Yesterday, Yahoo announced that it would be shutting down its free webhosting service, Geocities, later this year. The Geocities website sports a banner announcing that new accounts are no longer available, and urging potential customers to try their paid hosting services instead.

As it happened, I was sipping coffee from my Geocities mug while reading tweets that either mourned the demise of the service or, far more often, expressing amazement that the service still exists. The mug is one of my prized possessions from the dot.com years - it’s a gift from Geocities founder David Bohnett, when my friend and business partner Bo Peabody and I visited their corporate headquarters in Santa Monica. (Bo got a Geocities polo shirt, which he promptly tye-died and wore around Tripod offices to taunt us into working harder. He threatened to smash my mug more than once, but I fended off his assaults.)

Geocities was Tripod’s much larger and more commercially succesful competitor. (In one sense - they sold the company for lots more money than we did. I’m not convinced that they ever got any closer to profitability than we did.) And while I’ve got a certain pride in the fact that Tripod and Angelfire, two free web page companies I’ve helped run, have survived longer than our rival, I wouldn’t be surprised to see those companies - both part of Lycos, a company that’s changed hands more often than a joint at a Phish concert - close doors in the near future.

When Geocities was at the top of the web game, we HATED them at Tripod. We spent years in an escalating arms race, competing for users. Both companies offered tools to “move” homepages from one site to another, screenscraping the data in the hopes of capturing customers… and building increasingly aggressive countermeasures. We believed that their vastly superior traffic statistics came from users hosting pornographic sites on their servers, and ran “black ops” to reveal their secret pornographic business plans. Over a decade later, I feel cameraderie, not rivalry, and I’m sad that they’re gone.

Gregorio Espadas sees the Geocities closure as the definitive sign of the death of Web 1.0, with old-fashioned static websites replaced by the dynamic, interactive sites we all know and love today. I don’t think the dividing line is quite that neat. I’d suggest that sites like Tripod and Geocities were the first Web2.0 sites, years before Tim O’Reilly and others had popularized the term.

Web2.0 isn’t a technical shift but a conceptual one, from professionally-generated to user-generated content. This wasn’t an easy shift, nor was it one that we at Tripod were especially happy about. As late as 1998, half our staff was dedicated to designing and editing smart, funny, edgy web articles by brilliant writers like Emma Jane Taylor and Josh Glenn, who’ve gone on to real-world literary success. Unfortunately, their best contributions often generated less traffic than a user’s page of cute cat photographs, and after 18 months of heated argument about the future of Tripod, we ended up ditching most of our professional content and focusing on getting as much revenue as possible from the cute cat content our users were providing, gratis.

We never figured it out. When I left Tripod/Angelfire/Lycos (Lycos bought Tripod, and with Lycos’s money, we bought Angelfire) in 1999, our R&D department was focused on text classification tools, which we hoped would let us identify all car-focused webpages and sell adspace to Ford or Toyota. At the same time, Google began pushing a new model of advertising, one where you paid not for impressions of an ad, but actual clicks on the ad. Google’s model has helped turn them into the juggernaut that they are today, while it gets tougher each day to run businesses supported by banner ads.

There’s two interesting questions that arise for me from the death of Geocities. One is whether ad supported, user-generated content models will ever be viable. Farjad Manjoo had an interesting piece on Slate recently, arguing that Google may be forced to rein in YouTube because it’s been difficult to sell ad inventory on videos of cats flushing toilets. (My example, but his general point.) Manjoo points to a Fortune article by Taylor Buley about Facebook, which reveals that ad inventory on the network is extremely cheap, even despite the network’s access to lots of demographic targetting information. (Ad inventory, targeted specifically to college students, appears to sell for $0.50 on a cost per click basis. That’s a very low rate, compared to ad rates on high-quality professional content on blogs or mainstream media sites.) We couldn’t make targeted advertising work with text analysis on Tripod, and Buley speculates that Facebook won’t be able to do it with careful demographic targetting on Facebook. My guess is that models that offer free services and upsell premium memberships, like Flickr, are a lot more viable in the long term than hosting companies that focus purely on ad inventory.

The other question has to do with the valuation of web companies. It’s easy to laugh at the money companies like Yahoo paid for Geocities - over $3.5 billion in early 1999 - but somewhat harder to know how to value other popular web properties today. What’s Facebook worth? It just turned down funding at a valuation of $4 billion, and various methods for calculating valuation turn in prices from $2 billion to much higher.

We sure as hell thought $3.5 billion was a crazy price to pay for Geocities in 1999. We’d sold Tripod a year earlier for less than $100 million, and we’d used Lycos stock to purchase Angelfire for a small fraction of what we had cost. But these numbers are all pretty meaningless when you’re playing with equity - if your stock is overinflated (as Yahoo’s certainly was in 1999), it’s cheap currency for these transactions. And the late stages of the first dotcom boom became an odd race to acquire as much traffic as possible, whether or not that traffic could be turned into ad sales. In late 1998, Tripod was #8 in the world in terms of traffic, and I believe Geocities was in the top 5 - it was an irresistable target for Yahoo, which desperately wanted to retain its position as the top of the web traffic heap to help prop up its stock price.

