be the change you want to see in the world

Well, things tend to grow and progress, don’t they? Last night I signed up for TagWorld to see how it compares with some of the other social ecosphere websites.

TagWorld is huge. Integrated into a single user space are a social networking app with a themeable personal home page like MySpace, a blog with free tagging , RSS, video and podcasting capability like Blogger, a webmail account like GMail, a social music discovery engine like Pandora or Last.FM, private and public photo sharing app like Flickr, free file storage like streamload, a video sharing app like YouTube, a classified ad system like craigslist, a social bookmarking app like del.icio.us, and I’m sure there is more I haven’t discovered about it.

None of the implementations of these functionalities are as thorough or innovative as the ones they emulate, but they are pretty good. In fact, the blogging engine looks better than most. And this thing actually runs. Performance is pretty good.

I won’t use TagWorld. I have no need for it since I have all these things already spread around the social web and coming together around this blog. But for someone who wants to get started and wants everything in one place, easy to use, and 1.6M people already there waiting to hear what you have to say, it is an impressive tool.

So who are they?

TagWorld is helping build the Social Web by providing a unified set of easy-to-use, web-based services that will let users create and engage in a more meaningful, social experience.

The Social Web empowers people’s ability to engage in self-expression and communicate and share information with whomever they choose. As the Internet’s influence evolves, a new social phase is emerging that calls for enabling people to place and have access to a broad range of personal information that they wish to place on the web. To support users, TagWorld sees five fundamental components for building out this new social web infrastructure: people, photos, blogs, tags and storage.

Based in Santa Monica, TagWorld is an online ecosystem that provides the most comprehensive and tightly integrated set of publishing, communication and networking features to support and enable the social web. Its cross platform functionality supports users’ migration toward the social web, where they can engage, create, and share their personalized content online in a multitude of ways, for a more meaningful social experience. The company was founded in July 2005 and is privately held.

Add this to a strong management team, and you have a pretty significant, privately-held player who has only been in existence for nine months. Impressive. Look for them to be married to a giant before too long.

The Binary.

The Binary is the only formula that matters now in news reporting. Two sides of a story. No in-depth. No detailed analysis. Just The Binary. Give me left and right with some reporter’s jibber jabber in between to frame it up.

Nothing at all happens in reporting anymore. It is over. Finished. A reporter may as well be a CITY-TV Speaker’s Corner booth for all they add to our collective wisdom.

Is it really that bad? Years of consolidation, downsizing, syndication and shortening of deadlines have made it so. The news media now must output product on a continuous basis. There is no longer a media cycle. No longer a battle for top of the hour supremacy. News is now like a metastatic informatics tumor. Born of cathode radiation and the urgency of the buck, stories are like some mutant T-Rex, two huge feet stamping first left, then right, then left again until it stumbles and dies. Or until its spinal cord is severed by a bigger story.

Gone are the days when a reporter would provide four angles or more to a story: a pro, a con, some experts, and then the reporter’s estimation of what it all means. The reporter used to have the ability to think long enough to offer a guarded conclusion about an issue without being accused of bias or editorializing. This was because the reporter was presenting enough evidence for there to be emergent facts. This was because the reporter was informed on the subject. Probably more informed than each of the other individuals interviewed.

Perhaps I am guilty of fostering a myth of origins here, but I don’t think so. I don’t recall being so utterly incensed by the banality of the formula. Even our beloved but belimed CBC has fallen victim. I listened to the news at five pm tonight and heard that same formula. Introduction; lefty; righty; then nothing. End of story. No conclusion is drawn, no analysis offered. There’s no time for it. The budget happened. People disagreed about it. Same thing tomorrow, I’m guessing.

So, thus goes our popular culture. Our societal outbursts are now the same. Left talking points, followed by right talking points, followed by left talking points, followed by right, with a steadily increasing volume and decreasing interlocution. We now talk past each other. We now perform our role in an ever-binary single act play, the tragedy of the missing facts. Nobody expects there to be an outcome or a dialectic. It is performative. The winner performs the best, delivering talking points with the most panache. In bars and coffee shops, we emulate the talk show hosts, talking over and shutting down as the desired outcome, rather than a meeting of minds with a single outcome - or at least some movement and mutual respect.

