Tim Naftali's "Blind Spot" is reviewed in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs.

In the end, each administration's excessive concern with setting a new course seems to have trumped the nation's interest in continuity.

In other words, the political parties' product positioning activities are a national security risk.

Naftali's account makes clear from the outset that communication failures were often the unfortunate side effects of petty turf wars.

The Foreign Affairs reviewer is critical of Naftali's analysis in a few places, including those which I highlighted in my review, such as Clinton's efforts against al Qaeda. She ends her review by invoking the "al Qaeda is a scene" meme.

Counterterrorism in Retrospect

In this article for the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Richard Haass, author of The Opportunity, argues that the US should change course in its approach to North Korea and Iran.

A foreign policy that chooses to integrate, not isolate, despotic regimes can be the Trojan horse that moderates their behavior in the short run and their nature in the long run. It is time Washington put this thinking to the test, toward what remains of the axis of evil. Delay is no longer an option, and drift is not a strategy.

Haass also talked about his new book in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on May 31. (The interview is also available as an MP3.)

Haass's argument here works in concert with a recent essay by Robert McNamara, who argues that "It is time -- well past time, in my view -- for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool."

Zakaria has picked up Haass's meme. In his Newsweek column for June 27, "How To Change Ugly Regimes", he compares and contrasts the US approach to Iran, Libya, Cuba, Vietnam, China, and more. Zakaria writes:

What about Mao's China at the height of the Cultural Revolution? Nixon and Kissinger opened relations with what was arguably the most brutal regime in the world at the time. And as a consequence of that opening, China today is far more free -- economically and socially -- than it has ever been. If we were trying to help the Chinese people, would isolation have been a better policy?

Today's lesson is:

It's the memes, stupid.

Regime Change and Its Limits

Was it the intellectuals who replaced Toscanini and "Playhouse 90" with "Mr. Ed" and "Gilligan's Island"? Was it the intellectuals who shifted resources away from opera reviews in Time magazine and toward celebrity puff pieces in People and its various epigones?

Ultimately, it was the bottom line that destroyed American middlebrow culture.

I have to wonder how many questions on standardized tests are devoted to appreciating the works of Faulkner or Hemingway. How can we expect children to establish a love of learning when we take all of the exploratory fun out of it? Not everything can be boiled down to a multiple-choice question.

In the 1950's and 60's, the middle class looked longingly at the upper class. Now, the American middle class aspires not to the values and sensibilities of the privileged classes of half a century ago, but to the wealth and power of the new class of celebrity rich.

The Decline of Middlebrow Culture

Since 1961, more than 50 senators have run for president and they have all lost.

Sometimes in their quests to perform greater acts of service, people lose contact with their animating passion. And the irony is that the Frist of years past, the Tennessee Republican, the brilliant and passionate health care expert, is exactly the person the country could use.

Power corrupts?

What Makes Bill Frist Run?

More at OECD Work on Digital Content

... a comprehensive analysis on digital broadband content, focusing on growth and value creation, drivers and barriers to growth, and changing market structures and emerging issues with development of new delivery platforms.

The Working Party on the Information Economy (WPIE) is undertaking stocktaking studies of sectors where digital content is transforming value chains and business models. Initial sectors studied are: scientific publishing, music, online computer and video games and mobile content services. The studies are designed to further identify analytical, policy and measurement issues, and prepare the ground for more in-depth analysis of horizontal issues and challenges to broadband content development and applications.

You may be interested in the bibliography, which includes, among much else:

Stardom, Peer-to-peer and the Socially Optimal Distribution of Music

Navigating through this space, you'll find Microsoft's lessons learned in the first year of XBox Live, where Michel Cassius says that social networking is the key to taking online gaming to the mass market.

OECD Report on Digital Music

If the 65 I haven't seen are as good as the 35 I have, then there's still a lot of movie-watching left to do.

Time Magazine's All-Time 100 Movies

Pamela Samuelson has built a nice collection of pointers for her course on the legal and policy challenges of peer-to-peer technology.

News angle: The Supreme Court is expected to announce its decision in the MGM v. Grokster case, as early as Monday. Steve Lohr at NYT has written a brief article:

The mission of Mr. Glickman's trade group is to tilt the legal climate and public opinion as much in Hollywood's favor as possible -- to influence legislation, law enforcement and people's attitudes so that illicitly sharing copyrighted movies becomes more risky and less acceptable behavior.

"My advice to Hollywood is to really start selling online," said Bram Cohen, the 29-year-old programmer who created the BitTorrent software. "They have nothing that vaguely competes with Netflix."

