Tom Watson

Reckless Crazy

So who needs a New York Dolls record from an emaciated David Johansen, a pudgy Syl Sylvain, and three or four able studio guys half their ages here in 2006 - a full generation removed even from the post-Dolls late-70s era that I (and a few regulars on this blog) enjoyed in punked-out and grimy New York?

Me, it turns out.

The title of the new Johansen epic (and it really is a Johansen record, be not doubtful) is ironic about the state of irony, like a double mirror in the barber shop showing the back of your head to infinity. No doubt Johansen got a chuckle from this official record company promo copy:

Now in 2006, the band returns with the follow-up to 1974's Too Much Too Soon that proves that the band hasn’t lost a step and that they are ready to show the world what they've been missing. The new studio album "One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This" captures the spirit of a band that had disappeared long before rock n roll became about big business, and presents the essence of fun, revelatory Rock N Roll in its purest form.

A follow-up to Too Much, Too Soon? Now that's a scream. Hasn't lost a step? Perhaps not, but it's lost four regular players to death, most importantly Johnny Thunders, who created a guitar sound imitated by thousands, and most tragically Arthur "Killer" Kane, the bassist who came back for the reunion only to die almost immediately of leukemia.

So a return to form for the Dolls - no. More like a return to a certain type of artistry for Johansen. This "Dolls" record is closer in many ways to Johansen's first two post-Dolls classics - David Johansen and In Style. Like those late-70s outings, this record perfectly blends what has always fascinated Johansen - and which reached somewhat tighter arragements in his soloc career - a blend of Motown, Chicago blues, surf music, and girl band vocals. Think Bernadette meets Pipeline meets John Lee Hooker, add a touch of slouchy glam, and you've pretty much got it.

This record has a bunch of good tracks, some hilarious and emotional writing along the lines of Frenchette and Funky But Chic, and plenty of delivery. My fave is the rolling mid-tempo piano blues number I Ain’t Got Nothin', all crammed with regret but delivered with a sly wink. Irony about irony. And there's nothin more ironic than a new Dolls record, here in post-everything New York. Get it and you won't be sorry.

Previous Dolls-related posts for your reading pleasure:

Considering David Jo
Johnny Thunders Best
Johnny's Still Dead

Tags: New+York+Dolls David+Johansen Johnny+Thunders Dolls Johansen Thunders 

Bits and Pieces

Whatcha got under the hood there, fella? That a six-cylinder or the eight? What kind of gizmos and flibgadgets are you using on the front end? How's the mileage on the hozzle? These are the kinds of high-tech questions that we hard-core early adopter types have to field on a daily basis. We try to boil it down to layman's terms, of course, so that even the non-engineers can attain a vague grasp of the fundamentals. So now and again, we take a quick look at some of the more technical advances at Tom Watson: My Dirty Life & Times - a tip of the virtual hat to the massive team that keeps this blogmobile moving down the highway. Some new additions to the basic muscle car Typepad V8 powertrain:

See that box of head shots and avatars down the left side - no farther, the LEFT side. There. That's the handy little widget from MyBlogLog, a newish web service that Fred tipped me off to. It's incredibly viral - and for grownups, too. Kind of a MySpace for middle-aged people who write blogs. Basically it tracks other bloggers who visit your site, creating a kind of central community around blogs. I like it very much so far,and I'd love to see more of the bloggers in the B-roll join up. Here's a hint: it's already bringing in new readers. so please sign up and join my community. I'm curious to see what feature sets MyBlogLog adds down the line.

Also down that left column is the feed from my coComment account - a nifty service that I use to track my comments left on other blogs. Too often, I've found I drop a comment or two and orget to come back and follow the conversation. Then too, how will my own readers know what I'm commenting on elsewhere? In the open spirit of this conversation of ours - and with coComment's help - you can track my virtual footprints around the web and leave your own as well if you choose. I like this feature very much.

