I love Norah Jones. What's the best way to support artists like her? Building on my comments in my previous blog post about MP3s, here's the opportunity today: amazonlocal gave me a free voucher to purchase her new album "Little Broken Hearts" on Amazon MP3 for $3.99. It retails for $7.99. Keep in mind, audiophiles hate MP3s because the fidelity is inferior. I visited norahjones.com and am pleased to see that she has a store where the CD (superior fidelity) sells for $15. And she accepts PayPal! Here's something I didn't expect: she also sells a 180 gram double white vinyl with download card for $20!  I'm tempted, but I don't have the equipment to enjoy it fully. (My turntable is cheap. For that matter, it's been years since I went to the trouble of dropping a needle on a platter. Who has the time?)

So what's the tradeoff? The tradeoff is how efficiently I can support Norah Jones. Directly. With my money. Where it hits the music industry the hardest. And they certainly deserve to get hit. Hard! If I want the MP3 album, the voucher is a no-brainer. Unless. Unless there was a way I could pay Norah Jones directly. Or is there another MP3 store that would give her a better cut than her people negotiated with Amazon? Do you see where I'm going with this? The value chain for artists whose work can be digitized needs radical reform. I want to support musical artists, not the music industry. Let the masses continue to be influenced by industry marketing and pay for the priviledge. But the time is coming (in my lifetime, I hope) when artists can connect directly with their fans and have the option of bypassing the dinosaur music industry completely. I already wrote about how Derek Sivers did that for independent artists by inventing CD Baby. That's only the start. Let the industry do what it's always done best: Scout for talent and promote it to make it famous. But once an artist is famous, why does it continue to need the music industry? Ms. Jones has accounts at Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Shouldn't that be good enough for a star like her? (We need to replace Facebook with something the way we replaced MySpace with Facebook, but there's still time for that. Google+? Maybe.) I'm guessing her agent gets 10%, and there's other overhead a star has to live with just to keep the momentum of their business up. But how much of the $3.99 I pay Amazon will she see? This is what motivated me to write this morning. Amazon's prices are too low! If I had the option of paying $3.99 of which the artist takes $1, or paying $4.99 and the artist gets $2, I'd rather show my support for the artist by paying more! To a point. That's what I mean. Amazon sells music too cheap. Of course, I'll buy from Amazon before I buy from iTunes based on price. But now there's money sitting there that I want the artist to have! Help me spend more. Where can I buy Ms. Jones' new album so she gets the best cut of what I spend?

Further reading

Free voucher to purchase her new album "Little Broken Hearts" on Amazon MP3 for $3.99 - you, too, can take advantage of Amazon's offer (even though I get nothing for promoting it).

The evolution of writing onto the Internet, a blog post sized to be read in one sitting, in which I ramble about art, MP3s, CD Baby and much more.

 

It's 0226. At least, it was when I started writing. At 0429 I realized I had more to read before breakfast. I got back to writing at 0504. (I've been using military time more and more. A symptom of the evolution toward 24-hour culture. What will this do to our natural rhythms of sleep and wakefulness? I'm the wrong person to ask. I have narcolepsy. No cataplexy, hallucinations, or sleep paralysis, thank God. Just a blurring of wakefulness, unconsciousness and REM sleep. Doesn't explain the insomnia. In this case, my knowledge of my own sleep patterns leads me to conclude I couldn't sleep because of my anticipation of my full agenda today: Discussing Early Christians Speak over breakfast with the men of STGAC, training for county GOP (unpaid) election work, then meeting fellow volunteers for the campaign to re-elect Amy Stephens for State House District 19. Then again, I would like to think that The Holy Spirit woke me up because I had work to do. Writing is work. To work is to pray. Therefore, by writing, I pray. And the purpose of prayer is to seek unity with the Creator of the Universe – thank you, Fr. Scott. But that's enough theology for now.)

