be the change you want to see in the world

The recent introduction of Google Instant got me thinking. That won’t be the case for most people though. In fact, Google Instant will allow most people to think less, and that is a bad thing for all of us.

In fact, Google Instant may have an unintended consequence similar to the outcomes predicted by proponents of net neutrality. Net neutrality proponents point to the value and necessity of free speech in a healthy society. They argue providing priority bandwidth for some, as proposed by some of the major operators of the Internet, hurts free speech and flow of ideas. I agree. Google Instant provides another way for us to self-limit our free speech and thereby lose the benefits of it.

There is a concept in philosophy known as “noology”. Noology refers to the image of thought present in a person or society. What is an “image of thought” you might ask. An image of thought refers to the character, shape, form, intent and many other characteristics of thought. It refers to a style of thinking. Just as you may wear your hipster hat tilted forward or backward to indicate you personal outlook, and we might think of you as having a certain attitude or outlook as a result, so too does your style of thinking provide insights into who you are, or, in this case, who we all are.

I have previously written about Google and what it means for modern metaphysics. If you dig deep enough into any religion or metaphysics that appeals to an authority (God, the proletariat, etc.) you always find Us looking back in the mirror. The collective We is always the author in one way or another.

I believe Google Instant diminishes and devalues Google Search, which is a major collective source of authority we share. It does this by taking away the need for creative thinking in query construction. Not only that, but by using predictive technologies that present you with what it calculates to be the common query you have started to type, it reinforces the mainstream of thought. By allowing you to quit or give up when articulating your desired destination, Google instant herds us into one of the larger cattle gates on the human pasture. The hidden valleys and roads less traveled are lost from view before the search results load.

A good way to understand the Noology of a society where Google Instant is a major source of authority is to metaphorize it in the language of ecology. The web certainly is an ecosystem in one way. It is an ecosystem of thought where ideas and memes grow and develop, are discussed and debated, and may rise to the level of established truth or fade away into obscurity. By allowing us to stop thinking early and avoid having to creatively articulate ourselves, Google Instant promotes monocultures of thought. It clearcuts the forest of ideas and replants it with repetition and predictive algorithms. This is a bad thing in our human cultural ecology just as it is in our environment when we change things via forestry for example.

In some practices of forestry we cut down forests with diverse gene pools and replace them with tree farms made up of saplings all taken from one source. The trees are therefore all vulnerable to the same diseases and environment changes in the same way. We know from our ecological research that a diverse forest is a healthier more resilient forest; one more likely to withstand the ravages of disease and weather changes. This is particularly true in the era of climate change.

A monoculture is a dangerous thing to rely on when we live in challenging, changing times. Google Instant promotes a monocultural social noology. It does this by limiting the diversity of search queries and thereby the ways of expressing a question or idea.

When everyone sees the same preformed search queries, and therefore the same results in their Google search window, we will be increasingly influenced by the same sources of information, and the same set of ideas. We will increasingly reflect those ideas back to each other. Like minded but not-so-mainstream people will find it harder to connect, and potentially valuable new or different ideas will die off. This makes humanity less able to withstand the challenges of changing times. It makes us less innovative, less creative, and ultimately more vulnerable. We become permanent inhabitants of Plato’s Cave, uncritically watching the same shadow play.

Of course, this may not happen at all. I may be completely wrong about this. I hope so. All I know is that I want a web of diversity where healthy, creative ways of thinking are promoted and facilitated. I don’t see how Google Instant can nurture that. Quite the opposite, in fact. I see it as a self-inflicted blow to our collective requirement for net neutrality. As Senator Al Franken has said, net neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our generation.

I welcome your thoughtful comments.

I am thrilled to announce the launch of Coal-is-Dirty.com. This site was built by my company Catalyst Internet, Inc in conjunction with Junxion Strategy, Inc. for the DeSmogBlog team. It is a tool aimed at challenging the idea that coal is a viable fuel for our future energy needs.

Working with the DeSmogBlog team has been a great experience, and I have learned a lot from them about high-stakes PR, astroturfing, greenwashing and how the spin machine works. I have reposted Kevin Grandia’s launch message below. Please visit the site to see it in its entirety.

Welcome to the Clean Coal Body Slam

by Kevin Grandia

For too long the idea of clean coal has gone unchallenged.

A lot of people have received an email from yours truly over the last four months with the subject line: “Clean Coal Body Slam.” I thought it explained the intentions of this project very well.

Along with Greenpeace USA and Rainforest Action Network, we have pulled together some of the best and most outspoken leaders on the environmental, public health and economic effects of America’s addiction to coal, including:

Jeff Goodell, contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America’s Energy Future.

Jeff Biggers, author of In the Sierra Madre and The United States of Appalachia and a regular contributor on Huffington Post.

