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Daily Blah for... Sunday, November 30, 2003
San Francisco Goes Green
Apologies to the regulars for not posting in a week. I have two pretty good excuses. The day after my last post was my 30th birthday, and the surprise party P arranged that night took some time to recover from. Then there was last week -- not just Thanksgiving, but my one and only chance to get something in the magazine on the San Francisco mayor's race, which is shaping up to be one hell of a battle. But after a short week crammed with interviews and soul searching, my story got slashed into the 60-line stump you see below. I'll post the longer version tomorrow.
The Greening Of San Francisco
The rise of mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez
By CHRIS TAYLOR
Sunday, Nov. 30, 2003
As if Arnold Schwarzenegger's victory weren't enough, California Democrats now have to contend with the very real possibility of losing the mayor's race in San Francisco — and to someone who has outflanked them on the left. A TV poll last week put Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez ahead of Democratic rival Gavin Newsom, 52% to 45%, among those who say they are "certain" to vote in the runoff election on Dec. 9.
Gonzalez, 38, is a floppy-haired former public defender who once played bass in a punk rock band and doesn't own a watch or a car. Elected to the city's board of supervisors during the dotcom boom, Gonzalez (who was a Democrat until he became disillusioned with the party's campaign tactics in 2000) helped lead the charge against upscale real estate development to house the high-tech rich. But he still manages to charm campaign contributions out of two of the city's biggest developers. He promises to make San Francisco a "laboratory for what government will look like under Green leadership." So far, that appears to be a pledge not to be like the incumbent mayor, Willie Brown, in promoting political cohorts to choice city posts.
Gonzalez seems to be riding the anti-incumbent wave that swept Schwarzenegger into office. He joined the race only 12 weeks before the primary, and finished second to Newsom, who until recently was the all-but-anointed heir of the term-limited Brown. Newsom, 36, was well known for his backing last year of a popular proposition dubbed Care Not Cash that sought to solve homelessness in San Francisco by offering shelter vouchers in place of welfare payments. He is endorsed by such top Democrats as Al Gore and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi of California. And he has a $3 million campaign war chest. Gonzalez has raised a mere $300,000.
But in the counterculture capital, Newsom's advantage may be a drawback. "I tell Democrats, 'Want to have an easier race against a Green? Don't outspend him 10 to one,'" Gonzalez says. "It's such an unlevel playing field, the electorate starts to identify with the small guy."
Daily Blah for... Friday, November 21, 2003
Mighty Mouse
What can I tell you about my friend Souris, aka Lanha, aka Fake Funk? She's an evil videogames genius, one of only two people in the world who can repeatedly kick my ass at Soul Calibur (the other being her hubby, Silvio). She sometimes hovers in mid-air. Her name means mouse in French, which is entirely appropriate. She's more fun per square inch than just about anyone else on the planet. She's a superconnector of super people, a motormouthed maven. And I cannot believe she just discovered I have a blog.
Anyway, as a kind of blog-warming present, she sent me this article from Gamer TV: Love's A Game. It's aimed at women who, unlike her, are afraid of videogames; perhaps they've even been widowed by them. The number one piece of advice: get involved. It's more fun than you think.
This reminds me of what happened last week, when my cousin Lisa and her boyfriend Simon came to stay. Simon and I had spent a couple of enjoyable nights drinking wine and playing FIFA 2004 on the Xbox by ourselves, while Lisa and P rolled their eyes at such a stereotypically male pursuit (videogame soccer, yawn). But as soon as we got them to play on our teams, they transformed into demons of the soccer pitch. It was like I was watching Bend it Like Beckham. Lisa scored more goals than any beginner I've ever had the pleasure of playing with, while P displayed her delightful ubercompetitive streak and started yelling at the virtual referee.
It was an absolute blast, much like the legendary Mario Party games nights Souris and Silvio host at their Manhattan home. There are few things in life more fun than four friends, a little booze, and a frenetic game. As I'm sure Mighty Mouse will agree.