I think Larry Sanger is onto something. I read Part 1 of his blog series, "How Not to Use the Internet." I agree: it’s a problem that the Internet distracts us. And I am also reading Charles Murray's piece in the New Criterion, "Future tense, IX: Out of the wilderness." (Thank you, Arts & Letters Daily for the teaser, "What conditions give rise to great artistic achievements? Wealth, urban centers, belief in God. Wait: What? Secularism is incompatible with creativity...") In fact, Part 2 of Larry's piece (Part 1 of which I finished uninterrupted – 1,737 words according to Word), is sitting right ahead of Murray's piece in my Instapaper folder. (I'm not reading my collection in sequence. And, by the way, Instapaper totally rocks! I'm reading that folder offline in my Kindle app as a .mobi "magazine.") His piece is 5,592 words and I'm 1,794 words into it. Coincidence, I don't think so.

When I read Murray's sentence, "In literature, the organizing structure that created an eruption of great work starting in the late eighteenth century was overwhelmingly dominated by a new principle: the modern novel," I was hooked. Who has time for novels anymore? Well, I do. Sort of. I recently became aware of Thomas Pynchon's existence. It seems he wrote an award-winning postmodern novel. Murray assumes his readers know this. I haven't read the first word of it, though. The book I'm focused most on is simply a pair of stories in one volume: "Not Quite Dead Enough" and "Booby Trap" by Rex Stout. This book is a milestone for me. I've read other long works electronically. In the 90's I had an IBM PC-XT that ran on two AA batteries and fit in the palm of my hand. I read The Imitation of Christ on it. I got through it, but it took much longer because it wasn't very comfortable. I had to use some custom software to rotate the text into portrait mode, and the LCD contrast was not restful on the eyes, unlike a modern Kindle. I still haven't finished Pride and Prejudice. I started it on an iPod Touch. I read a chapter or three in paperback, and I downloaded it to my NOOKcolor™. (That ereader didn't survive a fall from the floorboard of my car to the pavement. R.I.P.) It's still sitting in my NOOK app library on my iPad, beckoning me. I don't know how quickly I'll finish it. But I fully intend to get through Stout's nostalgic, light yet profound pair of stories on my iPad. They're both contained in the first ebook I ever checked out from my library. (Thank you, Pikes Peak Library District, for inspiring me in 1979 with the idea that technology can make the humanities better!) I've already "renewed" it once (re-download after timebomb auto-delete). I have sixteen days left before I have to repeat that awkward yet tolerable (hey, what can one honestly expect for free?!) process. And so, for me, the novel is well underway toward being supplanted by electronic text.

Murray is also elaborating on music as art. That went digital before books, as we all know. My lovely and talented wife giddily shared her new acquisitions as we carpooled home yesterday evening: Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" and Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats." (Oops. A tiny bit of her privacy just leaked onto the Internet. Sorry, Sweetheart. Forgive me?) This was also a milestone. She paid $1.29 apiece. She said it was the first time she'd bought tracks since obtaining an iPhone. There was no easy way to confirm they're MP3s during our trip, but I seem to remember that Apple raised their prices at the same time that they began selling the open format. I get my MP3s from Amazon for 23.26% less. It's funny, this digital music thing. Giddily-funny. In the 90's I dreamed of paying $0.10 each for tracks. I expected I'd soon be able to buy them directly from the artists. I still hold out hope that someday musical artists will make a decent living supported by their fans through direct micropayments. Meanwhile, there's CD Baby. (Thank you, Derek Sivers!) You can pay in chunks. I'm a fan of The Cook Trio. Delightful Gypsy jazz. And I will never forget the radical Internet music pioneer Janis Ian. (Well, I did forget her name tonight, but a little googling cured that lapse. What I never forgot was the impact she made on my understanding about how the Internet was changing the music industry. That was before Radiohead was famous.) No Connection with CD Baby. Support independent music. Buy something through CD Baby.