For every day that Hollywood spends sitting on its hands, film further fades in mindshare among the next generation. By the time they decide how to react, customers will have moved on. Hollywood is the new Broadway, and that's not a Good Thing. Consider the history of the musical:

The decline of the Broadway musical had several causes. First and foremost, the competition of television soap operas, that catered to the same audience as the musical. Then the escalating production costs, that simply made it too risky a venture for entrepreneurs who could invest their money in more reliable ventures. In terms of "taste", the musical never truly managed to assimilate the new taste that developed with the advent of rock'n'roll, disco music and hip-hop. Somehow, the musical had successfully assimilated new genres (ragtime, jazz) up until the Sixties. In the Sixties, rock music introduced not only a new musical paradigm but also new forms of consumption (from Woodstock to the video clip) that were simply not compatible with the theatrical format. Finally, there certainly was a change in the national psyche: as the Cold War forced the USA to abandon its childhood and entered its adulthood (a difficult time of subtle strategizing and risky undertakings on a global scale), the musical had a hard time abandoning its childhood, and eventually fell out of synch with the rest of society.

When I say GWOT, do you think Hollywood? No, I didn't think so.

The Challenge of P2P | INFOSYS 296A-2 | SPRING 2005

The pace of information development is forcing internet surfers to skip the eye-candy for the luxury of skimming.

Here enter the noteworthy blog, whose tagline is "Pick up the pace. Skip the click-through."

And so imagine my surprise when I started reading from news services that Google created Personal Pages to compete with Yahoo’s portal services. I think the analysts have it all wrong. I don’t think Google really feels threatened (or has ever felt threatened) by portal strategy.

This is definitely true. During Eric Schmidt's interview with Charlie Rose:

Rose: And a lot of people said that's why I go to My Yahoo. That's what My Yahoo delivers for me. And here you come wanting them to come to you first. Because if they come to you first, you hope they'll stay with you for a while because they'll read your ads.

Schmidt: Again, people didn't understand what we announced. We did something different but everybody confused it with something else.

Back to the Hale article:

In the race to find what deserves face-time, services like Del.icio.us in combination with the rapid adoption of web apps like kinja are making Google’s search seem very, very slow.

Have you tried Kinja? It looks pretty cool.

If you want to see a good example of what I’m talking about, check out Gataga, a bookmark search engine that’s powered by social bookmarking services and an RSS feed for every search.

particletree · The Importance of RSS

The United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is seeking information on potential sources with the capabilities and facilities to provide cost effective turn key cradle-to-grave design, engineering, acquisition, sustainment logistics, and production for vehicle, manpack and aircraft variants of the Family of Loudspeakers II (FOL2).

FOL2 will be the second generation loudspeaker for use on the battlefield by tactical PSYOP teams to broadcast messages to target audiences. The current vehicle system is a 1990's design which utilized multiple components connected by numerous cables. The future systems will be required to provide additional volume and clarity while utilizing a compact wireless design and minimal cables. Commonality in the FOL family allowed the vehicle system to be utilized on watercraft with few changes. Manpack versions currently utilize a two-horn system, interface box and multiple cables in a design which is not very flexible. The future systems will be required to be configurable in multiple army common truck systems. The current aircraft variant is used on the UH-60A/L. The next generation will be utilized in additional rotary wing aircraft. The next generation will field several other variants that will be developed for emerging capabilities such as unmanned vehicles and loudspeakers which can be scattered from the air.

You know where to go.

Family of Loudspeakers II

Decius wrote:
I really don't think this is going to work. This is an idea whose time hasn't come.

I tend to agree. I don't think the technology is here yet. Literary types will be highly critical of this idea. An editorial built this way will either have no voice or contain such a cacophonous jumble of voices as to be considered psychotic.

A wiki is the wrong tool for a collaborative editorial. It crudely combines too many discrete steps to be manageable, especially at scale.

What's needed is:

1) collaborative position finding and group formation. Active participants need to be able to express approval or disapproval on a statement by statement basis. Like-minded people must form groups and work together to find the most effective way to express their sentiments. In the wiki format, it's all one global group; the edit history is full of blues and reds cyclicly rejecting each others' changes, and collective progress is made fitfully, if at all. This step is best executed by a small core team for each point. Passive participants at this stage are selectively expressing their approval of statements, and this information is available in aggregate to the editors.

2) narrative construction and storytelling. Editors use the output of the thought circles to build an editorial. They are not allowed to change the words, although some expression is possible here by means of juxtaposition and choices about sequencing, inclusion, and omission. Again, a small number of skilled editors can fulfill this role. Passive participants at this stage express selective approval of the assembled articles. Based on data from the group formation stage, automated link structure analysis enables participants to easily find editorials they are likely to approve (or disapprove) strongly.

3) mind share visualization. Readers explore the space of competing editorials, annotating the constituent statements with approval or disapproval. As the reader provides this input, she navigates the space of editorials; with each new rating, an alternative editorial is displayed based on an automated search for the closest match from among available editorials.

RE: Welcome to the Los Angeles Times Wikitorial Page (Public Beta)