Daily Blah for... Thursday, November 20, 2003
Multiple Chris Taylor Syndrome
Very happy to discover, while researching a story on search engines, that Daily Blah is the third most popular result when entering the term "Chris Taylor" into the top ten or so engines. You might think I'd be disappointed with the bronze medal. But how can I compete with Chris Taylor the recording artist, who promises to appeal to "fans of music as diverse as Jeff Buckley, Radiohead, U2 and Over the Rhine" and boasts "the official worldwide Chris Taylor website"? See, I just knew I was the unnofficial version. I only hope he doesn't sue me. And I certainly don't take pictures of the California landscape as enchanting as those of Chris Taylor no. 2.
No, I'm quite content with third place. After all, just look at all those sucker Chris Taylors below me I can thumb my nose at. Take that, Chris Taylor, CEO of Gas-Powered Games! (Not really; I've met him, he's a lovely man, and what's more, built like a brick portapotty.) In your face, Professor Chris Taylor, chair of medical biophysics at Manchester University! Eat my dust, Coach Chris Taylor of the Lafayette Leopards!
Do you think they'll help me pay the therapist's fees?
Daily Blah for... Wednesday, November 19, 2003
No Jacko is Good Jacko
Daily Blah. Your official source for absolutely no Michael Jackson news.
Yes, that's right. This website vows to bring you non-stop, round-the-clock inattentiveness to the top story of the hour. Our hand-picked team of reporters is laboring day and night to utterly ignore this case. We offer a complete lack of lurid speculation, an absence of analysis on what this whole situation tells us about the media age, and a vacuum of vapid stand-ups from the Santa Barbara sherrif's department.
All of that hot air and care we would have expended on this subject will be donated to an entertainment news recycling program, which provides much-needed media time for hungry tabloid reporters covering the Laci Peterson trial.
Daily Blah for... Monday, November 17, 2003
The Radical Cheerleaders
"They fight bombs with pompoms and kick high for consciousness," says the AP in this intriguing story on a new network of radical cheerleaders that are showing up at all the anti-Bush, anti-WTO, anti-whatever protests. Damn good idea, especially if -- as the piece says -- they're not simply chanting the tired old "1, 2, 3, 4, we don't want your racist war." So what exactly are they chanting? It's not exactly Shakespeare, if this page of Radical Cheerleader cheers is anything to go by. An example from the anti-capitalism page:
Is it right to get rich
but think Liberty's a bitch?
Is it right to make some dough,
But step on other people's toes?
Can you pay minimum wage
and keep yore [sic] workers in a cage?
WE Say HELL No, Mr C-E-O
Yore [sic] skeezy system we are gunna overthrow
A Cellphone's-Eye View
If you've ever wondered, I can now report authoritatively on what it sounds like to be a cellphone going through an airport security system.
Much as expected, it's a bunch of thumps, thuds and other crackles and pops. Not too exciting.
But it was an interesting experiment, and I now have a little bit more respect than I used to for all those laptops, backpacks, keys, coins and even the occasional guitar that we routinely ask to get screened on our behalf but rarely inquire of as to how it went.
I came by this knowledge because I was doing a phone interview this morning with a gentleman who was at the airport while he was in the security line. When his turn came, he put his phone down into the tray with the idea that we'd continue the conversation on the other end. Assuming the phone didn't disconnect. And praise be to his carrier, it didn't. I got to hear every exciting moment of that phone's journey through the screening machine.
My only question: Did I just get X-rayed?
MoveOn's Big Mo
Boy, this was a painful one. Karen and I wrote this story on the MoveOn phenomenon several weeks ago, and watched it languish in the "might run this week" pile for some time. Finally it runs in this week's issue -- but at half the original size. I did the butchery myself. There was a fair bit of blood on the floor. In this business, you pretty much have to be able to withstand any level of story surgery, all the way up to a cover story being cut down to a paragraph.
