Chris Boese's Weblog

Tim Porter echos Dan Gillmor's thoughts

I feel reinforced, as he picked up on the same key elements of Gillmor's post mortem that I did. And they bear repeating in Tim's nutshell form, so I'll quote it here. Also, it is worthwhile to repeat what Tim's commenter, Dan Conover, adds to the discussion. That, I think, is the best part.

Link: First Draft by Tim Porter: Citizen Journalism: Making New Mistakes.

[...]

I don't think it's wise to draw any deep conclusions about the future of citizen journalism or grassroots media - and there is a difference -- from Bayosphere's short-lived existence. We are very early into the we-media cycle. The technology is still developing, the user curve is still rising and there hasn't yet emerged a large-scale viable business model based on media creation (vs. selling the tools).

That said, I see three principles from the Bayosphere experience that are key for newspapers and other entities that hope to use citizen journalism as part or all of their business:

Community can't be forced.
Focus is foremost.
Personality is a plus.

Community can't be forced. Dan alluded to this when he said, "Tools matter, but they're no substitute for community building." I would amend this to say, "Tools matter because they allow people to build communities."

[...]

There are many others who have thought more deeply than I about virtual communities (start with Howard Rheingold), but I think it's fair to say (and please correct me if I'm off base) that most successful online communities thrive because their users feed, nuture and police them, not because they were built by an entrepreneur or incumbent media company.

I have been using Flickr as a recent example. The site now contains more than 70 million photos uploaded by users, who sort the images by tags, rate them as favorites, and share them with friends and family. Within this vast digital warehouse, hundreds and hundreds of communities have formed, groups devoted to locations (California), pets (cats) or objects (doors). Flickr provided the tools, invited members of the digital camera revolution and got out of the way.

HEAR HEAR!

[...]

One of the differences between "forced community" sites like Your Hub and Flickr is well articulated by Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, in a comment on Grubisich's piece:

"With online journalism, the less you structure your grassroots initiative like a workplace newsroom, and the more you structure it like a social community, the more successful your initiative will be."

[...]

In his post, Dan Gillmor said that "citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words." True. It is also about communities telling their own stories. Newspapers must now decide if they want to be a part of those communities.

Posted by Tim Porter at January 25, 2006 10:03 AM

Comments

Now that I'm advising an actual newspaper on these topics, one of the most important things I tell people is that they simply cannot look at these new forms as traditional business ventures to be planned, staffed, marketed and "launched." You cannot "launch" a community. You can serve one, tend one, nurture one, grow it, but you cannot launch one.

Nor can you control one. A community you control is a plantation. God knows we have enough of those.

Posted by: dan conover on January 26, 2006 07:05 AM

What Dan says is something I've been meditating on since working on my dissertation, and I think it is just essential. From the very beginning, tech wonks got excited about building tools and platforms, but they neglected to pay attention to what happens at the place where community or cyberculture meets interface, where the rubber meets the road, or more importantly still, how cultures construct interfaces.

I remember when I was just beginning my dissertation research into the Xenaverse, and I happened to be hanging around in the MIT Media Lab with one of my friends, picking the brains of the grad students around there. At a party I was telling one guy a little bit about my project, and he loved it, but he kept coming back to this one point... what kind of an interface or a platform could you build for those people?

And I was so frustrated in trying to explain to him that the community or culture was organically constructing its own interfaces, its own virtual landscape, and peopling it, enacting it, authoring it, cross-linking it. True, the Xenaverse didn't have blog tools, but especially when it came to fan fiction, some of the best fan fiction index sites made powerful use of database tools, interaction design principles, and other organic elements of self-organizing sites (ratings, reviews, comments). Not to mention the extensive beta-reader network that grew up around the different groups of fan writers, essentially writing workshops.

