The following is currently running at the top of The Guardian's newsblog page, but it won't be there long. It's also accessible from the Pick of the Day archive, which lists many other excellent and interesting sites.

Newsblog | Pick of the day

Friday February 18, 2005

Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke, aka Chief Blogging Officer, is helping HighBeam Research to create tools for bloggers and writing a great blog in the process. More details here.

Posted by Jane Perrone at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

If you feel inclined, you can comment directly from that final link, above.

This is going to be a followup to yesterday's post about Firefox. But first I want to tell a little story to set up an analogy.

My first child was born in 1970. My wife Karen and I named her Shanti, so that gives you some idea of the then-current zeitgeist and where we saw ourselves in all that. I raised goats and organic vegetables. Yes, me. Shocking, I know, but true. And in keeping with that "alternative lifestyle" (though we didn't know that phrase yet; we just called ourselves freaks; with some pride, I should add), we of course did the Lamaze training in preparation for Shanti's arrival. Pant-blow, pant-blow. Yeah, it was a little weird, but back then, what wasn't?

So some months later, when the contractions were five minutes apart -- to quote from the literature -- we set out for the hospital. Karen was ushered into the process with all due regard for "her condition," but when I asked where I could change into scrubs and where the labor room was, the nurses looked at me funny. Real funny.

"The waiting room is down that hall," they said. Not adding, but I could tell they were thinking: you freak!

"You don't understand," I said in my best understatement. "We're doing Lamaze."

Now the whole nursing station was tuned into this man from Mars who'd just told them that he and his wife were "doing Lamaze." Was it a new kind of illegal drug? Had he just said the equivalent of "we're doing acid"?

After much confusion and rolling of eyes -- theirs and mine both -- our doctor was consulted. To the nurses astonishment, he told them yes, I was to be admitted not only to the labor room, but to the delivery room as well.

"Well!" The nurses dispersed with a tacit yet nonetheless clearly communicated "Harumph," their authority not only challenged, but recklessly overridden. They'd lost.

So I got to be there to see Shanti take her first breath. Hold her in my arms. Welcome her into the world. The barriers that had excluded men from this experience were clearly all wrong. And they fell.

Three years later, we had a second child. Jesse. Much more conventional, you're thinking. Yeah, except that his middle name is Mountain. I was still doing acid and Lamaze. And here comes the point of this little tale. When we arrived at the hospital this time, all the nurses had been trained in natural childbirth techniques. My participation raised not a single eyebrow. Lamaze births had, in those three intervening years, become standard procedure. No one had lost. Everybody had gained.

OK, ready for the analogy? This may be a little painful at first, so follow my lead here. Pant blow. Pant blow...

Three years ago, it was next to inconceivable that a mere Microsoft employee -- and by "mere" I mean one not drilled in the Key Point dunning techniques of Corporate "Communications" -- would someday speak publicly and positively about a competing company or product. But that day has come, and that "mere employee," now magically transmogrified into an actual human being is Robert Scoble.

As he took a little friendly fire in my previous post, I want to reproduce here -- in full, links and all -- what he posted about an hour later...

Congrats to Firefox on 25M downloads

Hi Blake Ross (and Asa and others on the Firefox team): Congrats on hitting 25,000,000 downloads of Firefox. You did what few people have done: you changed the world and got people to download and install your application.

At Demo yesterday I saw Firefox all over the place. I saw far far far more Firefox icons than I saw Linux or Macintosh icons.

In just a few months your app has become one of the most used Windows applications in the world. My hat's off to you!

And a few minutes earlier than that one, he wrote:

Hey, did anyone notice the 400 comments left over on the IE Blog yesterday?

Nah, don't start a conversation. Why would someone want to do that? Heh!

The big story here is not another browser war (not that I have anything against one; as I said yesterday, what fun!), but rather the conversation that has finally started between people inside companies and people outside those companies. The net made this inevitable, as the cluetrain manifesto predicted in 1999. Did Doc Searls, David Weinberger and myself really believe it would ever happen? I can't speak for Doc or David, but I know I was skeptical.

Something has begun here that is hugely significant. It doesn't mean there won't be any pain, but -- pant-blow, pant-blow -- maybe we can get through it, one contraction at a time. In some cases, of course, there will be complications and the (spin) doctors may have to resort to massive administrations of morphine. (Oh do  please hit that link!)

The point is not the process, though. It's the product. And the product in this case is neither Firefox nor Internet Explorer. The "product" is the conversation itself. People talking to people. Just us chickens here, boss!

How could we ever have let it become otherwise? Now that we've got a toehold on this baby, let's not let it happen again.

