Wired News from the Past

"The telegraph made it possible for people in different places to read the same news."
-- Valerie Komor

We take news for granted. At the Money:Tech Conference today, speakers were talking about how to deal with real-time newsfeeds, which continues to drive the financial world. Brian O'Keefe of Panopticon said "we're collecting and disseminating news at a greater rate than our ability to consume it."

On a visit this week to the Associated Press, I had the opportunity to meet Valerie Komor, the archivist for the AP, and explore the fascinating history of the AP. The AP was founded in 1846 when five NY newspapers decided to share the costs of transmitting the news of the Mexican War from the port at Mobile, Alabama to the southern terminus of the telegraph, near Richmond, and on to New York. Thus was the "association of presses" formed. The brain behind the idea was Moses Yale Beach (1800-68), second owner of the New York Sun.[clarification from VK.]

Later the same five papers agreed to form the Harbor News Service to share the costs of a rowboat used to retrieve the news of Europe from incoming ocean liners. They hoped also to avoid some of the problems of intercepting the new -- the many press boats were crashing into each other.

The AP, established as a cooperative and owned by newspapers, grew and developed into a national news organization that gathers and distributes news on behalf of its subscribers. It was the technology of the telegraph and the teletype that got it started.

You can read more about the AP's history on its site. I particularly like this tidbit about using carrier pigeons from 1849: "Daniel H. Craig, pigeon trainer and news entrepreneur, begins operations out of Halifax, Nova Scotia to meet ships arriving from Europe. Craig is able to telegraph stories over the Nova Scotia telegraph line before ships dock in New York." See the FedEx Super Bowl commercial featuring carrier pigeons. Early newspapers were in the "express" business, investing first in a pony-express operation between New York and Boston, and later in express trains on the same route. Before the telegraph, a lot of news arrived in newsrooms and homes as letters delivered by the postal system.

The Teletype system came along in the 1920's, built by the Teletype Corporation of Skokie, IL. (See Wikipedia on teletype and telex systems; a telex is a means of routing messages between teletypes but the word telex seems to be used the way we used fax to refer to the machine and its output.) The teletype terminal above is shown with keyboard; there were models without keyboards for receiving only. An ASR terminal (automatic send and receive) had a paper tape reader and hole punch system. This tape was frequently edited by cutting sections and taping them together, an early form of "cut and paste."

Teletype transmissions were very slow by today's standards at sixty words per minute. Yet that's how news was sent from one city to another through the 1960's and later.

Valerie pulled out a file and showed us the telexes from the day of the Kennedy assassination. These were sheets of paper that were ripped out the Teletype, as each fragment of the news story came to them. An AP photographer on the scene called the Dallas bureau and they began transmitting the news as it happened -- in real-time -- to the Kansas City bureau, which was the regional hub.

The telex reads:

Photographer James W. Altgens said he saw blood on the President's head.

Altgens said he heard two shots but thought someone was shooting fireworks until he saw the blood on the President.

Users of the teletype system developed concise forms of communication because every word was precious. “We all spoke in telex jargon. You had to shorten everything you said,” said Gustavo Bottan in the MIT Sloan School Alumni Newsletter (Spring/Summer 2006). “I remember spending a lot of time writing the telex message and then shortening it.”

The Teletype had its own "wirespeak," the name of a book documenting it by Richard Hartnett. "--30--" meant "end of story" or "end of transmission." It's a convention that many writers continue to use today. "--73--" meant "thanks" and "--88--" stood for "love and kisses." Add telex jargon to the odd history of abbreviated communication that today includes emoticons and SMS acronyms.

A recent Economist story, "A Faint Ping", talks about the diminishing number of telex systems in use. Yet some stubbornly survive.

Many of the remaining customers are banks. Telexes, unlike ordinary e-mails, are legally valid documents (being to all intents and purposes impossible to fake). “The telex network is closed—you can't get in unless you are part of the club,” says Peter MacLaverty of SwissTelex.

As newspapers look to re-invent themselves, they might learn as much from their past as they can from worrying about the future.

