Web Stuff : : It's So Hard, Communicating

That's what my friend Robert said to me the other day, trying to explain what he'd meant in a googleChat when he'd written . . . which, when you think about it, makes no sense at all.

Earlier in the day I had come across these observations on the futility of conversing by Osmo Wiio, a Finnish researcher of human communication. For some reason, I find them heartening.

• If communication can fail, it will.
• If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
• There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
• The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.

Found at 37Signals. More here.

Web Stuff : : So How Long Until a Photo/Reporter Covers an Event via Twitter?

Fred Wilson tries out Dave Winer's new Twittergram service, which will grab a properly-tagged photo on upload to Flickr, then send it out as a Twitter.

Wilson says the only wink link is the image upload from his Blackberry (via MMS), which fails about 1 out 5 times. I wonder how an iPhone would work as the starting point.

Web Stuff : : Maira Kalman Unbound

Now that Mr. Sulzberger has torn down that paywall and TimesSelect is headed for the internet archive, go check out The Principles of Uncertainty, the series of 12 cartoon/columns that Maria Kalman painted and wrote for TimesSelect. They are all utterly devastating, in a comforting, reassuring way. My favorite is "Heaven on Earth," from August 2006.

Penguin is publishing the entire collection next month. You can preorder The Principles of Uncertainty at Amazon now.

Web Stuff : : Something I Wasn't Necessarily Expecting in My Feedreader

Web Stuff : : And It Really, Really Works

Two weeks ago I invoked the Lazy Web, hoping someone would find a way to republish photography criticism no longer in print, such as "Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on lnfluence," by photographer Tod Papageorge. Papageorge's essay is available via used book dealers, I noted then, but at collector's prices ($195 on up). "I just want to read [it]. A PDF would be fine."

A day later, a PDF of the essay landed in my inbox, courtesy of the author. Score another one for the Lazy Web.

But wait, there's more!

Now you can read it too. Papageorge's essay is the first in an occasional series, Photography: The Missing Criticism, which will bring back into print -- well, at least PDF -- great writing on photography.

Art StuffWeb Stuff : : Photography: The Missing Criticsim

I like reading about photographs almost as much as looking at them, and though there is a considerable body of great criticism in print, there's also a lot that has gone missing.

Case in point: Tod Papageorge's Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence, which was apparently the catalog for a 1981 show Papageorge curated at Yale, where he's run the graduate photography program for years. I'd never heard about this show or book until last week, when Time critic Richard Lacayo mentioned it, calling it "one of the most illuminating books about photography I ever read."

I could buy a copy of Papageorge's book via Amazon or Alibris, but the cheapest price I found is $195.06. I don't want to collect a first edition, I just want to read the essay. A PDF would be fine.

This seems like a perfect opportunity for some innovative web publisher to work the Long Tail, not only for Papageorge's essay but any number of essays and introductions from out-of-print books and show catalogues that warrant being re-introduced to the photographic conversation. Paging Tim O'Reilly!

As long as I'm playing Lazy Web here, I want to add a Lazy Publishing request: Would someone (Aperture, are you listening?) please publish The Collected Introductions of John Szarkowski, a compilation of the essays he wrote for photographers' books.

Web Stuff : : "I canceled HBO this morning"

David Chase failed to satisfy many with his Sopranos finale, but the Internet Sopranos commenters haven't let anyone down.

The archetypal commenters were out in spades on Digg, including the ever present Simply Sad One: "I canceled HBO this morning."

Things got a bit more fun with the arrival of Conspira-Theorist (emphasis mine here and below):

"WOW!!!! AMAZING!!!

OK, at first I was really angry. I mean really, really angry. I can't believe though that no-one has posted by now what happened. The only thing I saw that was right, was that in the last scene we are seeing through Tony's eyes. Remember when he was speaking with Bobby...basically saying that you don't see it happening?

So here is what I found out. The guy at the bar is also credited as Nikki Leotardo. The same actor played him in the first part of season 6 during a brief sit down concerning the future of Vito. That wasn't that long ago. Apparently, he is the nephew of Phil. Phil's brother Nikki Senior was killed in 1976 in a car accident. Absolutely Genius!!!! David Chase is truly rewarding the true fans who pay attention to detail.

So the point would have been that life continues and we may never know the end of the Sopranos. But if you pay attention to the history, you will find that all the answers lie in the characters in the restaurant. The trucker was the brother of the guy who was robbed by Christopher in Season 2. Remember the DVD players? The trucker had to identify the body. The boy scouts were in the train store and the black guys at the end were the ones who tried to kill Tony and only clipped him in the ear (was that season 2 or 3?).

Absolutely incredible!!!! There were three people in the restaurant who had reason to kill Tony and then it just ends. This was Chase's way of proving that he will not escape his past. It will not go on forever despite that he would like it to "don't stop". Not the fans!!! Tony would like it to keep going but just as we have to say goodbye, so does he. No more Tony and I guess we are supposed to be happy that Meadow didn't get clipped as well (she would have been between the shooter and Tony) since she is the only one worth a crap in that family.