And this brings me (finally – I know, I ramble) to my vision of the evolution of writing onto the Internet. I think it was fair to talk about reading first. And music is just another form of art. Anyway. Writing. I'm about a thousand words into this piece. Why is that important? Because the art form I'm promoting is Internet-enabled writing. This is the evolution of the blog post. I'm limiting myself to between 1,700 and 1,800 words. As I said, I don't believe it's a coincidence that I read 1,734 words by Larry uninterrupted and 1,794 words by Charles Murray before diving into my own work. That's plenty of space to create a thoughtful essay. And I like to think of the blogger as an evolution of the essayist. (Thank you, Ken Myers, for the Mars Hill Audio Journal; thank you, Alan Jacobs, for being a frequent guest on MHAJ and for writing Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant, which has been on my to-read list since I heard Ken interview you, and thank you for introducing me to the father of essayists, Montaigne.)

The interview of Professor Jacobs by Ken Myers inspired me to download Charles Lamb's book, Essays of Elia from Google. (It goes without saying that we all owe Google a debt of gratitude for starting to digitize the world's books. But I'll say it anyway: Thank you! You don't have it all figured out yet, but you are taking digitization of human knowledge far beyond where Project Gutenberg has the resources to go.) Prof. Jacobs mentions Lamb's essay, Poor Relations, which I found on page 173. I checked my journal. My entry for February 2, 2011 is: "[I] read the essay on [my wife]'s iPad. Exquisite!" I have not yet read Montaigne himself, but Prof. Jacobs raised my awareness of his importance, and a month later I listened to Sarah Bakewell discuss Montaigne on a Philosophy Bites podcast with Nigel Warburton. The next day I read "Montaigne's Moment" by Anthony Gottlieb in the New York Times (online, of course – thank you, Lady Gray, for fighting to carve a path forward for digital newspaper survival; I loathe your myopic political bias but do not deny your influence).

So I will restrict the length of my essays so that I can preserve a form that is comfortably readable on the Internet. I appreciate how Twitter restricts me to 140 characters. (That restriction is so a tweet will fit in a single text message. I don't know who decided on the length of text messages, but Wikipedians agree it was so they would fit into the existing signaling formats, and that sounds truthy enough for the purposes of this essay. (I have to double up on parentheses here to point out that it's absurd to cite Wikipedia. Human beings create the content. They're mostly anonymous cowards, but they're all human. So you're not citing an authority, you're citing a crowd. Get it right! (And thank you, Steve Colbert for inventing truthiness!))) I like to work within constraints. It's good practice for all aspects life.

I now have to get ready for breakfast. This essay is just a little short. Better than risking being too long. But more than essays in past centuries, it lives! It's not a finished draft because I don't have time to review it thoroughly. Spell checkers catch gross mistakes, but we all know to write the first draft from the heart and the second draft from the head. I don't have time to use my head if I want to get this published in the proper sequence. Up it goes. Then comes publicity: Instantly on Twitter. But later today at Google+, Facebook (default – I'm not sure if it will be public or not) and (perhaps – I'll remove this parenthetic when I'm sure) LinkedIn. And email. Email isn't being replaced by social media. It's not either/or. It's both-and. (Thank you for that image, Michael!)

Larry helps the reader avoid distraction by publishing links at the end of his essays. I'm taking it one step farther. Google and Wikipedia contain all the answers you need if you wish to follow up on anything I've said.

"For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." (Mat 12:40 KJV)

Jesus Christ is risen! As they say in Russia: Христос воскрес, Воистину воскрес!

Yesterday (Holy Saturday) I pondered Jesus' time in the tomb. I was wondering about the sequence of events. Do the math: He was crucified Friday. His body vanished sometime before early Sunday morning. That's only two nights. But as the quote above shows, he said he would "be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." Why the inconsistency? The answer became clear to me after a little googling. I don't know what a trained theologian would say. I read a couple web pages, though, and I don't think the explanation is difficult to understand. I was surprised how many ignorant web authors ignore the Jews' definition of a day beginning at sunset. Three days is easy by Jewish reckoning: Friday was day one, Holy Saturday began sunset Friday night. And Resurrection Sunday began sunset Saturday night. Jesus rose on the third day, just as he promised. But that's only three days and two nights. It's inconsistent unless one accepts that Jesus' passion – his travails in the "heart of the earth" – actually began in Gesthemane Thursday night. Our Pascal Lamb was unblemished when he was betrayed by Judas. That was his first traumatic night, like Jonah "in the whale's belly." His body was laid to rest before sunset and lay in the tomb two more nights. But "the heart of the earth" is not the same as the tomb. The fact that Jews count days starting at sunset cannot be disputed. One only has to accept that Jesus' suffering started Thursday night to explain the rest.