Slow Down and Read Make

The comic "Over the Hedge" featured Make in its January 21st strip. Thanks to Poncho Alarcon of Monterrey, Mexico who spotted the turtle named Verne reading Make.

I'm working on a piece for the next issue of Make called "Slow Made," which points out similar ideas in the Slow Food movement and the Maker movement. The idea is to explore ways to become a co-producer, not a consumer. Verne is said by his creators, Michael Fry and T Lewis, to be "a true renaissance-turtle." Perhaps he's a perfect symbol for slow made.

Hand of Google

While looking at a library book scanned by Google, I found this image, the hand behind the scanner revealed.

The Rest of the Rest of Us

Macworld is about the excitement of the arrival of new "cargo," to use Jared Diamond's term from Guns, Germs, and Steel. As Diamond wrote, people with more resources see the world differently. It shapes our world view. The things we possess are not just these things but (to us) symbols of hope and signs of optimism that good things are possible. Technologists, by definition, are people who not only have resources but are resourceful -- we know what to do with what we have. It's a huge advantage.

I was reminded of Apple's slogan that the Mac was "The Computer For The Rest Of Us" unveiled as part of its "1984" commercial. How we identified with that slogan. To quote Henry V, "we happy few." It spoke to how we saw ourselves as outsiders, as participants in a rebellion against conformity. We saw technology as a way of setting ourselves free -- free to explore, free to do things our own way, free as in freedom. With this technology, the "rest of us" became an enlightened majority and ever since we've been buying computers, cell phones, HDTVs, HD video cameras, digital cameras, GPS systems, iPods, etcetera, etcetera.

Well, what about all those people who don't have what we have, who don't pay attention to Macworld, who don't keep up with the latest technology? Aren't they the "rest" of the "rest of us?" It's possible they don't understand "our" world and more likely that we don't understand theirs. They don't have our access to tools and information (resources) and they don't share our sense of hope and optimism. They don't share our belief that technology (and the people and companies developing it) can change the world. Instead, they live with fear of many things, including a fear of what we may do, including making decisions without considering them.

I raise this issue because I feel iPhone guilt. Taking the iPhone out of my pocket in a public place makes me uncomfortable. Some people ask nicely about it: "How do you like it?" But I'm keenly aware that others don't have what I have and they notice it. The iPhone is a great phone but I'm conscious that it's helping to define "the rest of us versus them."

A recent Economist story, "The Social Technologist," profiles Yossi Vardi, the gregarious Israeli entrepreneur who made his name selling ICQ to AOL in 1996 and has been herding start-ups ever since.

His message: only a happy few are benefiting from Israel's amazing high-tech boom. “We have become two countries: a high-tech one with few children and very high incomes, and a poor one with lots of kids.” Vardi says.

The same could be said of the United States, of course, or any country with a sufficiently developed "high tech" sector. What's worrisome -- and you see this if you go watch student presentations at Stanford or sit-in on any number of presentations by high-tech start-ups -- is that the resourceful keep discovering new ways to serve one another. The people with lots of cargo are excited about getting more cargo. MySpace keeps getting better.

I recently visited Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where the market once supported lots of jobs in textiles, tobacco, and furniture-making. One person told me that a 16-year-old could drop out of high school and walk into a factory for work and live a middle-class life. Today, kids still drop out of high school at 16 but they don't have a factory job waiting for them. Even those who once had the factory jobs are out of work now and attend government-funded retraining programs. Said this same person: "How many lawn mower repairmen do we need?"

One of the presidential candidates (sorry, I can't remember which one) said that we are losing lots of jobs, and not just factory jobs, but white collar jobs as well. In other words, the college-educated will have difficulty finding many of the "good jobs" that were available to previous generations. I've never heard a politician say before that the college-educated may be in the same position that factory workers have been in over the last 20 years.

It's not just the tech community that has trouble seeing these problems clearly. Timothy Noah writes in Slate of a recent column by Gloria Steinem in support of Hillary Clinton and maintains that Steinem's own agenda is blocking her view of the big picture:

"Gender," writes Gloria Steinem on the op-ed page of the Jan. 8 New York Times, "is probably the most restricting force in American life." That is incorrect. Poverty is the most restricting force in American life. It's become somewhat unfashionable to point this out, but I don't see how it could be otherwise. Given the choice between being born poor and being born female, which would you choose?