So what’s Twitter worth? Whatever it’s worth to an acquirer to position themselves at the top of the social media heap, whether or not the site ever makes a dime.

Later today, I’ll pour a beer into my Geocities mug and toast their demise. It’s my demise, too, and the sort of creative destruction and rebirth that’s made the Internet such a fascinating place for the last fifteen years or so.

Sick of Twitter yet? Can’t say I blame you. In a week where Oprah took to the medium (and promptly got smacked down by Shaquille O’Neal, an old hand at the 140-character medium), where Aston Kutcher promised bednets for Africans if the Twitterverse would just show their love for him (and picked a fight with Africans who think the practice of donating bednets is unwise and destructive to local economies), it’s easy to understand why one might want to encounter the world through another medium. So let me point you to one of the best things on radio… and yet more conversations about Twitter.

Twitter, and the benefits of real-time feedback

I’m on On The Media this week, WNYC’s must-hear media criticism show, talking with Bob Garfield about Twitter in Moldova. We cover most of the same ground I covered in my second post on the topic, but with fewer histograms, excel spreadsheets and, well, data. Perhaps that’s a good thing. At the very least, it’s good to be talking about Moldova, and nice to have a Twitter story that’s not focused on American celebrities. (I’m not sure this interview is my finest hour, but OTM really is one of the very best things on the radio, and is absolutely required listening if you’re interested in the media and intelligent critiques thereof.)

My friends at TechPresident have a lovely Twitter story as well. Nancy Scola points to a blogpost on DailyKos about a wonderful experiment with Twitter disinformation by “Bamos”. Bamos created a Twitter account named “InTheStimulus”, and tweeted outrageous (and utterly fabricated) items in the stimulus bill. The feed included gems like:

# $473,000 to Fueled by Ramen, record label for such bands as Fall Out Boy.
# $4 million for Obama bobbleheads.
# $104,000 to exhume President Taft.
# $465 million for massive air conditioners to combat global warming.

And finally,
# $855,000 for the gambling debts Laura Bush incurred on diplomatic trips between 2004-2008.

His posts were widely retweeted and amplified by angry conservatives, almost none of whom questioned the accuracy of the information - indeed, he reports that many thanked him for the service he was providing. (Reviewing the retweets, it looks like he got a bit more obvious near the end, pricing absurd items at $88 million and inviting people to call bullshit on him.)

His conclusions from the experiment:

First, conservative activists are crazy and gullible. But second, be careful of what you read and believe on Twitter. I think some of the leeway granted to InTheStimulus is based on the soundbite nature of the site; people can get away with no citations, which is less likely than with a conventional blog. And be careful, because if I could do InTheStimulus, a conservative could do a Twitter feed tricking us.

Interesting. As I’m looking into the Moldova protests more closely, it’s clear that one of the interesting storylines is the use of the #pman tag for disinformation as well as for reporting on events on the ground. Jon Pincus notes that a hashtag is an open channel - in the same way that the #skittles tag, promoted by the company as a form of viral marketing ended up being used for NSFW posts, it’s hardly surprising that #pman would attrack trolls and disinformation.

On the other hand, participatory tools may be particularly effective at debunking this form of disinformation. Here’s a comment on one of my Moldova blogposts, from Twitter user Gabriel Radic:

I did a little experiment on the day of the events. These were posted at a couple of minutes interval…

- Following the uprising in Moldova, on Twitter #pman
- The .md uprising seems big on Twitter. I wonder how much is propaganda. Next 2 tweets are fake!!! It’s bate for the media, ignore them.
- Russia’s 4th army tanks, based in Tiraspol, are moving towards Chisinau. #Moldova #pman
- Moldavian navy choppers “engaged to restore order in the capital”. Pictures coming soon. #moldova #pman
- Ok, just seconds later my tweets are being RT-ed. The ball is rolling like a headless chicken.
- RT @Ceziceu: @gr stupid fake twitts. no army and navy in #Moldova. #pman
- I take back what I said. Twitter as news does work. My troll/experiment was quickly uncovered. Happy.

Anecdotes don’t equal data, of course. I’m looking forward to looking closely at how Romanian-speaking users challenged disinformation in the #pman feed, and how long it took for good and bad information to spread.

One last Twitter note, before a weekend of interacting with the world in a less mediated fashion. I’ve been enjoying the opportunity to post shorter links via Twitter than I generally post on this blog. But I’m starting to bump into the inherent limits of the medium. During Kutcherfest, several friends pointed to this article by TMS Ruge, a fierce critique of celebrity aid to Africa, with a special focus on Kutcher’s promise to donate mosquito nets.

I retweeted the post as follows: “CNN versus Aston Kutcher - not just stupid, but bad for Africa: http://bit.ly/pwziW (via @whiteafrican @afromusing)” That was my attempt to summarize the article, offer the link and credit the folks who’d pointed me to it, all in 140 characters. Unsurprisingly, people assumed that was my take on the situation, not my summary of Ruge’s take, and several folks took me to task, asking me whether this was inconsistent with my complaints this week about Dambisa Moyo’s new book.