Human relationships are in a very troubled state as a result of human brokenness. This brokenness rose to a crescendo in the social revolutions of the 60's. Marriage is especially troubled. That's one reason I decided to sign the Manhattan Declaration. But I want to be civil, so I'm going to try not to ruffle any feathers about this fleeting frame (1:06 into the video) in the clever work of art (hat tip @googledoodles) by Michael Lipman. Overall, the story he tells without words is unarguably heartwarming and has universal appeal. I hope the video remains available on YouTube to the end of time. However, it raised a question I'm pondering: What do we mean by "love" at Valentine's Day? If we ever encounter an intelligent extraterrestrial species, what would it mean for us to be valentines with it? What does it mean for cookies and milk to be valentines?

Before anyone accuses me of ignoring the same-sex images, I will merely say that I have chosen to leave them out of consideration because the politics are so volatile that discussing them would overshadow everyting else I want to say. I can't say they're perfectly normal because that would offend some of my friends. I can't say the opposite because that would offend the rest of my friends. (I'd love to receive a letter on this topic from any of my friends, though.)

For that matter, we wish dogs and cats would stop fighting. (There's power asymmetry between the aggressive, offensive canine and the docile, passive feline. The dog is in a dominant position reinforced by its physical superiority, but let's not dig any deeper today.) But what would it mean for those two species to be valentines?

Finally, consider the princess and the frog. This is a classic image from the fairy tale that teaches a moral lesson: One should look beyond physical appearance to find one's mate. (Note how Shrek tries to turn this lesson on its head, but eventually the film obediently concludes by settling back into the social container the mass media audience inhabits.) The whole point of the fairy tale relies on the frog not remaining a frog. The frog is an enchanted human prince. To live happily ever after as a couple, the princess must kiss the frog so he can return to his original unenchanted form. Does Lippman expect us to accept the possibility of valentine love between a human and an amphibian? What would that mean?

Valentine's Day is a secular holiday that celebrates love. Love is one of the most complicated words in the English language. The ancient Greeks used four different words:

1. Agápē (ἀγάπη) is the highest form of love. Christians have come to refer to "agápē love" to express the unconditional love God has for humanity. And it is likewise used to challenge Christians to reciprocate that love for God and to love one another with agápē love.
2. Érōs (ἔρως) is passionate, sensual love. We get our word "erotic" from this Greek root, but the Greeks didn't require a sexual relationship to express érōs.
3. Philia (φιλία) still means friendship or affectionate love in modern Greek. It was also used by the ancient philosopher Aristotle to describe dispassionate, virtuous love. You might have plain philia for friends and community. We get the word philanthropy (love for humanity) from philia. And philosophy, by the way, means a love for wisdom. I do not believe Michael Lipman is expressing a coherent philosophy in this paricular segment of the animation.
4. Storgē (στοργή) has meant "affection" in Greek since ancient times, but we have less evidence of its use in ancient writing. When used, it described relationships within the family. Modern Greeks use it for that same purpose. It can also be used to express putting up with a bad situation. I, for example, can easily say I have storgē love for President Obama.

Let's ignore the cat-dog romance. That is often offered as a metaphor for different types of people ("cat people" and "dog people") in a working but unlikely relationship. And let's ignore the ambiguity of the princess and the frog, because it's either completely understandable and benign, or it's just as bizarre as the astronaut-alien relationship and the carbohydrate-dairy product relationship.

[Major rewrite from original draft. And I'm still thinking about it. But this will do for now.]