Nonetheless, one doesn't want to be a poor single mother with children. One would rather be a Hillary or Gloria. Steinem's argument's basis in gender would have us believe that the problems of poor women are essentially the same as those women who themselves have lots of resources or who grew up in families with lots of resources.

Novelist and English professor Lorrie Moore writes in an Op-Ed in The New York Times called Last Year's Role Model that the "political moment for feminine role models has, arguably, passed us by."

The children who are suffering in this country, who are having trouble in school, and for whom the murder and suicide rates and economic dropout rates are high, are boys — especially boys of color, for whom the whole educational system, starting in kindergarten, often feels a form of exile, a system designed by and for white girls.
In the progressive Midwestern city where I live, the high school dropout rate for these alienated and written-off boys is alarmingly high. Some are even middle-class, but many are just hanging on, their families torn apart by harsh economics and a merciless criminal justice system.

While we have become comfortable debating issues of gender and race, many of us are missing the obvious fact that people who are poor lack the resources the rest of us have and that's what makes them disadvantaged. That's why they see the world differently. That's why they don't share our optimism for the future or the future of their children. With a public school system that's failing the poor (and all but the brightest of the middle class), there is not much hope that children in poverty can find a way to escape it. An article on Barack Obama in The New York Times make this point:

After Hurricane Katrina, (Obama) did not attribute the lumbering federal response to the race of most of the storm’s victims. “The incompetence was color-blind,” he said, adding that the real stumbling block was indifference to the problems of the poor.

It's unacceptable that our government is indifferent to the poor. But let me reframe this argument again in terms of technology, lest you think I'm trying to make a political point. (I hope you understand that I'm not trying to argue on behalf of a candidate but rather for the importance of poverty as an issue deserving our full attention.)

Is the high-tech world indifferent to the problems of the poor? Do we have any competence that matters in helping them find a better life? Or are we just making "the happy few" that much happier?

What is a social network if the people facing the toughest problems are not part of it? They don't need more signs that tell them that they are on their own. The have-nots don't do networking. It doesn't get them anywhere.

Whether it's the latest from Web 2.0 or Apple Computer, do we need to ask what it means for those who aren't able to take part? Does it help them catch up or put them further behind? That calculation is part of the social cost of any new technology. We might think of it like we're starting to think about our oversized carbon footprint and its impact on the physical world. Is there any way to offset the negative social impact of the technology that we're so busily developing?

It's a challenge for the "best of us" to address.

Designing for Fun on the Run

Last week's Interaction Design class presentations at Stanford made me laugh. Scott Klemmer's CS147 class, a mix of undergrads and graduate students, demonstrated applications for mobile devices, which featured Nokia N95 (supplied by Nokia) and the iPhone. Each of the 15 or 16 groups had one minute to explain their project and that session was followed up by poster sessions with more detail -- a very nice format.

What made me laugh was how specifically personal the applications were. I might label these apps as Fun on the Run. Influenced by Twitter, these students focused on taking care of basic needs such as food and sleep, finding friends (often combined with food and drink), organizing their schedule, and what to do when they're bored. Many of the applications were not particularly original -- you can do many of these things via the Web already. Figuring out how to do them on the cell phone is a new challenge. Because the cellphone goes everywhere with you, it becomes part of you, just like your eyeglasses or your wallet or purse. It is you and yours, much more than a personal computer, and this is why these applications seemed so highly personalized.

Most of students followed the age-old design instinct to identify one's experience with a broader group of people. These were students presenting to other students and they had make that connection in one minute. Several of the presentations started out "Have you ever...", sounding like infomercials. One presenter said "How do you let your mother know that she's calling you when you're in class? And how can you say you're in class when she calls and you don't want to talk to her?"

Here are some of the applications:

• Good Food Now. Find a restaurant quickly.
  
• iLocator. Find lost devices.
  
• wdzzup 2.0. Find out what your friends are up to right now.
  