Then the tail end of the 1990s came along, with all that top-down, VC-driven frenzy of force-feeding audiences and force-feeding cultures, with no magnetic draw, no reason for surfers to return for enriched experiences and repeat visits. But they WERE doing that in the Xenaverse, to the tune of millions of hits on the top sites, or crashing servers when new story installments were posted. All those top-down people could not force what the Xenaverse and other vital online communities like it created AND AUTHORED organically.

That is why I had to laugh a bit when Jason Calacanis came charging into the blog movement like he was going to own it (OK, so he did get a $25M deal out of it, but there are suckers born every minute). He came in thinking money and top down, and maybe he succeeded and maybe he didn't. It depends on how you measure success. I look at it in terms of the vitality and longevity of a community or cyberculture. The blog movement is/was a wonderful revenge against those top-down skim-meisters. Calacanis may have skimmed his piece off the top of the blog movement, but he still doesn't have a handle on what bottom-up grassroots really is, and it can't be faked, manufactured, freeped, stapled, mutilated, or folded.

I'm not saying it's the be-all and end-all, or even that it will last forever, any more than the Xenaverse in its heyday did. But it does posit the impossibly simplistic dichotomy of central control vs organic distribution. And that is worth thinking about for a while.

And for a lot of people, most of that thinking entails ways to take control of that which cannot be controlled and still remain what it essentially is, fencing the wild west, making walled gardens, creating bridges and installing oneself as a Troll to charge a toll to the Billy Goats Gruff, creating artificial choke points of power, until the network routes around them.

Wouldn't it be interesting if the people thinking so hard about ways to control the herd of wild horses were instead devoting all that energy to how to foster more herds?

• Control model of power= value through scarcity.
• Distributed model of power = value through circulation.

Always, there are those who are thinking intensely about ways to harvest value from an enterprise. What is interesting to me is to observe the different routes through which they attempt to get it.

Dan Gillmor reflects on Bayosphere

Since I taught Dan's book "We the Media" last semester, I'm very interested in his de-briefing below, and an update from him on things I've perceived that were holding the Bayosphere site back as well. I'm not giving up on the concepts Dan has introduced to the conversation, but I think monitoring and adjusting is most helpful at this time.

I just had to grab out my favorite pithy bits from Dan's post.

Link: From Dan: A Letter to the Bayosphere Community | Bayosphere.

From Dan: A Letter to the Bayosphere Community

Submitted by Dan Gillmor on Tue, 01/24/2006 - 6:30am.

A little over a year ago, I left the San Jose Mercury News to pursue my passion for what we've come to call "citizen media" -- the idea that anyone with something to say could use increasingly powerful and decreasingly expensive tools to say it, potentially for a global audience.

I left what I considered one of the two or three best gigs in the entire newspaper industry. But having published We The Media -- and seeing first-hand the application of bottom-up communications in all kinds of arenas, especially journalism -- I knew it was time to devote my full energies to this emergent phenomenon.

I learned some things last year, about media, about citizens, about myself. Although citizen media, broadly defined, was taking the world by storm, the experiment with Bayosphere didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. Many fewer citizens participated, they were less interested in collaborating with one another, and the response to our initiatives was underwhelming. I would do things differently if I was starting over.

I erred, in retrospect, by taking the standard Silicon Valley route. I was trying to figure out how to make this new phenomenon pay its own way out of the gate, just as the traditional, still deep-pocketed media, super-energized entrepreneurs and legions of talented "amateurs" -- a word I use in the most positive sense here -- were starting to jump seriously into the fray.

[...]

We envisioned Bayosphere as a place where people in the San Francisco Bay Area community could learn about and discuss the regional scene, with a focus on technology, the main economic driver. My tech and policy blogging would be an anchor, hopefully attracting some readers and, crucially, some self-selected citizen journalists who'd join a wider conversation.

The evidence strongly suggested early on that this was not likely to be a viable publishing venture for some considerable period without partnerships to bring in both readers and contributors. But long discussions with potential partners -- including several whose participation would have been game-changing in a journalistic and business-model sense -- didn't pan out. (It will be an exciting day when one or more of those folks tries a citizen-driven media venture.)