Thank you David Chase for making it so obscure that I feel bad for hating you at first. Absolutely amazing!!!!"

what do you guys thuink? {sic}

Enter — a couple of responses later — Profane Debunker:

You're full of shit, I just re-read the credits about 10 times, "Nikki Leotardo" is not even mentioned in the credits.

The two black guys are not the same actors that played the two who were paid to wack Tony in season two. Although, I have to admit, even I was thinking that.

Honestly? I think he left it open ended, I haven't seen any good evidence pointing to anything definitive...

Profane is accompanied by his close friend Researcher Debunker:

from the hbo boards:
The end credits of this episode just say "Man in Members Only Jacket" not Nikki Leotardo (hell, googling "Nikki Leotardo" yields no results!).

And if you google actor Paolo Colandrea (who played "Man in Members Only Jacket"), you get this:
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-06092007-1360360.html
This guy owns a pizzeria in Philly and has never been on the Sopranos before. So he's not "Nikki Leotardo."

But enough with the negativity. Let's hear from the Bell Theorist:

Tony is obviously dead. watch the last scene again (I have several times). every time someone comes into the door you hear the bell, then the camera view shows tony, then switches to his point of view to show who is entering the restaurant. this pattern happens 4 times (first with curly haired lady who looks like janice, then trucker dude with USA cap, then carmela, then the hitman followed by AJ)

When meadow enters the restaurant you hear the bell as usual, we then see tony from the front and when we expect to see meadow from tony's view we instead get the black screen. The view from his perspective is black - he is dead (flashback to conversation on lake with Bobby)

This is the only possible explanation given what we have seen on screen.

And then, as happens not infrequently, Close Reader speaks up:

To me... The final episode all came down to Meadow. She became Michael Corleone.

Basically, she went from wanting to work with civil rights to now wanting defend unjustly accused Italian Americans, i.e. a mob lawyer. She wants to try save her father the only way she can.

So, in way, Tony failed at his one admirable goal at keeping his kids out of the family business. And I think her unable to park her oversized luxury vehicle illustrated her change.

Finally there's a refreshing quencher from Apatow Stoner Dude:

Whatever. I'm more pissed they never showed Meadows tits.

Thanks, Digg players. While some were waiting for tits, elsewhere another close reader, Ron Rosenbaum, was imagining, hoping for, predicting ducks in the finale.

And then the ducks return. Like the chickens come home to roost, get it. Go ducks.

But Ron didn't get his ducks, the same way that others didn't get their clear murder or not-murder of Tony. (Since I'm mentioning Ron, I feel compelled to mention that I've blogged about once before).

I've only watched the final episode once, but when Tony was out behind his house, raking leaves, he looks up in the sky, looking, I think, for ducks, which are gone, never to return. Internet commenters, though, we will always have with us.

Web Stuff : : My Kind of Convergence

This is what the blogosphere sounds like when its described by one of the greats of the magazine era, not one of the cool geeks who are building it and, for the most part, populating it so far.

Out of the delirium of Judiana (Gawker’s coinage), a paradigm shift? Out of the welter and whirlwind of exegesis of intelligence leaks comes … redesigned intelligence? An epistemological extreme makeover? [snip]

I think the recent total frenzy of Judiana—the Talmudic, blogospheric analysis of the entire spectrum of speculation, rumor, conjecture in the Plame case and its Judy Miller subplot that has consumed so many of us—may mark the moment when the way we process information has changed in some deeper fundamental way that transcends this particular media colonoscopy, transcends media consciousness and suggests some deep internal realignment of the prefrontal lobes.

What I mean is that whatever the Plame special prosecutor decides—and I write before any indictments have been filed—I believe the escalating online delirium of Judiana and Plame blame-game analysis will be remembered as the moment when more than the media changed. The very nature of literacy, perhaps even the shape and texture of consciousness changed, the way Virginia Woolf declared human character changed in 1910. All that transformative stuff McLuhan predicted might actually come true, although not in a way he had foreseen. It’s no longer about how the Web is changing us, although the Web is a factor. It’s not merely about cyber-connectivity. It’s about internal neural connections and configurations; it’s really about the way the brain may be changing. The way the blogosphere has become a new hemisphere of the brain. Now there’s right brain, left brain and blog brain.

This is Ron Rosembaum in The New York Observer. His colum this week is a minor classic, recounting his breakthrough moment of realization, when he finally grokked the "brain-altering role of the Web."

Rosenbaum should have been down with the internet from the beginning, given his love of meta-meta-ness (comments on comments on comments), his gift for teasing out relationships between apparently unrelated items, his trafficking in obscure niches of wildly original alternative analysis — all things the internet enables in a way big way. He even wrote the celebrated article "Secrets of the LIttle Blue Box" in Esquire in 1971 about phone phreaks, the proto-hackers who could manipulate the telephone network by mimicking system tones (Wikipedia: phreaking).