I N T E R N E T P O L I T I C S / C A M P A I G N ' 0 4
MoveOn's Big Moment
By CHRIS TAYLOR AND KAREN TUMULTY
Monday, Nov. 24, 2003
Few Democratic campaigns can boast matching funds from megarich financier George Soros, feisty speeches by Al Gore and a make-your-own-campaign-commercial contest conceived by pop star Moby. These are the trophies of MoveOn.org, an activist website with just seven staff members and no office. What it does have is an e-mail list with 1.8 million members, who have little more in common than anger and a tilt to the left.
The seven staff members focus that anger on the liberal topic du jour. One day, MoveOn's e-mail armada pushes a petition against the FCC's relaxing rules on media ownership; the next, a fund drive that brought in $1 million in 48 hours to support the Texas state senators who had fled the state to stop a G.O.P. redistricting plan. There are no membership dues, and gratification is as instant as a mouse click. "MoveOn is easily the largest political-action committee in the country," says Professor Michael Cornfield of George Washington University. "It's the Christian Coalition of the left."
MoveOn's latest campaign is its most ambitious — a $10 million drive to fund anti-Bush commercials in key battleground states later this month. Billionaires Soros and Peter Lewis last week offered to give $1 for every $2 given by members, up to a cap of $5 million. Meanwhile, Moby and a host of celebrity pals (like Jack Black and Janeane Garafolo) are getting ready to judge the best commercial made by members, which MoveOn will air around the State of the Union.
All this began with Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, a married couple of Berkeley-based computer entrepreneurs whose company was best known for a screensaver that featured flying toasters. In 1997 they sold it for $13.8 million. Then came impeachment. Wes and Joan put together a website and sent it to friends. Its title and policy: Censure and Move On. As an afterthought, the couple put together an e-mail list of supporters. "It was supposed to be a flash campaign," says Wes. "We're in, we're out, we're fixed."
But they were hooked. By 2000,MoveOn.org was raising $2 million for Democratic candidates, including more than $100,000 to help California's Adam Schiff beat Congressman James Rogan, one of the House managers during Clinton's impeachment trial. In mid-to late 2002, as the Iraq war loomed, the MoveOn e-mail list doubled, to 1 million. Wes and Joan hooked up with Zack Exley, whose parody campaign 2000 website, GWBush.com, caused candidate Bush to declare, "There ought to be some limits to freedom"; and Eli Pariser, 22, a New Yorker whose post-9/11 e-mail petition for peace was signed by 500,000 people worldwide. All four still work out of their homes, communicating by e-mail, instant messaging and a regular Tuesday conference call.
In June, MoveOn held what was billed as the first Internet presidential primary, and more than 317,000 members voted. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean grabbed the top spot with 44%--not quite the 50% MoveOn required to endorse a candidate but enough to give his candidacy the momentum it still enjoys. Dean's rivals grumbled that MoveOn had advised Dean on how to market himself to its members. Exley says the site had made the same offer to others, but "back then, the Dean campaign was the only one desperate enough to take us up on it."
Now Wes and Joan's quiet Berkeley home plays host to a steady stream of consultants and candidates coming to pay homage. Those who seek endorsement are in for a disappointment. "I don't spend any time figuring out who the right candidate is," says Wes. "All I want to do is evangelize populism, so they go away thinking 'Whoa — there's someone other than wealthy donors I have to impress?'"
Daily Blah for... Sunday, November 16, 2003
The Universe of Cool, the Universe of Outrage
Thank you, Dan. I think I'm in seat 24E. Could you hold my popcorn for a second?
Seriously, welcome to the Daily Blah. Welcome to the Blah stage two, in which I'm hoping to employ the fine wit of my most plugged-in friends for more extensive reportage. Well, it's that or I'm just too damnably lazy to write every day and I need more eager participants to create an echo chamber. Either way, call it Blah a la BoingBoing, the web's premiere bloggy destination, written by the delightful Cory Doctrow and some fellow intimidatingly smart minds.
