My Guide to Hamilton’s Guide to 2019

If the Projector is Constant

Tis the season to reflect, and plan for the next year.

(And to use the word “Tis” apparently.)

I’m currently working on a plan that is complex, and just a pain in the ass to get done. It’s the kind of thing that is so new that if you were to lay odds, you would bet against it.

Of course, that was true about me when I started a new business back in 2001. The odds were against me, and still somehow I launched the business, and then sold it in 2006. The odds were not great when I started another business right after that. I’m no longer involved in that one day-to-day, but Bill Track 50 is thriving to this day. Same story for the blog writing service now known as Verblio, which is also rocking thanks to the staff and the writers making it happen.

But my effort to fix Fake News is the hardest yet. 

To whom do I turn for inspiration? Once again, it’s Hamilton. (I wrote about this at much more length way before I even saw the play.)

I even made a meme, above, using the gorgeous photograph from Josh Lehrer, made with a camera from the 1800s.

The line comes from the excellent book Alexander Hamilton’s Guide To Life, by the incomparable Jeff Wilser. 

The language is a bit obscure, but Wilser does a great job of breaking it down.

The “Projector” is you. You are the one who is projecting what the future will be. If you project yourself into the future and you create it, then you can succeed.

But it just takes hard work to make it happen. That’s the “constant” part.

Be nice if I could just have great ideas and then sit back and watch them take off. But... no.

This projector needs to be constant.

That’s going to be really important to remember in the coming year. All signs are that between the economy and the current occupant of the White House, 2019 is going to be a rough year, full of distractions and annoyances and everything that can give any of us an excuse to not remain constant.

So for me in 2019, my theme is for the Projector to stay constant.

And now I’ve got a meme to go with my theme.

Why the “Fake News” Conversation Will Never End, Even at Misinfocon London

Big news in the world of “Fake News” recently is that both the French and British governments are united in fighting it.

Not the problem, unfortunately, just the name.

The French have come out against the name “Fake News” for no reason other than their long history of hating any words that are Anglo-Saxon.

What should we call it? 

Information fallacieuse.

Even for the French, that seemed like a mouthful, so they also coined a new made-up word that they think will be catchy: “Infox.”

I wouldn't count on that word lasting long.

And the Brits are not offended by the Queen’s English but they are, as always, offended by Americanisms, so they, too have banned “fake news” from official documents.

There is no such thing as American English. There is English. And there are mistakes.

— A tweet quoted in the excellent The Prodigal Tongue by Lynn Murphy

The problem is that they could not agree on what word to use in its place.


— From the report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sports Committee to the UK Government

So in very clear terms the government has said that there will be a “shared consistency” with one word, it just isn't sure which word that should be.

Ummm. Thanks.

Look, both governments are right, the term “Fake News” is horrible, and is being used to mean everything from News I don't like all the way to organized propaganda designed to destabilize democracy.

But the problem for those of us inside the battle is this: Every time we tell people who are not working on this all day every day what we are working on, no matter how we describe what we are doing, they will invariably say:

“Oh! You are fixing fake news! That’s so important!!!”

That’s when we smile wanly and say thanks.

Luckily, for those who are working on this so hard, the part about defining the problem is pretty much done. In reality, it’s been done for a long time. 

In fact, it has been done since February of 2017, when the inimitable Claire Wardle published this guide.


As helpful as that is, it still uses both the mis- and dis- forms of information.

So, which is it?

I’m going to say that misinformation has won the day, in no small part thanks to the Cyrillic alphabet, and whichever clever person it was that came up with the coolest logo for a conference, maybe ever.

Of the hundreds of conference badges I’ve gotten in my life, this is one of the few I’m hanging on to:


I wrote, at some length, about my experience in Kyiv, and then I posted some photos from the D.C. version of the event on Twitter, and will post them again below.

Unfortunately I won’t be at the event in London this week, but I expect that even at a conference named for misinformation there will still be some talk about what to call it.

And there will be more conversation about what is being done around the world. (If you are at the conference, and get that task, feel free to cheat off the homework that I already did.)

So it just may be that we will always be talking about what exactly fake news is. And the term, for better or worse, is now a permanent part of our language. 

But just as terms like Yellow Journalism or Broadsides have settled into our language with specific meanings, fake news will eventually settle in.

In the meantime, we’ll keep having the conversation, and we’ll keep trying to fix the real problems.

Just for the record, here are three examples of the gravity of the problems that we are dealing with from only the last few days:

  1. New proof that Russians are again trying to disrupt the U.S. elections.
  2. Twitter found out about a bot attack only after alerted by journalists.
  3. Fake News is flooding the zone in Brazil before its election.

This is serious stuff, and thoughtful people are hard at work trying to make a difference. I’m totally engaged in working on my particular slice of the solution, one that is working to strengthen many of the other efforts going on by making certain that news publishers do in fact have the imprimatur of the standards-based bodies they profess to follow. You can see more about that on the Certified Content Coalition page.

But lest you think the people themselves are all humorless, I present here my own captions to some pictures from the D.C. Misinfocon.

While I won’t be at the London event, I will be looking for photos that I can use for my next post.

Thanks for reading!


Colorado Ballot Guide - I did the homework so you don't have to

I doubt anyone much cares how I’m voting on the less well-known stuff on the Colorado ballot given that they probably don’t care that much how they cast their own vote!

But on the off chance that I can be helpful, here’s my quick guide on how I voted on the stuff that’s not in the headlines all that much.

Congress District 1

My counter-culture tendencies would like to vote for the Libertarian just because there’s absolutely no hope that anyone other than the Democrat will win in this district. (That’s why I’m voting yes on Y and Z - more on that below.)

But I’m going to vote for Diana DeGette because she’s a proud graduate of Denver South High School, where I went and where my son is going now.


Secretary of State

It’s going to be a blue wave this year, no doubt about it. The one guy who might survive is Wayne Williams. I think we have a pretty good tradition in Colorado of keeping politics out of this office, so I’m voting for Williams because he was smart enough to hire the incomparable Lynn Bartles.


Colorado Court of Appeals

I actually read the Blue Book for each of the judges, and there was only one who didn’t get a unanimous nod from the State Commission on Judicial Performance: Elizabeth L. Harris. So, that’s enough for a no vote from me. 

From the Blue Book: “Sometimes she unnecessarily reexamines facts and lower courts’ reasoning, which reduces her efficiency and which may create a perception that she is unfair. Lack of timeliness also has been a problem...”

All the rest of them got a unanimous nod, so they all get a Yes vote.

And if I could vote twice, I would for Kerri Lombardi for District court. Is it because I once covered a trial where she was an excellent prosecutor? Maybe a little bit. Actually, the real reason is that she’s another proud graduate of Denver South High School! Is there no end to the glory of that place? ;-)

Denver South High School

That’s Denver South High School in the background. 


Amendment V

Change the age for serving in the Legislature from 25 to 21? 



Brain development and full rational thinking is just not in place until we hit about 25, experts say

So, that’s a no vote from me.

(Even my son — who’s an intern at the legislature, and would be a wonderful elected official, said that he thinks legislators could use some more impulse control, and he’s studied the science enough to know that even he won’t have full use of that until he is 25 — urges a no vote.)


Amendment W

Change the format for the ballot for judicial retention elections.

Really? We have to vote on this? Isn’t this up to some underpaid staffer running MS Word in the bill room?

Mmmkay. I’ll vote yes.