Because if the Lamaze learning-curve example was an analogy for this recent exchange, so is this recent exchange an analogy for something larger, something not yet quite in sight. But it needs to come into focus, and fast. There are far more pressing issues in the world today than which operating system and which browser we'll use. Is it too much to hope that the conversations we're learning how to have today constitute a training ground for how we'll keep this planet hung together for another 1000 years? We'd better hope it's not too much to hope.

Pant blow. Pant blow...

Take a tip from the old CBO. Never, ever, say you're "always on the job," then spend the whole next day reconfiguring your entire working environment until you're near blind and you've got 68 random parameters coming out your ears. I finally moved to the Mac about nine months ago, and while it wasn't a walk in the park to relearn all my old tricks in brand new software, I have to say -- well, I don't have to, but I will -- that's it's mostly been a lot of fun.

I hope you won't mind too much that I'm gonna talk geek in this post. I usually keep it under pretty good wraps. But beneath my mild mannered exterior lives a seething, fire-breathing technofreak of no mean skillz. Imagine me beating my breast here like Johnny Weissmuller (for the youngsters among you: that was the guy who played Tarzan in the old Saturday afternoon matinees -- which you also don't remember).

However, I lie. The sad truth of it is that I'm only just good enough at this stuff to be dangerous. Mostly to myself. I suppose it's a tribute to Mac OS X that I'm still up and running after the way I hacked this poor little 12" powerbook today. Why, I beat it like a red-headed stepchild!

So two things caught my wavering attention this morning. Or whenever it was I woke up today. Yes, now I remember. It was morning. God, I hope that never happens again. And those two things were? Oh yes...

1. I saw that Scoble had something about Gates alluding to a commitment to propose to deliver sometime in the future a new beta version of Internet Explorer. Whoa, huh? Now, I like Robert, and I know he's got a tough job over there at Microsoft, walking that fine line between truth and dare. But dude! That was so lame. No, no, I don't mean you. I mean that other guy saying like (and I paraphrase), we've heard The People speak, and they shall have of us that wonder they have yea verily demanded and Bill himself has spoken on this saying oh ye of little faith, just wait another couple-three quarters and it shall come to pass. Words to that general ipecacian effect.
2. And the other thing I saw was this...

...because that tail and those ears are connected to a fox that is right now as we speak, so to speak, eating Microsoft's lunch. It is, in point of fact, a wily Firefox. And it has powerful friends all around the world, who are doing a kind of marketing number I once could only dream (and occasionally write) about.

I mean, if you catch my drift...

And I have to say, I felt genuinely embarrassed when I looked at all that unbridled enthusiasm. I felt as if I'd been out of it way too long. Sitting on the sidelines licking my various wounds. So that's why I tore into my system and changed just about everything about how I'm working on this stuff. Not that I was using IE much anyway. I guess I'm just prone to being swayed, being moved, being rocked to my sox by this fox out of box. By this kind of rockin-the-top-off JOY. And that's what it is, make no mistake. Dangerous stuff when allowed to run wild and free like that. A dangerous business.

I guess it's just that I like a good firefight every once in a while. It clears the air. Like everybody in town getting wasted for carnival. I just went over to the IEBlog, which I'd never even heard of before today, and was rolling on the floor laughing at all the Firefox molotovs being tossed into that um conversation. And I know what some of you are thinking, though I'm thinking you've gotta be a small minority of those reading my anarchist ravings with any, shall we say, regularity. You -- the few, the proud -- are thinking this sort of behavior isn't very polite. And of course you're right.

Yeah, but it sure is fun!

I knew the net was going to do this someday. I could feel it in my creaky old bones ten years ago, maybe 20. One day, I thought, some giant company is going to make some major announcement -- or what it would like the world to believe is a major announcement -- but the carefully crafted if utterly empty rhetoric will be drowned out by the block party going on next door.

after all the cock and bull, could it really be?

take back the web. damn straight.

The Tampa Tribune, January 3, 2005: "The Firefox browser, downloaded an impressive 10 million times in its first month, is creating a buzz on the Web as people weary of the security shortcomings of Microsoft Internet Explorer give the open-source alternative a try."

The Christian Science Monitor, February 3, 2005: "A clever fox is sneaking into Microsoft's henhouse, and some observers are warning that though it won't steal any valuable software itself, it could leave the door open to more ravenous invaders if the software giant isn't careful... In just over two months, [Firefox] has grabbed about 5 percent of the market, while IE has dropped from more than 95 percent to just over 90 percent."

Business Week, February 7, 2005: The article is titled, "Move Over, Internet Explorer," and it ends with this. "One last to-do item before you start surfing with Firefox: Take a minute on the Mozilla.org site to make an online donation to the foundation, whose mission is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet. The browser is free, but Mozilla has expenses. If you're using the product, why not help support it?"

Good question. In fact, it's an excellent question. Sounds to me like The End of Business Week As Usual. <g>

Every picture tells a story, don't it? These stories have been important to me. Crucially so. Your mileage may vary, of course. In which case, if you're feeling particularly brave -- or reckless -- baby, you can drive my car...

