’s Bunker Buster. In the meantime, it’s critical to understand the current reimbursement model to understand why Google Health failed to transform the landscape.

To understand the impact, I’ll exaggerate to make a point—your healthcare provider doesn’t care about you unless they can see the whites of your eyes. Why is that? Today’s flawed reimbursement scheme only compensates the healthcare provider for a face to face visit. It’s hard to fault the primary care physician who has been put on a hamster wheel of 30-40 appointments per day and can’t even give their practice away upon retirement (that was once their retirement plan) for not wanting to deal with their patients sending email or sharing information from their personal health record.

Interestingly, in the transformative models I describe below, doctors consistently tell me that half to two-thirds of their patient interaction time doesn’t need to be face-to-face. They can deliver high quality medicine without being in the same room as them. Yet, the fee-for-service model causes this country to waste mountains of time waiting to get appointments and then in the waiting room in order to facilitate the face-to-face appointment.

The problem for a company like Google or Microsoft is their success is measured in the tens of millions. Those kinds of numbers are only present in the legacy reimbursement model. Frankly, Google could have done all the right things, but if the reimbursement model doesn’t change Personal Health Records will remain irrelevant for most healthcare providers. At best, we’re seeing Electronic Health Record vendors release so-called Patient Portals that are often driven more by a marketing objective than a clinical objective. Further, they are flawed in that they are a one-way broadcast of the silo’ed information from only one healthcare provider.

Is there any hope for individuals to be more involved in the healthcare system as Personal Health Records promised? After all, it’s clear that healthcare works best and costs least when the patient/individual is a partner in their care with their healthcare provider. Fortunately, I believe that we’re seeing the first waves of a tsunami lapping the shore.

It’s what I call the P.A.C. Tsunami. Patient-centered, Accountability and Coordinated. Today’s flawed fee-for-service reimbursement system is essentially the opposite of those three elements creating all the wrong incentives. In its place, we’re seeing the first waves. Both the Do-it-Yourself Health Reform movement and the government-driven health reform are creating incentives for what are called a Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACO).

We are already seeing dramatic success with the first editions of PCMHs in the models such as MedLion that were highlighted in The Most Important Important Organization in Silicon Valley No One Has Heard About article. ACOs have the right goals in mind but remain like Unicorns—fantastical beings no one has seen yet and have been described as stupefyingly complex in their design. In contrast, one can’t help but be optimistic when studying the results of PCMHs such as 40-80% reductions in the most expensive facets of healthcare (surgical, specialist & ER visits) or a pilot program in Ohio with Medicaid diabetics that scaled could save Ohio $500 million annually.  Or consider the case of Denmark that was the first country to broadly adopt the PCMH model. It’s been so successful, they have reduced the number of hospitals in that country by over 50% as they simply don’t need that many hospitals anymore.

What does this mean for the tech community? I’d posit that as mobile technologies have fundamentally reshaped voice and data, there’ll be an equally radical transformation of healthcare. Just as legacy telcos had to fundamentally transform themselves or they’d be an artifact of history, so too will healthcare organizations transform (or die). With the transformed healthcare ecosystem, there are requirements for entirely new categories of software that a new generation of startups will develop. Exciting times indeed.

Image credit: Colin Dunn

Update: I have authored a 20+ page paper on verifying social media content based on 5 case studies. Please see this blog post for a copy.

I get this question all the time: “How do you verify social media data?” This question drives many of the conversations on crowdsourcing and crisis mapping these days. It’s high time that we start compiling our tips and tricks into an online how-to-guide so that we don’t have to start from square one every time the question comes up. We need to build and accumulate our shared knowledge in information forensics. So here is the Google Doc version of this blog post, please feel free to add your best practices and ask others to contribute. Feel free to also add links to other studies on verifying social media content.

If every source we monitored in the social media space was known and trusted, then the need for verification would not be as pronounced. In other words, it is the plethora and virtual anonymity of sources that makes us skeptical of the content they deliver. The process of verifying  social media data thus requires a two-step process: the authentication of the source as reliable and the triangulation of the content as valid. If we can authenticate the source and find it trustworthy, this may be sufficient to trust the content and mark is a verified depending on context. If source authentication is difficult to ascertain, then we need to triangulate the content itself.