Amendment X

Industrial Hemp? What?

Luckily, the swell team at Ballotpedia has a page on this one. The thing I looked for was that Jon Becker was in favor, as was just about everyone else in the statehouse. If they all looked at it and are fine with it, than I am, too. 



Amendments Y and Z

I may be more passionate about these two than anything else this year in Colorado.

A big part of the reason that politics is so screwed up right now is that the congressional districts are gerrymandered so that the entire race is the primary. Only the extreme edges of the spectrum show up for those, so the race is to see who can out-crazy everyone else.

Then the general election comes and those of us nearer the middle wonder where we got these loony candidates.

These two amendments will take a step toward fixing that.

Two big YES votes on these two.


Amendment A

Slavery, as the saying goes, is our country’s original sin.

Can we please pass this? It won’t absolve us, but it needs to be a part of our path to absolution.


Amendment 73

I have good friends on both sides of this, but for me I’m voting yes.

  • Money does NOT make for a good education, but a good education is impossible without money.
  • This will make all the TABOR mess even messier. Well, maybe we should fix that?
  • The tax falls more heavily on the rich, who should be doing really well because of the Trump tax cuts, so they won’t even notice it, right?


Amendment 74

While reading the text of Amendment 74, I kept thinking of this:


So, that’s gonna be a hard pass. 

No on Amendment 74.


Amendment 75

This is the one about campaign contributions. If someone donates $1 million to themselves, then all the other limits go out the window.

This is a thoughtful amendment, and it may actually help.

But this is a constitutional amendment, so if it has some unintended consequence, well, we’re screwed.

So I’m a no vote, just barely.


Proposition 109

This is the one is trying a bit too hard to be clever, with the whole “Fix our damn roads” name and the idea that there is a magical way to pay for roads without raising taxes.

I was tempted to vote yes because I think this throws another bomb into the TABOR mess (we really should fix that) and because, well, I wish we could fix the damn roads.

But there’s a lot of damn stuff that needs fixing, including dams.

(Reminds me of a joke: What did the fish say when he ran into a concrete wall?


I think the legislature needs to do its damn job, and decide how to spend tax dollars. We elect them to make the hard calls between roads, schools, prisons, etc. I say we let them do that job, and we’ll stay out of the way.

I’m a no vote on 109.


Proposition 110

This is the other roads one, but it’s done the right way. It comes from the Chamber of Commerce, which isn’t exactly a tax-and-spend kind of group. 

If we want roads to be better, we should stand up and say that we will pay for the roads to be better, and that’s what this does.

Yes on 110.


Proposition 111

Payday loans. Why hasn’t the legislature fixed this?

My hunch is that the people who make fistfuls of blood money making these predatory loans have spread just enough of it around that it has kept lawmakers from taking action.

When the legislature can’t get the job done, it’s up to us.

Vote yes on 111.


Proposition 112

This one has gotten enough press, so you are going to have to make up your own mind about this.

Luckily, this one is a change to the statute, not the constitution, so even if it does pass, the legislature will be able to fix it, or get rid of it entirely.


I hope this has been of some help.

Voting is one of the great honors we have, and I hope that everyone reading this does vote, and then checks to make sure all their friends and family are doing the same.


The Lighter Side of ‘Fake News’

There's nothing more serious to me than the fight against misinformation.

Innocent journalists are going to jail for doing their job. Elections and democracy itself are being compromised. The very notion of “Trust” is under attack, and it seems like the attackers are winning.

This needs to get fixed.

Serious people need to have solemn and clear-headed conversations and work very hard to fix what's been broken on our watch.

But do we have to take ourselves seriously every moment we are at work?

I sure hope not.

So, with this post, I begin what I hope will be a series of posts taking a look at the lighter side of fake news.

Today’s installment:

The World Cup of Information Warfare?

Inspired by an interview from Alex Stamos with CNN:


Nobody knows more about this than Alex, and he’s highly respected. (And I personally find it a bummer that he’s out of the trenches and is now an academic.)

But it got me thinking: Are the U.S. Elections really the World Cup of  Information Warfare?

I mean, he is talking very specifically about the U.S. Elections, and the US didn’t even get into the last actual World Cup. Americans are famously blasé about soccer, so making that analogy here may actually minimize what a big deal misinformation is. 

So, with all due respect to Alex, here’s a better breakdown:

Misinfo Category Sports Analogy Reason
U.S. Election Misinformation Super Bowl While it seems like there is actual competition, at least recently there really isn't. Everyone knows the team coached by Bill Belichick will win, and that he will cheat.

Similarly, everyone knows that the Russians cheated in trying to influence the U.S. elections. But in this case because of their influence, the one person who might stop the cheating is now in charge, so nothing will happen.
U.S. Election Hacking World Series of Poker This is different than misinformation, this is actually trying to manipulate votes. Anyone can get in, anyone can win.
Spammy “News” Olympics Much as with Olympic teams made up of people without much of an actual connection to the country they compete for, there are spammy operators all over the world pretending to be from somewhere else.

And there are so many different forms of competition that nobody can keep them all straight.

And just as we all know about, say Michael Phelps or the time that Google News showed a story about how Las Vegas Shooter Was a Rachel Maddow Fan, most of these competitors toil in obscurity. (Bonus: Just as with the actual Olympics, we know the Russians will cheat.)
People Claiming
“Fake News”
WWE  People who believe a politician who claims that stories he doesn't like are “fake” are the same people who believe Pro Wrestling is not fake. (By the way, it is not fake to report that Donald Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame.)




Who the hell is Scott Yates?????

First, why this post?

I've been kind of off the radar of social media lately, and this blog has been quiet, even by the not-so-staggering standards of years past.

It's because I'm working on a new project. Can't talk about it just yet, but soon you won't be able to get me to shut up.

Once that project becomes public, my profile on the interwebs may grow a bit, and there may be some people who have the question I posed in the title of this post:

Who the hell is Scott Yates????

In the spirit of always making it easy for the reader, I offer this post as an answer to that question.

One warning: If you come here thinking that you will find proof that I'm a proto-communist, or a quasi-fascist, or whatever, you will likely be disappointed.

I approach politics and life with a single point of reference, and that is that I like to solve problems. That approach has meant I've spent time as policy wonk for a conservative Republican, and as volunteer for the homeless, public television, immigrants, and other traditionally liberal redoubts. 

If you are looking for a box to put me in, it will be a weird-ass box.

Early days

I grew up in Denver happy and basically well-adjusted, given that my mother was a licensed social worker, and read all the books about how to raise well-adjusted kids. She was a liberal dating back to the days when she and her father cried together when JFK died.

I attended CU-Boulder, but dropped out. No scandal there. I wish there was. I wish I could have a story like Steve Wozniak, who reportedly was asked to leave after he hacked into the Regents computer system. Mostly I just didn't know what I was doing, so I left, and spent some time as a live-in volunteer at a Catholic Worker house in community with the homeless, and my best friend, who was doing the same thing for much more intentional reasons.

Then I decamped for New York to attend NYU, and work in the publishing capitol of the world. I had a great time there where I was a columnist for the school paper, and I got internships at New York Newsday and SPY Magazine. I got to meet living heroes of mine in person, like the time I got to meet Nat Hentoff when spoke at the original Catholic Worker House. I loved every second I was in New York.


The author, pictured in the 1980s, at least 10 years after that style of mustache had gone out of style.