I don’t know what I think about donating mosquito nets… not that I haven’t thought about it, but because it’s really, really complicated. I think that nets are more effective as part of a multi-part strategy, preferably one that includes spraying houses with DDT, draining standing water and providing anti-malarials where necessary. I agree that models that produce nets locally (as Jacqueline Novogratz’s projects do) are superior to programs that bring nets in from other countries. The success of social marketing campaigns to sell condoms at affordable prices suggests, to me, that selling nets for a low cost is a bright idea. And I worry that providing nets in fishing communities can have nasty, unintended consequences, as fishermen start seining their streams and ponds.

In other words, it’s complicated. Way, way too complicated to address in 140 characters. I was thrilled to see friends like Katrin Verclas engage with the article in the comments thread, and hope that people made it beyond the headline, to the blog post and to the comments beneath it. The point I tried to make in my interview with Bob Garfield is that these media don’t always make much sense in isolation, but they’re very powerful in combination. Blogs are a good space for argument. Twitter’s a great way to push people to those conversations, but not a good space to hash these things out.

I find myself engaged in an extremely goodhearted disagreement with Evgeny Morozov, now on the topic of whether social media technology is inherently progressive, or whether it’s equally useful for progressive and repressive movements. And while I’m looking forward to hashing through these ideas on my blog and on his, I’m really looking forward to having lunch with him on Tuesday - sometimes face to face is the best Twitter alternative of all.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everyone. I’m joining the nearly two thousand people who’ve responded to Suw Charman-Anderson’s pledge: “I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.” You’ve got a few more hours to join the pledge, if you’d like - you’ll be in very good company.

I’ve had the good luck to work with inspiring, brilliant women at every stage of my technical career. At Berkman, I get to work with incredible researchers like danah boyd, Judith Donath, Eszter Hargittai… and, of course, Rebecca MacKinnon, my co-founder on Global Voices. In my activist work, I cross paths with inspiring folks like Katrin Verclas, Beth Kanter, Bev Clarke, Brenda Burrell, Ory Okolloh, Juliana Rotich, and so many others. Once we open the Pandora’s Box that is Global Voices, I could spend all day - let me simply say that I think of Georgia Popplewell whenever I need an inspiration to help me be calm, compassionate, professional and caring in my work - she’s truly one of the most extrodinary people I’ve ever had the honor to work with.

But as I thought about Ada Lovelace day, I realized that I wanted to honor not just women in technology, but programmers, the folks who get their arms dirty making code do what we want it to. And so I found myself thinking back to Tripod, the first real job I ever had, and still the best time I ever had building something from the ground up. In retrospect, Tripod looks like a pretty amazing boot camp for joining the Web industry. My dear friends and colleagues Kara Berklich and Margaret Gould Stewart both found themselves, alongside me, in the odd position of being vice presidents of a large and growing web company before we’d left our twenties. Kara’s now the Veep of marketing for Rubicon, an innovative ad network, and Mags is heading up user interface design for YouTube. (She just moved there from Google, so don’t blame the current mess on her - she’s there to make it better.)

But the Tripod friend I was thinking of was Kate Krolicki. In 1997, Kate had two fairly lousy jobs. One involved life modeling for art classes at Williams College. The other was as a “porn-sniffer” for Tripod - this involved looking at screen after screen of images uploaded to Tripod that our algorithms had identified as being likely to be pornographic, and therefore subject to deletion under our terms of service. After a few months of these two jobs - which Kate reported “can do very strange things to one’s body image” - she found herself hanging out with a group of Tripod programmers and asked, “How hard would it be for me to learn Perl?”

Almost everyone at Tripod at this point was a self-trained programmer. We had a chip on our collective shoulder about computer science majors, and tended to hire folks who’d learned enough programming to be dangerous while majoring in physics, math or philosophy. So Kate found herself learning Perl from a bunch of cocky, sloppy hackers… who happened to have thrown together a web service used by roughly 15 million people. Within a couple of months, Kate was no longer stomping out porn, but writing the core code that controlled our mail systems. She went on to write some nifty mail code for the late, great community newsletter company, Streetmail, and now geeks for Williams College, where she’s part of a small team that helps faculty figure out how to integrate technology into their classrooms.

Tripod got over its prejudices against trained programmers, in part because the CTO who (thank god!) took their reins from me started hiring programmers from General Dynamics, the downsizing defense contractor two towns over. As it happened, many of the best programmers from General Dynamics were women with CS degrees and years of experience writing careful, well-documented, tested code for department of defense systems. They basically kicked our collective asses and taught us a great deal about how production code gets written in the real world. But I’m still proud of my friends who believed - and, I suspect, still believe - that programming isn’t a cult, an art form, a strange, esoteric discipline, but a straightforward, practical tool that can be mastered, even by women and liberal arts majors. That it seldom is is more a function of the pretensions of the people who program and the culture that’s grown up around it.