Lets unpack these two processes—authentication and triangulation—and apply them to Twitter since the most pressing challenges regarding social media verification have to do with eyewitness, user-generated content. The first step is to try and determine whether the source is trustworthy. Here are some tips on how to do this:

• Bio on Twitter: Does the source provide a name, picture, bio and any  links to their own blog, identity, professional occupation, etc., on their page? If there’s a name, does searching for this name on Google provide any further clues to the person’s identity? Perhaps a Facebook page, a professional email address, a LinkedIn profile?

• Number of Tweets: Is this a new Twitter handle with only a few tweets? If so, this makes authentication more difficult. Arasmus notes that “the more recent, the less reliable and the more likely it is to be an account intended to spread disinformation.” In general, the longer the Twitter handle has been around and the more Tweets linked to this handle, the better. This gives a digital trace, a history of prior evidence that can be scrutinized for evidence of political bias, misinformation, etc. Arasmus specifies: “What are the tweets like? Does the person qualify his/her reports? Are they intelligible? Is the person given to exaggeration and inconsistencies?”

• Number of followers: Does the source have a large following? If there are only a few, are any of the followers know and credible sources? Also, how many lists has this Twitter hanlde been added to?

• Number following: How many Twitter users does the Twitter handle follow? Are these known and credible sources?

• Retweets: What type of content does the Twitter handle retweet? Does the Twitter handle in question get retweeted by known and credible sources?

• Location: Can the source’s geographic location be ascertained? If so, are they nearby the unfolding events? One way to try and find out by proxy is to examine during which periods of the day/night the source tweets the most. This may provide an indication as to the person’s time zone.

• Timing: Does the source appear to be tweeting in near real-time? Or are there considerable delays? Does anything appear unusual about the timing of the person’s tweets?

• Social authentication: If you’re still unsure about the source’s reliability, use your own social network–Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn–to find out if anyone in your network know about the source’s reliability.

• Media authentication: Is the source quoted by trusted media outlines whether this be in the mainstream or social media space?

• Engage the source: Tweet them back and ask them for further information. NPR’s Andy Carvin has employed this technique particularly well. For example, you can tweet back and ask for the source of the report and for any available pictures, videos, etc. Place the burden of proof on the source.

These are some of the tips that come to mind for source authentication. For more thoughts on this process, see my previous blog post “Passing the I’m-Not-Gaddafi-Test: Authenticating Identity During Crisis Mapping Operations.” If you some tips of your own not listed here, please do add them to the Google Doc—they don’t need to be limited to Twitter either.

Now, lets say that we’ve gone through list above and find the evidence inconclusive. We thus move to try and triangulate the content. Here are some tips on how to do this:

• Triangulation: Are other sources on Twitter or elsewhere reporting on the event you are investigating? As Arasmus notes, “remain skeptical about the reports that you receive. Look for multiple reports from different unconnected sources.” The more independent witnesses you can get information from the better and the less critical the need for identity authentication.

• Origins: If the user reporting an event is not necessarily the original source, can the original source be identified and authenticated? In particular, if the original source is found, does the time/date of the original report make sense given the situation?

• Social authentication: Ask members of your own social network whether the tweet you are investigating is being reported by other sources. Ask them how unusual the event reporting is to get a sense of how likely it is to have happened in the first place. Andy Carvin’s followers, for example, “help him translate, triangulate, and track down key information. They enable remarkable acts of crowdsourced verification [...] but he must always tell himself to check and challenge what he is told.”

• Language: Andy Carvin notes that tweets that sound too official, using official language like “breaking news”, “urgent”, “confirmed” etc. need to be scrutinized. “When he sees these terms used, Carvin often replies and asks for additional details, for pictures and video. Or he will quote the tweet and add a simple one word question to the front of the message: Source?” The BBC’s UGC (user-generated content) Hub in London also verifies whether the vocabulary, slang, accents are correct for the location that a source might claim to be reporting from.

• Pictures: If the twitter handle shares photographic “evidence”, does the photo provide any clues about the location where it was taken based on buildings, signs, cars, etc., in the background? The BBC’s UGC Hub checks weaponry against those know for the given country and also looks for shadows to determine the possible time of day that a picture was taken. In addition, they examine weather reports to “confirm that the conditions shown fit with the claimed date and time.” These same tips can be applied to Tweets that share video footage.

