Has the Sixties Counterculture Suffered an Inversion?

It's interesting to see some of the same people who battled to legalize marijuana in the Sixties now working to make tobacco illegal.

In some places they are encouraging the narcs they once denigrated. In Ohio, for example, signs exhort individual citizens to become informers, in order to punish business owners for the uncontrollable actions of others. (Huge fines are specified for the owners of public establishments where smoking occurs.)

And where once you might have heard, "Man, have you tried that Yellow Sunshine? It's outta sight!" you now hear "Yes, Prozac really made a difference for me!"

No matter what your views on drugs, smoking, or even coffee, culture has certainly gone through some ironic twists.

Experiment: Where's the Book?

I received an interesting email yesterday from David Kennedy, a reader in San Diego. He enjoyed Blogging Heroes, and wants to share it with grad-student friends and co-bloggers at the Utah State University.

Only one problem: nobody has spare cash for shipping. So David is trying an experiment. He left the volume at a book dropoff, with a note attached asking people to help it along from the College Rolando branch of the San Diego library to a fourth-floor break room at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

See http://bloggingheroes.orderinchaos.org/ for the full story.
The note, which you can see attached to the book's cover here, reads:

Hi,

My name is “Blogging Heroes”, and I’m a book about blogging. I’m trying to get from San Diego to the Break Room on the fourth floor of old main at Utah State University in Logan, UT.

I have some friends waiting for me, and was wondering if you could help me get there? Even a little would help. Thanks! Just pick me up and move me a little in That Direction.

Feel free to read me, or even take notes in me! I want to learn as much about my trip as possible.

When I finally get home, I’ll make sure that my trip is told on bloggingheroes.orderinchaos.org

THANKS!

Kennedy and friends run a blog titled 16Bit, stuff every programmer should learn.
The experiment is completely independent of me and Wiley, the publisher. Can Blogging Heroes make it on its own? Time will tell. If you're in the vicinity and see the book, give it a read and a ride!
--Mike

Barnes & Noble eBook Rreader

Barnes & Noble have come out with their own eBook Rreader, in competition with Kindle. It's called "nook," and at the moment is offered for $259. For an analysis, see Joe Wikert's blog entry:

http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_average_joe/2009/10/bns-nookand-beyond.html

and B&N's own page for the nook:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/?cds2Pid=30919

Shopping Centers without Roads, Billboards without Messages

I wonder when people will stop trying to represent just about everything on the Web as a simple counterpart of real-world events, situations, and so forth? Why can't the Web just be the Web? It's not like the pre-Web days, when we had to explain things like chat rooms and IMs in terms of CB radios and telephones. Today, there's no t need to entice people into the online world by downplaying their fears with metaphors.

Oh, well ... as long as we're still doing this, I am inspired by an earlier remark to say that publishing thousands of books about selling online by getting found and noticed, without publishing more books to show people how to search is akin to building a shopping mall with no roads to it.

Or might a better simile be "... like putting up billboards in Antarctica?"

Okay, okay--it's a reach! But I think that there's a huge imbalance of subject matter. And the books are largely derivative of one another, packed with such solid advice as, "Put quality content on your Web site to attract people." And a lot of telling the reader what to do, but not how to do it.
--Mike

Vanished from twitter

Some of my twitter tweets (yeah, cutesy name, that) are flapping away. I read something that boiled down to, "If you lose your Internet connection, your tweets disappear." Makes no sense: you lose your Internet every time you turn off your computer (daily for me), and I've never had them disappear before. Hell--maybe I'm posting heretic stuff and don't know it.

Anyway, I'll park a few here:

Unlikely ad: "Wanna get laid? There's an app for that!"

Improbable book title: "Empathy for Narcissists"

Interesting to note that so many publishers are very interested in (and publishing) books on how to market your stuff with search engines and social marketing (a school of wishful thinking), but don't want to put out books that teach Internet users how to FIND stuff on the Web (which would include how to find the stuff their books are exhorting people to market). Uh ... how're you gonna sell anything if they can't find you?

The wisdom of the crowd is a myth: intelligence is not cumulative. The highest intelligence in a group is the smartest individual in that group.