But at first he didn't get it. In 1999, as he quotes himself in his column, he wrote that "the only unequivocal beneficiaries of wired culture" will be "neo-Nazi pinheads … child pornographers and Bill Gates."

This, even as late as 1999, was pretty much the way the NY magazine intellegentisa felt about the web. And appropriately enough Rosenbaum's put-down was pubilshed in Slate, a web site, sorry, "magazine," whose primary mission has been to make the internet seem safe for people who went to Harvard.

I suspect Rosenbaum's been coming around for awhile. I recall but can't point to (literally, his older pieces are behind an archive paywall) previous columns where he's noted things in passing that he could only have noted had he been spending significant time online, previous columns where he's dropped hints that his regard for the web had changed. He may even have been more explicit at some point, and I missed it.

If only Rosenbaum would take the next step and blog. He's a natural for the medium, but I think that about a number of writers who should be online and aren't (case in point). Still, it's great to have him writing columns like this one. I've bounced back and forth between the NY media world and the online world, and the two worlds seem very close to me, but the Venn diagram of the actual overlap is too small.

Even if Rosenbaum is finally on board, the Observer still has some catching up to do. Rosembaum's column is free online until some point next week, I'm guessing late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning, after which it goes behind the paywall. So run don't walk, read Rosenbaum now, and save the $2.95 it will cost you after that.

Cross CountryWeb Stuff : : WiFi: Right Up There With Cleanliness

In case you were wondering, it's pretty easy to find a motel with WiFi when driving around the states. My wife, daughter and I just drove NYC to LA (78-PA Turnpike-70-44-state highways-25-40-15-10), and everywhere we stopped along the way we could find a motel with "high speed internet access," which is the phrase everyone uses.

It's not just the chains on the interstates: HSIA is more readilby availble in the outposts of Comfort Inn, Super 8 and the like, but many out-of-the-way one-offs have it too: Note, above, the Lodge USA Motel in Guymon, OK. I won't say Guymon is in the middle of nowhwere, since it sits in the midst of the instensely beatuiful Great Plains, but I will say it is off the beaten track: in the Oklahoma panhandle, miles from the nearest interstate. Still, the Lodge USA has recogizned that competitive demands require it offer free HSIA, a selling point right up there with that other roadside motel staple: "clean rooms." And at $35 per, who can argue with that combo?

A few more HSIA tips and observations:

HSIA almost always means WiFi. Only once in our travels did it come from a wall-socket.

HSIA almost always means free. We stayed in a Route 66-era motel in Kingman, AZ, which charged $5 a day for access. But then the room cost $40, so what's $5 more?

HSIA almost always means "in your room." Occasionally it means "only in the lobby," which, if you didn't clarify up front, can be a bit infuriating once you've checked in and are told "in our rooms we have dial-up." Oh. Great.

Web Stuff : : Site-Specific Podcasts

The hive's buzzing about podcasts today, what with the story about Odeo on the NYT business frontpage. I've been reading about the glories of podcasting for some time from the first-movers — Winer, Curry & Searls — but it's never much appealed to me. If someone has something to say, I'd rather read it than hear it. I'm also not much for listening to my iPod through headphones. (So what do I do with it? Not much, but I do use it via a cassette-adapter in my car.)

However, this morning I've thought of podcasts I'd strap on the earplugs for, maybe even pay for. I'd love an art or architecture critic talking in my ear as I tour the new MOMA; Simon Schama annotating the Rembrandts at the MET; or Peter Schjeldahl walking me through some blockbuster exhibit. Yes, museums do audio guides all the time, and occasionally they are even good. But why should museums have a monopoly on this content? I want something unstuffy, edgy, unbeholden to any institutional pressures.

I'd also like to hear somone in my ear at certain destinations — Shelby Foote at Shiloh, say, or Ian Frazier on a particular resonant stretch of road in South Dakota (notice here I've plugged my iPod into my car stereo). Now that I written these last two, I think I should make clear I'm not looking for books-on-tape excerpts but specific narration made for looking at a certain scene from a certain vantage point.

I guess I should also make clear I'm not just looking for podcasts from big old-media types, who will of course be the last ones to do them. I'm open to anyone the blogoshpere wants to serve up. Maybe John Robb has a favorite battlefield?

This is mostly a lazyweb request for content (hopefully that works too), but I did do a few googles looking for extant examples. In 2003 an artist group called Nature and Inquiry produced Invisible Ideas: A GPS-enabled Artwalk through the Boston Public Garden and Common for PDAs. Not exactly a podcast, but kind of what I am talking about. Couldn't find anything on Audible or at ipodder, but I may have missed it.

Like I said, this is mostly a lazyweb post/request. This is what I want to hear. Someone out there get busy.