Page van der Linden, contributing editor on Daily Kos and longtime campaigner on nuclear and coal issues.

Kert Davies, Research Director for Greenpeace in the United States and the architect for the well-known ExxonSecrets.org campaign and the recently launched StopGreenWash.org

JW Randolph, staff Legislative Associate for the powerful Appalachian Voices organization and manager of the Appalachian Voices blog.

Ted Nace, the director of Coal Swarm, a group that works to support the grassroots movement opposing coal.

David Novack, producer and director of the great new documentary, Burning the Future: Coal in America, which chronicles the environmental devastation of the coal industry in West Virginia.

Kate Rooth, who works for Greenpeace in the United States promoting climate, forests and oceans issues. She works with the Research Unit to support campaign and action work and is also a non-violence trainer.

Mark Fiore, who the Wall Street Journal recently called “the undisputed guru of the form,” creates animated political cartoons from an undisclosed location somewhere in San Francisco.

Richard Littlemore, Senior Writer for the award-winning site, DeSmogBlog.com.

These are amazing people, doing amazing work and I am very confident they will deliver the clean coal body slam so many people are looking for.

For a while now, whenever I mentioned the term “clean coal” people would roll their eyes and groan, “clean coal,” usually followed by a rolling of the eyes or a mock gagging, eyes bulging expression. Most people know coal isn’t clean, but that hasn’t stopped the coal industry from trying to convince us otherwise.

In mid-January the Washington Post ran a story about a newly launched $35 million “clean coal” campaign to be run by an organization called “Americans for Balanced Energy Choices” (ABEC). An organization run by Americans, but paid for by the coal industry.

If “clean coal” was not already engrained in the public lexicon, $35 million is sure to finish the job. The goal for ABEC, who has since changed their name to “American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity” (ACCCE), is not to make coal clean, it is to sell the idea that coal is clean.
In essence, this site exists to sell the idea that coal is dirty. Pretty easy to do when you consider the facts and clear out the rhetoric. Like the fact that mercury emissions from coal fired-power plants continues to rise and that carbon capture and storage remains an elusive pipe dream that will take another 40 years to deploy on a commercial scale.

We don’t have $35 million (not even close), but I hope this site can serve as a nexus of information for people interested in knowing the dirty facts about clean coal.

So click around, enjoy the site, check out the videos, the fact sheets and the articles.

If you’re writer, let us know if you would like to contribute. If you’re not a writer, but have a good story idea please let us know.

Drop us a line and tell us what you think of our work, sign up for our weekly e-alert and please tell everyone you know about the site.

Regards,

Kevin Grandia

Managing Editor

www.coal-is-dirty.com

I’ve been having a lot of fun with my new Casio EX-F1. This hybrid still/video camera has a lot of interesting features. It is not a pro studio camera, but I think it is about the finest link-bait camera out there right now. It give bloggers the capability of producing some really great web-ready content with a minimum of production cost.

The F1 does 60fps hi-speed 6MP jpeg images. This function is great for producing pro-looking image series, or for getting the exact shot you want in an action scenario.

The F1 also has a range of features that automate some of the trickier aspects of photography. It has a motion sensor so the hi-speed shutter fires when the camera detects motion in the frame. The F1 has programs that simulate motion blur and HDR, as well as bracketing on shutter speed, aperture and focus, which allows for focus stacking macro images or allowing subject and background to be in focus even when the lighting isn’t right for small aperture.

The F1 also does some pretty amazing hi-speed video at 300, 600 and 1200 frames per second. Here’s a sample of the pontoon spray from our float plane as we took off from Coal Harbour on Friday. Here are Casio’s sample videos. I think the possibilities for this function are limitless, and the results are very interesting to watch. Perfect for linkbait on your blog. I have not had a chance to do a lot, but practically everything I try turns out well. I have insects hovering, water undulating, matches lighting, etc. The featured video on the home page of this blog is a seagull taking off in slow motion.

The F1 is a pretty big camera, but it feels solid and performs well for normal shooting as well, although, at 6MP, you won’t be making posters with it, or cropping too hard.

There are extensive reviews available on the web, and discussions about its strong points and weaknesses as well. I am finding the camera to be a great deal of fun. It defintely brings out the “oohs and ahhhs” when you demonstrate the features. As I say above, it is great tool for adding some interesting content to your blog.

I am getting 10,000 spam comments every two weeks. Akismet gets almost all of them, and real comments do get through. It is a great service.

Akismet has caught 211,843 spam for you since you installed it.

You can delete all of the spam from your database with a single click. This operation cannot be undone, so you may wish to check to ensure that no legitimate comments got through first. Spam is automatically deleted after 15 days, so don’t sweat it.
There are currently 10440 comments identified as spam.