That’s why my inspiring women for this Ada Lovelace Day are the fine folks behind the Organization for Transformative Works. Not only is OTW building a women-centered community dedicated to the art of fan fiction, where fans extend, remix and rethink works of fiction, they’re building a vast archive of the works that have been produced. And the software for the archive - An Archive of Our Own - is written and sysadmin’d by a team of remarkable women. Notable among them is Naomi Novik, who’s not content to be one of the best fantasy novelists in the world today - she led the team that designed and began building the Archive… while writing books that have dominated the New York Times Bestseller list.

What’s most impressive to me is that OTW saw the project of creating an archive as an opportunity to induct dozens of women into the wonderful world of programming. They’re building a huge, complex system that is truly their own and mastering tools in the process. That, I suspect, is something Ada Lovelace would have appreciated, and it’s something I’m inspired by.

In early March, we all go a little crazy here in western Massachusetts. It’s been snowing since November, and there’s no guarantee that it will stop until May. In March, local stores start advertising “cabin fever” sales. Local families attempt to sell themselves on eBay. We’re all looking for an excuse to get out of the house, and more or less anything will do.

Looking back through some old photos this evening, I realize that March is my best month for photography. I seem to react to cabin fever by engaging in my favorite hobby: milling.

Milling is a variant on a phenomenon some call “urban exploration“. We don’t have too many urbs around here, but we have a wealth of beautiful abandoned mills. Milling involves finding ways into these mills and photographing them. This, in turn, involves driving around looking for promising looking mills, scouting them out and returning with milling gear (steel-toed boots, good flashlights, reflectors to bounce light, cameras, tripods…)

So I was scouting yesterday afternoon when I came across an utterly beautiful collapsing mill in the south side of Troy, NY. I started following back roads to get closer to the buildings, and was stunned to discover that I was able to drive up to some of these hulking wrecks, climb out and start shooting photos - generally, milling requires you to park a truck and hike into sites, climbing fences, crossing railroad tracks, wading streams. I shot photos with my phone until my battery ran out and drove out… straight into the parking lot of the Rensselaer county jail.

Looking for an access road that didn’t take me past a couple dozen of Troy’s finest, I discovered that the site I’d been exploring was blurred out on Google Maps. I’d read about sensitive sites - like the Vice President’s house or Dutch military bases - blurred out on Google Maps. I’d read enough on the issue to know that this probably wasn’t Google’s fault - some government authority had approached a satellite imagery provider and demanded that a feature be obscured. And I quickly discovered that the same site was unblurred on Yahoo Maps, though not available at the level of resolution that most of Troy is on Google Maps.

Still - this was the first time I’d found myself at a location in the real world that was invisible to Google Maps. Why would someone so carefully obscure this area, leaving the jail’s basketball courts visible a few hundred meters away? And if it was so important to obscure it, why was it so easy to get into?

The ease of entry is pretty easy to explain. Based on the site is an electronics recycling company called eLot. The eLot folks are in the business of disposing of old computer hardware, televisions, comact fluorescent light bulbs, and the other detritus of our digital age. While they probably don’t get a whole lot of walk-in business, they do maintain a store, where you can pick up desktop computers for $59, or old Cisco switches. While they’re not open on Sundays, the site is open so that trucks full of dead televisions can be offloaded.

So why’s a publicly accessible site blurred out on maps?

Here’s my guess, based on a little 19th century history, and a bit more recent history. The site I was exploring (and intend to explore again, just as soon as I can find a better way in) is part of the Burden Ironworks. Built by Scottish inventor Henry Burden, the Ironworks harnessed the flow of the Wynantskill creek towards the Hudson river to power an automated horseshoe making machine. The machine was a wonder of the industrial age, and featured the largest vertical water wheel in the world, a 250 ton beast that produced 300 horsepower.

The Burden Ironworks converted from water power to gas in the late 19th century, and the wheel was abandoned in 1890, collapsing about twenty years later. From what I can tell from old maps, the northern part of the Burden complex has evidently been razed and replaced with the Rensselaer county jail - the southern part, which features the gas boilers, is still partially standing, and is the facility I began exploring. I’m looking forward to visiting the Burden Ironworks museum, which stands in the facility’s former office building, at some point soon - as it’s open by appointment only, that might require a bit of planning.

There’s a move to renovate some of these historic industrial structures. At least, there was. The Rensselaer Iron Works, just up the river from the Burden Ironworks, was purchased from its owners by the city of Troy, and New York governor David Patterson had announced plans in April 2008 for the building - post-renovation - to become the hub of an ecological monitoring center to track pollution across 315 miles of the Hudson. Less than two months later, the buildings were burned to the ground in a case of probable arson.

The gorgeous Lost Landmarks of Upstate New York website features a photo tour of the ruined buildings before the fire, noting that one of the mill buildings had been damaged by an earlier arson, and that the remaining structures were filled with abandoned cars and boats. While I can construct a narrative of someone in the Troy underworld realizing that a corpse hidden in an abandoned Edsel was going to be discovered in the renovation… but it’s as likely that someone decided to burn the building down because they were bored.