• Follow up: If you have contacts in the geographic area of interest, then you could ask them to follow up directly/in-person to confirm the validity of the report. Obviously this is not always possible, particularly in conflict zones. Still, there is increasing anecdotal evidence that this strategy is being used by various media organizations and human rights groups. One particularly striking example comes from Kyrgyzstan where  a Skype group with hundreds of users across the country were able disprove and counter rumors at a breathtaking pace. See this blog post for more details. See my blog post on “How to Use Technology to Counter Rumors During Crises: Anecdotes from Kyrgyzstan.”

These are just a handful of tips and tricks come to mind. The number of bullet points above clearly shows we are not completely powerless when verifying social media data. There are several strategies available. The main challenge, as the BBC points out, is that this type of information forensics “can take anything from seconds [...] to hours, as we hunt for clues and confirmation.” See for example my earlier post on “The Crowdsourcing Detective: Crisis, Deception and Intrigue in the Twitterspehere” which highlights some challenges but also new opportunities.

One of Storyful‘s comparative strengths when it comes to real-time news curation is the growing list of authenticated users it follows. This represents more of a bounded (but certainly not static) approach.  As noted in my previous blog post on “Seeking the Trustworthy Tweet,” following a bounded model presents some obvious advantages. This explains by the BBC recommends “maintaining lists of previously verified material [and sources] to act as a reference for colleagues covering the stories.” This strategy is also employed by the Verification Team of the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF).

In sum, I still stand by my earlier blog post entitled “Wag the Dog: How Falsifying Crowdsourced Data can be a Pain.” I also continue to stand by my opinion that some data–even if not immediately verifiable—is better than no data. Also, it’s important to recognize that  we have in some occasions seen social media prove to be self-correcting, as I blogged about here. Finally, we know that information is often perishable in times of crises. By this I mean that crisis data often has a “use-by date” after which, it no longer matters whether said information is true or not. So speed is often vital. This is why semi-automated platforms like SwiftRiver that aim to filter and triangulate social media content can be helpful.

Charles MingusMingus said of himself "I am half black man, half yellow man, but I claim to be a Negro. I am Charles Mingus, the famed jazz musician--but not famed enough to make a living in America."

"His statement summed up the conflict that plagued this musical genius his entire life: volatility, pain, prescience, and raw rage roiled inside a complex man, composer, bass player, and trombonist who transcended labels and refused to be pigeonholed into a single musical style--and who did not achieve real fame until late in his career.

According to Twitter PR representative Carolyn Penner, Twitter has started rolling out its new photo feature to a small subset of users outside of employees. The feature was live for employees as of last week, but it is hitting the rest of Twitter users starting this week. Our own @Alexia is one of the lucky users to get the service first.

As we reported last week, the new feature allows users to upload photos, which show up in your actually Tweets and timeline. Because some users now has the service, we now know more details on how it works. For example, the camera feature is located next to “add your location” in the Tweet UI (see screenshot below) and from there you’ll be able to upload a photo as you Tweet on Twitter.com and eventually via mobile clients.

For now, the service doesn’t seem to work on mobile clients, and defaults to yFrog’s photo sharing service.

Twitter is partnering with Photobucket to host these photos but you don’t need a Photobucket account to use it. And photos are only visible on Twitter, and not on Photobucket’s image sharing site. Beneath every photo is a “powered by Photobucket” note.

And if you click on a photo in a user’s stream who you are not following, Twitter will show you this message, “This Tweet is from someone you’re not following. The media they’re mentioning could be anything, even something you might find offensive” with an option to display the photo. You can also choose to always display photos from users who you are not following or following. You can also turn off auto-display in Settings as well.

Twitter just announced a pretty in-depth integration with Apple’s iOS 5, which also leverages the new photo service. Here’s what the iOS/Twitter integration looks like.

Israelis and Palestinians obviously have competing “historical truths” or narratives, but if we are to cultivate a next generation on both sides that can tolerate each other, shouldn’t we be teaching the conflicting narratives as a bridge towards reconciliation, and not as a weapon with which to crush the other?

Speaking at an education conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday, Israel Minister of Education Gideon Saar addressed the question (Hebrew) of teaching the Palestinian narrative in Israeli schools for the first time explicitly. He asserted (predictably) that Israel’s Ministry of Education will never permit the instruction of the Nakba or anything related to the Palestinian narrative in Israeli schools since “Israeli Independence shall not be treated like the Holocaust.”