What will be the basis of this reportage? Anything in the universe of cool. And anything in the universe of outrage. I want Daily Blah to be a place where people come to get excited or angry about the world, but never unmoved. Our writers will be prospectors looking for nuggets of gold: tiny yet pivotal news items that affect the nature of things. We will face the onrushing future with smiles of greeting and a quizical eyebrow. We will not be afraid to wonder out loud. We might point gleefully to the latest gadget or social network, or skewer them with satire. Perhaps both at the same time. We might take a piece of news small enough that it didn't make many front pages (say, Wesley Clark's recent hints that he would support a flag-burning amendment) and tie it to other developments (Howard Dean announcing his intent to appeal to guys with Confederate flags in their trucks), leaving instinctive conclusions (are the mainstream Democratic candidates tilting to the right, or do they just want to look like they are?) hanging in the air like colorful helium balloons.
We will link shamelessly. We will offer ideas freely. We will build coalitions of ideas. We will give shout-outs. (Nice article on TiVo addiction, Elinor!) From out of the global babble, we will cherry-pick choice quotes. We will walk up to you at the cocktail party of life with a tray full of nouvelle cuisine-like news, presented as amuse bouche, and wash it down for you with the champagne of writing styles -- brief, bubbly, witty and weighty. And would you like a napkin, m'am?
We will bring you, in short, the Daily Blah.
Now with 20% more self-advertizing.
Um...Is anyone there?
*Cough*
Ahem...I'll be your guest blogger for the moment.
Just got back from an evening of ushering at Cirque du Soleil in San Francisco. So may I be the first to welcome you to Alegria. Which section are you in?
Um, maybe I should check my head. It's been a long day.
My name is Daniel. I'll be visiting here from time to time. I found the keys to this here Daily Blah thing this evening, so if you don't tell anyone that I have them, I'll keep your secrets, too.
Thanks.
Daily Blah for... Saturday, November 15, 2003
Smart Library
Yes, it's another Amazon story. This one ran as a sidebar to the iTunes piece:
Smart Library
Amazon's new search service takes readers inside their books
The trouble with books is that they're too low-tech. Like all wood-pulp devices, they have no built-in search engine. Sure, you can look up stuff in the index. But who has the time? Certainly not the generation that is growing up with Google. According to a 2001 Pew Research Center study, 71% of online teens rely "mostly on the Internet" for their homework. As the pace of life grows faster, the tendency is to shun any information that isn't delivered fresh and piping hot to our computer screens within seconds. And that means books lose out. At least it did until Jeff Bezos intervened. On Oct. 23, the Amazon.com CEO (and TIME's 1999 Person of the Year) unveiled a new feature called Search Inside the Book. Amazon had spent the spring and summer digitally scanning 33 million pages—that is, every page from more than 120,000 in-print titles—and putting them in a vast searchable computer archive. Before on Amazon you could look only for names of books; now, to the chagrin of some authors, you can pinpoint a text reference on the very page where it appears and call it up in a jiffy. At a stroke, the world of wood pulp and the world of wired information just merged.
Of course, Bezos is not running the archive as some kind of nonprofit virtual library. He's improving our access to books because he wants to sell us more of them. Only registered Amazon customers may use the service (registration is free but a credit-card number is required). Even the most determined searchers will not be allowed to see more than 20% of any single book. The idea is to turn us all into bibliophiles by showing just how many authors have written about whatever topic we desperately need to know more about. The first few pages are free. Once you're hooked, you'll have to charge it at the checkout. Still, the Search Inside the Book archive is a stunning achievement. Those 120,000 titles are about as many as you would find at your local Barnes & Noble store. Even with the best cataloging system and the most helpful staff, tracking down every instance of a subject by browsing the stacks could take years. Like Steve Jobs with his iTunes Music Store, Bezos had to negotiate a maze of copyright issues and publishing-house egos to get his digital archive off the ground. Some writers in the cooking and travel genres fear a whole new kind of literary Napster situation. They say readers will too easily crib a recipe or city description without buying the book. They may have a point. Then again, how hard is it to scribble down a recipe while standing in the cooking aisle at Barnes & Noble?
To offer us the inside of every book, Amazon has a long way to go: the Library of Congress holds 19 million tomes, and about 3 million are in print. But Bezos is off to a blazing start. To go the distance, he's appealing to authors' dreams of immortality. Let us digitize your work of genius, he tells them, and the reading public will have access to it forever.