My guess for why the Burden site is blurred out - to help prevent future arson. That seems crazy to me, but I don’t have a more plausible explanation. I know that I use Google Maps to plan my routes into mills, and for all I know, arsonists do the same. Given that accessing the site involves little more than parking behind Marty Burke’s South Side Tavern and strolling in, this seems like overkill, but I’ve got no better explanation. If urban explorers, millers or Troy historians have a better explanation, I’d love your input on the comments thread.

It’s the attack of the internet memes! I’ve been tagged by two good friends, so I’ll take a few moments on a cold, dark January day to answer questions you may not actually want answers to…

Joi Ito recently tagged me with a blog meme with the following rules:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

So… seven things you may not know:

1. I used to be a pretty competent musician. I spent much of my time in college playing hand drums as part of the college’s African music ensemble. My first trip to Africa in 1993 was on a scholarship to study Ghanaian music. While I’ve still got two xylophones and half a dozen drums in my house, I rarely play these days, mostly because I remember how if felt to be a competent drummer and I’m usually disappointed by how I play these days.

2. I’m a good cook, and my kitchen is generally filled with cooking experiments, some of them more successful than others. My latest experiment is a homemade mustard that features a heavy dose of Otter Creek Stovepipe Porter - it’s very yummy.

3. While I write a lot about journalism, I haven’t worked in a newsroom since I was sixteen years old, writing for the sports page of the Lewisboro (NY) Ledger, a weekly. The story I remember best was a feature on a game of donkey basketball that took place at the local high school.

4. I was a dreadful athelete in high school. Unfortunately, the school I attended made sports mandatory, and I spent a lot of my teenage years running on the school’s cross country team. I was so bad that I recall my parents celebrating a race in which I didn’t finish last, perhaps the only one of my career.

5. I ran a freelance graphic design business in college, accepting work from professors to lay out their books for publication and from college organizations. I probably learned more about the Internet by looking for pirated graphic design software, fonts and clipart online in the early 1990s than from any other aspect of my education.

6. I love accordians, though I don’t play as well as I’d like. There are two accordians and a concertina in my living room, and I firmly believe there is very little music that couldn’t be improved by adding an accordian line to it.

7. I collect bad movies, and have a special fondness for terrible musicals. Gems of my collection include “Big Meat Eater“, Psychos in Love, and Tongan Ninja. Recently I acquired the late Brandon Lee’s “Laser Mission“, which is rapidly becoming a favorite.

All right, and now to spread the joy. I hereby tag Lokman Tsui, Daudi Were, Mike Stopforth, Georgia Popplewell, Amira Al-Hussaini, ThaRum Bun and Rachel Barenblat.

And now, to write the post I was tagged about weeks earlier…

Vijaysree Venkatraman of the Christian Science Monitor has a very generous article about my recent thinking on the challenges of finding sufficiently challenging information online, and how media organizations can architect serendipity in a digital age. I come off somewhat more zen-like than I suspect I am in real life, but perhaps that’s not a bad thing.

I’ve been (very slowly) putting together a book proposal about serendipity, homophily, xenophilia and cultural bridging, and so the ideas in the CSM article will look pretty familiar to my regular readers. For anyone else who’s stumbling onto this line of thought for the first time, let me recommend:

- A talk I gave at MIT Museum’s Soapbox Series, which includes excellent questions and brainstorming from the audience

- A conversation Global Voices editor Solana Larsen and I had with master interviewer Chris Lydon for Radio Open Source

- Blog posts from April, June, September and December of this year on this set of topics. (See? Told you I was writing slowly.)

Okay, that’s roughly as much self-promotion as I can handle this week. Thanks to Vijee for her interest in the story and for CSM for helping to share these ideas with a wider audience.

My friend Christopher - “Stophe” - Landis has never been a man of half measures. When he directed the first groups of Geekcorps volunteers in Ghana, he elected to live in a house without air conditioning, prefering not to make the switch between hot and humid outdoor spaces and cool indoor ones (and making a statement about environmentalism, acculturation and solidarity). On one of my trips to Ghana, I stayed with Stophe and his wife Shawn for a single night, before I concluded that I was, in fact, a man of half-measures. (It also turned out that the fan in room I was staying in was miswired so it was spinning backwards and failing to generate any cooling breezes.) I’m a wimp. Stophe is not.

I’d lost touch with Stophe when he, and then later, I, stopped working on Geekcorps. According to the email I received from him earlier today, he’s been a busy man. No longer focused on connectivity and technology in Africa, Stophe’s been building a house in Ithaca, NY, using the principled, uncompromising approach I knew from working with him in Ghana. Stophe’s not building a house - he’s building an Earthship.

I hadn’t encountered the Earthship model of building previously. Pioneered in Taos, NM, it’s a school of building that tries to create self-sufficient structures, which harvest and recycle rainwater, use hyperinsulation and passive solar construction to heat and cool, and attempt to use recycled materials as often as possible. The heart of the structure is a U-shaped berm made from used tires filled with packed earth. Internal, non-structural walls are made from cement and recycled bottles or cans. It’s hardcore treehugger construction with a good bit of scientific research behind it, and many of the structures built in the desert Southwestern US look very comfortable. (An unsympathetic commenter on an Earthship YouTube video suggests building your structure from recycled hippies, which is probably illegal, and which don’t generally provide sufficient R-value.)