On the right side are two features that have been up for a while. The first is my Flickr box, which has been a feature here almost since the start. Love Flickr - an almost too obvious thing to say. But since it's recently been redesigned, I love it more. Keeps track of my pics, helps distribute photographs to a wider world, and lets me in on the lives of many friends and colleagues online. Visit my Flickr page. Tell me how cute my kids are.

Finally, there are the charts from Last.fm, a social music site that is really amazing - not only does it track what I'm listening to on my desktop (but not my iPod, alas) and report it back to me - and me to you - it offers up an infinite set of tag-based "radio stations" that allow me to discover new music and old faves. I use it all the time. Feel free to comment on my taste in music. (Strangely, my most-played track at work is Brand New Cadillac by the Clash - hmmm). That's what this sucker is for.

Part of the purpose of this blog is pure experimentation with the medium - of it there's anything else I should add, let me know. Features are liable to come and go, depending upon whether they work for me. But hey, it's my blog. I'm the digital grease-monkey here. Over and out.

UPDATE: Of course, as soon as I endorse coComments, the javascript for publicizing the service takes the site down for a couple of days for those of you stuck using the Internet Explorer browser. I endeavored to take it down - from the shore, via my Treo phone - and patched things together. Fred apparently suffered the same problems, and comments on his experiments with "blog bling." I agree with him - this is an experiment for me, and if a script takes my breathless writing offline for IE users for a day or two, well that's the price ya pay for living in a transparent world.

A Fatal Detachment

Here in the hot summer of 2006, with every flat screen in town showing dayside images of screaming children and bombed-out buildings - as understaffed American television news crews move from Baghdad to Lebanon and Haifa by way of Cyprus - it is almost inconceivable to remember how worried supporters of Israel were over the impending Bush II presidency a mere six years ago. Back then, the hardliners recalled all too well the tough stance taken by the President's father his and his attack-terrier Secretary of State James Baker with the Israeli government. As this piece in a 2000 issue of New York magazine by Craig Horowitz worried aloud: "a lot of Jews are very worried about a Bush victory. Their most urgent and conspicuous concern is what U.S. policy toward Israel will look like if Bush becomes president. To put it plainly, they want to know if George Bush is good for the Jews."

Uh, that'd be a "no."

The images of destruction in southern Lebanon - the destruction of a fledgling Middle East democracy, for that matter - are horrific in almost direct proportion to the level of engagament of this President in the fortunes of our greatest friend in the region. As bad as his father was "for the Jews" by some measures (at least for those who equate Israel with Judaism, viewed as a united monolithic culture) his son has been worse. The simple fact is this: both Jim Baker's tough love act and Bill Clinton's frenzied personal diplomacy were both preferable to the sad, lamentable, tragic and mistaken military campaign undertaken by a weak and ill-prepared Israeli regime.

Fact is also, that our own sad, lamentable, tragic and mistaken military campaign undertaken by a weak and ill-prepared American regime in Iraq has emboldened any angry man with a gun in any religious faction throughout the Middle East, where these battles have raged for a thousand years. We were a better friend of Israel under Poppy and Bubba.

The Policy of Detachment (Except in Iraq) simply hasn't worked. And Israel's invasion and bombing campaign have done it a generation's worth of harm, alarming those (like myself) who would like to see its prosperty and security guaranteed. A wiser Presidential Friend of Israel would have lent a helping hand, shown something of an interest, been a big brother to the tiny Jewish state. Instead, we either ignored the larger problems, or rubber-stamped Israeli policy. As James Wolcott notes: "We did Israel no favors with such fraternal submissiveness ... Israel has been given so much slack, it may have hanged itself, at least as far as world opinion is concerned."

But why be an engaged super-power when it's time to hit the bike, grab a PB&J sandwich, and sneak upstairs to the residence for SportsNight? That stuff's for micro-managing twits like Daddy and his big, red-nosed buddy. Eugene Robinson, writing in the Post, pretty much nailed the fatal detachment while lamenting his choice of vacation weeks, newswise:

Just my luck. I go away on vacation and it happens to be the week when George W. Bush's strategic view of the current world situation is revealed: Russia big. China big, too. World leaders boring. Lady world leaders need neck rub. Terrorism bad. Elections good (when the right people get elected). Israel good. Time to go home yet?