Cross-posted at

http://groups.drupal.org/node/9486

I know I am weighing in on a sensitive topic. I found that out earlier today with my poorly received attempt at a humorous blog post entitled “Decapitate Drupal, please”. I was unprepared for the negative response I received (though I did get some positive response as well). Someone rightly pointed out that Drupal Planet was not the right place for the discussion and suggested I come here. So, here I am.

The event that got me thinking about this issue went as follows: I will preface this by saying that I have no complaints about the Drupal update process. Many people thought I was complaining about that, but I wasn’t. I think it is great. We did an update on a customer site yesterday and accidentally over-wrote the favicon we designed for them with the Drupalicon. We didn’t notice. They noticed in the morning and we replaced it with the right one. No big deal and, yes, it was our error. We’ll survive.

The interesting part came in the message from the customer. The customer thought perhaps they had been hacked as their icon had been replaced “with picture of a kid wearing a dunce cap”. A dunce cap is an old grade school method of shaming kids who are not trying, in the opinion of the teacher. the teacher would make the kid wear a pointy hat. The hat was called a “dunce cap”.

I believe this perception by my customer, who had never seen the Drupalicon, is of great value. I believe it would be shared by many people on first encountering the Drupalicon, which is in effect the Drupal “brand”. Many people might not come to the conclusion that the Drupalicon is a kid in a dunce cap, but I assure you they would also not think of it as a professional logo. It is not. It is somewhat juvenile and hacker-ish. This does no good for the Drupal community. It means the Drupal community is succeeding in spite of the brand, not because of it. The brand does not have its shoulder to the wheel. It is a flat tire. Of course, there is no need to take my word for this. I have a proposition.

The d.o. redesign presents a great opportunity to talk about the Drupal brand. What is a brand? A brand is a customer experience represented by a collection of images and ideas; often, it refers to a symbol such as a name, logo, slogan, and design scheme [wikipedia]. We navigate our world to a certain extent by virtue of the syntax and semantics of brands. We also evaluate the viability of transactions and projects based on the brands associated with the participants in the transaction or effort.

Regardless of what we might wish to be the case, the brand does have an effect. First impressions are very important. In the course of negotiations and planning, a negative brand expereince can form a background noise and have a detrimental impact on your overall effort. “They seem good, but what’s up with that logo?” It is something people take seriously on a very deep level because the mechanism of brands is so deeply ingrained in our psyches.

Now, it may be that I am just talking out of my assumptions and not the facts. What to do?

Rebrand Drupal.

I suggest that as an open community we put everything - even the name Drupal - up for evaluation. Don’t be scared. re-naming projects like this one happens all the time, and if done right, it works well. I would like to begin the discussion by proposing a process.

1. Ask - survey a range of people including branding professionals, Drupal stakeholders, Dupal consulting and integration companies and the general Drupal community. Ask them all about the Drupal brand and see what we get back. My company hosts online surveys as one of our service offerings, and I would be happy to offer the facility in support of the effort. I will also commit to leverage my relationships with branding pros to get them to help design the survey so the information we get back is as useful as possible.
2. Evaluate - Allow the community to digest the results. It may be that no action is required, but I would find this surprising. I predict a rebrand will be suggested, perhaps not as fundamental as renaming the project, but that should be an on-the-table option, for the sake of the health of the community and project. I believe I read somewhere that Dries is calling his new Drupal-based installation project Carbon, so it seems that Drupal can go forward under another name.
3. Rebrand - the branding process as practiced in the commercial sphere may not be appropriate for an open-source, open community project like Drupal. I suggest we be as innovative as Drupal has always been and research and develop an “Open Branding Process” based on commercial branding but embodying the values of openness. The outcome should be an “Open Brand”. I have seen some discussion online about the characteristics of an “Open Brand” and they mirror the general values of the open-source community and the various discussions going on about “openness” that have emerged from the growing global trend in this direction.

In my mind, the open branding process would differ from the commercial branding process in interesting and significant ways. There is a very ambiguous and blurred relationship between consumers, producers and other stakeholders in the totality of the Drupalsphere. This blending and intermingling has been well-documented in publications like the cluetrain manifesto and others. An opportunity exists for Drupal and its community to break more new ground in the way we do this. I would be very excited to be a part of the process. There are obviously energetic people fully engaged in this process and I am happy to lend my energy on this topic should people see it as a viable and desirable part of the process.

The opportunity seems to be here with the discussions and planning around the d.o. redesign. If I get a positive response to this post, I will put more effort into planning the process, and the first stage will be general approval (by the Drupal Association or whoever is required to be party to the decision) of the process involved in deciding if a rebrand is required or desirable.

Let’s do something new and original…and open…by creating a new Drupal brand to launch with the redesigned drupal.org.