I lament this. I bodes poorly for us. It means power can do as power wishes without fear, since facts are inconveniences now disabled and submerged by the very culture of discourse itself. That culture of discourse mirrors the debasement of the news media and the absence of analysis in reporting. We are told to trust the news. We trust it and emulate it. We do.

I’m sure there is a level of frustration building around this. I’m sure this is at the root of the growing nastiness, the closing off, the burgeoning otherness that lurks just over the neighborhood hill. Our intellectual isolation is making us paranoid.

So, blogging specifically and the social web in general are important because they open a space of discourse with time aplenty for the development of arguments, the presentation of evidence, and the evolution of positions. The ever tightening and singular cycle of traditional mass media has squeezed off a good sized bubble of desire for more depth, more discussion and more meaning. Some facts, please. It should come as no surprise that bloggers and people who read blogs are the same demographic that has traditionally consumed mass media forms like newspapers. People do want facts. They care.

Canadian politicians still don’t get this. A few have tried, but as many have failed dismally. The Prime Minster’s chief writer in the last election cycle thought blogging was about getting away with insults not deliverable through talking points. No clue. No clue whatsoever. Politicians are now wind-me-ups with durabite batteries. Don Newman is a Max Headroom simulation.

Mr. lefty what do you think? Well, that’s surprising. Righty, what about you? Whoa, stay in the box there boy. Our advertisers aren’t paying for distractions like facts.

People are getting it. Mass media moguls are starting to get it and are making big moves into the social web. There is some hope. The biggest challenge will be to ensure social media do not become simply a mash-up of the same story we tell ourselves day in and day out. Our own private talking points reinforced by our well-worn feedpath.

So for me, the question is this: how do we ensure social media develop in a way that encourages debate and the necessary social dialectic, rather than grow silos of identity that stand defiantly against each other?

The Bowerbird collects a sometimes incredibly beautiful array of objects to decorate the bower it builds. It builds this bower for mating purposes, in the hopes that its grandeur and aesthetic mastery will attract a female. When a female arrives, the Bowerbird will do a dance [rm|wmv]. If all goes well, the two will procreate. Nature is beautiful and fun, though sometimes heartbreaking as well.

This reminds me of the growing inventory of Web 2.0 applications. Every day a collection of newly minted companies trot out another mashup or social software application that leverages a new (or sometimes not so new) aggregation of data from the growing list of open APIs. Then, not unlike the original dotcom bubble, they hope to get laid (attract an investor).

This is not a bad thing. Sex is good. Money is good. I like both, and the dance of investor and start-up is very much like courtship and seduction.

The thing I find funny is the way these start-ups are just like Bowerbirds. APIs are the shiny objects, the bower is the application or mashup, and the dance is, well, the dance - the beautiful swirl of data intermingling and synthesizing to make something meaningful and useful. Gyrations that amuse and excite.

Good luck to you all. I honor you.

Is there a better place to quickly see what people are up to in the world of mashups than ProgrammableWeb: Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix? This thing is truly amazing.

If you want to see what the beginnings of fluid information synthesis (the holy grail) looks like, check out what is really the equivalent of the open prairie in the time of homesteader. These little plots are going to grow into something quite incredible and life-altering.

Playing with Drupal 4.7 tonight and wondering what the .install file does. After installing about twenty modules the old fashioned way - using PHPMyAdmin to run the .sql file to create the database tables needed to support the module - I decided to read an install.txt file. Imagine my suprise to learn that, if there is a .install file included with the module, all you have to do is upload it to the modules directory and enable it on the module admin page. Drupal now creates the database tables for you. I tried it. It works. Makes sense, given everything Drupal needs to know to do this is already in the config file.

Many people are not comfortable with adding database tables using PHPMyAdmin. Now they don’t necessarily have to use it to install modules. This will help the Drupal community extend its reach and grow the install base. And it will save me a bit of time on each Drupal project. Time is money. And it adds up.

Thanks, Drupal Gods!