Tags: Israel Bush Lebanon James+Baker

Carried in the Current

The storm brought winds from the northeast, and covered the map from New Haven to Barnegat. Squalls swept across Long Island Sound, down into New York Harbor, and on into Sandy Hook. They slowed the ferries on the East River and the Hudson, and made the engineers ride their brakes on the slick rails along the commuter trains from Islip and Greenwich. The fishing fleets in Montauk and Shelter Island and Sag Harbor stayed at their moorings, as did their cousins at the quays down in Manasquan and Little Egg Harbor. The fisherman stayed bottled up in the pubs and bars along the docks, some mending line under awnings and in sheds, others just drinking away a day with neither catch nor pay.

New York Harbor still operated on a day like this, of course, but more slowly; the tugboat crews pulled on slickers and kept a hand free to grapple for safety in the unpredictable swell. At all hours, truckers in the container yards huddled under loading dock porches, smoking cigarettes and talking traffic, while the longshoremen alternated between frantic activity and menacing ease, secure in the protection of their bosses, union and otherwise, and hopeful of overtime pay.

In Manhattan, the rain created a shine on the impressionist painting of urban modernity, the grim overcast shrouding the tops of the tallest office buildings. Pools gathered on the streets, but little torrents ran down the avenues. Yellow cabs backed up on the elevated roadway above the station, turning through huge swamps at the bottom of the ramp onto 42nd Street. The musty smell of soaked wool and sweat filled the cars of the IRT and drifted through the expanses of Grand Central Terminal, where newspaper hawkers were chased from their street corners to shout headlines in the humid side passages. They sat by the bundled piles of newspapers, the broadsheets face up with grim news out of the eastern battlefields; the tabloids were face down, showing photos of a troubled ballplayer.

In the Bronx, the rain blanketed the tenements of Mott Haven and Mosholu, the depot at Hunts Point and the low warehouses and factories down near Hell’s Gate. It soaked the back streets in Melrose and Belmont, and up in Riverdale, the old trees of Delafield’s estate swayed in the storm, and a sea of black umbrellas held back the water outside of a small stone church not far from the bluffs above Spuyten Duyvil. There in the drive, the rain rolled off the polished black hood of a hearse that delivered the casket to the church.

Truth was, a heavy rainstorm didn’t clean New York as much as it stirred up the dirt, and caught the detritus and slime of eight million and floated it like sewage to the surface. The hot, dry pavement spattered with warm rain gave forth the telling odor of its borough, its neighborhood, its block. Stale beer in front of Tammany-era saloons, thin paper down Broad Street. Animal blood and rended fat swam in the meat-packing district; reeking fish guts on Fulton Street, and assorted oils, cabbage, and turned milk clouded rainwater puddles in the ethnic bedroom stretches of the outer boroughs. The city ran with its own filth in the rain, and some of it washed into the East River and the Hudson River and the Sound and the Harbor; the waters turned a satisfying gray-brown, the true melting pot of New York, neither pleasant nor aromatic, just overflowing and full of filth.

Tags: New+York NY

When Blogs Attack!!!

In the high-stakes game of national political punditry, those who rely constantly on the merely conventional soon look like a contestant dressed as a giant Wisconsin cheese who just got frozen out by the smiling devil Monty Hall. They choose the big box, the first curtain, and win nothing but some parting gifts and a seat in the studio audience. Today's cheesehead is Jonathan Chait and yeah, that's the deep voice of announcer Jay Stewart describing the fun, wacky play-at-home version of the show he'll be taking with him: sadly, the New Republic blogger chose door number one - which opened to reveal the hackneyed, lazy lie that the "netroots" wing of the Democratic Party is filled with nothing but bomb-throwing, flag-burning, hate-mongers.