His statements were made in direct response to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ op-ed in the New York Times last week, in which he reiterated the call for Palestinian statehood and its recognition by the United Nations. Saar claimed that Abbas distorted the “historical truth” of the region when he argued that following the 1947 Partition Plan:

“Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued. Indeed, it was the descendants of these expelled Palestinians who were shot and wounded by Israeli forces on Sunday as they tried to symbolically exercise their right to return to their families’ homes.”

Certainly this is not how Zionist historians would tell the story, and Abbas’ account may have switched or altered the order of events a bit, however the point is that this is his “historical truth” as he constructs it. Although Abbas is actually an academically trained historian, his “historical truth” is not disconnected from his being a politician competing for the legitimacy of the narrative of the nation he represents – just as Gideon Saar represents what he sees as the proper Jewish, Zionist narrative, which he also calls “historical truth.”

Any good critical thinker should know that “historical truth” is neither history nor truth, but rather the collective memory of a people, at best, and propaganda, at worst. But what is at issue here is not the philosophy behind “historical truths,” but rather the Minister of Education’s vision for the educational curriculum in Israel.

During an Israeli radio show discussing Minister Saar’s speech, two professors were invited to discuss the question of teaching the Palestinian narrative – one to ostensibly represent the “lefty” position that the Nakba should be taught, the other, arguing that there is no room for the state to fund a competing narrative in schools that have an obligation to teach Zionist, Jewish identity.

The professor that argued the “pro-Nakba” position reasoned that it was necessary because the only way to criticize – and refute – the Palestinian narrative is to first present it, to make students aware of it. This is logical enough. Yes, to oppose propagating ignorance in schools. He did, however, insist that there is an ultimate “historical truth” for Israelis but that it simply has not been reached yet, essentially arguing that grappling with conflicting narratives is the only way to credibly insist on one’s own.

He went on to assert that this will help Israel justify to the world its claim to be a democracy, since all proper democracies make room for the “Other’s” narrative – as if admitting that Israel’s democratic mechanisms are activated, not out of a genuine dedication to cultivate a democratic society that actually breeds social equality and tolerance, but rather to merely appear as one in the international arena.

This is a very practical approach: Let’s teach the Nakba in some shape or form in the schools, so that we can better prepare our students to delegitimize and disregard it with impunity. There is no sense, even among those publicly in favor of teaching the Palestinian narrative in schools, that there is room for both narratives – rather the notion is that there should be education for the sake of credible rejection of another narrative.

Knowledge is indeed the key to independent and responsible decision-making, however it would be better if the means (teaching the Nakba) weren’t so blatantly justifying the end (refuting the Nakba). In an ideal world, education, openness and tolerance are NOT tools to be taught in school for the sake of propagating a specific, exclusivist nationalist goal, but rather should simply be provided as tools in and of themselves, for the purpose of endowing each and every Israeli in the next generation with the ability to responsibly scrutinize the world.

Textify lets you drag an image onto the page and watch it be reconstructed purely out of text. The markup for the resulting textual image can be copied and used elsewhere.

There are a lot of settings which allow you to control the characteristics of the text. Even the smallest tweak to the settings can result in a very different output. Beware that using very large amounts of text will cause heavy browser lag. Textify has only been tested and confirmed to work in Chrome and Firefox 4.

Requirements: Chrome or Firefox 4
Demo: http://textify.it/
License: License Free

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In comments, On Lawn wrote:

Laws don’t regulate who can and who can’t be visited by their beloved, hospitals do.

That’s a nice theory, but not how it works in real life. Hospitals can to a significant degree be regulated by public policy (hence the law being discussed in Wisconsin; hence Obama’s recent executive order, which is nice, but which can be undone the moment a Republican takes office as president).

…there are other ways to get that recognition still. Not having a DP registry does not stop a same-sex couple from obtaining visitation rights, it is not substantially a marriage benefit (as Anna noted).

The “other ways,” as I understand it, are legal papers: health care proxies, power of attorney, and so forth. But in practice, lesbian and gay couples have found again and again that legal papers aren’t reliable when they’re needed most.

For example, Sharon Reed and JoAnn Ritchie, partners for 17 years, had mutual power of attorney when JoAnn went to the hospital; they even had the paperwork with them. That didn’t keep a nurse who disapproved of lesbian relationships from refusing Sharon access to JoAnn’s room and bedside. JoAnn’s final conscious hours were spent without Sharon; by the time Sharon was allowed back into the room, the next day, JoAnn couldn’t be revived. JoAnn died not long after.