Then I travelled some, saw some of the world, and then returned to my home state of Colorado and took my first job as a cub reporter at the Durango Herald. That was followed by an ill-advised cup of coffee at the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American. I then returned to Colorado and worked at Loveland Reporter-Herald, my second "P.M." paper. (That's what old newspaper hands call an afternoon paper, printed after noon and delivered by high school kids on bikes. That's where I learned to write fast, and why I get approving nods from journalists who've been around.)

I then moved to a weekly paper in my hometown of Denver best known at the time for all the futon advertisements: Westword. It's now better known for marijuana advertising.

You can look at some of the stories I wrote on the Westword site, I think that was the first place to publish my stories on the web. If you want to look for a slant to what I wrote for the papers before that, well, good luck with that. Mostly it was school board stories, so...

After Westword I essentially got out of journalism. I did some work at a health food magazine, but much of that was helping them transition to the Web. Then one day I got a call from Governor Bill Owens. He was a conservative, and he wanted some help with writing, and a few other jobs, including running a conservative think tank for him. He never asked for my party affiliation, just asked if I'd work for him. I did, happily and productively, for years and he remains a friend to this day.

I'm not actually sure what my affiliation was. In those days you had to register with one party to vote in the primary, and because I lived in Denver I probably registered as a Democrat so I'd have some interesting primaries to vote in. Republican primaries in Denver are something like gatherings of non-alcoholic beer fans: Lonely and kind of pointless.

I was conservative, though. I remember my mother wondering where she'd gone wrong when I told her I wanted to vote for Bill Armstrong, and even put a bumper sticker for him on my Datsun.

These days I'm like George Will: a homeless Republican. The party left me while I was standing there, advocating for conservative values like the rule of law, and a stable and limited government.

Startup Life

It didn't take a lot of foresight to realize that there wasn't a great future in journalism, as much as I loved it.

I enjoyed the people in the newsrooms, and the culture, and the problem-solving that came with trying to figure out how to distill complex problems into understandable stories that would hold a readers' interest for 900 words. I really did love all that, but I also started getting frustrated writing about problems and not solving them.

It was one day, stuck in traffic, that I realized I could to some small degree actually solve traffic problems with information.

Kids, ask your parents about the days before iPhones and Google Maps when you couldn't pull a super computer out of your pocket and find out what traffic was like. In those days, we'd all just finish work, go get in a car, and get stuck in traffic without knowing how bad it was really going to be. Ten minutes after we were into the drive and already stuck in traffic, you could hear a guy in a helicopter tell you how screwed you were, which was... not awesome.

So I started a company that let people know about traffic before they got stuck in it: In those days, companies like mine weren't called "startups." It was called a "dot-com." I got a patent on that, and eventually sold the company to, which later got bought by NavTeq, which was bought by Nokia, which was bought by Microsoft. Food chain in action.

I then started another company that eventually became BillTrack50, and is delighting clients to this day, helping them keep track of legislation. The original company, however, ended up in a lawsuit against some of its investors. I signed a thing saying that I can't say what happened with that suit, which is an obtuse way of saying that I won, but not in court. The original court filings are public, and you can go and get those and read them (I hired a lawyer who was a pretty good writer). But I signed an agreement saying that I would not continue to publish them on the internet as I had been, so sorry for the hassle there.

I then wrote a book called The Future of Water, and then started another company, BlogMutt. You can read lots about that all over this blog, and the BlogMutt blog.

Then in 2016 I decided to hire someone to replace myself. The new CEO and I were together at a trade show in Boston when the election happened.

I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do after that, but I wrote a post about what I wanted to do, and at the top of the list was to be an Entrepreneur in Residence. It's good to announce to the world what you want to do, because that's exactly what happened, with the most amazing research facility you've never heard of: CableLabs.

I love the concept of an Entrepreneur in Residence because it allows a person to really think broadly about problems and solutions. That's where I came up with this idea that I'll be announcing very soon, I hope.


So, that's it. That's my story. Feel free to dig in and see if you can find something more embarrassing than a picture of me with a cheesy Village People-esque mustache, though it's hard to imagine anything more horrifying than that.

Everything bad is Bill Clinton's Fault. Except for Man-Buns.

I challenge you to find fault with any the following:

  1. If the #metoo movement would have been around, Bill Clinton wouldn't have survived being governor of Arkansas, let alone survive a Democratic primary for President.
  2. Bill Clinton’s abuse of Monica Lewinsky was horrifying.
  3. It was so horrifying, that a respected reporter was completely correct to try to report it. 
  4. The true story of what Bill Clinton did to Lewinsky was killed by Newsweek editors.
  5. The killed story made its way to what was then an obscure website called the Drudge Report.
  6. The Drudge Report became one of the top sites on the internet after that.
  7. As it grew it sent huge amounts of traffic to a site called Breitbart, making it a huge success.
  8. One of Breitbart’s founders was Steve Bannon.
  9. At Breitbard, Bannon worked with investor Robert Mercer.
  10. Mercer funded Cambridge Analytica, which also hired Bannon.
  11. Cambridge Analytica, Bannon, and Mercer were key players in getting Donald Trump elected.

Is there any fault in any of that progression? Any of those facts?

Now, a logical conclusion is that without that set of facts, maybe we wouldn’t have Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon would still be a third-rate movie producer, and maybe a few thousand voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would not have voted for Trump.

Unlike the numbered facts above... it’s debatable. 

Bill Clinton didn’t just create a world where Trump could beat his wife in the electoral college, he created a world where it was Trump, and not someone else, would challenge his wife. “How do we maximize Trump?” was a memo that actually circulated in the Clinton campaign, according to an inside account.

What’s not debatable is that Bill Clinton sowed the seeds that made things bad for Hillary, Monica, and women in general.

He also made things bad for immigrants, way before Trump figured out how to make that an issue.

But Bill Clinton made things good for friends like Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and Donald Trump.




So, while we can’t blame Bill Clinton for man-buns, just about everything else that's really bad right now can be traced back to him.







"Up and to the right"








And grow we did.



It's still all about growth

So, what am I doing now?

I'm still thinking about growth, all the time. 









Steps to Consistent Growth





The answer is the 10X Growth Club.







If not, maybe you'll want to join us Thursday night.


Join us?



Thanks very much in advance.

Up and to the right,
I remain,

-Scott Yates

What Comes Next?

Last year I decided to step down as CEO of BlogMutt. While I'm still founder and board chairman, I'm no longer involved day-to-day.

What comes next?


Well, I'm now realizing that I'm not interested in starting another company, not at the moment. I don't mind hard work, but creating another startup from scratch right now just feels… lonely.

However, there's a problem: I don't play golf. 

I don't ski.

I don't want to train for a marathon, a triathlon, a decathlon or even the Butt-Numb-Athon.

In short, I gotta get back in the game. I wanna be in it, solving problems, making customers happy, bringing new approaches to sticky problems.

A bunch of friends asked me what I want to do when I announced I was leaving, and I didn't really have a good answer. After a bit of a break, and thinking about it for a while, I finally have one, so this post is essentially the answer to that question.

Here's three scenarios of what might make sense:


Scenario One: Entrepreneur In Residence

Let's say you are in an established company. Maybe a growth-stage tech company, maybe a media operation. Maybe even a non-profit that's got a good track record.

Things are going well enough for you, but you realize that the world is changing fast, and you have a sneaking suspicion that you aren't really keeping up. What you'd like is for someone to come into your operation and do a few things without upsetting the apple cart too much. 