Posits Chait on the Lamont-Lieberman showdown in Connecticut: "...the sticking point for me is whether Lieberman is truly an outlier--a figure whose embrace of Bush and inability to muster outrage at mismanagement of the war set him apart from other moderates--or whether he's merely the first in a series of moderate Democrats to be targeted by the activist left."

Yes, it's not as crazy as some of the so-called centrists: your Marshall Whitman, your David Brooks. Here's some of the Moose's Bull:

The left knows no limit to their hatred of Lieberman. It is deep. It is irrational. And it has the potential to damage the Democratic Party for many years to come. Truth will not deter the left wing practitioners of swiftboating. Just as their right wing brethren sought to make a coward out of a war hero, the left wingers seek to make a right winger out of a long-standing liberal.

Chait is clearly under the thrall of the "crazy bloggers" wisdom. He's been honking on Bobo too damned much. Any real reporting (a little-used tactic called "the interview" might be useful) would reveal the wide range of opinion in the so-called Soviet netroots. Nobody marches in lockstep.

You see, the netroots' activism in Connecticut isn't about a radical leftist agenda (hell, the annointed leader of the bloggers is Markos Moulitsas, an ex-soldier who has no problem supporting Jim Webb in Virginia and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania). It's about access and power, and anti-incumbent fatigue, not a flavor of liberalism. And it's about the damned war - a war now opposed by two-thirds of Americans, and that percentage has to be higher in Connecticut. That's why the latest poll shows Lamont has jumped ahead of Lieberman among likely voters, 51 to 47 percent. Lieberman is not an "outlier" - he's a tired incumbent whose support for a despised President is sinking his numbers among members of his own party.

Larry Sabato nails it; he was quoted by Josh Gerstein in the New York Sun, at the end of a good article about how alarmed centrist Democrats (read, the connected consultant class) are desperately trying to counter the vicious attacks of the wild-eyed lefties of the so-called netroots:

The bloggers' distaste for the DLC is not strictly ideological. "I tend to think it's as much about elitism as about political philosophy," a professor at the University of Virginia, Larry Sabato, said. "They view the DLC as a bunch of insiders from Georgetown who try to control the party and it's nomination.

See, that was door number two, Jonathan. And door number two had the trip to Acapulco and the new dinette. Not door number one.

UPDATE: New York mag has a long, must-read profile of the Lamont-Lieberman race.

Tags: Ned+Lamont Joe+Lieberman netroots Kos Senate 2006

Hot in Hoylake

West Kirby, originally uploaded by Tom Watson.

The sportswriters make all of Merseyside seem like it's just now recovering from the havoc wrought by German bombers and Thatcherite privatization, but it's not true. As the best golfers in the world tangle along the grass of Royal Liverpool in 100-degree heat - and guys like John Daly channel the Beatles at a rebuilt-for-tourists Cavern Club - a rare international eye is turned Liverpool's way. And the reputation that's dragged up is hardscrabble at best.

But Merseyside is, in reality, a diverse area with tough, inner-city neighborhoods only a few short miles from windswept coastal scenes of great beauty and simple farming towns. The Wirral, across the Mersey from Liverpool, is home to the bigger, urban towns of Birkenhead, Wallasey, and New Brighton. But the mallet-shaped peninsula is also bound by the Irish Sea and the Dee, a tidal estuary separating it from the hills of northern Wales. Along that coast, at the corner of the rectangle facing Wales and Ireland, is the sandy spit where Tiger, Phil, and the rest of the greats are battling in the Open Championship. Royal Liverpool stretches from Hoylake in the west to West Kirby, around the bend. Both towns are what you would call upscale, by the way - the Wirral's gold coast.

There's a winding path that runs through the dunes along the edges of the course, and to walk its several miles is to escape any notion of downtrodden northern England. At the end of the walk is the wide, wide beach at West Kirby. There a few years back, we paid 50p for Devon to ride a pony on the sand. It's one of my favorite photographs. He's bigger now. But as I caught a glimpes of Tiger struggling in a pot bunker, the wind kicking up the sand, I could see over his shoulder in the distance the wide vista along the coast. And I remembered that pony ride and a very special place.