Even so, Bayosphere attracted quite a bit of traffic, and some heartening effort on the part of some citizen journalists. I'm grateful to them for trying. But as is obvious to anyone who's paid attention, the site didn't take off -- in large part, no question about it, because of my own miscues and shortcomings. My friend Esther Dyson says, wisely, "Always make new mistakes." Did I ever. But I learned from them, and from what did work.

 

[snipped great bullet points on the lessons Dan learned. Go read them! I don't want to go point-by-point through it, but I do disagree on several issues. Regarding the pledge and names and responsiblity, I think sites like Daily Kos diaries or TPM Cafe, or even the odd community of the Huffington Posters hang together better, names or no, not because of the name issue, but because discontent fuels motivation, spurs action, writing, posting. People with interesting things to say. Bayosphere had Dan, who is always an interesting read, but he was JC Penney's at the Bayosphere mall, and he needed to recruit a few ace writers, anchor stores, if you will, and allow others to distinguish themselves according to their talents.

In that respect, I still have to defer to the terrific work that Jonathan Weber and Courtney Lowery are doing at NewWest.net, tapping into the motiviations of people who care about the land use and conservation and politics of the various localities of the West to generate interest, controversy, and outstanding journalism. And New West won some online journalism awards too. Dan's ideas inspire me, but the example of New West shows what the interfaces and communities can do, even though it is still definitely a startup effort. I remain very grateful that they allowed me to observe and learn about what they are doing with the site. There are many brilliant ideas implemented on the site, and I plan to steal and bastardize from them freely.

What is most impressive in Dan's points is that he recognizes that you can't wave a magic wand and create a vital community. And I've learned (often the hard way) that it is equally hard to migrate vital face-to-face communities into online community spaces. It really makes me realize more than ever how EXCEEDINGLY LUCKY I was to stumble on the Xenaverse for my dissertation, because friends  who wanted to study the same community and interface issues I did around grassroots movements online often hit dead ends when their communities fizzled. The Xenaverse NEVER lacked motivation, and here, years after the show has gone off the air, is still bringing people online, sending them to conventions, etc. They were activists in terms of their interactions with old media forms, yet they also had a great thirst for interaction with each other, and that kept things rolling and really made my project.

Anyway, back to Dan's words...]

A more personal lesson also emerged: As an entrepreneur, let's just say I wasn't in my element. The relentless focus on a single, limited project for long periods of time, combined with the inevitable compromises inherent in for-profit decision-making, turned out not to be my best skills. For almost 25 years I'd thrived on the constant deadlines and competition of journalism. So I assumed I'd easily handle the pressures of trying to create a business from scratch while also keeping my reporting and writing skills intact and helping other people join in. In reality, I was unprepared for what proved to be an entirely different kind of pressure, and didn't handle it nearly as well as I'd expected. I allowed myself to get distracted, moreover, by matters that were not directly relevant to the project.

[...]

In September, we stopped spending our investors' money, and sustained Bayosphere ourselves on a relatively bare-bones budget from our own funds, putting in our own time.

We've never lost sight of this, however: A more democratized media is crucial our common future -- grassroots ideas, energy and talent. I believe this more than ever, as do Mitch Kapor and the folks at the Omidyar Network, who provided seed funding for the project. Their work is changing the world for the better, and I admire them.

As the Bayosphere project was playing out last fall, I concluded that I could do more for the citizen journalism movement by forming a nonprofit enterprise, a "Center for Citizen Media" where I could put my skills and passion for the genre to better use -- looking at lots of disparate elements and connecting the dots. (And as a friend accurately remarked when I told him not long ago about my planned shift toward the nonprofit arena, "Well, you've always struck me a more of a dot-org kind of guy than the dot-com kind.")

[...]

I share the disappointment of some of our citizen journalists. And I respect their skepticism; we encouraged it, after all. It's definitely no fun to have disappointed folks (starting with Michael and our investors, and myself). Still, I owe those of you who participated and visited my thanks for being part of the experiment.

