So I’m interested in what you folks’ experience has been with Technorati. Mine is best summed up in the headline.

It seems to be that as they build a richer, more finished site, it becomes less and less functional – both because of what appears to be sheer incompetence, and worse – by design.

Some cases in point:

I use a Treo 650. Technorati Mobile – http://mobile.technorati.com – brings up a search box, a list of top searches this hour, and a “what’s happening on the web right now in:” and a list of stories that are highly linked.

If I fill in the search block, and click on “Search”:, you’d expect to get a set of Technorati search results. Go try it and see what happens. Nothing. Nothing has happened for weeks, if not months. Has anyone at Technorati even bothered to look?And the technical geniuses at Technorati decided to redo their UI to a level of desigm matching their technical acumen.

There’s a basic rule of good Information Architecture that I swear by:

1) The same control always does the same thing.

2) I ought to be able to get to the underlying data without a PhD is user interface design.

Take a look at this:

Technorati breaks Rule 1 on the most commonly-used controls on their site; and worse, when they do break the rule, there is flatly no way to get to the targeted post, and the primary control doesn’t take me to the blog, but to the Technorati page about the blog.

Anyone out there want to fund a small startup? Is there a startup out there I can invest in? I’m just effing tired of this and if we have to build something better to have a tool that works, that’s what we need to do.

OK, someone is going to go to bed with no dinner.

From the Weekly Standard:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp–author of the much-disputed “Shock Troops” article in the New Republic’s July 23 issue as well as two previous “Baghdad Diarist” columns–signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods–fabrications containing only “a smidgen of truth,” in the words of our source.

Separately, we received this statement from Major Steven F. Lamb, the deputy Public Affairs Officer for Multi National Division-Baghdad:

An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by PVT Beauchamp were found to be false. His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims.

According to the military source, Beauchamp’s recantation was volunteered on the first day of the military’s investigation. So as Beauchamp was in Iraq signing an affidavit denying the truth of his stories, the New Republic was publishing a statement from him on its website on July 26, in which Beauchamp said, “I’m willing to stand by the entirety of my articles for the New Republic using my real name.”

This seems pretty definitive, and unless someone who is accountable by name is flat-out lying – which in this era seems pretty darn risky – I’d say that we’re one step away (public comment from Beauchamp and/or release of his sworn statement) from putting a wooden stake into the heart of this story.

On the other side, I’ll raise a simple proof that would go a long way toward establishing some veracity on Beauchamp’s part. Find someone who recalls a burn-disfigured woman who served at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait during the time that Beauchamp might have been there. I can’t believe that’s not something people would remember.

For me, I think this issue is close to closed. Sadly, it’s also closed for people who want to believe the worst of our troops – that the kind of soulless cruelty that Beauchamp wrapped himself in is close to the norm, rather than the exception – the truth or falsity of Beauchamp’s ‘facts’ are irrelevant – his stories, like all good literature speak to a deeper truth that they embrace tightly.

My piece in the Examiner on the California voting decision is here.

Pass it around and like freely; if it doesn’t make the Top 10 I’ll spend the whole flight home from NYC silently weeping and creeping out my seatmate.

Yeah, I know I have other more “serious” stuff to blog about, but this piqued my interest. And since it touched, in part, what I do for a living, I thought it’d be fun to do a blog post out of left field and see what happens.

Tomorrow – ‘Perilous Times’, ‘TNR’, and more on voting machines, I promise…

Jason Calcanis has a blog post up on “social network fatigue,” in which he asks:

OK, now that we’ve got that on the table why else are we here? Putting aside the need for humans to procreate, I can’t help but wonder: are we creating a social system to communicate with each other at a distance because the reality of creating and maintaining that social networking face-to-face is, well, scary? Do we not want to pick up the phone and tell five friends we want them to come over for dinner and a movie, so we instead throw food at them and tell them to watch something we previously watched and liked? Intimacy, deep friendships, and love can be scary, clicking your mouse is not.