Soon Amazon hopes to start its own publishing service, serving up fresh copies of any title the moment you ask for it. The phrase out of print could soon lose its meaning. And the Google generation might get a lot more interested in wood pulp.
—By Chris Taylor
Daily Blah for... Monday, November 10, 2003
The 99-cent Solution
A lot of Time stuff this week. It's that time of year again: our Coolest Inventions special issue. Here's my piece on the winner.
The 99¢ Solution
Steve Jobs' Music Store showed foot-dragging record labels and runaway music pirates that there was a third way
By CHRIS TAYLOR
When Steve Jobs holds forth in public, it's usually to a mob of fawning Apple-ites—the true believers who still develop software and accessories for Apple products. Not so last month at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This crowd was more mack daddy than Macworld. Bono, Mick Jagger and Dr. Dre made video appearances. Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart was in the audience. Sarah McLachlan sang her latest hits live. What was pulling these musical supernovas into Jobs' magnetic field? A software product that just might save their free-falling industry: the iTunes Music Store.
It's a disarmingly simple concept: sell songs in digital format for less than a buck and let buyers play them whenever and wherever they like—as long as it's on an Apple iPod. Jobs had proved the idea back in April when he launched the Music Store for Mac users, who represent only 3% of the computer world but promptly gobbled up a million tracks in the first week of business. By October he was ready to set the Music Store aloft in the 97% of the world that uses Windows PCs, and the prospect of converting millions of music pirates into credit-card wielding music buyers was enough to make even the most jaded rock stars take notice. How did Jobs do this trick? In a word: simplicity—the transparent ease of use that is the hallmark of Apple's entire product line, including the Music Store. "I'm a complete computer dummy," McLachlan told Time after the event. "If I can use this, anyone can."
And, it seems, just about anyone is. Three days after the Moscone event, PC owners had downloaded a million copies of the software and paid for a million songs (adding to the 14 million music downloads already made by Mac users). In a year when record labels hit a sour note by suing students, grandparents and 12-year-old file sharers, Jobs had effectively brokered a peace agreement: he had shown the music industry how to win friends and make money on the very Internet that was being used to steal their songs.
Other inventions this year may have more altruistic intentions (like Dean Kamen's water purifier) or be more visible on street corners (like those ubiquitous camera cell phones). But for finally finding a middle ground between the foot-dragging record labels and the free-for-all digital pirates and for creating a bandwagon onto which its competitors immediately jumped, Apple's iTunes Music Store is Time's Coolest Invention of 2003.
Long before the Music Store came on the scene, frantic record-industry executives had been searching for some way to combat their nemesis: Napster, the original file-sharing service, but to no avail. Their first online ventures, MusicNet and PressPlay, were disasters, largely because the labels didn't trust their users—or one another. High subscription fees and poor selections turned off would-be customers; most skulked off to the underground services, such as Kazaa and Limewire, which had sprung up after Napster's demise.
Enter Jobs. Back in April, Apple's ceo revealed that he had spent the previous year negotiating an unprecedented deal with all five major labels and thousands of independents. His iTunes software, which had previously been nothing more than a place to store and play digital music on a Mac, would become a gateway to the Music Store, where you could easily find and save music to your hard drive, CD or iPod music player—no subscription necessary, just 99¢ per song, or $9.99 for an album. Competitors tried to match that price but couldn't come up with a service as free of restrictions. They said Jobs had been given a sweet deal by the labels because Apple, with its miniscule share of the computer market, was never going to be a real distribution threat. "The Mac world is a walled garden," said BuyMusic.com vice president Liz Brooks. "The PC environment is like the Wild West."
Then came iTunes for Windows, and suddenly there was a new sheriff in town. Not content with creating a music store for PC users that was a perfect clone of its Mac counterpart, including all of the 400,000 songs Apple now has the rights to resell, Jobs added a couple of cool new features, the best of which was a monthly allowance you can set up for your kids to govern their online purchases—a godsend for any parent trying to curb an offspring's downloading habit.