I've been a member of Ward Cunningham's wiki wiki web community since 1999. Today I was delighted to read the entry for the word "wiki" online in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here's the citation:

"wiki, n.". OED Online. December 2011. Oxford University Press. 18 February 2012 <http://oed.com/view/Entry/267577?redirectedFrom=wiki>.

I also want to give a plug for an excellent resource called WebCite® (webcitation.org). Ward wrote "Correspondence on the Etymology of Wiki."  and here is the web-friendly citation of that:

Cunningham, Ward. "Correspondence on the Etymology of Wiki", URL: http://c2.com/doc/etymology.html, Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/65Y4Fjcmn on February 18th, 2012.

Go ahead - click on it and have a look at the archived version. Then bookmark webcitation.org for all your quality writing needs.

This is work I'm doing for my project on the art of digital letter writing (AODLW), which is, in turn, part of my more general project on the art of writing in a digital age.

I received a letter from a young friend today. I love the art of digital letter writing (AODLW)! It's not the same as ephemeral email. (You do archive your important email, don't you?) My handwriting is poor (a disability of being left-handed), but I still enjoy breaking out the fountain pen every so often and committing words to paper in my ugly (but unique and personal) script. Script isn't even taught in all elementary schools anymore. May I live long enough to see that trend reversed! Asian culture knows the value of communicating with one's hands. Not all have the ability to write with their hands, but for the able-bodied, typing is not what it means to be fully human.

Here's the first rule of digital letter writing: No TOFU ("Text Over, Fullquote Under"). A letter should stand alone. Most mail apps add TOFU by default. Delete it before sending. Email has meta-data that automatically "threads" replies, anyway. Making every letter stand on its own is more challenging than continuing to top-post replies. It's good to think about style. For daily email -- and even for informal letters -- TOFU helps keep the entire conversation in one place. But I find it liberating to write without TOFU. I can associate freely, and I can choose how much context to include.

There is a risk that the letter writer won't include enough context, and the recipient will have to review previous correspondence. Again, that's what email "threads" are for. Also, don't give up the ancient tradition of saving correspondence for future reference. I twittered about letter-writing a couple years ago (1of2, 2of2). Before email, I made photocopies of my letters. Before photocopies, we used carbon paper, and before that people had to copy letters by hand before sending. Not all practiced such discipline, and more's the pity. Note that we have Thomas Jefferson's correspondence because he made copies of all the letters he sent. Jefferson (not counting his flaws) is one of my heroes. (And Clay Jenkinson is also my hero because he brings Jefferson to life through chautauqua. But I digress.) So the second rule of letter writing is: Archive your correspondence!

I'm already seeing the difference that social media makes regarding the AODLW. Letters in the past century were normally the main way people communicated at a distance. Some might catch up (or get to know a pen pal more closely) with long distance phone calls. But unless they actually met face to face, their lives were relatively isolated. Now it's so easy to stay in touch. Some would say it's too easy, but just because it's easy shouldn't mean one should settle for shallow. Samuel Johnson wrote, "A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation - a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something." But Johnson didn't have email. The third rule is: Buy time by sending a note or SMS.

It has also become common to send "newsletters" to multiple recipients, and I would argue that's also a good use of technology. I love writing annual letters to include with Christmas cards, and I love getting the same from friends and family. It's more challenging to write to an audience larger than one. But those letters can inspire personal correspondence, phone calls and face to face visits. And as one example of the value of annual letters, I have twenty years (and counting!) of snapshots of family life that I can pass on to my own children.

Finally, to my readers with whom I am behind in correspondence: Please forgive me. Time is more precious than gold these days. May we all live long enough to see that destructive trend reversed! But I do believe technology makes us more efficient with only a minor cost to our humanity. Txt me (or DM me on Twitter) if you'd like to chat!

If this was ready to publish as an essay, I wouldn't post it to my blog. But let's get this project going together! I'm eager to hear how you practice the art of digital letter writing.