UPDATE: Man, Tiger looked great. Jason has a good post on golf's Rifleman. And Blue Girl says Tiger represents perfection, though I suspect for different reasons.

Tags: Tiger+Woods British+Open Wirral Hoylake Liverpool Merseyside golf PGA pony West+Kirby

The Isobar Scene

Sitting comfortably in the super-charged path of my Kenmore 5000 - a Category Five blast of pure  kilowatt-sucking air-conditioned power - I was stunned by a line in one of those wonderful Richard Russo novels about poetic, hopeless goobers stuck in some backwater helltown up past Albany: "The paper says rain."

The paper? The damned paper? Who gets their weather from the paper anymore? For Crissakes, the freaking paper was printed last night. At the very best, the so-called "weather" is circa yesterday afternoon. It's about as relevant as the Compromise of 1850. Entire cold fronts have shifted in the last half-day. Tropical depressions have moved hundreds of miles in that slow, creeping timespan.

These days, "the weather" changes as fast as - well, er - the weather.

That is to say, reporting is real-time, baby. They show the latest forecast in my office building's elevator. Desktop applicatons abound. Text messages drop into the queue. I want (and can get) the latest Doppler 4000 charts on my mobile. The old-fashioned time/temperature sign outside the local funeral home or bank has mainlined some brand of instant data heroin and is multiplying  in demonic Fantasia broom-sequence madness all over the wireless world.

This pre-dates New Orleans, my friends. It's not that "eveything has changed" and we're living in some strange post-Katrina landscape in which Mother Nature takes on the sinister killing glare of an al Qaeda operative. This goes back a ways, back to some blurring of the space-time continuum, a moment when the Weather Channel went from cheap charlie basic cable throw-in extra to "programming."

Have you seen Storm Stories? Or Full Force Nature? How about It Could Happen Tomorrow? Me either, but I know some people who have. I come from a long line of weather buffs actually. Barometer fiddlers. Weather-band radio buyers. Generator owners. Foul weather gear wearers.

It is for them, and their growing ranks, that programmers create this "disastertainment." For ratings, of course. And so that we can all be prepared...When Nature Strikes!

And it will strike, of that I'm convinced. As a confirmed lightning-phobe who closes windows tighly and will not use the telephone during an eletrical storm, I have a healthy fear of the natural elements. There was that hurricane my family rode out on the Jersey Shore back in '71, another I covered for The Riverdale Press in the 80s (when a falling tree just missed my Ford), and the heat-related blackouts of '77 and '03. I can still see the image of Jerry Koosman on the hill at Shea go dark as the electricity ebbed. That and the announcement three years ago in a 44th Street bar that the tap was dry, they'd stopped serving, and our dwindling band of sweaty office refugees would have to be sent into that warm, hopelessly dark Manhattan night to somehow bribe a cabbie into taking us home - either that, or sleep in Bryant Park.

Yeah, the worst weather is always summer-borne, in my llving memory. Blizzards leave me cold.

So this week's triple-digital weather - as the TV weather stars intone with such good cheer - is part of our own huge, all-encompassing reality show. Yesterday, as a massive pro-Israel rally kicked out the jams here on East 42nd Street (and a tiny anti-Zionist counter-rally looked for shade across the street), everyone still talked about the heat. Especially the handful of cops in full, black battle gear, index fingers outstretched on M-16s and sweating pouring from underneath Kevlar helmets like the East River through Hell's Gate.

Sure enough, MSNBC's bright, newsy homepage made the switch today. All-out war in the Middle East became a sidebar. The new headline? "Summer Sizzler." Part of their in-depth global warming coverage, I guess.

Did I mention, it's hot?

UPDATE: Tropical Storm Beryl - which just happens to be my nickname for the Artist - is bearing down on defenseless coastal New England, and Lance Mannion is live on the scene in the BloggerSeven News Truck. We switch now LIVE to Chatham. Lance, what can you tell us about conditions there?