A Short Bibliography

• Can Love Last?: The Fate of Romance over Time
• Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection
• Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love
• A General Theory of Love
  
  And if none of those work for you, there's always this stalwart fallback...
• Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

Now wait. Because I know what you're thinking. I know what you're saying to yourself: "OK, now that he's got my attention, here comes Locke's usual ploy, slinging the old industry bullshit -- as if I'd be even remotely interested."

Am I right, dude? Am I right, dudette? That's what you were saying, or quietly thinking to yourself. I know it. I have my ways of knowing these things. But wait. As I said above. Just hold the frickin phone, alright? Jeeze! You're sure hair-trigger today. Perhaps it's a phase-of-the-moon effect. Who knows with you. Has anyone ever suggested you should, you know, like maybe see someone  about this?

Nevermind. None of my business. I respect your privacy. And your blatant denial. It's OK by me if you want to be like that. It's a free country. For a while yet, anyway.

Point is: there's more to this little announcement than may meet the eye at first, and if you don't make it to the end, well... your loss, you boisterous bunch of misbegotten blogger hooligans!

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

---

You can read all about the purpose of this open competition on the Fast Company page, About the Fast 50. In brief: "Our goal is to remind the world of all the good that's created when passionate people with big ideas and strong convictions [see, e.g., above] are determined to make a difference." The list of winners is here, and the salient entry (as far as this particular post is concerned) falls under the category called out as "New Ideas: Making their mark with products and services we hadn't imagined." The listing reads:

Nexis for the Rest of Us
Patrick Spain, 52
Founder, Chairman, and CEO, HighBeam Research Inc.

Fast Company's full profile of the company includes a bit of Q&A, with said Patrick Spain, from which I quote the following -- for reasons I hope will be obvious...

Q: What are your goals for 2005?

A: HighBeam will launch powerful document saving and sorting capabilities, improved searching, access to databases (beyond its HighBeam Library Archive, Reference and Executive databases), upgraded alerting, support for bloggers and other tools to help people at all phases of the research process -- locating, organizing and sharing research.

And then, in an appended section of comments about the company, what to my wondering eyes should appear but this:

have used it for years. HighBeam is a great service.
Christopher Locke - Boulder CO USA

Hey, I thought, that's me! On a good day, at any rate. I forgot having written that, probably because it was before I landed this dynamite gig as Chief Blogging Officer^IM (<-- Irony Mark). However, I really have used it for years -- going way back to the dawn of the old "eLibrary" -- and it really is a great service.

But, as they say on teevee, don't just take my word for it. I ran across the following via Technorati while ego-surfing for CBO links. David Churbuck, the blogger what wrote it, is an old pal (more about which below), but we'd been out of touch for years. So, just for the record, I had nothing to do with this glowing endorsement. That's David, below, looking very well indeed in either Cape Cod or Katmandu, it's a little hard to tell which. Here's what he wrote...

Will Highbeam nuke Factiva?

One of the worst things of going freelance (aside from paying one's own benefits) is losing access to a professional research department like the ones I took for granted at Forbes and McKinsey. I'd file a request and a few days later a couple reams of paper were on my desk, sorted in order of relevance, with post-it flags to steer me to the good stuff.

Search engines have always been woefully incomplete for serious fact hunting, but in 2000 Forbes gave me a Factiva account and it was pretty cool, sort of an HTML Lexis/Nexis which I could abuse because the bills went elsewhere.

I did some consulting for a firm that bills its clients for every breath it takes, and so its Factiva searches had to be affiliated with specific clients. No more wandering around the archives, everytime I opened a full-text document I racked up a couple bucks in charges. I started to hate Factiva. I feared it. I thought about sliming someone else's log-in and doing a number on their account.

Then along comes Patrick Spain (founder of Hoovers) who launches HighBeam Research (where the dear [!!!] Chris Locke is "Chief Blogging Officer". I paid my monthly fee and suddenly felt like a fat person at a buffet.

Proving what? At Jerry Michalski's first meeting of the minds in the 90s, one of the speakers told the story of a conference he attended where everyone was given a roll of pennies in their registration packet. The deal was everytime a person entered or exited the conference hall, they had to drop a penny in a bucket or a security guard would nag them. Most of the attendees just dropped the entire roll in the bucket and told the rent-a-cop to f.o.

Moral of the story: micropayments suck. Hit me once like Highbeam and make me happy. Factiva makes me more nervous than sitting in the back seat of cab stuck in traffic on the B.Q.E. on my way to LaGuardia with only a twenty in my pocket.

As I hope my interpolated exclamation marks indicate, I don't think anyone has ever called me "dear" -- at least not in a context like this. Churbuck must've been laughing merrily when he wrote that. But more to, ahem, the point: there's a lot of history reflected in that little item.