What kind of things?

  • Talk to the team, see what entrepreneurial ideas are lurking around, but aren't getting any daylight.
  • Launch a new low-impact initiative, maybe a podcast or something that everyone thinks is a good idea, but it never seems to get done.
  • Evaluate other new ideas, see if there's any traction.

The concept of an Entrepreneur In Residence is catching on at places like Target, Cisco, AARP, and even the federal government.

Typically an EIR just comes in for a defined time, usually one year. After that you'll have a much better sense of the future, and you'll have a program in place if you want to bring in another fresh set of eyes a year from now.


Scenario Two: New Product Leader

Let's say you have a new product idea, but your current team is busy with the current product. You've got some indication that this new product could do well, but you need to know how well it will integrate with what you do now, and you need to figure out what you don't know about actually launching this thing.

You want someone to come in who won't freak everybody out, but will also move the concept forward, and fast. That I can do.


Scenario Three: CEO Transition

I just ran a process to gently ease a CEO out of his position, run a search that he liked, and then found a great new CEO who is now kicking ass.

It's true, I was the first CEO in question there, but I have to say that I really did a good job at that.

Do you know a CEO who is, perhaps, a bit restless? Or perhaps that CEO just is no longer a good fit for what the company needs? And that CEO knows it, but just doesn't know how to let go?

I can help. I can help the CEO really look at the situation without a lot of emotional baggage. I can give hope to that person to see what the world might be like having moved on? And I can run a search to find the perfect new candidate, and then make sure that new CEO gets going in the right direction.

It would be hard, if not impossible, for someone who hasn't been in those CEO shoes to have that conversation. There are a lot of recruiters out there, but this is something entirely different. I've been there. I can empathize, strategize, and then move things forward for the person, and for the company.


Scenario Four: ??????

I realize that what will actually happen may be a bit different from what I plan on happening. Always works that way, right?

But if you are someone, or if you know someone, who might be interested in talking to me about one of these scenarios, or something entirely different, be in touch


Jackson vs. Hamilton: Which one should we dump from US Currency? [Infographic]

The current controversy over putting a woman on the $10 bill — instead of the $20 — is helpful because it sheds a bright light on the powerful history, and all it represents today.

But history can be hard, so to help make it easier here's a helpful infographic. Feel free to share, embed, print, post, and then share some more. Let's bring history home, and ensure that no injustice is done in the paper we carry in our pockets every day.

Jackson v Hamilton

The full PDF for your full use is here.

For more reading, I recommend Ron Chernow's essay, and that you make plans to go see Hamilton on Broadway.

Why Star Wars is Going to Make the World Awesome. Again.

One year from right now on Dec. 18, 2015, I'm going to either be in line, or in a theater watching the new Star Wars movie.

It might easy to think that this is just a movie. It's not.

I think that it's going to be a harbinger of a great new era.

Why? Well, the last time Star Wars started, the world just got better. You couldn't really buy a computer in 1976, but in 1977 the Apple II, the Atari 2600, and the Comodore PET went on sale.

Also in 1977 the Space Shuttle began test flights, the first phone calls were carried on a fiber optic cable. The the first  TCP/IP pings went through on what they called then the ARPAnet in November of that year, the same day as the first flight of the Concorde from New York City.

Also, I turned 12 that year. I was born in January of 1965, the first month after the Baby Boom so I was technically a member of what would later be known as Gen X. The Boomers dominated in 1977, but it was the Xers who made the world suck less over the next 30 years. Then we got the Millennials (don't get me started) but the group of kids actually born after the year 1999 seem to be showing the same understated but significant progress of Gen X.

We don't know what technological marvels will be released in 2015, but we do now have a whole generation of kids who don't know the magic of anticipation of a good Star Wars movie. The last time a generation grew up with Star Wars, the whole world became almost magical, as if it was guided by some all-powerful force.

Need more proof? 


Funk that Star Wars got us out of

Watergate, Vietnam

Screen Shot 2014-12-15 at 8.46.23 AM

Great Recession, Afghanistan
Crappy dystopian scifi we don't have to pay attention to any more

Logan's Run

Screen Shot 2014-12-18 at 9.52.38 AM

Hunger Games

Screen Shot 2014-12-18 at 9.56.10 AM

Scary disease that was going to kill us all

Swine Flu

Screen Shot 2014-12-11 at 4.47.14 PM


Notable cars before Pinto, Pacer

Aztec, Cadilac ATS

Notable cars after Porsche 928, BMW 7 series


Protesters that faded away Yippies

Occupy (Fill in the blank)

Hobbit version not as good as the book released the year before.   Screen Shot 2014-12-18 at 10.02.25 AM

five armies 

May the force be with you. 

Brad Feld Patent Office? Most indubitably!
















Who said this?

Take a look at this quote: 

"They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do. Government ... shouldn't get involved in cultural issues, you know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional ________s view the world, and I think most ______s understand that individuals can't go it alone, that there is no such society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture."

I cut a little for this experiment (full quote is here), but what word did I leave a blank for? You could make a strong case that you could put the world "liberal" in there both times and imagine many Republicans making this statement.

Turns out that it was Rick Santorum who said this about the Barry Goldwater-style conservatives.

I post this only to make two points:

  1. Wonks like Shawn Mitchell are right that if Santorum is the nominee Obama will probably win all 50 states, and,
  2. Liberals have way more in common with a Santorum than they would ever admit.

I know we are coming into a season of high pique, but my goal for me in this year is to really try to find common ground and say as many positive things as possible about those inside and outside of politics, and the amazing thing is that I don't think it will really be that hard.

How to deal with mean people: use their brains against them



I got into the mud and played with pigs.


















I was telling them what to do.


I should have, and here's why:











(See what I did there?)

The Zeitgeist of 2011

Have you seen the great Google Zeitgeist? It's a remarkable look at the trends in search over the previous year.

Why is it called the "Zeitgeist"? Because it's a great word that sums up the somewhat subtle notion that is more encompassing than "trends" and more lithe than "analytics."

I'm convinced, however, that Google would call that page, "Google aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search using data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search and internal data tools" and not Google Zeitgeist if not for one man: Kurt Andersen.

Andersen has been capturing the Zeitgeist better than anyone for the last 25 years or so, most famously in Spy Magazine as he did here.

He has done so again recently when Time tapped him to write about the Person of the Year, the Protester

It's a great story, I recommend purchasing the magazine if you can still find it, or reading it in the "reader" function on Safari to minimize all the junk that Time throws up to make it hard to read. 

The story is informative without being dull, global yet personal. It perfectly encapsulates the zeitgeist, and because it's written by Andersen, even encapsulates the word.


So really, stop whatever you are doing and go read the story.

Time-&-Labor-Saving Device




So it's up to me.




The Digital Calculator



Management (and other) lessons from the movies






















Are we done now?

All day yesterday I had this poem going through my head:

REMEMBER me when I am gone away.

  Gone far away into the silent land;

  When you can no more hold me by the hand, 

Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.  

Remember me when no more day by day,

You tell me of our future that you plann'd: 

  Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while 

  And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

  For if the darkness and corruption leave  

  A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,  

Better by far you should forget and smile  

  Than that you should remember and be sad.


The TechCrunch Also Rises



I know, I've been there.












Now is the August of our Discontent


OK, not just this summer. Ever.