Another example: Janice Langbehn and Lisa Marie Pond and their children were on vacation in Florida when Lisa had an aneurysm. They each had granted the other power of attorney, but the Florida hospital chose not to recognize it for eight hours. For eight hours, Lisa lay dying alone in the hospital, while her spouse and children were forbidden contact with her. The usual counseling services that the hospital routinely provides for relatives of dying patients, were not offered to Lisa’s family. “Jackson Memorial social worker Defendant Frederick approached Janice and informed her that she should not expect to be provided any information on the condition of, or have the ability to be with Lisa Marie as they were in an ‘anti-gay city and state.’”

There are many more examples. Kristin Orbin and Teresa Rowe. Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson. Carol Conklin and Janet Peck. Bill Flanigan and Robert Daniel. Trey and Guy. Steve, forced into a sham marriage with a woman who robbed him, just to have control of his own medical treatment.

According to lgbt rights advocate Carissa Cunningham, these are not rare, isolated examples. “It’s very routine. It happens all the time.”

Andrew Sullivan writes:

When people talk about marriage as some kind of abstract matter, an interesting debate to be had, an issue to be discussed, they forget the actual, brutal consequences of laws that treat gay families as non-families and gay people as sub-human.

Heterosexuals have the luxury of believing that same-sex couples can just sign some legal papers printed out from a website and — poof! — the problems disappear. But the real-life experience of same sex couples show that legal papers are not a reliable solution when a loved one is critically ill. Trey writes:

Nearly everyone I know has a story of denied visitation rights, or ‘family’ swooping down and forcing health decisions against a partner’s wishes or contesting (often successfully) wills, or even walking into shared homes and taking things out. There almost isn’t a gay or lesbian couple (ok, i’m sure there are a few, somewhere) out there that doesn’t at least occasionally wonder or are concerned about one of their family members (we have one in our family) who would make life hell for the partner if their ‘family’ member became sick or died.. taking away health decisions or making life impossible after losing their loved one. The fact of the matter is, courts and law STILL overwhelmingly favors ‘blood’ relatives or ‘married’ spouses over the partners of gays and lesbians. Even wills and legal documents are superseded by ‘family’ law in many cases.

From the Florida Sun-Sentinal:

Wills, power of attorney papers and cohabitation agreements can create some protections of marriage. For $1,500 to $3,500 in legal bills, gay couples can guarantee they have the right to visit each other in the hospital, that property is split equitably if they break up and that the surviving partner inherits when the other dies.

Attorneys say such legal documents, which can be challenged in court, provide only the bare bones of the security that comes with marriage.

“Lawyers can only fashion remedies in haphazard ways,” said Dean Trantalis, a Fort Lauderdale city commissioner and gay rights activist who draws up such documents as part of his law practice. “The law uses marriage as a guideline to provide rights and impose responsibilities. There is an undue burden on same-sex couples.” …

One of the primary functions of marriage is to make two unrelated adults into close kin; that creates mutual responsibilities, but it also makes a family that courtrooms, police, hospitals and other crucial institutions of society are obliged to acknowledge. Right now, heterosexuals are able to point to their life partner and say “this person, this person here – s/he’s now my closest family in the world, for all legal purposes” and (99.99% of the time) make it stick. Lesbians and gays don’t have that right. And real-life experience shows that the ability to write up a personalized contract is no match for being a legally recognized family.

I’ll admit, I was merely disgusted when Mickey Mouse tried to trademark Seal Team 6. But Mickey’s seeming embrace of GateGrope is far more disturbing. (h/t Bruce Schneier) In a press release boasting about changes to Walt Disney World’s Star Tour ride, Disney boasts of their imitation TSA checkpoints!

The second room of the queue is now a security check area, similar to a TSA checkpoint. The two G-series droids are still there, G2-9T scanning luggage and G2-4T scanning passengers. For those attraction junkies, you’ll remember that the G-series droids are so named because in the original Disneyland Park version of the ride, they were created by removing the “skins” from two of the goose animatronics from the soon-to-close America Sings attraction (Goose = “G” series). While we won’t tell you why, you’ll enjoy paying a lot of attention to what the scans of the luggage show is inside. When it’s your turn to go through the passenger scan (a thermal body scan), you may be verbally accosted by a security droid. Also, keep an eye out in the queue for an earlier version of RX-24 (“Captain Rex”) from the original Star Tours; he’s labeled “defective” and has some familiar dialogue.