An Embarrassment of (Reviewer) Riches

I just had a flashback. When the weekly "hey, hey, hey!" from CNET popped up in my email, I opened it to a bunch of headlines about "Sidekick."

My mind immediately rebooted to the days of DOS! "How can you lose data with Sidekick? Sidekick can't hurt anything!" flashed through my mind for nearly a millisecond before I noted that they were talking about T-Mobile and not Borland.

This happens whenever I see "Sidekick." It's pure Reflex (if you'll pardon the pun. Those of you who weren't around before Windows won't remember Reflex, a pioneering flat-file database cum spreadsheet that had everyone going nuts. Great program.) When DOS was king, I was working hard to find all sorts of ways to get more out of the apps. Sidekick was one, a key-combo pop-up notepad, alarm, etc., etc., a TSR that didn't enrage other programs and make your system crash. Both Sidekick and Reflex were products of Borland.

I liked Borland. Without exception, they sent me a minimum of two copies of every program (and new version thereof) they brought out--and this was before I wrote a book with Jerry Pournelle (his only computer book, btw).

I suppose they thought I had two computers, which I did after a time because more than one PC clone maker sent me two machines with the paperwork to return only one. Just as Intel did when they came out with their first hand-scanners. (Greyscale, 4 inches wide, with clever software.) And you couldn't return the review hardware without the paperwork.

It was truly and embarrassment of riches--and fun! The only outfit that was really serious about getting all their equipment back was Apple. The agreement I signed with them must have been intimidating, because I made sure I got their Mac IIci back to them with time to spare before the deadline.
--Mike

Writing Tip #273

When the story starts getting out of control, it's time to cut!

Official Robert A. Heinlein biography scheduled

The first volume of a two-part authorized biography of famed science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein: Volume 1 (1907-1949): Learning Curve, by William H. Patterson, will be released on April 13, 2010.

The book will be a hardcover, and published by TOR Books.

According to Patterson, the original manuscript came in at 700,000 words. He cut it to 400,000. Get your order in now! Click here.
--Mike

Videotex: What the Web Almost Was

On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders is available in ebook form via Safari Books Online. A preview of the chapter that covers Videotex (the Internet that almost was) click here. And here are sample screens from the Viewtron Videotex service:

Google in Control?

Will Google have exclusive control of Public Domain and/or out of print books? I don't see how it is possible. Anyone who wishes can scan PD books and, with permission, scan and post out of print books still protected by copyright.

The copyright owners (publishers and authors) can themselves limit the kind of access made available—anything from those small "glimpses" (images of a portion of a page) to partial content, to complete books.

What remains uncertain is how Google intends to meter books. To really make money, they must limit user access in a particular way, then charge to remove the limit. Someone—an executive at Random House, I believe—suggested that Google levy a small charge for any look inside a book. I expect this will provoke protests from the public, the reaction being that anyone should be able to browse books online, just as in bookstores or libraries. And, really, reading a few pages can help one make an informed decision on a novel or a non-fiction book.
--Mike

Library Books Don't Get No Respect

Over the past decade I've seen too many library books that haven't been taken care of by borrowers. The problem is not torn pages or writing on the books, though I see that, too. The biggest problem I see (and frequently) is what you might call "foreign matter" on book pages.

Sometimes it looks like food--grease and stains and blobs of unidentifiable substances. (At least, I hope it's food; the alternative is even more disgusting.) Occasionally there will be a dead insect, or maybe a lone wing or portion of a carapace--all that's left of a bug that landed on a page and was crunched by a reader.

And then there are the unpleasant odors drifting from opened books ... I have had to put a few out in the open air before I could read them.

Can you people take better care of the books you borrow? The occasional coffee or soda stain I can understand. But what I'm finding on pages nowadays is the result of sheer carelessness. Try not treating library books like they're your own. Treat them like they belong to someone else--someone you respect.
--Mike

Magazines at Google Books

Interesting resources at Google Books lately:
Billboard (1945 on)
Publishers Weekly (back to the 1880s)
Library Journal

And lots more, including Ebony, Jet, Popular Science, and others that you might not expect. Take a stroll through http://books.google.com.