Jobs has one more reason not to be concerned about the competition. "The dirty little secret of all this is there's no way to make money on these stores," he says. For every 99¢ Apple gets from your credit card, 65¢ goes straight to the music label. Another quarter or so gets eaten up by distribution costs. At most, Jobs is left with a dime per track, so even $500 million in annual sales would add up to a paltry $50 million profit. Why even bother? "Because we're selling iPods," Jobs says, grinning.
That may make iTunes the most benign-looking Trojan Horse in software history. The Windows crowd can get iTunes free, and it offers almost all the same functionality as the paid versions of MusicMatch and Real One, two PC-based rivals. But iTunes is the only music application that will work with the enormously popular iPod, and it has features—like its powerful search function—that are unrivaled. "Once people are locked into using iTunes, the game's over," says Charles Wolf, an analyst at the New York City? based Needham & Co. investment bank. "They could sell an extra 2 million iPods because of this." And the margins on these devices make the Music Store's arithmetic look like child's play. Each $499 iPod returns as much as $175 in profit, Wolf says.
Such calculation may also explain why iTunes doesn't support Windows Media Audio files—a Microsoft format that Bill Gates had hoped would become the music-industry standard. If iTunes becomes the player of choice for PC users, it would be a blow for Microsoft's grander audio ambitions—and may well unearth the hatchet that Jobs and Gates buried back in 1997.
For now, Jobs faces some smaller hurdles, like filling in a few significant gaps in the iTunes Music Store selection (the Beatles are the most glaring omission). Even so, Jobs continues to score points with consumers for making available songs so easy to find and so easy to download. The music industry, of course, is anything but simple. That's probably why Jobs, an inveterate challenge seeker, likes it. But can it grow his business? Stay tuned.
Daily Blah for... Monday, November 03, 2003
Google Your Books
Here's my latest Your Time piece. I was a little nervous about the headline, above. I'd originally had "The Google of Books." Somewhere along the editorial line, it got changed. The subtle difference is apparently very important to the Google folks, who have been known to send out lawyer's letters any time the name of their site is employed as a verb in print. We'll see.
Amazon's new search engine thumbs through literature at light speed
By CHRIS TAYLOR
Last week the search for weapons of mass destruction suddenly became a whole lot easier — if you happened to be hunting for them at Amazon.com. The No. 1 online bookseller just added an astonishingly clever feature called "Search Inside the Book," which turns the site into the Google of literature. Every page of some 120,000 in-print titles has been scanned into a vast computer database and can be accessed as text. This doesn't mean you'll be reading your favorite best sellers on Amazon for free; there are limits on how many pages you can browse in a single book. But it does mean you can do the kind of comprehensive search that most librarians would give their Dewey decimal systems for.
Enter weapons of mass destruction into Amazon's search box, for example, and you don't get only the dozen or so books in print with WMD in the title. You get all 1,690 books in the Amazon collection in which the author wrote that phrase — including such unlikely sources as On Writing by Stephen King or The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. A couple more clicks and you get an image of the page where the phrase appears (and, if you choose, two or three pages before and after). Care only about books that discuss WMD at length? Amazon is smart enough to remember which books were bought by other readers who did the same search, and to rank those titles at the top of the list.
The upshot is probably the most useful tool for shoppers, scholars and bibliophiles ever invented. In fact, there's no reason why you can't use the service to search books you already have on your shelves. No matter how fast you try to thumb to and from the index pages, Amazon's computers can do it faster. Now you know how Garry Kasparov felt when he was beaten by a chess program.
The only downside is that before you can look inside the books, you have to either have an account already or give Amazon a credit-card number for "security purposes," which might keep a lot of kids and teens away. While this is a nod to publishers worried about people gaining too much free access to their literature, it's a shame. What Amazon would lose in sales by being used as a kind of gigantic Cliffs Notes, it would gain 10 times over by becoming widely known as a search destination (just ask the highly profitable Google how important that is)--in other words, a weapon of mass education.
From the Nov. 10, 2003 issue of TIME magazine
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