Tags: Weather+Channel weather Beryl hurricane

A Day that Broke Up Your Mind

The officer gently tapped the sleeping hulk on the tiled station floor with the toe of his shiny black shoe. No movement. Covered by a tattered gray blanket, sparse brown and white hair flowing from under a greasy cap, the man was as quiet and still as a living person can be.

"Hey buddy, you with us. Hey. Hey buddy, you with us, man?"

He turned my way. The nameplate on his pocket said Salerno. "Well, he's not dead. This how you found him?"

I nodded. "Yeah, I don't think he's moved. Thought he might need help."

The man on the floor twitched, his shoulders swerving upwards and to the right with an unctrolled heave, scattering the blanket and lifting two large feet off the floor. The sudden movement startled the cop, who had been leaning in expecting the barest slurred movements of a drunk deep, deep into his muted version of the night. This guy looked strong. Long, stringy hair, some brown with the gray and white, sparse beard on a dirty face and the darkened, hollow eye-sockets so common on the early morning rounds in the tunnels of Grand Central.

Only the eyes were different. Green and alert. Darting curiously around the corridor, and then back into the cop’s face. Not drunk at all. Small pupils too. "Let’s do this right." Officer Salerno tapped the radio button on his left lapel. "Psych case, shuttle passage." All the while keeping the man locked in his gaze.

"Listen buddy, my good friend Officer Monroe and I are going to take you someplace warm, get you some coffee maybe something to eat, have the doctors take a look, ok? Hold steady there a minute pal."

The man sat up, ran a grimy sleeve over his mouth, and clicked his tongue loudly. The noise echoed down the tunnel.

"We got it, buddy. Thanks."

I nodded at the cop, pulled up the raincoat around my neck, and walked away.

Selling Treason in Jersey

For birders and lovers of Victoriana and its gingerbread architecture, Cape May, New Jersey is a throwback to a more genteel time. To the north, Wildwood is also a throwback, but not to gentility; property values along the precious Atlantic coast have not knocked away this last great Jersey Shore honky-tonk outside the gutters of Atlantic City and its failed experiment with organized crime. Strangely enough for a town in a pure blue state, Cape May is below the Mason-Dixon line and seemingly carries a whiff of southern charm and manners; Wildwood sits squat upon it and has neither. Indeed, lately it as become somehow a center for Confederate regalia, according to Rich Juzwiak's blog, fourfour. Rich offers a colorful and shocking photo tour of T-shirt shops and other inspiring sights on the beach and boardwalk of Wildwood, New Jersey [hat tip: Lindsay].

The Confederate flag - known as the Battle Flag to CSA buffs and the Stars and Bars to many others - is all over Wildwood's shops and swimmers, it seems. It's simple really - tons of people don't realize that the flag represents two things above all else: black slavery and treason.

They're content to wear it on their chests, tattoo it on their arms, stick it in their labels, fly it from their flagpoles, wiggle it from their asses, and emblazon it on all manner of vehicles - as if it were really a mere symbol of cultural pride, a lasting badge of honor.

History is simple: a murderous gang of treasonous southern leaders turned their back on the United States of America to defend the enslavement of blacks, for economic, cultural, and racial reasons. It was a catastrophic last stand for a horrid, immoral way of life that may have died out in another short generation because of growing distates for shackles and whip throughout the western world. The flag was the symbol of the armed rebellion against the very idea of America. It is an icon of the greatest act of treason in our history - an icon made worse by the constant attempts at its resurrection as a legitimate cultural symbol after Reconstruction.

But some people are literally unreconstructed; listen to this guy on Rich's blog:

I live in Virginia. I have always had friends from various ethnic backgrounds, grew up listening to hip-hop, and attended a predominately/historically black college. I'm not at all religious and believe in the equitable treatment of people from all races, belief systems, and sexual lifestyles. I also hold the Confederacy dear to my heart. The basic idea of freedom has been altered since the Union won the Civil War, to the point where there is basically no real choice left in America. When people bemoan the two-party system and the choice between two evils that they're forced to make every four years, they ought to understand that it began when the C.S.A. was defeated. It's unfortunate that the source of the conflict was slavery, because it clouds the issues of personal freedom and of the rights of the States. Slavery is indefensible, but this country was founded with an allowance for the freedom of each individual State, and that war destroyed this freedom and led to the death of many others.