Scott Yates fb post











Ahh nevermind. Let's move on.









Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York





Here's how this became concrete for me just yesterday.








Mmmmmmm. Ice cream.

A Pull Carr TechCrunch Homage Loosely Related to Blogmutt









Better. But still "meh."






By Fake Paul Carr

















What's the right length for a blog post?



That didn't last long.




For example?




Yes. Just so.






Why all this about forms for me right now?

Two reasons.





It's only over here, on, that I babble on about everything from Bob Woodward to a slide deck. This is my personal blog, and that's just what this is all about.



Sorry about that, but thanks for reading anyway!

Closing the book on The Future of Water

Last night was the book signing event for The Future of Water. Below is a version of the remarks I prepared. What I actually said was somewhat close to this, just without the links.

Scott-at-dpcWhen I tell people that I wrote a book called The Future of Water, they usually say, “Meh. [pause] Sounds dry.” 

[Insert groan]

What people actually say is some expression of concern, wondering just how bad things will be.

I have to say that I actually came away from the process of researching that book a bit more optimistic than when I started doing the research. Why?

Part of the reason is the nature of water itself. The water the dinosaurs drank is the same water we drink today. The water where life started is still here. The water we use today is the same water that fish crawled out of long, long ago.

And the amount of water in the world is the same, too. Fossil fuels get burned and are gone forever. Water remains.

There might be a little less on earth, as the space station has some floating around, though it’s now getting reused in the now-famous urine-recycling machine, a technology that may be coming to your home.

Another part of my reason for optimism is certainly technology. I had a vague idea before I started, for instance, that desalination is basically no option at all, given the huge amount of fossil fuels needed. But I learned about some solar-powered and some wave-powered technologies and one other technology that uses a kind of ionization that may fundamentally change that equation.

I wrote about those, and other changes that aren’t technical, but are new, including changes in governmental agreements like the kind we are just now learning about with Denver Water and the West Slope.

New technologies and new, local, cooperative efforts are the future of water.

So I'm optimistic because of the nature of water, because of new technologies, but also because of people.

People like those of you here tonight who work in the world of water. You know, for instance, that if we don't replace 100-year-old pipes that they will burst and people will be without water. Little by little I think that you are doing a better job of communicating that and people are starting to listen. You all know that uninterrupted green grass surrounding every home west of the Missouri River is an absolutely unsustainable dream. Slowly that word is getting out. You all know that rooftop rain collection and home grey-water recycling are not harebrained schemes but are part of the inevitable arc of water history.

What is scary? China is scary.

China's built a dam so massive that the water inside is so voluminous, that it's actually lengthened the time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis, so if it seems like days are getting longer you can blame the Chinese for that. (It's actually only a handful of milliseconds, but still.)

It's also created some local earthquakes as the weight of the water has flooded hundreds of cities and towns, 6000-year-old archeological sites and some of China's most beautiful countryside. Seventy five million people live in the floodplain of this dam; they all live downstream of a dam that has created its own earthquakes.

Turns out that Chinese Premier Hu Jintao was a hydrology student, and his first job was in a dam-building conglomerate.

The World Bank doesn't lend money for dams any more -- there's just no way to justify them environmentally, or economically. China, however, is building dams on its own in Africa and South America.

China is also building dams in China that have already begun to choke off the Mekong Delta. The Vietnamese war was bad for the environment, with the Agent Orange and everything, but nothing comes close to the devastation we'll see in Vietnam and other countries in the region if China builds all the dams it's now planning.

And the dam China hasn't announced, but some reporters have confirmed, is the one that would block the flow of a river that flows from Tibet into India. It’s one of the only decent sources of water that India has. One report is that China might use a nuclear bomb to blow up the area in the Himalayas to hold the water from that dam.

The people from Boulder want a free Tibet, but it’s important to understand why China wants Tibet. It’s not because of the little prayer flags or the monks. It wants the water.

India isn’t going to give up all that water without a fight in an area that's still disputed as to which country it's in. China and India fought one war, and India won't give up all that water without a fight. That’s scary.

In spite of all that, I do remain optimistic. America has its problems, but we have freedom and with freedom -- in general -- we take on the responsibility to leave the earth a bit better than how we found it.

Consider Denver. This amazing city was a dusty desert not that long ago, just a junction of two streams that were bone dry for half the year. Now it’s an amazing and great city built in part because of how we’ve harnessed water.

Denver has great wealth, but also serious pockets of poverty. Even so, the poorest person in Denver can get drinking water from a tap and feed it to a child without fears of water-born illness. That’s not true in most of the rest of the world. Indeed the tap water in the poorest part of Denver is better than in a fancy hotel in the biggest 10 cities in the world

But the water is safe and reliably delivered here in Denver, and all over America. That’s remarkable when you think about it. Because of those of you who are in the water industry, that amazing fact is true every single day of the year.

I think eventually the rest of the world will get closer to that reality by following the example you all are setting.

So, thank you for what you do. Thanks to AWWA for hiring me to write this book, and thank you for taking care of water.

I’d like to say a few more words of thanks here.

First is to my wife, Kathy Yates. After I turned in the manuscript for the book, Kathy and I went to a book signing by Steven Johnson, and during the Q and A he said that he really enjoyed writing. He said that he had many writer friends who complain about writing, and he told his wife that he should get some credit for the fact that he wasn't a big complainer when writing.

She said, "No. You don't."

We went up after, and my wife told him, "Tell your wife you deserve more credit. My husband just finished writing a book, and he was a total grouch the whole time and sent me and our son to California for the last two weeks of the writing."

Truth is, I was more than a grouch, I was also unable to have many conversations without muttering something about water or word counts. My wife encouraged me when needed and tolerated me when I was intolerable, and for that I thank her.

Many family members and good friends came for the reading, and I will be buying each of them a beer or other beverage of their choice, as long as it's not bottled water!

The room was packed, so I'm certainly missing many, but I do want to mention a few people in particular who attended, including Dominic Dezzutti of Channel 12, Patti Thorn, my former books section editor, and Rebecca Cantwell, my former night-desk editor, both from the Rocky Mountain News (sigh). Also in line to grab books I saw sustainability-issues lobbyist Whit Allen, Colorado's car guy Tim Jackson, and Jeff Laws, though it's not that hard to get Jeff to come by the bar at the Denver Press Club.

Two of my fellow graduates from the Founder Institute also came, including Matt Ryan and Oza Klanjsek, who not only came, but took the photo you see above and brought her kids. I told her that if we don't bring our kids to bars, who will? 

Also, I'd like to thanks Google Docs (never had to worry which was the current version) and a new search engine called DuckDuckGo that had great results even though the whole thing is built by one guy.

So, thanks much to everyone, and with this post I'm closing the cover on this book.

Stalking the Billion-Footed Facebook Beast

How big is Facebook?


What's going on?
















I'm not actually sure, but let's take a look:

1. Scene-by-scene construction.


2. Realistic dialogue.


3. Interior point of view.


4. Status details.














Scott Yates year-end wrapup



Time to eat Grandma!
Save her with a comma, or
She's yours to savor.




Wikileaks Shows Generational Divide (And a Startup Lesson)

The whole Wikileaks event is fascinating on so many levels. There's been ton's of great coverage. I've read lots of it, but there's one thing that hasn't really been said: This seems like essentially a generational issue, yet another sign that the world is changing fast and the Hey-man-let's-change-the-world Boomers are the ones standing in the way of history.