The shift in how we communicate and collaborate, how we learn what's going on in our world, has barely begun. Predicting the future is for other people, but I'm optimistic that we'll collectively figure this out.

[...]

A few words from the honored U.S. patriot, Patrick Henry

This is from Patrick Henry's opening speech on June 5, 1788, during the Virginia Convention during debate on ratification of the proposed new Constitution of the United States. (For the historically-challenged, Henry's most famous line is "Give me liberty or give me death.")

"If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute! The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him, and it will be the subject of long meditation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to
accomplish his design, and, sir, will the American spirit solely relieve you when this happens?

I would rather infinitely--and I am sure most of this Convention are of the same opinion--have a king, lords, and commons, than a government so replete with such insupportable evils. If we make a
king we may prescribe the rules by which he shall rule his people, and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them; but the president, in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke.

I can not with patience think of this idea. If ever he violate the laws, one of two things will happen: he will come at the head of the army to carry everything before him, or he will give bail, or do what Mr. Chief Justice will order him. If he be guilty, will not the recollection of his crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American throne? Will not the immense difference between being master of everything and being ignominiously tried and punished powerfully excite him to make this bold push?

But, sir, where is the existing force to punish him? Can he not, at the head of his army, beat down every opposition? Away with your president! we shall have a king: the army will salute him monarch; your militia will leave you, and assist in making him king, and fight against you: and what have you to
oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?"

Will not absolute despotism ensue?"

Clifford pinged me, 4x4!

Well there hey, it looks like a fun game, so I'll bite. Gives me a chance to say hi to Clifford, since I've been such a bad correspondent, and he took such good pictures from our meeting/dinner thing in L.A.

Howdy Clifford! Thanks for thinking of me! I don't know how enlightening my answers will be, but I'll give it a shot. All these long lists of four, tho, and dude, I just got back to Atlanta and I'm supposed to be unpacking! All these boxes... ach ach ach.

Link: Meme of Four | Cosmic Variance.

Here are my answers:

Four Jobs You've Had:

1. Newspaper photojournalist
2. College radio DJ
3. University professor
4. Database massager for Cisco

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over

1. Harry Potter series
2. Lord of the Rings series
3. Matrix series
4. Anything with Julie Andrews

Four Places You've Lived

1. Eau Claire, Wisconsin
2. Wasilla, Alaska
3. Fayetteville, Arkansas
4. Troy, New York

Four TV Shows You Love to Watch

1. Xena
2. X-Files
3. Outer Limits
4. Anything on Food Network or HGTV

Four Places You've Been on Vacation

1. India
2. Southern California
3. NYC
4. Montana

Four Blogs You Visit Daily

1. Cosmic Variance, to be sure!
2. TV Newser
3. Boing Boing
4. Daily Kos

Four of Your Favorite Foods

1. Mayonnaise
2. Any kind of cheese
3. Raw oysters!
4. Pistachios

Four Places You'd Rather Be

1. Uh, the first one is censored, that's private
2. In cyberspace
3. Somewhere on the Mediterranean
4. I generally like being wherever I am, or else I would not be there.

Four Albums You Can't Live Without
(I'm boycotting the music industry right now, because it is E-VILE)

1. Anything with Jennifer Nettles singing lead
2. Indigo Girls "Rites of Passage"
3. Fleetwood Mac, "Rumors"
4. Anything by Julie Andrews

Four Vehicles You've Owned

1. '67 Red VW Beetle (went through 3 engines)
2. '78 Honda Civic
3. '87 Mazda B2000 Pickup
4. Various Saturns

Four Bloggers to Carry on the Meme

1. Jenny D
2. John Holbo
3. pericat at unlocking the air
4. BigSkySquid

And for Clifford's four new questions, OK, I'll do that too, just cuz I'm a good sport.