 

I wasn't sure how I would respond to the Wikipedia blackout today (#wikipediablackout). I decided to have a look at their website, and I like what they've done. After skimming the SOPA initiative page  and the EFF's page "How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation," I decided to do my part.

I see that Rep. Lamborn isn't on Twitter. Fine, we both know how to use the phone. His staff picked up, and I was asked for an email address. I'll be curious to see what kind of email I start receiving. (I gave him a unique address.) I called Sen. Udall and got his voicemail. There was an offer to speak to a person. I declined. He asked for my email. I gave him the same one. Then I called Sen. Bennett. Same offer to speak to a person or leave a message, but he asked for my zip code and didn't ask for my email. I gave it to him anyway.

So what does this mean for democracy? Well, it's certainly a good example of netizens organizing. I know, there are plenty of other examples, but this one hit home for me. I'm a Wikipedian and a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the EFF. It will always takes considerable time and effort to do democracy right. I'm glad technology helps so much. We have a long way to go, though. One last thought: The Sunlight Foundation is an excellent resource. I'm surprised I don't see SOPA or PIPA on their home page, but the search results (click on the hyperlinks) look helpful.

I was listening to TM Forum talk about the growth of machine to machine (M2M) services. That got me thinking about how Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are missing the boat as central players in identity authentication. I have already raised this point at TM Forum a couple times. A password is single-step authentication. It's something you know. But the second step is something you have. Our phones are being under-utilized for authentication. (You can use "something you have" without "something you know." The oldest example is the key to your front door.) I have been using Google two-step authentication since they introduced it. (Do you realize how much of your personal information is in your Google account? Don't trust it to password-only security!)

Anyway, this morning I was wondering what's available from the open source community to support two-step authentication. I started today by googling "open source" sms callback security. That led me to a couple interesting resources. @mnxsolutions looks like it's an organization populated by "my" kind of people. Linux command line. C instead of Java. They blogged about Two Factor SSH with Google Authenticator. That might be useful. And there's Kannel, which looks like a handy component if I wanted to create an M2M SMS system. Next I searched for anyone talking about Kannel at Twitter, and that's how I found @romboke's stream. Interesting guy. I love Internet serendipity!

Update: Added how M2M and CSPs fit into my morning serendipity.

 

"Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills..." -- Napoleon Dynamite. I love the way LinkedIn categorizes skills! Just made a first pass at adding mine. View my skills at LinkedIn.

Aside: I am not impressed with the way LinkedIn shares status updates. See how it looks on Twitter. But I love how Posterous allows me to share across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn #FAIL, Posterous #FTW.

I should be writing other things today, but some friends on Facebook are getting all nostalgic about the early days of the Web. That set me off like a dog after a squirrel, and here I am. Didn't help that yesterday I saw a tweet mentioning an article commemorating a website that went up 20 years ago. I responded to that with a tweet of my own, but now I see I was off by a year. (I forgot I'd written about my introduction to the Web on Google+ six months ago.) So now I'm going to write my little story once and for all. It all started nearly 31 years ago [1]...

I was issued an account on a computer with Internet access in January, 1981. I was a freshman at MIT studying Computer Science and Engineering. I explored what one could do with the Internet. It was basically file sharing and email. I subscribed to mailing lists. That's the only social medium we had. There were a couple years after I graduated that I lost Internet access, although I could dial-up my MIT account via modem from work. We were sending email via UUCP (UNIX to UNIX copy). HP Labs was on the Internet. In the late 80's I persuaded our HP division to connect to the Internet through the Labs.

In the early 90's I subscribed to the HPCWire newsletter, distributed via email. Tim O'Reilly was the publisher. He announced the Global Network Navigator (GNN) in 1993. That's when I became aware of the Web's existence. GNN said you had to download this thing called Mosaic to experience it. I stayed up all night and surfed the entire Web, including every Yahoo link. That's how small the Web was.

[1] I have one earlier story about being in middle school and having teletype access to an HP 3000 minicomputer. Thanks to my grandmother, a photo survives. I'll blog about that after I scan it.