Let me explain.

For all the hand-wringing, the actual upshot of the leaks has been... zilch. No covert operatives have been frogmarched down the streets of Moscow or Beijing. No foreign secretaries have been sacked.

(In the funniest tweet I've seen in a long time, my old Spy Magazine colleague Nell Scovell said: "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange thinks Hillary Clinton should resign. Does he know NOTHING about the Clintons???")

Clinton, of course, will not resign and neither will anyone else. If anyone was harmed even a little, all the governments and journalists so outraged about the leaks would point to that harm as an example of why the leaks are so dangerous. They've got nothing.

The only reason they are so upset is that they like keeping their little secrets. It makes them feel important. So far, however, the leaks show that the government of Russia is corrupt (Say it aint so!) and in most cases that diplomats have done a pretty good job. If all this stuff hadn't been leaked information, this "news" would be classified as "not news."

How is all this related to startups? I recently saw a presentation from one of the best startup guys working these days: Eric Ries. Ries is an advocate of taking the absolute minimum product that you can create and putting it on the web so you can see if and how people will use it. Then you learn your lessons, iterate quickly and keep moving. Someone asked him how it was possible to do this without alerting your competition to what it is you are doing.

Reis' answer was spot-on. In essence, he said that your competition is just busy trying to do whatever it is they are doing, and really won't be paying much attention to what a startup is trying to do in the same space. He said that you could actually take all the code you've written and send it to your closest competitor, and the chances are that they really wouldn't know what to do with it. So don't worry about them, Ries said, worry about your biggest challenge, which is to just do a good job of figuring out what your customers want and providing it to them.

So it is with all these "secrets" that are now out. They are only secret because of the legacy of the positions the people hold who are doing the communicating.

That's why I say this is a generational issue. People over 45 or so have this assumption that all communication is private. Gen Xers and younger -- the people who regularly post on the 'net where they are eating lunch -- understand that all communication is essentially public.

The reason there's been so much handwringing among the older parts of the media is that they liked the world back in the day when they, and they alone, would get to see all the private stuff and publicize it when they felt that it was interesting. The gatekeepers are just not that useful any more. What's useful is a search engine that allows anyone interested to find what they are looking for.

For those of you keeping score at home, gatekeepers are the Boomers, and search engines are from Gen X.

The person who allegedly provided all those cables to Wikileaks? A kid. The one calling for that kid to be executed? A presidential candidate, a boomer, who cloaks himself in Christianity. (Hypocrisy infects all generations, but its most friendly host is the Baby Boomer.)

So just remember these two things: First, if you really want something to be private, don't put it on the 'net. Second, ask yourself why you want it to be private. Chances are that if you try to keep it private, it will just make really boring stuff that much more sensational.

Movies that play with your mind


Why Time Bandits?



  • Fight Club
  • The Usual Suspects
  • Mulholland Drive
  • Donnie Darko









That's it.



Consider these pictures in this order:



And now:

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico 2010: Politics and Water don't mix

A few liberal writers have been critical of President Obama because his speech about the BP oil disaster was weak. I find myself agreeing with even more liberal friends of mine who posted on Facebook (so I won't link to them) that they thought that criticism unfair.

The mainstream media writers seemed to think that unlike the president's speech on race in Philadelphia, the speech about the oil spill didn't do anything to fix the problem. 

That's just dumb. Racial issues are issues of perception and attitude, and a great speech can help elevate everyone's perceptions and attitudes. The oil spill disaster is one of engineering and physics. No speech is going to fix that.

So, while I agree with my really liberal friends, I also find myself agreeing with conservative friends like Greg Walcher, who writes about how many of the solutions that really could help in the Gulf of Mexico are all illegal

And my perspective on the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico? Well, because of my book I see everything through water-colored glasses right now. I'm working on the chapter about what desalination will look like in the future, and so I've been looking at the volume of water in the oceans.

Bottom line: there's a lot.

The Gulf of Mexico is only the ninth biggest body of water in the world. The Pacific Ocean holds 283 times the volume of water in the Gulf, and still, the Gulf of Mexico is big. It's so big that even using the worst estimates for how much oil is gushing out every day, and even assuming they won't get it fixed until mid-August, the total amount of oil will add up to somewhere between a quarter and a half of one part per billion of the volume of water in the Gulf.

Now, I don't want to minimize the spill. The oil is a huge problem for all kinds of reasons, but it's mostly a problem on the surface (where most of the oil rises) and along the shores. In terms of contaminating the volume of water in the Gulf, it will add up to an amount that is way lower than the allowable amount of arsenic in drinking water. A drop in a bucket is HUGE compared to the amount of oil in the Gulf.

And as for the future of desalination of water... You'll just have to wait for the book!


Icon By the way, totally changing topics here, but I've been doing a bunch of the research for the book using a new search engine, DuckDuckGo. Google is googly in lots of googleliciuos ways, but I've really enjoyed the clean results pages and summary results that come up on search results pages while trying to learn about the Future of Water. 

(I am not getting paid for the link, but I do want to spread the news, which is why I used a link that the DuckDuckGo guy set up.)

TechCrunch Meetup in Denver

As of this morning at 8, nobody had volunteered to be the TechCrunch meetup organizer for Denver for the big fifth anniversary party. So I raised my hand.

I've been reading for most of those five years, and admire what Mike Arrington has done a lot.

And it's not exactly hard to get me to go to a bar on a Friday afternoon. I mean, I've posted on my permanent Scott Yates contact page that the best way to reach me on Friday Happy Hour is to go to the Pub on Pearl.

So, if you read this, I hope you can stop by starting around 5. But in honor of Arrington, let's not shake hands.

Elena Kagan is gay. Or she isn't. Big media is, however, dead for sure.

Members of the Supreme Court are the pinnacle celebrities of the legal geek world. As Kobe Bryant is to sports geeks, Steve Jobs or (but not "and") Bill Gates are to computer geeks, as Justin Bieber is to millions (so I read, anyway), the nine members of the high court are big celebrities.

So it makes sense that lots of people are interested in them.

I remember when John Roberts was nominated to the court, I read a bunch of the stories about him. They all had an "info box" or a "sidebar" that listed the highlights of his work history, his education, and his family, which included information about his wife and his two adopted kids.

I did the same reading about Elena Kagan. The stories were similar, both had lots of details showing how brilliant they are, bla bla bla. The one difference is that there was no "Family" section of the info box for Kagan. New York Times. Washington Post. ABC. Nothing.

It's as if everyone in the big media is all saying at the same time, "Move along. Move along. Nothing to see here. Move along."

To learn more, I turned away from the big media to a gay man, a Brit, and a thoughtful commentator, Andrew Sullivan. He has a number of posts on the topic, one of the most interesting, I thought, showed that a relatively new technological tool from (who else?) Google makes it clear that lots of people are interested, and are making their interest known by searching.

Here's my screen grab from this morning:

Clearly I'm not the only one who wants to know.

If Big Media had done it's job of just reporting, rather than trying to keep information out of stories and hope that we don't notice, I'm sure those Google suggested searches would look much different.

Look, it's not that I hope she is gay or isn't gay. The reality is that I don't care that much, except that I care about the people on the high court; I want to know what sort of people they are. I can find out all kinds of details about what kind of music she likes (opera), what her nickname was when she was a clerk (shorty), how she dressed for her high school yearbook photo (in judicial robes with a gavel), etc., but I'm not allowed to know if she's gay or straight?