Families are paying something like $280 a day to be amused at Walt Disney World. And as part of the amusement, they “get” to go through a “thermal body scan”?!?!?! All enhanced by the pleasure of being “verbally accosted by a security droid”!?!?!?! And all this as a way to make standing in line for obscene amounts of time to feel like a celebration of fantasy and/or capitalism rather than a pathology just like it was in the former Soviet Union?

I’m actually surprised that Schneier isn’t even more appalled at this than he is, given that he’s been as skeptical of “security theater” as anyone.

I mean, I want to know how a company with close regulatory ties to the federal government decides it will now claim it’s fun to submit to verbal abuse at the hand of what is cast as a “droid”? … How it decides either that “security scans” are such a part of our reality that no endless queue should be without one–all to help suspend our disbelief, I assume–or that a body scan is a good way to kill time in an hour-long line?

Sure, there’s a history of using Mickey Mouse to get children to accommodate security “precautions.” But do we really need to use Mickey to accustom children to RapeAScan?

Related posts:

1. Mickey Mouse’s Night Vision Goggles
2. BREAKING: Unusual Hasty Sunday Night Obama Statement
3. American Girl, Made in China, The Reality Show

Last month, Zoetica launched “Leveraging Social Media: Becoming A Networked Arts Nonprofit,” a peer learning project to build capacity for arts organizations in using social media effectively with a one-day masterclass.  Zoetica designed and is delivering the six-month program for Theatre Bay Area, with support from the Wallace Foundation, Grants for the Arts, the San Francisco Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Koret Foundation.

This week the beginner track got underway where 20 arts organizations will design and implement action learning experiments in Facebook, Listening, or Twitter to improve their social media practice.   They are “learning in public” on the wiki, paving the way for networked conversations with others.    Here’s a best practice about Facebook that surfaced from the discussions.

Facebook Custom Landing Tabs + Measurement = Best Practice

Why:  Custom Landing Tabs

The default welcome page for your Facebook Page is your wall.   There is a more inviting welcome mat. Facebook landing pages give people reasons to like your page.   Debra Askanese pointed to a study that shows Facebook pages with custom landing pages have a higher conversion rate than those without landing pages.

Principles

An effective custom landing page should support your SMART objective,  show value at a glance, and have a clear call to action.     A landing page without a strategy or good design will not  automatically make people like your organization’s page.    A landing page can reinforce organizational branding or promote specific campaigns, programs, or events.  It doesn’t have to be a static content either, it can change according to your organization’s activities.

Landing pages provide a fertile ground for testing and data collection much like nonprofits test their email newsletters.  While custom tabs might look nice and can be strategic, if you don’t measure – it’s a waste of time.

On my Facebook page, I asked nonprofit  people to show examples of customized landing pages.  Here’s a couple of examples.

Organizational Branding

Highlight A Program or Event

Promote A Fundraiser/Special Event

Renee Alexander Hamilton, who is the Social Media Manager for UNICEF USA, says that they used one of the DIY apps creators for the tab, but are fortunate to have an in-house designer to make it attractive.   Renee tracks the conversion rate including clicks to the tab, clicks within the tab, and the conversion rates (clicks to donations).  She mentioned that the app includes analytics, but prefers her tried and true ruler of choice:  Google Analytics.

Small Nonprofits Can Do This Too!

During the Leveraging Social Media peer session, which consists of small and mid-sized arts organizations, the Meridian Gallery showed off their custom tag that was created using a free version of one of the DYI apps, Pagemodo. Andrew Pulkrabek, the marketing director,  worked with a designer.   His words of wisdom:  make sure that people who are not the page administrators also test it.

The Techy Stuff

It used to be easy to create a custom landing tab with FBML, but you can no longer install that app.   Now it takes some tech skills to pull this off because of the switch to iFrames.  If you don’t have those skill then there are some free tools (and low cost tools here and here) available to get your basic Facebook landing page up and running. You might need some graphic design skills though.  You can also build a Facebook Page using Word Press, here’s the video. Want to look at a few inspiring custom landing pages, check these out.  Here’s a wiki on custom landing tabs and more advice here.