Four Scientists (Living or Dead) I'd like to have dinner with

1. Thomas Jefferson
2. Nikola Tesla
3. Carl Jung
4. Stephen Hawking

Four Favorite Research Papers

1. Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish"
2. Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media"
3. Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed"
4. Donna Haraway's "Simians, Cyborgs, and Women"

Four Things You'd Like To Do In Your Field Before You Die

1. Write a book on the level of the four favorite "research papers" above.
2. Build an engaging, fluid, and self-organizing platform for a user-centered and designed immersive VR learning space (think of the Librarian in Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash")
3. Rage, rage against the dying of the light
4. Leave a body of mulitimedia creative work that adequately expresses nearly everything I have to say.

Boy, that took a long time to work out. Clifford, next time you give me homework, let me know if there will be grades involved.

Chris

I'm still waiting for my piece of the pie...

Link: Google's Shadow Payroll Is Not Such a Secret Anymore - New York Times.

I've been running Google Adwords, of which the first rule of Google Adwords is that you can't talk about Google Adwords, but besides that, now I find out that I'm on Google's "shadow payroll." Go figure! No stock options or anything fun like that. And while I'm busy not talking about Google Adwords, does anyone else notice that one's return per click feels like it goes down the closer one gets to a payoff level? Maybe it's just me, but the goalposts feel like they're moving whenever I approach the imminent delivery of a check.

btw, here's a quick hit from the Lost Remote blog... the shadow payroll may be most folks' only hope at Google, unless you want to slip your resume' into a five-story slush pile.

Link: Lost Remote: Google wannabes top 150,000/month.

Google wannabes top 150,000/month
If you send a resume to Google this month, you won't be alone. In fact, you'll be in a pile of about 150,000 resumes. That's a five-story stack of paper. Still, writes the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, good perks: free cafeteria meals, free use of laundry machines, a child-care center, a free annual one-night ski trip (resort destinations vary depending on office location), dog-friendly offices and an on-site doctor. They had me at "doctor."

Posted by Steve Safran on 12/26/05

Link: Google's Shadow Payroll Is Not Such a Secret Anymore - New York Times.

E-Commerce Report

Google's Shadow Payroll Is Not Such a Secret Anymore

By BOB TEDESCHI Published: January 16, 2006

FEELING depressed because you missed out on Google's stock bonanza? Not to worry. Just get on the company's shadow payroll.

Hundreds of thousands of people have essentially done just that by starting blogs, forums or other informational sites and getting paid for posting ads on Google's behalf. And while the money they earn might not be enough for them to buy, say, a share of Google's stock, such revenues are growing.

The trickle-down effect from Google does not stop at fledgling entrepreneurs. A growing number of rank-and-file contributors to Web sites are also profiting. Consider Digital Point Solutions, a software company in San Diego, which publishes an online forum (http://forums.digitalpoint.com) frequented by about 15,000 users. Any one of them who starts a new forum discussion topic receives half of the advertising revenue paid to the site by Google for ads on the front page of that topic section. (The discussion's creator then splits his share with others who post messages.)

[...]

Mr. Hogan said it was difficult to say whether the financial incentives had made the forum's participants more active, because its growth rate was about the same before and after it started paying users. Either way, the payoff is meager. "In the best-case scenario, someone might make $50 a month, so they're definitely not quitting their jobs to do this," he said. "But it might be enough to buy a nice dinner."

One area of concern, Mr. Hogan said, was whether the forum's participants would skew their postings to earn more money. For instance, since advertisers in certain categories, like sexual-performance drugs, pay much more to place their ads on Google and its affiliated sites, you might expect technology discussions to randomly veer in that direction.

[...]

Google's advertising network sales, which come largely from its AdSense advertisers, reached $675 million in the third quarter of 2005, the last period for which Google reported results. That figure was up 76 percent from a year earlier. AdSense generates slightly less revenue than Google's primary revenue engine, its search Web sites, which sold about $885 million worth of ads in the third quarter of 2005, a 115 percent jump from the previous year.