ABCNews.com and the Internet's Birthday

The lead technology story at ABCNews.com today is about the 40th Anniversary of the Internet. I'm quoted therein; hence, my special interest in this piece. The article begins, "Though it might try to hide its graying hairs, it was 40 years ago today that computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, established a network connection between two computers ...."

And, indeed, it is almost as if the origins of the Internet are hidden from contemporary view, though not by any intent. I expect that the facts of the existence of early computer networks (ARPANet, the Internet, consumer online services like CompuServe, and many other types of telecomputing nets) have been displaced in the public mind by the many glitzy developments on the Web in over the past decade and more.

Further, the story is so complicated that the majority of attempts to chronicle it end up focusing on one or two elements. For instance, you can read a half-dozen randomly selected books that purport to tell the history of the Internet and the Web, and come away thinking there was nothing until ARPAnet (online content existed years before that great experiment), the World Wide Web (a johnny-come-lately in 1992), and AOL (whose predecessors go back to 1978) are the full story. It's far from that; get a copy of On the Way to the Web at your local library (or from the publisher, or wherever) to see what I mean. In the meantime, read the ABCNews.com story. In addition to providing the facts and milestones, the story (and those to which it links) offers a handy list of milestones along the way to the Web.

Happy Birthday(s) to the Internet!

Happy Birthday, Internet! September 2, 1969 was the date that the first two ARPAnet computers were connected at UCLA. Those were UCLA's Sigma-7 mainframe and the Internet Message Processor (IMP) that would connect with the network-to-be.

But some mark the beginning of the Internet as the day the first message was transmitted between network nodes: UCLA to Stanford. That was October 29, 1969. So, we have two birthdays. Some media are citing Sept. 2, while UCLA will hold the official 40th anniversary celebration on Oct. 29.

Significantly, Leonard Kleinrock, director of the project, says of the transmission on Oct. 29, "That was the first breath of life the Internet ever took."

But, he also notes, it was on Sept. 2, 1969, that data bits first moved between two machines—UCLA's Sigma and its IMP. For still more facts, see: http://internetanniversary.cs.ucla.edu/slides/internet35/kleinrock_welcome.pdf

All the details are in my book, On the Way to the Web. Have a look and decide for yourself. (For more blasts from the online past, follow mikebanks on twitter.)

Korean Daily Newspaper: Interview and Video about Blogging Heroes

Interest in Blogging Heroes continues. A couple weeks back Young Choi, a journalist from The Seoul Shinmum Daily (South Korea's oldest newspaper) came to interview me about the book and blogging.

The interview is here:
http://www.seoul.co.kr/news/newsView.php?id=20090725500005

Scroll down for the video interview. It's in English (Korean is one of the languages I do not speak) and has Korean subtitles. If I look odder than usual, it's because I'm squinting into the afternoon sun. The interview and video were conducted at the United States Air Force Museum (highly recommended, by the way).
--Mike

Letter-Writing for Writers

Remember when you wrote real letters--hardcopy sent via street mail? I imagine there are some younger people who have always used E-mail, but at some point in their lives nearly everyone has written letters.

I became a prodigious letter-writer in the 1970s, staying in touch with fellow science fiction fans, model builders, and other friends across the U.S. and Europe. This continued through the 1980s and for part of the 1990s, until nearly everyone got on the E-mail bandwagon. (I think about 25 percent of my correspondents were using email by 1985.) By the turn of the century, I wrote only the occasional hardcopy letter to older friends and relatives.

Several years ago I went back to writing letters regularly to people who also use E-mail. It's a nice break, printing out and mailing missives the old-fashioned way. Sometimes I write them by hand.

Interestingly, I find myself using all of my writing skills and technique, even dialogue, in letters. The vocabulary is adjusted to the recipient and/or subject, but I get as much satisfaction from a well-crafted letter as I do from a good article or short story.