So the Confederacy was about some basic idea of American personal freedom? Slavery "clouded the issue." Do they actually teach this stuff? Then there's this:

maybe it is time for a history lesson, the civil war wasn't about slavery and lincon didn't abolish it out of the goodness of his heart. the civil war was about states rights and economy, slavery was abolished as a way to further weaken the south, not to up hold the libreal ideals of abolitionists

And ok, one more:

I am black and the proudest of southerners. The Confederate flag is not patently offensive. What is more, perhaps many northerners should get off their high horse about blacks, slavery, the flag, and the south. The north has it own problems, including racism. I have friends that have the so-called Confederate flag, and they are not racist. As to this topic, it seems northerners lack the ability to comprehend the naunces of love for the South, it culture, long dead family members that fought in the lost cause, while not necessarily hating blacks or loving slavery. It is more than just bumpersticker logic to say that one can be proud of the south, as I am, without being a racist. I am proud of Martin Luther King, but I am also proud of Robert E. Lee, as he was an honorable gentleman, solider, Christian, and educator. We all make mistakes.

We all do indeed make mistakes, but symbols of those mistakes can be very powerful and incredibly offensive. In a land where we attempt to amend the Constitution to prevent the burning of our national symbol, and where mainstream commentators accuse newspapers of treason for reporting accurately on secret government programs, symbols do matter in daily life. And while arguing over the causes of the Civil War in the context of boardwalk T-shirt shacks seems silly, arguing over the symbol adopted by Klansmen to terrorize Southern blacks within many of our lifetimes does not.

Besides, the flag-burning amendment folks have one thing right - if you're an American, there's only one flag.

Tags: Confederacy Stars+and+Bars treason KKK racism New+Jersey Wildwood Civil+War

MySpace is YourSpace

Typepad is like the ancient Buick Skylark I used to drive. Sometimes it flies, that killer 350 smacking down shiny Camaros out on Central Avenue. And sometimes it just answers with a cold, empty "click, click, click" when you turn the key. Today was the dead battery Typepad, so while I sat there unable to post, it got me thinking about these internets of ours.

Specifically about social networks, actually - those hotter-than-Hades social-bookmarking, social-tagging, and social-er-hooking-up sites that are sucking up more and more user time online, and more and more ink in the press.

First off, I'm not hooked.

Yeah, I use tags...sometimes. When I forget, I forget. Mostly I use 'em to keep track of stuff for myself, whether on Technorati or Flickr or my own blog. I don't use them to meet other taggers. Same thing with Delicious (when I can figure it out). The only other reason I use tags is the somewhat hypocritical notion that they'll deliver a larger audience. Both selfish reasons, unrelated to a wider sense of online community - for that, I rely on comments, both on my blog and the many other sites I track on a regular basis. Comments are social networking, to me.

I was thinking about this after reading a terrific post by Mark Hurst of Good Experience, who was hired by Delicious (again, no dots, I'm too tired) to help in making the site/service more user-friendly. Mark's key observation hit home:

Since we finished the project a few months ago, I've noticed a lot of attention in the press paid to this area. Every other week, it seems, there's a major story about "social bookmarking", "tagging", "folksonomies", or some such term. Despite the fact that the average user has no idea what these mean, and no easy way to reach the benefits, these stories proliferate. And here's why: techies are so adept at understanding these tools and reaping the benefits that they sign up in droves; journalists talk to techies to get story ideas; and voila! a new "hot trend" is born in the press.