Google.com and the company's foreign search sites contribute more to Google's bottom line than AdSense, because for every dollar the company brings in through AdSense and other places that distribute its ads, it pays roughly 78.5 cents back to sites like Digital Point that display the ads.

But in some ways, search advertising has a more limited horizon, since the number of advertisements a company can display is limited by the number of searches its users conduct. Internet users continue to increase their reliance on search sites, and Google in particular, but the rate of growth is in the single digits.

[...]

To that end, the company has refined the program significantly, with various features intended to attract more advertisers and publishers. For instance, as of late last year anyone who created a blog with Google's Blogger service was automatically enrolled in the AdSense program.

"Before that, it was quite painful to figure out," said Gokul Rajaram, the business product manager for AdSense, "so over the last few months we've seen a sharp uptick in bloggers using AdSense."

[...]

Broken ice dam blamed for 300-year chill?

Link: New Scientist Breaking News - Broken ice dam blamed for 300-year chill.

I got into this subject after watching a terrific 2-hour special on the "Little Ice Age" during medieval times on the History Channel (official title: "Little Ice Age: Big Chill." ) You read and hear about various political and social forces during the so-called "Dark Ages," the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, but here I am a weather geek, but previously I knew nothing about the climate issues that precipitated some of that social unrest (not to mention the implications for public health and nutrition).

So this thing in New Scientist caught my attention, but if you watch the same show I did, you probably won't be so quick to blame an ice dam as a clear cause/effect thing (the article below tempers totally direct causality as well). The TV program outlined a number of interrelated theories as to why the climate shifted during those centuries, not the least of which was a big volcanic eruption in Indonesia toward the end that kept summer from arriving one year. In the show, I was most fascinated by the early part of the period rather than the later part, because the social effects were so dramatic. I could imagine trying to deal with such inexplicable changes myself.

I remember seeing an unusual (to me) bit in the film version of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," when there was this strange ice party/carnival in England, and the crew of a Russian or Slavic boat was forced to winter there because the sea-going boats were iced in.

Also, I've been learning a bit more about these ice dams from living last semester in Missoula, Montana, an area that once was a massive freshwater lake held in place by an ice dam as well, I've been told. When that dam busted, it made a 500-foot wave that ran all the way to the Pacific, according to folks there. They may have been joshing a newbie, but I bought it.

Link: New Scientist Breaking News - Broken ice dam blamed for 300-year chill.

Broken ice dam blamed for 300-year chill

14:21 10 January 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Kurt Kleiner

A three-century-long cold spell that chilled Europe 8200 years ago was probably caused by the bursting of a Canadian ice dam, which released a colossal flood of glacial meltwater into the Atlantic Ocean.

Two new papers, using different computer models, show that the massive freshwater flood accounts for evidence of the sudden climate change, which cooled Greenland by an average of 7.4°C, and Europe by about 1°C. It was the most abrupt and widespread cool spell in the last 10,000 years.

[...]

In 1999 Don Barber, a geologist now at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, US, and colleagues suggested that the cooling was caused by flooding by glacial meltwater. Geological evidence shows that by about 11,000 years ago, retreating glaciers had left two huge freshwater lakes sprawling over Central Canada and parts of the northern US, bigger than all of today's Great Lakes combined.

Eventually, the lakes broke through an ice sheet that served as a dam and drained into Hudson Bay, and from there into the North Atlantic (Nature, vol 400, p 344).

[...]

"Strong confirmation"

In the new papers, one in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the other in the current Quaternary Science Reviews, two teams of researchers using different computer models say that both models show that such a freshwater flood could shut down ocean circulation in a way that is consistent with temperature data from the time.

[...]

The work could have implications for the modern climate. Some researchers suggest that global warming and glacial melting might one day change ocean salinity enough to cause a similar disruption in ocean currents.