Shawn offers a tour of the Earthship a month ago.

But it’s not always easy to adapt models from the dry, hot southwest to the wet, cold north. You can see how Stophe, Shawn and their friends are progressing following their videoblog on YouTube. There’s roughly a hundred video posts, accumulated over the two years of the project. It’s great fun to watch old friends pursue a dream, and amazing to see such an ambitious and beautiful project take shape.

I’ve been in Dubai for the past three days at a World Economic Forum event. WEF is starting a new project called “Global Agenda Councils”, and they’ve invited people to participate in conversations on 68 topics, ranging from the very broad (”Faith”), the very scary (”Pandemics”) and the very prosaic (”The Future of Mining and Metals”.)

(Why 68? According to one account, they wanted 70, to riff on the lucky number seven, but two didn’t come together.)

I suspect that gatherings like this one represent the ultimate nightmare for the world’s conspiracy theorists - seven hundred wealthy, powerful, privileged, important and self-important people gathering in an opulent setting to debate the world’s problems. And more than one person pointed out that there’s something of an irony in asking the sorts of folks here at WEF to address the outcome of the global fiscal crisis - aren’t these the folks who caused it?

To disappoint all the folks who imagine a secret world government emerging from these meetings… don’t count on it. The phrase, “the world’s largest brainstorming session” has been thrown around for the past couple of days, and that may or may not be true, but the emphasis has been on brainstorming and talking. Lots of talking. Three days of talking.

This was a very useful thing within our group. While the folks confronting “the future of the internet” agreed that we’re not facing a crisis, as many of the other groups are, we did agree that there’s two sets of issues worth considering in explaining the state of the current internet: stresses, and fractures. Stresses are widespread strains to the system - a huge increase in traffic due to filesharing and online video, the continuing copyright wars, the professionalization of cybercrime, the increasing effectiveness of DDOS attacks.

Fractures are slightly more subtle. They’re issues that if left unchecked might cause the single, unified internet we know and love to split into multiple internets. These include incompatibilities between the mobile and wired web, the immobility of content trapped in the “walled gardens” of companies like Facebook which make it challenging to migrate content, as well as more social issues, like the fragmentation of public space online (the possibility of echo chambers ala Cass Sunstein) and the danger of fragmentation by language, culture and local laws, my current obsession.

The structure of the event demanded that we offer policy recommendations to ensure a healthy future of the internet. This is easy to do, but hard to do in a way that breaks new ground. We spent a difficult and frustrating day simultaneously trying to draft a short set of recommendations and brainstorming on ways that the internet could be a useful tool for the other 67 councils, most of which are working on issues more pressing and challenging than ensuring a vital, creative and generative internet. The brainstorm yielded what I think is a pretty interesting frame, the idea of the internet as a tool for social homeostasis.

Homeostasis is the set of processes that organisms use to regulate their internal environments. If a mammal gets hot, homeostasis systems cause the animal to sweat or pant, trying to cool it off. They work based on feedback mechanisms, constantly monitoring environments and changing behavior based on this feedback. It’s been observed that an emerging “internet of things” will allow for refined environmental monitoring, both locally and globally. On a personal basis, you could have much better control of your personal energy use if you could get a display of every appliance turned on in your house and its energy usage; similarly, we’d likely have a better understanding of temperature fluctuations if we could embed billions of temperature and atmospheric sensors into infrastructure around the globe.

This idea of using the internet as a backbone for feedback mechanisms may have utility beyond the realm of environmental problems. Image a schoolsystem with pervasive internet connections and a mechanism for collecting and listening to feedback from students, teachers, administrators and parents. An enlightened school system might be able to make better decisions and change decisionmaking mechanisms through incorporating opinions from all levels. As Jeff Jarvis pointed out, it’s as likely that networked publics will build their own feedback mechanisms and find their own ways to institute change, either cooperating with existing powers or challenging thems.

For the internet to act as a medium for homeostasis mechanisms, it needs to be free, open, uncensored, accessible, multilingual and all other sorts of good things. It also might mean that it makes sense to advocate for universal connectivity in the context of advocating for other problems, believing that systems that aggregate information bottom up and communicate it vertically and laterally could lead towards better problem-solving on large societal issues. A few of my colleagues and I are trying to group-write a short essay on this topic, which I hope to share on this blog later this week.

One of the reasons I was excited to come to the Global Agenda Councils meeting was the chance to visit Dubai. I hadn’t visited previously, and I’ve a wide range of opinions about the city. We got a truly unusual picture of the city, one that gave me a bit of cultural whiplash on Sunday.

The geeks and the sheik. Photo by David Sifry.

After the main conference ended, our group stuck around to meet Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai. The sheik had requested our presence for a fifteen-minute audience to brief him on our deliberations. This turned out to be long enough for each member of our party to make a single statement about what we thought might be important about the internet’s future.