Is Facebook a more efficient, rejection-free, surrogate for the real world? Is that what we want?

There’s obviously a certain amount of limerance in using social networks. But, I’ll argue that there’s some beef there, and that once the companies and tools shake out, tools to facilitate social networking will continue to be among the most important tools on the Internet.

Why?

Well, I’ll suggest that the real value of social networks for someone like me – who does manage to have friends over enough to annoy my wife – is in dealing with the big groups of people outside one’s social ‘core’. Because that social core is shrinking…

The new study, based on face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative group of 1,467 adults, provides the most comprehensive look yet at Americans’ degree of social connectedness. The 20-minute questionnaire was done by pollsters at the University of Chicago as part of their General Social Survey, one of the longest-running national surveys of social, cultural, and political issues.

In the survey, respondents were asked to identify people with whom they had discussed important personal issues in the past six months. On average, they named 2.08 people in 2004 compared with 2.94 in 1985. Almost half of those surveyed could name only one or no confidants, while the portion with at least six close friends has dwindled to 4.9 percent of the population.

The researchers said that over the 20 years, Americans were most likely to turn away from friendships outside of their families. Four out of five people surveyed in 2004 said they only talk to family members about important personal matters, compared with 57 percent in 1985. The percentage of people who confide only in their spouse increased from 5 percent to 9 percent.

Now this was done in 2004, before the bump in social networking, and measures the change from 1985 – 2004 – a period that overlaps the Internet explosion, but I wonder how much of this is Internet-based, and how much is the simple Robert Putnam “Bowling Alone” collapse of intermediate social institutions as work and parenting consume our lives.

But the unquestionable truth is that we have narrowed our social focus to just a few people, and that most of the people we deal with are acquaintances.

And keeping track of that big cloud of acquaintances is, to me, what social networking tools are primarily about. there are maybe a dozen or dozen and a half people I know who I keep track of personally and professionally because I talk to them often enough and we have a strong enough sense of mutual obligation that we would call each other and talk about any personal change.

How do I keep track of the other 1100 people in my Outlook database? How do I keep ‘freshening’ those acquaintances so that they stay alive, and so that some of them have a chance to become real friends?

Because what happens as we increasngly become nomads at work and recluses at home is that we need to reach out – for a contact, for some advice, for help with something or another – and our narrow slice of close friends doesn’t have anyone in it who can get it done for us.

So we reach into the cloud. And, to make the metaphor really icky, if we want the clouds to produce, we need to seed them. We used to do that at Rotary meetings, or playing softball on the company team.

Now we do it on Myspace or Facebook.

There are other things there as well…it’s in the queue, it’s in the queue.

Kevin Drum says re Jonathan Alter’s Newsweek piece on electoral fiddling:

I see that the latest crackpot initiative from the Golden State has now gotten national attention.

Alter says – accurately:

Our way of electing presidents has always been fertile ground for mischief. But there’s sensible mischief – toying with existing laws and the Constitution to reflect popular will – and then there’s the other kind, which tries to rig admission to the Electoral College for strictly partisan purposes. Mischief-makers in California (Republicans) and North Carolina (Democrats) are at work on changes that would subvert the system for momentary advantage and – in ways the political world is only beginning to understand – dramatically increase the odds that a Republican will be elected president in 2008.

Kevin doesn’t see fit to mention North Carolina’s plan to grab some electoral votes for Team Blue. But Jerome Armstrong at MyDD did:

Great news for the Dem candidate in ’08:

North Carolina appears headed to becoming the third state in the nation to abandon the winner-take-all method for awarding its electoral votes as the House tentatively agreed Thursday to shelve the method.

In its place, according to the measure approved on a largely party-line vote, would be a more proportional method that would reward the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each of the state’s congressional districts.