Journal references: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0510095103), Quaternary Science Reviews (vol 25, p 63)

BTW, it was on the History Channel that I watched that documentary. Here's the listing for the next showing of it, on January 23rd, twice that day, times depending on your time zone. They've got the DVD for sale too. Little Ice Age: Big Chill DVD Climatologists reveal what happened, and debate whether a similar cataclysm is in store for the 21st century. See how a few small degrees of difference changed the face of the world for centuries.

Scientists call it the Little Ice Age--but its impact was anything but small. From 1300 to 1850, a period of cataclysmic cold caused havoc. It froze Viking colonists in Greenland, accelerated the Black Death in Europe, decimated the Spanish Armada, and helped trigger the French Revolution. The Little Ice Age reshaped the world in ways that now seem the stuff of fantasy--New York Harbor froze and people walked from Manhattan to Staten Island, Eskimos sailed kayaks as far south as Scotland, and "the year without a summer" saw two feet of snow fell on New England one June and July.

Could another catastrophic cold snap strike in the 21st century? Leading climatologists offer the latest theories, and scholars and historians recreate the history that could be a glimpse of things to come. Face the cold, hard truth of the past--an era that may be a window to our future.

Tune In:
Monday, January 23 @ 10am ET/PT

Not so long ago, civilization learned that it was no match for just a few degrees drop in temperature. Scientists call it the Little Ice Age--but its impact was anything but small. From 1300 to 1850, a period of cataclysmic cold caused havoc. It froze Viking colonists in Greenland, accelerated the Black Death in Europe, decimated the Spanish Armada, and helped trigger the French Revolution. The Little Ice Age reshaped the world in ways that now seem the stuff of fantasy--New York Harbor froze and people walked from Manhattan to Staten Island, Eskimos sailed kayaks as far south as Scotland, and two feet of snow fell on New England in June and July during "the Year Without a Summer". Could another catastrophic cold snap strike in the 21st century? Leading climatologists offer the latest theories, and scholars and historians recreate the history that could be a glimpse of things to come. Face the cold, hard truth of the past--an era that may be a window to our future.   TVPG  cc

My Postal worker is the one who alerted me to the Netflix theft...

Someone named Mike posted this to TechDirt, but I was immediately struck by the coincidence with what happened to me this January as I was relocating back to Atlanta from Montana.

Link: Techdirt:Through Rain, Sleet Or Snow, The Postal Serice May Steal Your Netflix DVDs.

Through Rain, Sleet Or Snow, The Postal Serice May Steal Your Netflix DVDs

Contributed by Mike                 on Monday, January 9th, 2006 @ 02:14AM
from the that's-a-lot-of-movies dept.
Netflix's (patented) red DVD envelopes are quite distinct and easy to spot in a mailbox. That's good for marketing purposes... but apparently also good for unscrupulous postal service workers. Apparently, police have arrested one postal worker and are investigating another for over 500 missing Netflix DVDs. Of course, it makes you wonder what these postal workers were thinking. With so many DVDs missing in one particular area, it wouldn't take a genius to figure out exactly where the problem is occurring.

                               

The comments on this particular post are instructive, especially the two people who make direct defense of postal workers. I live in a big apartment complex, and it was my very sharp postal worker who told me of identity and mail thieves in the complex, and some other tenants who were ripped off, either by people putting unforwarded mail up above the locking mailboxes, or by the apartment management not changing the locks diligently enough as the postal boxes change hands.

I'm getting a new mail key tomorrow, but I think the three Netflix movies that were delivered here before I arrived in state are simply gone, and I'm trying to figure out how to report the theft to Netflix. I'm still a big fan of the program, but the locking boxes had lulled me into a false sense of security, I guess. Doesn't do much good to have locking boxes if people are regularly recycling old keys and trying old boxes.

The good news is that I had not officially forwarded most of my bill mail to this address yet, knowing it would take me a while in transit to get back to town.

I'm still not sure about getting a PO box yet, or even one of those commercial mail boxes. I like getting my mail where I live, and our locking boxes don't have our apartment numbers on them or anything.