• Mobogotchi. Find out if your working out enough.
  
• Alarm us. Set a nap alarm that blocks calls.
  
• Simply on Time. A better alarm for power napping.
  
• Shopping ++. A better way to list what you need to buy.
  
• Food Hound. See Good Food Now.
  
• Flight Finder. Find out how long your flight is delayed.
  
• I'm There. Find out where your friends are.
  
• InTransit. Find out what's happening with your bus or subway.
  
• Fidget. What to do when you're bored on the bus or subway.
  

Another application promised to allow you to take a picture of an object in a store and do a look up on Amazon and other ecommerce sites. On its poster, the first component of the application was "Wizard of Oz" object recognition. A nice hand wave over a difficult problem.

One application that seemed more functional than many of the others was "Email Quick Replies", a macro facility for iPhone's email. Jeff Siebert and his team created a hack (which could become a native iPhone app once Apple allows it) so that with a few keystrokes you can recall a stock email reply. It was something that a guy over fifty like me might find useful.

These students apps could be a signal of what's to come once we have truly open mobile platforms. These user-driven mobile applications are a lot more fun than anything the carriers have come up with on their closed systems.

Photos below by Mike Krieger.

Scott Klemmer talks to students about their projects.

The poster for an iPhone quick-reply facility.

The poster for I'm There.

The poster for the Fidget project.

A Passion for Reading

Several items about books:

Stephen Levy writes in his Newsweek cover story on the Kindle and Jeff Bezos:

"When making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, [...] we may overlook an object that is superbly designed, wickedly functional, infinitely useful and beloved more passionately than any gadget in a Best Buy: the book."

Elizabeth Hardwick, a Kentucky-born writer who died last week in NY, said this:

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is moral illumination."

A remembrance of Hardwick, titled "The Bohemian from Kentucky", appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal newspaper last weekend. Hardwick along with her then husband, the poet Robert Lowell, were among the founders of the "New York Review of Books," which got its start during a newspaper strike in NY.

Levenger, whose tagline is "Tools for Serious Readers", offered a tempting holiday gift: a limited-edition reproduction of the Grimani Breviary, an illuminated manuscript of 1520.

Breviaries have another important place in history ... : they marked the early days of making books for a single reader. (They were shorter books than the communal ones, hence their name—an abbreviation, or summary.)

Unfortunately, the Breviary appears to be sold out at Levenger.

The recent New York Times Book Review podcast introduced me to the book "Little Heathens", an Iowa farm memoir by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, an 85-year-old, first-time author. The Times picked it as one of the best books of 2007. It also sounds like a book for the readers of Make.

From the book's home page:

I have noticed a resurgence of public interest in the rural matters where people yearn to engage in satisfying activities that have direct meaning in their lives. Perhaps this is because our current national and international challenges result in individuals feeling helpless and disconnected. My book tells of a life of total involvement.

Little Heathens' focus is on how my siblings and I were raised on a working farm in Iowa by aging grandparents (photo) imbued with Puritan values and the Protestant work ethic, while our somewhat different and indifferent mother did her insufficient best to rear us...

Our farm had no running water, no central heat, and no electricity. Above all, we had no money. Side-by-side, the adults integrated all of the children into the work force. My three siblings and I — along with our cousins who lived on a farm directly across the road — had a part in practically every aspect of making the family and the farm a successful operation. My book relates what and how we lived and learned in that very challenging world so that my story is also a how-to manual — how to scrub a pig’s head in preparation for making head- cheese, how to tame a raccoon, how to plant potatoes, and how to wean a calf.

Ms. Kalish remarks in the podcast that growing up on a farm taught her dependability, resourcefulness, and, above all, thrift. I've ordered copies for myself and for others as a holiday gift.

Kith and Kindle

Amazon's personal electronic reader cannot go it alone. Here is an idea for the Kindle to become part of the social media landscape. Let's call it Kindle's Family and Friends plan.

Similar to a few cell phone plans, let a Kindle user share books for free with up to five members of their family or friends. Once you identify your friends and family, you can share any e-book you've bought with them. This addresses one of the major issues raised by early users.