I had been thinking about internet censorship that day since encountering a brief story in the Gulf Times about a set of photos of the Obama family watching election results. The story referenced a Flickr URL, and when I tried to load the page, I got the UAE blockpage, alerting me that “the site falls under the Prohibited Content Categories of the UAE’s Internet Access Management Policy.” In UAE’s defense, they’re transparent about filtering the internet and allow people to request sites be reviewed and unblocked. However, my colleagues at the Open Net Initiative have researched UAE’s filtering closely and argue that it’s inconsistent and strays beyond censoring “un-islamic” topics to blocking political speech. I used my 90 seconds to introduce the idea that the internet is a method for social feedback and that it can’t work in this fashion unless the internet is open, pervasive and uncensored. I have no idea whether the sheik and his advisors realized this was a reference to UAE’s filtering policies - my colleagues did, and I felt better than I would have had I let the opportunity pass.

With no international incidents other than David Sifry beginning his remarks, “Your excellency, Hi!” which reduced several of our team members to laughter, much of our merry band headed downtown to explore the older side of Dubai. We’d spent three days in the Jumeirah Beach hotel and associated properties, which are very beautiful, hospitable and comfortable and feel very much like the newer hotels in Las Vegas. They’re an imagined version of Arabia, very comfortable but entirely divorced from history, and it’s very hard to feel like you’re actually visiting a real place. Walking alongside the creek in old Dubai, I felt myself relax a bit.

Walking around the souks, it’s easier to understand how Dubai came to be - a trade city allowing for interaction between Indian, Persian and Arabian culture. It’s amazingly multiethnic and cosmopolitan in the old town - I had fun trying to identify national origin by face and dress. Walking with Bruce Schneier, he observed, “It’s like one country laid on top of another.” Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, maybe? Or Las Vegas redone by Walt Disney overlaid on the universal souk. I managed to talk our group into dining downtown at one of the outlets of the Evergreen Restaurant, a chain of vegetarian Indian restaurants pitched at the folks who work in Dubai, not at wealthy travellers. We ordered an embarrasing amount of food for six people, all of which was richly spiced, vegetarian and filling - dinner for six cost under $25.

And then to experience true cultural whiplash, we took Afghan-driven gypsy cabs back to our luxurious hotel, cleaned ourselves up as best as we could, and talked our way into the Burj al Arab hotel. Advertised as a “seven star” hotel, the Burj isn’t the sort of place you simply visit and stroll around in - fellow travelers told us that we needed to make a reservation and leave a cash deposit just to tour the lobby. We managed to talk our way into the bar that’s cantilevered high above the ocean, one of the more opulent and absurd spaces I’ve ever entered. And yes, the drink I ordered cost more than the dinner we’d purchased for six.

I came out of the evening feeling a little dizzy, and not just from the gin. Many development economists suggest that a society with a high level of economic inequality is inherently unstable, and it’s pretty clear that the difference between the world of the Burj al Arab and the Evergreen is pretty vast. Then again, the folks who do most of the physical and service work in Dubai are guest workers here on work visas, making it highly unlikely that there’s going to be an effective rebellion of the underclass.

I had a moment of reassurance in a very strange way as I drove home today, not about economic inequality in the UAE, but about Schneier’s observation about places laid atop one another. I was hungry as I drove home from Kennedy and knew from experience that there are few places to stop on the Hutchinson Parkway. So I turned off at the exit for City Island and had breakfast in a truly unique corner of New York that looks more like a coastal town in Maine than like any part of the Bronx I’d ever seen. I was baffled by the fact that I’ve driven past the turnoff to this neighborhood dozens of times and never realized that there was a treelined parkway leading two miles to a rustic beach town, which is part of the city of New York. It’s not the difference between the downtown and the beach hotel in Dubai, but it’s a reminder that places are laid atop one another all the time, not just in the strange, beautiful and unsettling country that is the UAE.

Four talks in eight days, four cities in three countries. (Tihany, Hungary; Barcelona, Spain; Camden, ME; Manchester, NH). I’ve come to two conclusions. One, I need to travel less. Two, I really love librarians.

I’ve had two chances recently to speak about homophily, xenophilia, bridge figures and disconnection to audiences of librarians, and the talks have been extremely good fun. The problems associated with creating serendipity are ones librarians are often well acquainted with. I finished the talk (very well reported at the NELA conference blog) and immediately fielded questions about how librarians could help patrons stumble onto serendipitious information about Nigeria or Niue. (A couple of ideas that came up: Leverage immigrant populations in your communities and ask people to suggest the best books to help neighbors understand their communities and home countries. Pick stories being featured in local or national newspapers and put up collections of resources associated with the countries or issues covered.)

I keep telling myself that I need to speak less and write more. Perhaps the answer is that I need to speak more to audiences that give me excellent and critical feedback, as I got yesterday. Good fun. Thanks to everyone at the New England Library Association for inviting me and for such a fun event.