I first met David -- virtually speaking, natch -- when I was working at a now-defunct SGML software company, and he was working up a profile of Charles Goldfarb for Forbes magazine. Goldfarb was the guy who invented SGML at IBM Almaden Research Center. I think I was the only person in the world at that time who called him Charlie. People tended to treat him as a god. In fact, despite his brilliance, he's a pretty nice guy.

Several years later, I went to work for MCI -- what can I say? all that bad karma ; had to work it off somehow, I guess -- as "Editor in Chief of the Net Editors segment of InternetMCI." A clunkier title I hope to never have in whatever nether world I'll be flung into after this one for my most grievous sins. Yeah, anyway, I hired David to write for the thing, and he did, producing a series of weekly installments about -- get this -- salt-water fly fishing. To say that the suits at MCI "didn't get it" would constitute grotesque understatement.

But think about it: this was essentially a blog -- in 1995!

And it's real purpose was to demonstrate how to build HTML pages. Something not everyone knew how to do back then. And, thanks to lots of innovative blogging software, even fewer know how to do today. Which is fine, of course. Though having some vague idea what you're doing can, in the odd case, come in quite handy.

David is now long gone from Forbes, whose entire online assets he managed for several years. He being the only one at that august publication back then who knew what he was doing in that regard. However, the site he originally put together when we were both slaving away in behalf of the deeply benighted InternetMCI -- Reel-Time: The Internet Journal of Saltwater Fly Fishing -- is now approaching its tenth anniversary.

So David, to (finally) answer the question you sent in email: yeah, I think those old files are still somewhere around here. But they're on one of a number of dead PCs, their disk-driven memories, like so much else they held, now sleeping wit da fishes -- or deep in the rare remaining records of those heady years...

Keynote speaker David Churbuck, Forbes editor of online services, talked of the challenge of a new online story form. We are moving to a "Russian doll" model of stories that are built in hyperlinks, he said, and are no longer linear. Interactive online has given a voice to readers. They talk back.

from: The Online World 1996 Conference by Susan Feldman
source: Information Today, 1 December 1996
via: HighBeam Research
Copyright © 1996 Information Today, Inc.

As you may have noticed, there wasn't anything here after Wednesday last week. That's because I got sick. Man, I felt lousy! I slept all day Thursday and Friday, took tons of Echinacea, vitamin C, and made sure to smoke lots of cigarettes and drink plenty of coffee. Still, none of my usual remedies seemed to be working, so I decided to go see my doctor. "You're not looking too well," he said.

He listened carefully as I described my symptoms, and the more I told him, the more concerned he began to look. "Doc," I said, "what's up? You're starting to spook me."

"I'm going to put this to you straight," he said. "From the looks of it, you have Ebola."

"Doc," I said, "what have you been smoking? I don't have freaking EBOLA. Are you nuts?" He's a good man and he truly cares. But sometimes I have to wonder where he went to med school.

He can also be tough, though, and this seemed to be one of those times. "You see the monkey on this television screen?" he said. "Look closely. Yes?"

I told him yeah OK I saw it. Sheesh.

"Well, this monkey looks a lot like you," he said. "And this monkey has EBOLA!"

This was clearly ridiculous. I mean, it's true: I felt like hell, my head hurt, my throat ached, nothing seemed worth doing. On second thought, scratch that last one. Nothing ever seems worth doing, even at the best of times. Suffice it to say, I was feeling pretty messed up. In body, mind and spirit, to coin a phrase. But I knew I didn't have no Class-4 biohazard hantavirus, for Pete's sake. The Doc, however, remained unconvinced. So he took another tack.

"Look," he said. "if you want to die, what's it to me? Why should I care?"

He had me there, I had to admit. But he was also starting to piss me off. Why all these existential questions? Why all the philosophy? Finally I couldn't stand it any longer. "Doc," I yelled, "enough with the small talk, already! Isn't there anything you can actually DO?"

"Let me think about it," he said. He looked at me straight on in the most disconcerting way, and for the longest time. I guess he was thinking.

After what seemed an eternity of this he asked, "Do you work with a computer much?"

Do I work with a computer much? What could I say? "Yeah I do," I told him. And he exclaimed "Ah-ha!" in a way I really didn't like at all. Then he wrote something on his pad.

What was he writing? He looked so serious, it scared me. And remember, I wasn't feeling so hot in the first place. So far, all he'd done was terrify me with these dire prognostications based on... what? Poor guy had flipped his lid, far as I could tell. This was insane! I was about to walk out, when he finally turned the clipboard toward me.

The way he put it -- and the way he looked at me! -- overcame my last ounce of skeptical resistance. Even though I noticed he'd misspelled "whatever." And so, long story short, that's why there weren't any posts after Wednesday last week.