Friday, April 21, 2006
Save now or lose
Jeff Pulver on his Viral Marketing Contest to Save the Internet:
I am fed up with the current wave of soundbites, platitudes, ads and marketing flooding the airwaves that profess to speak for the advancement of the Internet and communications. These ads are influencing Congress and governments around the World as they write the rules that will shape the future of the Internet and communications.
But, where is the voice and message of the Internet community -- the Internet innovators, entrepreneurs and enthusiasts -- in this world-changing discussion? We are primarily sitting out the battle, or perhaps comfortably blogging and Monday-morning quarterbacking on the sidelines. Sure, we’ll be able to point to our blogs and do a big “I-told-you-so” if the rules ultimately prove to undermine the promise of the Internet. But, we will not be justified in our criticism if we don’t at least try to affect a positive result.
Rules have to be written to enable us. If we do not participate in the debate, if we do not transform the messaging, the rules will not be written with our best interests at heart. And, frankly, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. We have to take over the messaging, both within the corridors of power and within the public zeitgeist.
We need soundbites of our own, messaging of our own...
Bonus link. Advance to Scenario III. Starts about halfway down.
Earth to NASA and SpaceFlight Now: Blog with RSS
Let's bring space flight into the Live Web age.
For an example, let's take a live subject: the CALIPSO and CloudSat satellites that were both due to lauch this morning from Vandenberg AFB aboard one Delta II rocket.
The launch had a one-minute window, at 3:02am Pacific time. It was scrubbed at 3:01am. Spaceflight Now reported progress this way:
1009 GMT (6:09 a.m. EDTTomorrow's one-second launch opportunity will be 1002:26 GMT (6:02:26 a.m. EDT; 3:02:26 a.m. PDT).
1006 GMT (6:06 a.m. EDTOfficials are tentatively posturing themselves for another launch attempt tomorrow.
1005 GMT (6:05 a.m. EDTThe launch team is working through rocket safing procedures following the countdown abort.
1005 GMT (6:05 a.m. EDTBoth the primary and backup communications links between CALIPSO and its support center in France went down simultaneously, violating the launch requirements, NASA says. The satellite is a joint U.S. and French project.
1003 GMT (6:03 a.m. EDTThe CALIPSO spacecraft lost communications lock with its ground systems. That prompted the mission team to call a hold.
1002 GMT (6:02 a.m. EDT
The countdown was halted just inside T-minus 1 minute due to a problem. This effectively scrubs the liftoff for today. The available launch window was just one-second long, leaving no margin for any delays.
1001 GMT (6:01 a.m. EDT
HOLD! Countdown has been stopped.
1001 GMT (6:01 a.m. EDTT-minus 1 minute. The Range has given its final clear-to-launch.
The Delta 2 rocket's second stage hydraulic pump has gone to internal power after its pressures were verified acceptable.
1000 GMT (6:00 a.m. EDTT-minus 80 seconds. LOX topping to 100 percent is underway.
1000 GMT (6:00 a.m. EDTT-minus 1 minute, 45 seconds. The launch pad water suppression system is being activated.
Each of those should have been a blog post with a permalink. Instead they were composed and posted inside whatever Content Management System Spaceflight Now uses. (View Source shows relatively uncomplicated HTML.)
Time-to-index for Live Web search engines (such as Technorati) are getting down into the sub-minute range, making RSS more "live" than ever.
On its Current Mission page, Spaceflight Now's most recent story (top of its reverse chronology) is from March 28. The top story on its front (index) page is from yesterday. No mention on either page of the CALIPSO and CloudSat launch/scrub for today.
In the right column of Spaceflight Now's index page is this block of text:
RSS News Feed
Spaceflight Now is pleased to announce the availablity of an RSS feed of our news headlines. By subscribing to our feed you can be alerted when we post new stories on the site via an RSS compatible news reader or web browser. Click the RSS button to subscribe.
I just subscribed and got ten stories all dated March 17.
Over at NASA, if you click around you might find CloudSat's main page, with news that the mission has been scrubbed for today and rescheduled for tomorrow. There's a link to this series of minute-by-minute updates (like the above), each with a +View Video link such as this one, which gets you to a video file page with links to Real and Windows Media clips.
NASA's CALIPSO page has a box with updates, the latest of which says,
04.10.06: CALIPSO Prepares for Launch! » View the pictures
The CALIPSO page among NASA's Mission pages carries the same info as the CloudSat page.
Over at Space.com, there's a story of the scrub. I suppose Space.com doesn't want to make its Top Stories a blog because it might crowd out the ads and other promos that crowd the page.
Vandenberg's Launch Schedule page is handy, but just has a stale table of launch dates. It includes today's, but not the scrub.
So, no 'fence, but they all suck. There's no excuse for that, now that we're five decades into the Space Age.
So. What to do?
The simple answer for all of them is to put the news in a journal, rather than a site. This requires a metaphorical switch. It isn't hard.
For background, see the talk I gave at Les Blogs last June. Especially the points about the war going on between metaphors for the Web and blogging, our founding blogfathers and blogs as journals rather than "sites".
Then watch Amanda Congdon's interview of Dave Winer in yesterday's Rocketboom (great nomenclatural coincidence for this post's topic).
And then dig Dave additional remarks, posted this morning:
Journalism is the new practice for Everyman, it's what we all will be doing all the time in this new century. As the professional media pulls back, the citizens, you and me, need to fill in and replace every pro with 100 of us, to cover every school board meeting, every planning commission, defense contractor, civic organization. It's like the Second Amendment for information and ideas. We need a well-informed electorate to make the tough decisions on our future.
Which means space freaks like yours truly and Susan Kitchens (and many hundreds more like us) need to gang up and help out the Space Media.
Ed 2 Lee re: Bob
Ed Bott to Lee Abrams on Bob Dylan's new XM Radio show:
I only hope there will be some way to time-shift this. As much as I’d love to sit down every week and listen to the Bob Dylan show, that isn’t the way the world works anymore. I want to record it, save it, carry it on my portable music player, put it in my car for a long drive.
Are you listening, Lee?
Bonus cringe: they'll be making nukes
This is the most disturbing story I've read in a long time.
[Later...] Mike Warot says he thinks the story is fictitious. Jeffrey Hodges finds the report "entirely credible".