In the 1980s, when I worked at the CBS News Election and Survey Unit, there was an A.P. ticker near my desk. At the time, the A.P. had the contract to collect election results from their county reporting points, summarize those results and provide them by teletype to members and subscribers. Most of the time, however, it carried the feed of breaking news and followup stories. Postings were not signed, they just had an originating station but, after watching for a while, the personalities of different stations around the World emerged. Mistakes were common and pranks were occasionally pulled. In today’s parlance, this was a very successful social media network with many of the characteristics found in today’s Internet mix of chatting, tweeting and blogging. It just wasn’t free and it wasn’t open. It was built on expensive phone lines leased from Ma Bell and you had to be an accredited member to post stories.

The A.P. has a great heritage that goes back many decades before my encounter at CBS. I have a novel that I bought at The Strand Bookstore on my first visit there upon moving to NYC after collage:  Informed Sources (Day East Received) by Willard S. Bain. The novel is a visual work in teletype-ese, printed in an ALL-CAPS typewriter font. Written in 1967, it was given away for free in mimeograph format by The Communication Company, an underground press, before being published by Doubleday and Company in this softcover edition that I’ll have to stop reading soon if I want to finish this post.

Informed Sources tells the story of a terrorist plot coinciding with the reported death of a pop culture idol from the perspective of the station staffers at Informed Sources (IS), an A.P. like network:

INFORMED SOURCES BULLETIN
    BERKELEY, NOW (IS) -- A PLAN TO BLOW UP GOLDEN
GATE BRIDGE IN HONOR OF ROBIN THE COCK, WHOSE
ALLEGED LIFE REPORTEDLY HAS ENDED IN RUMORED
DEATH, WAS ABANDONED TODAY.
                                          VC807PPS

Except that this is 1967 and everyone is more or less stoned. Yet, here too, you can hear voices like those of today’s Internet. Take this quote from the beginning:

BOSTON, NOW (IS) -- WHAT'S HAPPENING?
     IN SCORES OF SCATTERED BASEMENT BASES ACROSS
THE LAND THE QUESTION GATHERED ITSELF AND THEN
HOVERED IN THE ANSWERING ECHO.
     CYNICS SNEERED IT WAS ALL A BIG PIPE DREAM, BUT
ONE OVEREXTENDED PIONEER OF THE NEW LEISURE SAID
"THAT'S WAY BESIDE THE POINT."

The more thing change… Right? The novel remains an unknown classic of the underground literary world at that time when the beat poets were experimenting with LSD and cultural revolution. It’s not on-line, as far as I know. There are only four used copies of the softbound edition for sale on Amazon and only one of the mimeograph copies.

WHIMSY SEIZES SYNAPSE TRAPEZES

Sorry, but I don’t wish the A.P. well in their headline selling business. Not if it means a full court press against fair-use under copyright that will saddle the Internet with last century’s digital rights concepts. There is a big difference between atoms and bits and the bits of information that seach engines gather and maintain about other online content (links) is not that content — it is the conversation about that content. The A.P. did social media right for so many years but now they don’t seem to get it at all. Paid headlines, like paid speech must eventually lose market share to free variety.

This is important news. Not because it challenges Microsoft’s dominance of the PC operating system market, as stressed in the New York Times article on the announcement, but because it’s a sign that we are heading to another sweet spot in the information technology revolution. A sweet spot is where hardware, software and cultural trends come together to make complex tasks much easier and cheaper to accomplish. The effect transforms society enabling new ways for people to interact. For example, in 1994, reliable, dial-up Internet service met the graphical Web browser, Mosaic, just as Al Gore re-invented the Internet as an open platform for business, entertainment and the free, global exchange of information and ideas.

Here are the important trends today: A new generation of high-speed WiFi based on freed up broadcast spectrum from the conversion to digital TV is on its way and will meet up with new portable devices that are fun to use and cheap to own. After Google Chrome OS goes open-source, there should be versions available for everything from X-Boxes to old TiVo machines.

Speaking of Tivo, the recent Supreme Court decision to deny the appeal in the Cablevision DVR case highlights another trend. Cablevision wanted to provide DVR services upstream on their servers. The broadcast networks held that this was making copies for redistribution and, thus, they should pay royalties. The Appeals Court ruling, which the Supremes let stand, held that, once the consumer paid a license for a piece of content, it didn’t matter where it was stored on the consumer’s behalf—on a local hard drive or somewhere in the cloud.  This decision lays the groundwork for challenging all the restrictions that the telco, broadcast and cable monopolies, place on how, where and when we do anything.

Here’s my last trend to watch: A month ago, the state of Vermont OK’d the formation of virtual corporations by a change in its tax laws. This means that corporations (LLCs) in Vermont no longer need to have a physical mailing address and can conduct online board meetings.

An important conclusion was missed in the Vermont reporting – a corporation can have bank accounts and credit cards. This is a privilege hitherto granted by our government only to corporations and individuals and denied to such entities as: MeetUp groups and SecondLife communities. The effect of this, as Clay Shirky points out in Here Comes Everybody, limits our ability to leverage the Internet, with social media tools, to organize and engage in collective actions other than protest movements.

How will society change in the next two or three years when all of us are connected to a World Wide Web of rich media, all the time, in devices on us and around us; with fast, friendly software that knows about us, our friends and the tribes we associate with; when the last geographic and cost barriers to collaborative action for the common good are gone?

Google Chrome is a minimalist’s browser. It doesn’t offer a multitude of features, but it’s very fast and solid as a rock. It relies heavily on tabs when visiting different sites and each tab runs in its own process. This keeps the browser from crashing from a page error or some misbehaved plug-in, and prevents pages in the background from slowing down the foreground window. I like Chrome’s history function. When you open a new tab or window it displays thumbnails and links to your most recently vistited pages.

Chrome offers a single address bar for both URLs and keywords. Google is the default search engine, but it can be switched to others—Wikipedia, Aol, Yahoo, etc. The address bar has a fast auto-suggest function. For flying around the Web from site to site, Chrome is a jet fighter. However, if you mostly stay put on a collection of actively fed “home” pages, Flock may be the browser for you. It’s a mega-cruise ship.

Flock is Firefox on social media steroids. Flock takes a framed approach to visiting the Social Media Web, grabing feeds from places, such as: Facebook, Twitter and MySpace into sidebars and YouTube selections into a headband. Flock works best opened full-screen on a big, wide, LCD display. Beware! The shear number and variety of tool bars, control tabs, bookmarks, menus and search boxes can overwhelm.

Flock, by default, remembers the sites you had loaded when you last quit and reopens them. It also opens a generated page, “My World” that captures all your various feeds, messages and pings.  I like the way Flock integrates with Gmail, and find it useful as an “active desktop” – a one-stop site that I scan every so often to keep in the mix as I’m doing other work. Flock pops-up a standard blog editor when I want to post something and just about anything can be shared with a drag-n-drop action.

The online support documentation provided by the these two new browsers also provide a facinating contrast. Google wrote a Chrome comic book that teaches you how to use Chrome with a technical depth that’s actually readable. Flock has uploaded a series of youTube videos showing Flock’s Features in action. Check it out, you’ll get a better idea of what Flock is like and I won’t have to insert a screenshot here.

Google Chome is only available now for Windows. When it becomes available for the Mac, I’ll probably be using both Flock and Chrome more often than Firefox and Safari.

— Larry