Friends in New York City tell me that they never visit the tourist attractions - the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building - until they’re hosting guests from out of town. I’m not a Cambridge resident, nor am I ever really resident at Harvard, but I had the same experience yesterday when my friend Nate came to visit me at the Berkman Center. He dragged me across the street to visit the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

In a sense, he also dragged me back about a hundred years in time. These museums, in a sense, are a museum of museums, a memory of museums past. They remind us of when museums were places for collectors to store their objects and experts to study them, not tools to educate or entertain the public.

The central attraction of the Museum of Natural History is a collection of glass models of plants and flowers, created by Bohemian glassmakers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in the late 19th and early 20th century. They were comissioned by a Harvard botany professor and paid for by one of his students, and ended up becoming the life’s work for Leopold and his son. The models were used to teach botany to Harvard students - the fragile models now are art objects, more than scientific curiosities.

One of the Blaschka flowers in the Harvard collection.

Leopold Blaschka began his work making glass eyes for taxidermists. His incredible skill with lampwork - heating small sticks of glass over lamp flames to fuse together into fine, colorful models - was first displayed when he began making models of exotic flowers he saw in natural history books. A local aristocrat commissioned him to produce replicas of his orchid collection, and Blaschka discovered that the fascination with the natural sciences that was sweeping the academic community made his work extremely timely and popular.

It’s hard for me to imagine a time at which fused glass was the best material to build model plants for scholarly study. Then again, Blaschka’s work was likely a vast improvement on the work done by Louis Auzoux, making plaster and paper-mache models of the natural world. The glass models make a bit more sense to me when looking at the Blaschka models of marine life. It’s very hard to represent a jellyfish without showing transparent structures, something that glass is uncommonly well suited as a material to portray.

I like to imagine Rudolph Blaschka, in youthful rebellion against his father Leopold, throwing down his glass rod and tongs and declaring, “Father, I cannot bear to make a single stamen more. I’m going to make a sea slug!” Of course, there can be no greater example of filial devotion than spending a career perfecting your father’s craft.

A Blaschka model of maple leaves. Not a sea slug.

Or perhaps Rudolph rebelled later in life, when he made a set of models of diseased trees, colloquially known as the “rotten fruit” series. As the glass decays with the ravages of time, it’s harder to determine whether the rot on the models is what Rudolph meant to depict, or simply the ageing of the materials. There’s an amazing conservation challenge associated with these pieces, as the Blaschka’s made their own, unique formulations of glass to achieve colors and textures not available in conventional glass.

Walking through the museum, I got lost in another story of fathers and sons. The Museum of National History is filled with endless cases of stuffed, mounted animals. A peacock backs into a Bengal tiger, now dusty and threadbare. Beetles are arranged in mandalas, mounted on pins in glass cases. (Apocryphal: “What has the study of biology taught you about the Creator, Dr. Haldane?” “I’m not sure, but He seems to be inordinately fond of beetles.”) A hundred birds, tacked to their perches, all facing west. Just as Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz had planned it.

Photo by davidgalestudios.

Agassiz was one of the first great American scientists. An emigree from Switzerland and an ichthyologist and paleobiologist by inclination, he declared an intention as a young man to build a great museum of natural science. This strange, dusty, beautiful museum is one of his legacies. But Agassiz is remembered more for his theoretical work.

He was perhaps the first scientist to propose the theory of an Ice Age, based on observations of glaciers in the Alps. Not all of his theories stand up as well to history - he was a fierce critic of Darwin and argued, to his death, that species were introduced into the stream of life at different times at the whim of the Creator. He’s also closely associated with the theory of polygenism, a form of “scientific racism” that taught that different races had different intellectual capacities.

There’s another Agassiz represented in the museums, especially in the fourth floor balcony of the Peabody Museum, which houses art and artifacts from the Pacific Islands. I think it may be my favorite space on the Harvard campus: a vast, lonely, light-filled space where you can spend an hour contemplating bark cloth or shark-tooth knives without encountering another soul. The labels in this section are poetically cryptic. It would be wonderful to know who made this cloth, what they made it of, what it was used for. Instead, the label says, “Cloth. Tonga. Collected by A. Agassiz 1899, Donated by A. Agassiz 1902.”

Again, my fantasties of rebellion led me to wonder if Louis Agassiz’s son rejected the natural sciences and became an Indiana Jones-style swashbuckling anthropologist. Alas, it’s another story of a dutiful son following his father’s footsteps. Alexander Agassiz followed his father to the US as a teenager, studied the sciences at Harvard and became, like his father, an ichthyologist. The artifacts from the South Pacific were collected while he was studying fish around the Great Barrier Reef.

Unlike his father, Alexander had a successful business career as well, as an adventurous investor in copper mines in northern Michigan. His business success gave him a vast fortune, which allowed him to give $500,000 to Harvard University to found a zoological museum… the museum that houses his father’s collection.

What’s making me see rebellion in this building, a veritable temple to visionary fathers and dutiful sons? Is it that I’m playing hooky from Harvard Law School, losing myself in a museum, one of my father’s favorite pursuits?