This post isn't about her, it's about Big Media, what my old professor Jay Rosen calls the "Church of the Savvy."

Indeed just this morning he pointed me to the best long story I've read in a while by the always excellent James Fallows. It's about the future of news as being shaped by Google

The quote that fits this best is here:

“Usually, you see essentially the same approach taken by a thousand publications at the same time. Once something has been observed, nearly everyone says approximately the same thing.”

That's from a guy who's been watching Google News since the start, and he is absolutely right. I used to be part of that church. I did well, but I always bristled about the idea of knowing something and not being able to get it into the paper, and so I had some mighty fights with editors, and eventually left journalism and started my own business where I could put everything I knew out there.

(By the way, continuing my ongoing series on how rotten Gibbs is as press secretary, he has completely flubbed the White House response. He screwed this up, as he has with so many other issues, because he sees himself as one of the new high priests of the Church of the Savvy, and can't quite figure out how to recognize that the world is changing. His boss does, but in this case I think both President Obama and Kagan herself have erred in trying to keep it all in the closet, so that does put Gibbs in a tricky spot, but one that he could have worked out of more gracefully than he did here.)

The story will only grow and grow, not because it's fueled by haters on the right -- which is whom Gibbs blames -- or anyone else with an agenda. It will be fueled by people bristling at information being kept from them. Those Google suggested words are generated by a computer analyzing millions of searches. There's no conspiracy, vast or otherwise, driving what people all over the world type in their search engine windows.

Luckily for me and for all readers the walls are tumbling down, and it is possible to find other sources of news that are not in the Church of the Savvy.

Those who don't watch West Wing are doomed to repeat it?

Maybe this will become an ongoing series of life just being better on the show the West Wing as opposed to the real world of the West Wing. Here's my first entry on pardoning turkeys.

This one is more subtle, but watch at about 4 minutes into this video. With the polite tone that is befitting the setting, Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen delivered a stunning rebuke of a question posed by a senator.

Here's the better version. The sound quality is rotten, but it's the only one I could find on YouTube:

"The problem is that's what they were saying about me 50 years ago. It would disrupt the unit. You know what? It did disrupt the unit. The unit got over it. The unit changed."

If only Fitzwallace could have been there to smack down the senators.

Unemployment Rate For You

I seem to be in a mood to attack the New York Times today...

A million people have been linking to this gee-whiz graphic about the unemployment rate.

I don't think that's actually useful. I think all it does is make people feel better or worse about themselves while killing a couple minutes looking at some eye candy.

So, here, for you, with the help of the always talented Peter Jones, is a guide that is actually useful, and will not kill a bunch of your time today:

What is the unemployment rate for you?

The Mark Cuban Effect at DefragCon

The DefragCon kicks off in an hour, but the pre-conference get-together was plenty interesting.

I've been to a number of tech conferences, but somehow some of the dynamics always surprise me, especially what I think of as the Mark Cuban effect.

Cuban, of course, is the brash and bold entrepreneur who built up an early "dot-com" and sold it to Yahoo at the absolute peak of the market before the tech crash in 2000.

Now he's involved in all kinds of stuff, but is best known for owning a basketball team. The name of the team, the Mavericks, matches his personality perfectly.

Cuban is known in tech circles for having contrarian viewpoints, and issuing them as loudly as he can. For instance he railed against the Google acquisition of YouTube.

He's certainly earned the right to do that.

Now, I don't want to pick on DefragCon, which is actually much better than some of the other tech conferences, but it is still full of people who just love to do a "Cuban." They make loud, bold pronouncements about why an idea will absolutely not work, how it's been done before, or why some competitor will demolish the idea before it can get any traction, etc.

I ran into lots of those people when I was founding, then running, a web-based business dealing in traffic information. If I would have listened to them I never would have started the business, and I certainly never would have sold it to 

Heck, I may not have even bothered to wake up most mornings. 

Yesterday I talked to a couple of entrepreneurs who spent good money to come to the conference to learn and try to connect with others, and almost upon walking in the door they got the full "Cuban" from people who have never built, let alone sold, a company. (I actually had two experiences like that just in one day. The other was at the practice session for the upcoming Angel Capital Summit. More on that next week.)

I'm not saying that every idea walking around is great, and a little pushback is always a good idea. But for the next two days at Defrag I'll be attempting to tunnel through some of the bravado and find the great stories of new ideas, and bring them to you on or on I may not get to all of them right away, but I will try to report on many of them.

If you have a great story to tell (not just a press release announcing with great fanfare that version 3.2 of your whatever has just been released) look for me and let me hear it.

Douthat's Ignoble Nobel Blunder


Maybe some liberal copy editor slipped that headline past him.








Greatest Day of's Life!


No, not my life, my domain's life. 







Google Wave Scams, Why can't we all just get along?


Anyway, here's a complete guide to the Google Wave scams.


"This place is full of vultures. Vultures everywhere."


No, Scott Baio is not a Gen Xer

I disagree completely with this guy's assertion that the Original Gen Xers actually started being born in 1954.


If he had started in 1961, the year that Barack Obama, Douglas Rushkoff, Chris Anderson and Douglas Coupland were born, then he might have had a case. I mean Coupland literally wrote the book on Generation X.

But in the same year were born 

  • Julia Louis-Dreyfus -- famous only because of the completely boomer-centric Seinfeld 
  • George Stephanopoulos -- famous because of one of the first Boomer president, the appropriately narcissistic Bill Clinton
  • Meg Ryan
  • Randy Jackson and 
  • child stars Scott Baio and Ralph Macchio. 
That is not a group of Xers by any stretch.

Irony Alert: Bezos Apologizes for Big Brother-like Removal of 1984

The word "irony" is so often misused that it's almost refreshing when it is used properly.

Sure enough, the opportunity presents itself beautifully when Amazon removed the book 1984 from Kindles through a secret back door that most people didn't know existed. They thought that when you bought a book, well, that you owned it, just like with a book printed on paper. Not so.

So the moment comes, but unfortunately the US press didn't jump on the chance to call the situation ironic. Maybe they never read the book?

The British press, as we might expect, was all over the irony angle.

God save the Queen.

Unemployment is Helping Apple?

There's been a ton of analysis of why it is Apple is doing so well in the middle of the rotten economy, but there's one bit I haven't seen anywhere: Unemployment is helping Apple. A lot.

Here's why:

Just among close friends, I know a couple people who have been laid off. When they go, they have to turn in their corporate-mandated Blackberry. 

They have gotten used to having a smartphone, however, so they use a bit of their severance and go shopping for a new phone. They head to an Apple store. They may know full well that AT&T is a Big, Steaming Heap of Failure, but they also realize that if they are going to be unemployed, or turn into consultants, or whatever, that at least they don't want to hate their phone.

So, they get a phone that makes them smile. There's only one phone that does that.

I don't think that accounts for all of the 5.2 million iPhones Apple sold in the quarter, but I bet it was a lot of them.

Drudge, Hypochondria, and the President

I'm convinced that Drudge is a total hypochondriac. He's got about 20 stories about the swine flu up right now.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but he is leaning a bit too far in the panic direction.

On the other side is TechCrunch, which has a story up, saying that "panic" is being spread over the web

I disagree. I think these types of flu are a bit scary, and with the federal government now working on it, it's a legitimate news story.