In the beginning, this sharing has marginal impact because there are so few Kindles in use. However, sharing content helps to build a library and more significantly, create social interactions around that library. Think of the Kindle not as a personal reading device but as a personal library that you'd want to share.

Why is this important for Kindle's long-term viability? The true test of Kindle, especially for its publisher stakeholders, will be not whether enough people buy Kindle but whether the first group of people who buy Kindle use it regularly and often. (I have a Sony book reader which sits idle.) Sharing expands and encourages usage for the Kindle, and this is ultimately good for publishers. Note that I can share music I buy through iTunes with five other "devices," which in my case are the computers of my wife and children in my own home. This same music can also be shared by streaming it over the local network, something that happens widely in offices. Content should not be locked to a single device, whether it's an iPod or the Kindle.

People who enjoy a book naturally want to share it with others. Just today, my wife was sending a book she had enjoyed reading, "Dreams From My Father" by Barack Obama, to her mother in Chicago. This gifting of a book is part of what makes a book valuable in the first place. If the book didn't retain this value once we consumed it, we would throw it away. By sharing a book with a relative or friend, we cultivate those relationships. It gives us something in common to talk about. Inevitably, this conversation spills out into the marketplace, a good thing for the author and publisher. (Again, the alternative is the book is thrown away, and never used again, and the conversation may never get started.)

Family and Friends is the first step in building peer networks of Kindle users who share long-form content. What about co-workers on the same project at a company or team members working together from different companies? Amazon needs to encourage ways for these users to organize their own information as shared libraries for small groups. This library might be a combination of published information, private communications and internally produced or self-generated publications. A team working on a project might want to share thick specifications, project proposals, company policy manuals, reference manuals, business plans, and standards documents. Oh, yes they might share books, too. Make it easy to build a library that can be created from lots of different sources and tools and shared with a known set of users. Make it possible to sync a library across a group of peers. (Ray Ozzie of Microsoft knows this area better than anyone as he previously created the groupware platform Groove Networks.)

One reviewer of the Kindle on Amazon.com complained about a lack of PDF support and said that he did not want to replace books. "What Amazon does not understand," he wrote, "is that I want something that could replace my *laptop* so I can review work related PDF files without printing them out."

The Kindle does support sending Word files to the device via email (I do not have a Kindle and have not tested this.) I might forward to the Kindle a long Word attachment because I don't want to read it then and there on my laptop. I may not need to read it now but at some point in the future. That's also true of longer content I encounter on the Web, which I'd like to able to forward as well. Perhaps I want family and friends to be able to forward reading material to me, even if it's the equivalent of clipping a page out of a magazine. The Kindle could maintain a queue of my required reading.

When I look at my rather messy desk, I see this mixture of private communications, drafts of documents in various stages, printed Power Points, mail, reports, binders, etc., all mixed in with magazines and books. On my laptop, the same kind of content also exists in an disorganized array of folders. One of the problems I have is not knowing whether to keep something and where to put it if I do need it in the future. (I don't file.) Most often I am trying to retrieve a document by searching my email. At other times, I have to fetch an internal document from the intranet, trying to remember where I saw it last. Or I ask someone who might know.

Kindle users should be able to store a wide range of free materials mixed together with published materials, just as they blend together on my desk or on my bookshelf. Most of what we read everyday is not published. It's private communications, and a lot of it is email. It's easy to read short-form content on a laptop but a reading device can be useful for longer, more structured documents, which may be held for some future use. Wouldn't the Kindle be more valuable if used as a repository for personal and published information but one I can share with family and friends as well?

I will add that I have given similar advice to our own online books initiative, Safari Books Online. I think it's crucial to the success of Safari that it be designed as a repository not just for O'Reilly and Pearson books but materials generated by its users and shared for them as a small group. Safari understands the concept of library; it needs to help users organize material that doesn't originate with publishers. A group of programmers that developed an internal manual of programming guidelines could have that information on the same shelf as published guides on programming languages.

So my advice to Amazon and its publishing partners: forget strict controls and think of mind share.

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