Now, I'm something of a techie (slightly lapsed but recovering rapidly) and an early-adopter in these matters, but the benefit of spending hours creating a complex taxonomy for free, so that other users may somehow benefit (in mysterious and often unclear ways, as Mark points out) seems to come up a few dollars short of a bargain. This is something Joshua Porter over at his Bokardo blog took up in a post back in May (pointer by Mark):

Unfortunately, the ability to aggregate has blinded many software developers to think that tags are a cure-all to the success of their software. Tags have almost become a requisite feature in new software. I’ve received many emails in which developers try to sell me on the merits of their brand-new software based mostly on the ability of potential users to tag things, as if users inherently enjoy tagging things as a matter of course. Real people, in contrast, tag for their own benefit. And they surely won’t tag if the incentive to do so isn’t clear.

Aggregation, in general, is probably more effective as a second-order feature of software. If we create features just to aggregate them, without providing users with tangible value first, then people simply won’t use the features. My guess is that aggregation technologies which prove most useful will be ones that are added to some activity that users have already started doing without the promise of any aggregation benefits.

Still, you've seen the news about MySpace, haven't you? It's gotten more bytes in certain circles than the North Korean missile program - and in my book, the trajectory is just as steady. MySpace - where I spend zero hours and zero minutes per week because of age restrictions - is the new traffic leader, blowing by Yahoo and eBay in terms of total percentage of Internet traffic.  According to Hitwise, 4.46% of all Web traffic is MySpace. That means Rupert Murdoch - who picked up MySpace for half a billion - is the king of social media, the master of tags, kaiser of social bookmarks.

Strange, actually.

I would have thought that for people of Murdoch's generation, "social bookmarking" conjures images of sweet old ladies gathering on Saturday nights to crochet lovely placemarkers for their Bibles and book club bodice-rippers. Pass the lemonade dear.

In reality, big media masters like Murdoch believe that anything pulling people away from their traditional properties must immediately be tamped down and defeated or purchased and rolled into their empires. And they're right, quite honestly. Big media companies, if they're to remain big media companies, have to evolve or die - these days, just faster. And yet, if people roll their own media, where's the value to content-laden media vaults like Fox or Time-Warner or Disney? Robert Young has a terrific essay over at GigaOm that raises more questions than it answers, but is well-worth reading. He argues:

But just as the Internet was not a subset of AOL, social media will not become a subset of traditional media. In fact, social media will increasingly begin to compete directly with traditional media consumption. Yes, it is true that the media output produced and distributed by the audience itself will generally be of lower production value and quality. Even so, they will prove highly competitive to Hollywood products, as the personal engagement factor inherent in personal media outweighs any loss of production value.

So given the competitive nature of social media and the operational challenges it represents, why should media companies even think of embracing social integration? Because they have no choice… social media will continue to take market share away from traditional media, regardless of whether the media companies participate or not.

Defense for the social media startups seems rather difficult: anybody with a server farm and slightly-tipsy naming committee can come up with the next YouTube or Flickr. New services hit the clickstream daily. But the connections that people are making seem to be permanent - or at least the time they take to make them seems as permanent as the time they take on telephone calls and email. Notes Fred Wilson:

So we may have to wait until the fall to see where all of this is headed but my sense is that "social media" is here to stay. The individual properties may rise and fall (remember Geocities and Tripod?), but the idea of media that is personal and social is a lasting one and an important one.

I agree that social media is a permanent addition to our media lives, but it probably won't resolve in one big company. MySpace is hot as hell, but how do you play defense in a company like that? When you give the people full power over the tools that create media, who knows how it shakes out? We may well face a media future with lots of smaller companies, a trove of tool and die manufacturers for the digital age and a vast media heartland of server farms. Which will be pretty cool to follow, actually.

Well, I notice that Typepad is back up so I can go in and start tagging. Ah forget it, I'll just drop this post in and call it a day.

UPDATE: Jay at Compete adds some original analysis to the MySpace vs. Yahoo debate (which apaprnetly matters to some people, though I'd say revenue and profits are better yardsticks). And Markos points to a Wired story that claims MySpace has been "Foxified" under Murdoch's reign. It apparently pulled a video critical of right-wing Sen. Ted Stevens (he of Bridge to Nowhere fame).