Earlier this week, Causes, the popular Facebook fundraising app, announced integration with Facebook pages, a featured long awaited for by many nonprofits.    While it is not yet possible to measure the donation funnel or conversion rates, those features are no doubt coming soon.

Does your nonprofit use a custom landing tab on Facebook?  How did you create it?  How do you test and measure its effectiveness to get results that support your objectives?

I’m really curious about how networked nonprofits can use measurement and make decisions using data to get more impact from networked approaches.   I want to hear about your successes and challenges in making your networked nonprofit more effective using measurement and data to make decisions about effective use of emerging media.   I expect to be blogging more about this topic.

It is a hot topic in the corporate marketing world.  The State of Marketing 2011 report recently released from IBM analyzes over 300 online and direct marketers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and company sizes.  The study found that corporate marketers have become more practical about their expectations for campaigns that use  both mobile and social media technologies.

A key finding:

Nearly 60 percent of respondents listed “measurement, analysis, and learning” as their top information technology bottleneck

Respondents are seeking to find the value that social channels can yield with more targeted insights and actions.

According to this summary,  this theme is not an odd finding, it corresponds to this  Forrester Group report that states that marketers are struggling with both the organization of data as well as how to best measure marketing performance.    This not a problem limited to the for-profit sector or social media specialists as Holly Ross from NTEN suggests in her recent blog post “Four Ways Nonprofits Can Increase Their Impact With Data.”   As Holly points out, we need to get better at transforming data into knowledge and wisdom and using those insights to take action.

Holly offers four principles:
Know What Data You Have and What It Means
Give Your Data Meaning
Make Your Data Tell Stories
Share Your Data

How many nonprofits, in their quest to update their Facebook page or engage with stake holders on Twitter, are implementing tactics based on data and good measurement practice?  How many take the time on the front-end to set up a simple system to collect the essential metrics to figure out what is working or what isn’t?   Or to document results?
It requires a culture or discipline of measurement, not just as a task after the campaign or program concludes.   Networked nonprofits have a culture of measurement and learning and that makes them successful. 
How is your nonprofit using data and measurement to make effective decisions about networked approaches and social media?  Please share your stories in the comments below.

It appears that the Metropolitan Boston Transit Authority is considering banning open strollers on buses, and is even considering future expansion of this ban to subway trains.

This is problematic for any parent who uses public transportation, and especially so for parents and other caregivers who rely on public transportation to get around. According to this Herald article, MBTA general manager Richard Davey says that “The number-one complaint that I have received since I have been here is strollers.” People hate strollers on buses and subways. To some extent, we’re sympathetic. People sometimes take very large strollers on crowded subways (or even on buses) and that does produce problems for everyone. Even compact umbrella strollers can be a nuisance, but then so can luggage, backpacks, and, frankly, people. If fewer people were clogging up the buses and subway cars, I could stretch out a little.

But it is unrealistic to expect parents to always fold strollers, particularly on the subway. On a crowded bus, I can understand a driver asking a passenger to fold a stroller in order to accommodate more passengers getting on (which drivers currently do). Some other cities do have this requirement. But it can be extremely difficult for parents, especially those of us with multiple children, to juggle an infant or toddler, a backpack or bag, and an older child along with a folded stroller. It would certainly be disruptive to other passengers (toddlers who are strapped in are much easier to deal with), require much more time for boarding and exiting, and be potentially dangerous if seats were not available (although I have found that passengers will almost always offer me a seat if I have children with me).

The fact of the matter is that what is really inconvenient and annoying is having children on trains and buses at all. They are noisy, come with too much gear, pick their noses openly, and smell bad. It would be easier and more pleasant for many if children were simply banned from public transportation. Or better yet, from public. But sorry folks, I’m a parent and I have a need to ride on trains and buses with my kids, so I’m going to keep bringing them with me. And it’s better for all of us for me not to buy an SUV. Many thanks to the vast majority of you who smile at my kids when they are cute and tolerate them when they are not. If you want to be a voice in support of having family-friendly transit, let the MBTA general manager know that even if a stroller ban may be popular, it’s not OK to throw parents under the bus. You can leave a comment for the MBTA at this link or tweet the general manager at @mbtagm.

Update: The MBTA has a one-question survey up about this, simply asking if parents should be required to fold strollers before boarding a bus. I wish they were doing something a bit more nuanced than a yes/no popularity contest, but I left some of my thoughts in the comments.