(I bet we find, eventually, that like the last big scare of the bird flu, that this is not just some random thing, that there is a big-picture story that caused this. It turns out the avian flu was caused by chicken farmers in China giving Tamiflu and other antivirals to their chickens. It didn't work, surprise surprise, but what did happen is that they helped create a flu bug that did not get better when you took Tamiflu. This is something I learned about from a doctor because it hurt me directly: I got the flu and couldn't take Tamiflu to get better.)

The thing that worries, me, however, is that Drudge has such animus toward Obama.

I don't know if there's anything to the story that Obama met and shook hands with a man in Mexico City who died the next day from the swine flu, but I do know that if it happened to President Bush that Drudge would have had that story front and center.



  • Baseball is back. Ahhhhhhhhh.

This game may last forever!



In that book, the game went on for 2,000 innings.








Something, you know, apocalyptic.


And that wasn’t even it.



Ahhhhh. Love it.

Cure Cancer with the Internet

OK, now that the election is essentially over we can get back to using the Internet for worthwhile stuff, like trying to cure cancer.

I'm not joking. Right now there's a guy who has perhaps hours to live and there's a drug that may help him, but the company that makes the drug isn't releasing it for use on that one person.

(OK, the whole election isn't over, it's just boring. Except if you are one of those who want to "Say Yes On 50"  Yech. I hope not!)

Drudge let's me down a second time

The first time Drudge let me down, I figured he just had a bad source. He announced to the world that Evan Bayh would be Obama's Veep.

This time, though, he's really shooting himself in the foot.

Comeback Through headlines and pictures, he's trying to create the illusion that McCain is making a big comeback. He's not

(And remember, I like Drudge. With a friend, I invented the Drudge Widget!)

There's also some noise that he may or may not come out with a big new plan to help the economy.

The problem is that McCain is in a trap that Obama has laid down. He did this with the Clintons, which was masterful. Now he's done it with McCain without even breaking a sweat.

The trap? He's made the case that McCain is "erratic." So, now if McCain sticks to his same (losing) strategy he'll lose, and if he tries to make a big change, well, he'll just be more erratic. McCain really may never know what hit him.

I'm certainly glad to see, by the way, that McCain has started in small ways to tamp down some of the anger out there. I've been banned from talking on this blog about anything that could be perceived as a threat by anyone against any potential new president. I'm not allowed to talk about it, but let's just say that I'm really really glad that McCain is saying that Obama is a good, decent, family man and a citizen.

Hey, speaking of family man, I think all those people that are so afraid of Obama are mostly older, and they have a lot of fear about the economy, and just change in general. Change is scary! All of those who are scared should look to none other than the heartthrob of Wasilla, Levi Johnston. There's a guy who should be scared. He's a high school drop-out with a pregnant girlfriend, and a mother-in-law-to-be who is a lifelong NRA member and has a lot of guns and may, in fact, be crazy. (She certainly is delusional.)

But is he afraid? Doesn't sound like it to me:


What about Johnston's politics?

The young man said he wasn't an expert on politics by any stretch. Asked about Barack Obama, he replied: "I don't know anything about him. He seems like a good guy. I like him."

Sure, he says he will be voting for the Republicans. I would be to, if I was him; having the Palins several thousand miles away probably sounds like a good idea! TV is On The Air

For those of you who just can't get enough goodness on this blog, there are now some ways to catch up on the Tee-Vee.

As Chief Strategist for the Vote No On Amendment 50, I've taped a few interviews and discussions about why Amendment 50 would be such a bad idea for Colorado. Starting tonight, September 25, at 9 p.m. MDT on Comcast channel 25 or on DirectTV channel 681, the Altitude network will be airing a series on all the ballot initiatives. I don't know what order they will do them in, I'm hoping it's just numeric so that we will be on earlier. That show should be rebroadcast a couple of times.

Then on Monday, September 29, I'll be on Channel 12, the PBS station, at 8:30 p.m. MDT. That one may be on the internet after, and if so it will be posted on the Amendment 50 blog.

I've also been interviewed by the local Fox outlet, and have one set with the Channel 7, but I don't yet know when those will be on the air. If you see it, let me know how bad my hair looks. There have also been some great print interviews, and the Denver Post just endorsed the idea of Colorado saying No to Amendment 50, so with barely a week of volunteering for the side of truth and justice, I'm feeling pretty good about our progress!

OK, the self promotion is getting a little thick around here...

I got this email today

I can never tell if these are legitimate. This one seems like it might be real.

Dear American:

transfer of funds of great magnitude.
profitable to you.
1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.
detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the
Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson



Well, finally I can imagine someone. Check this out:



Fair? Check.

Does great research? Check.


An ability to question the Conventional Wisdom? Check.


Look, a guy can dream...


I shouldn't pick on this poor guy. Lord knows that there have been plenty of times that I've only seen a word, never heard it pronounced, and didn't know how to pronounce it.

Nah, I should make fun of him. When that happens to me if I don't know is I ask someone the correct pronunciation, or look it up. I did this recently with "inchoate." I did that just so I'd use it properly in conversation; I think if I was going to speak on a video available on the World Wide Web I'd really check out any word I wasn't sure of.

So, you don't have to watch all this video, which is otherwise essentially information-free infotainment, but do watch up to the pretty boy try to use the word "hyperbole" at about 1:01 in.

Maybe this guy needs to turn this into a thing -- the day after the Superbowl host a HyperBowl giving out awards for those able to generate the most hype out of a campaign with some obvious exaggerations.

Air Apparent

I've been reading lots and lots and lots of commentary about the new Mac Air, and they always seem to go along the theme of, "I don't want to like it, and it has all these issues, but I somehow can't help myself and now I'm so happy."

Apple has this amazing ability to infuse people with the opposite of buyer's remorse.

The funniest write-up, as so often is the case, comes from Guy Kawasaki, the title pretty much sums it up: Into Thin Air: How I Spent $5,000 on Air and Made Fifty-Year Old Women Swoon

The thing that has gotten almost no write-up, however, is Apple's new "One to One" service. Most people that write about technology on the Interwebs love hardware, especially the latest, skinniest, most powerful, whatever. I love all that stuff, too, but for this post I'm trying to look at the bigger picture.

Most folks actually don't care about technology. Most folks just use the IT department in their corporation to provide them the tools they need to do their job, even if they grumble about it.

Of course, the world is changing fast, and the number of people who work for big organizations continues to drop. We are becoming a free-agent nation.

What Apple has figured out is that free agents want an IT department, too. And what they want is not just some kind of service plan to fix the hardware if it breaks, what they want is someone who will show them how to use the tools to do the stuff they want to do. But nobody likes paying by the hour for that.

So, the really genius thing that Apple has done is said, "OK, we'll be your full service IT staff for $99 a year. You can use us as often as you like, just make an appointment."

Of course, then people are coming into the stores more often, buying more stuff, etc., but I think the genius of this product from Apple is that the company has decided it wants to be the single-source IT vendor to the Free-Agent Nation. Brilliant.

Mmmmm. Fast Food

I should make a category called "I love the Internet."



A guy in West Virginia has taken it on himself to compare the fast food photos from ads, and the food itself.

Really funny, go look for sure. (Also funny is the Alli Side Effects page.)

The best part of the internet, though, is that he has some Google ad blocks on his fast food page, and because of the keywords, some of the same outfits lampooned on that page are helping to sponsor the lampooner.

Ahhh. The Internet and America. I love 'em.