In addition, writing letters gives me something to fall back on when I'm temporarily stuck and can't get into one of my commercial projects. It gets my mind off being frustrated over the block, and keeps me in the writing groove. Try it.
--Mike

Mr. Ken's Wild Ride

Ken Moore, a well-known Nashville SF fan and art expert, passed away last week. He was one of those people who is a real "character" without knowing it. When a thought hit him, he acted on it and (sometimes) thought about it later.

Here's a remembrance of Ken, just one of hundreds of tales that those who knew him can tell.
A family vacation in 1980 took us through Nashville, and we stopped over to visit Ken Moore, a science fiction fan friend who lived there. He wanted to take us to lunch at a restaurant in town owned by a friend of his, so we drove there from his house in my 1977 Chevrolet Nova. Once we were seated in a spacious booth, the owner made a point of coming out to greet Ken and meet the rest of us. The only other diners in the place were a couple over in a far corner.

As we were finishing the meal, Ken ordered a screwdriver (at least, a drink that looked like a screwdriver). The girl waiting on our table brought it out, then returned to the kitchen. The couple left at some point, and several minutes later my son, who was 5 at the time, tried to call our attention to two men running across the parking lot. “Look at those guys,” he urged. “They look like they’re on a wild goose chase!”

We adults were busy discussing important science fiction stuff, and just said, “Oh, yeah. They’re running, aren't they?”

About that time the restaurant owner and waitress burst out of the back room. “We’ve been robbed!” the owner said, voice trembling. “They had a pistol, a .38! Made us lay down on the floor. I thought they were going to shoot us ... but they just took the money ... came out here!”

“God damn!” Ken yelled. He jumped to his feet. “Gimmie your keys, Mike.” Caught up in the moment, I just handed them over, like a fool. Ken darted out door.

It took a couple of seconds for me to realize what I’d done—and what Ken was thinking of doing. I trotted out to the parking lot just as he was starting up the Nova’s engine.

“This is my car,” I thought, “with an over-excited Ken Moore at the wheel!” Like most guys, I was kinda partial to my car, and figured I ought to go along so I could at least witness its fate.

I yanked open the passenger door and hopped in as he put it into gear.

“They went that way,” Ken said, pointing with the half-full glass in his right hand. With his left, he steered us out of the lot and into the middle of the street. Then he took a drink and waved the glass in my direction. “Here—hold this!”

I took the drink. There followed what I’ll always remember as “Ken’s Nashville Thrill Ride.” Scarier than the fiercest roller coasters at Opryland!

In memory, it’s cinematic blur of squealing tires and hard leans to the left and right. Ken took as around corners and through U-turns without slowing. He stopped every half-minute or so to ask someone on the street whether they’d seen two black guys running in this or that direction. There was a lot of bumping over railroad tracks at high speed, and swaying in and out lanes to pass or narrowly miss hitting other cars.

Caught up in Ken’s determination to do whatever he thought he was going to do if he caught these guys (run over them, I guess), I literally clung to the dashboard and hoped he didn’t catch them. After all, we were chasing two guys with a gun—and all we had was a 6-cylinder Nova!

Ken gave up after ten minutes, and we limped back to his friend’s restaurant. To this day I don’t know whether they caught the crooks. But I left Nashville with a bona-fide souvenir of Ken’s wild ride: a broken shock. And I didn't spill a drop of Ken's drink.
--Mike

Fiction Tip

Fiction Writing Tip #438: Don't take your characters anywhere your readers wouldn't go.

Visual Research Online: Article in The Writer

When researching biographies, I find information in strange places (like eBay listings). I've written about my research techniques in the past, in The Writer and Online magazine.

I'm back at it in the August issue of The Writer (page 36) with a piece about finding photos and videos from which you can extract information that you might not be able to find anywhere else. It's out there--but don't forget to have a second source for everything!
--Mike

Signings in Dayton

I'll be signing Before Oprah at two Dayton-area libraries this coming Saturday, and again in August. Books will be available:

Saturday, June 27, 2:00 PM
Wilmington-Stroop Public Library
3980 Wilmington Pke, Kettering, OH 45429

Saturday, August 01, 2:00 PM
Huber Heights Library
6160 Chambersburg Rd, Dayton, OH 45424

Click here to see a calendar of my signings, updated as new events are scheduled.
--Mike