(Photo credit)

Using the examples of Google Wave and FourSquare, this RWW post by Audrey Watters cautions tech companies not to get to excited by “early adopters” – the throng that flock to the newest, coolest technology. What they like may be unlike the preferences of other users, so success with early adopters may not foretell broader market success.

True, and worth a closer look. Who are early adopters of technology, and how are they different from the mainstream? There is more than one difference. Early adopters tend to be young and male. They like technology because it is new and different. They are interested in the new thing because it is cool, and move on when it stops being cool. They are willing to put up with sharp edges for something that is cool, useful, or both. They are willing to experiment with new practices.

Let’s look at FourSquare and Wave and think about how the early adopters might be different from the mainstream.

Google Wave incorporated technology innovation – it was a collaboration tool based on a synchronous chat protocol; it was a brand new and mindbending blend between the synchronous aspects of chat, the stream aspect of a threaded discussion, and the text presentation of a document. It got attention because it was new and different. and yet using it required new and different practices. It’s not unusual for new tools to require new practices; forums require moderation, wikis often use discussion to complement final-form documents, and so on. In the end, those who experimented with Wave never did establish practices that made it understandable and useful to others.

Several commenters to the RWW post observed that Wave was hard to understand. This comment points to Geoffrey Moore’s classic “crossing the chasm” methodology which focuses on building use cases and social references to help more conservative later adopters, who lack the early adopters’ experimental bent.

FourSquare, as shown by recent research is mostly appealing to young men. The initial design of the service focuses on competition (becoming the mayor of your local hangout), and this may be one of the reasons that it hasn’t yet broken out of the early demographic. FourSquare and other location based services are seeking to appeal to segments with other motivations, by providing different sorts of badges (collecting, exploring), and different sorts of rewards (for example, the practical, financial rewards created by linking to marketing loyalty programs for discounts).

The FourSquare research shows that the service hasn’t spread beyond it’s initial population of urban hipsters. By contrast, Facebook spread far beyond its early niche of college students. What makes a trend spread beyond the initial group? This comment to the RWW post talks about trend spreaders, people with a broad network of friends, are open to try new things, and tell their friends and family about their positive experiences. It seems that Facebook was popular with trend spreaders, not just trend-setters.

Then there’s the tendency of the fashionable to move on. Another risk to FourSquare is that as a social service, it’s more compelling when one’s friends are participating and much less compelling when friends don’t use it anymore. It is vulnerable to the flock rising up and flying away. Restaurants and nightclubs have thrived and declined by this dynamic forever. In the case of trends in clothes, the dynamic is all about who’s cool and what’s in style.

In the case of trends in technology, fashion is part of the story. This commentor points out that it’s actually white teenage girls are who are trendsetters. Yes for some kinds of clothes, certainly not for bicycle styles or San Francisco restaurants. But whether it’s white girls, Robert Scoble, or uber-foodies, this point about the aspect of early-adopterism that is about fashionability and social status. The fashion ends when the cool kids move on.

Trends in technology are partly fashion, linked with other attributes. Once upon a time, Motorola and Nokia phones were fashionable (remember back then?) But Apple came out with the most beautiful and usable smart phone. The iPhone is elegant, but the Androids haven’t been tied to AT&T’s poor phone service; Android market share is growing because the thing works better.

So, the cases of Wave and FourSquare illustrate different properties of early adoption.
* Wave was hard to understand; the tools and the practices around it didn’t grow fast enough to make it useful before Google pulled the plug. It not impossible that in the open source afterlife of the dead commercial product, someone may figure out uses, practices, and interfaces that make it work and catch on.
* FourSquare appeals to a psychographic attribute of the early adopter community. For location-based services to catch on, it needs to appeal to a broader set of motivations, and to reach people who are good at reaching out.
* FourSquare is vulnerable to the cool kids going elsewhere, for reasons that are partly social and partly more appealing service

So, if your product or service appeals to early adopters, there are a variety of things to consider in order to break out of that niche:
* work on use cases, usage practices, and ease of use that work people who value familiarity over experiment
* consider the psychographic – is there some way your early population is different from the broader market, and what needs to make it appealing beyond the early community
* consider social adoption patterns – is your service not only easy to share, but appealing to people who like to share
* keep improving or your early adopters will move onto something better

Just thinking about “early adopters” isn’t precise enough – think about how your product or service are working for early adopters, and what may need to be different to break out.