The Senate already has passed the meaure, which would take effect in 2008. A final House vote could come Friday, then the bill would go to Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat, just like the majority in the Legislature, which has backed the change. The state Democratic Party also supports it.

The Democratic candidate would be sure to receive at least 3 EV’s from NC, and probably as high as 7-8, depending on the nominee. Eye on ’08 points out that Dems have the trifecta in Arkansas and Louisiana as well, where they could possibly also make this change. At the least, it ensures that candidates are going to be coming to NC during the 2008 contest. If this had been in effect during 2000, Gore would have been President.

I know it’s impossible to read everything. But it’s not hard to realize that rules that benefit the GOP in California are likely – if applied elsewhere – to benefit the Dems elsewhere.

I’ve got a basic position; fairness matters more than partisan advantage. I have no problem fighting hard for what I believe in. But partisan issues – while important – are fleeting. A fair political system that everyone can look to as legitimate needs to last us a long time.

(fixed dumb misspelling of Alter’s name)

CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen has done the right thing and decertified Sequoia, Hart, ES & S and Diebold e-Voting machines. In fact she’s decertified all of them, with strong (and reachable) conditions for using the Hart and Diebold machines for this election cycle only.she did not approve the Sequoia or ES & S machines because of the massive security flaws in them.

Go read the Red Team reports and Source code reviews; if you know anything about technology – and I do – the only thing to do is scrap them and start over.

Huge compliments to Secretary Bowen for doing the right thing.

As I’ve said before it’s pretty damn cool to be able to delineate the exact moment when a tide changed; it’s my belief that one leg of our political system – confidence in voting – is as bad tonight as it is going to be in my lifetime, and we’re watching tonight as one brave woman managed to do the hard work to stop the tide and reverse it.

We’re not done yet…

Tomorrow, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen (disclosure: I supported her) will release her decision on automated voting for the next election cycle.

If you want a sense of the technical issues involved go read the top-to-bottom tech review – which is incomplete, but completely damning.

Watch for this – it’s the point where the wave breaks and turns back, and we’ll be on a path to trustable voting. Pretty cool…

Update II: OK, it’s a lot less plausible.

/Update II

Confederate Yankee has the official release from the Army concerning Scott Beauchamp’s tales.

They appear to be tall.

To your question: Were there any truth to what was being said by Thomas?

Answer: An investigation of the allegations were conducted by the
command and found to be false. In fact, members of Thomas’ platoon and
company were all interviewed and no one could substantiate his claims.

As to what will happen to him?

Answer: As there is no evidence of criminal conduct, he is subject to
Administrative punishment as determined by his chain of command. Under
the various rules and regulations, administrative actions are not
releasable to the public by the military on what does or does not
happen.

So someone is fibbing here; I think TNR either got snookered or the Army is covering up. My money? Snooker. The consequences to the Army of falsifying this are too high.

“Plausible” certainly doesn’t mean “true”.

/Update:

TNR has published a commentary on Scott Beauchamp which suggests that there is at least some third-party validation of Beauchamp’s core claims.

In this process, TNR contacted dozens of people. Editors and staffers spoke numerous times with Beauchamp. We also spoke with current and former soldiers, forensic experts, and other journalists who have covered the war extensively. And we sought assistance from Army Public Affairs officers. Most important, we spoke with five other members of Beauchamp’s company, and all corroborated Beauchamp’s anecdotes, which they witnessed or, in the case of one solider, heard about contemporaneously. (All of the soldiers we interviewed who had first-hand knowledge of the episodes requested anonymity.)

– emphasis added

I said that I felt Beauchamp’s stuff sounded “implausible”…I’ve got to say, as much as it stings, that it sounds a lot less implausible now.

And while Beauchamp may be a low-performing soldier in a low-performing unit, if these claims are plausible there’s a bunch of stuff that needs to be looked into.

I’ll try and have a longer comment tonight.

See Update

This is what not investing in infrastructure looks like:

While I don’t know the exact cause of this specific disaster, I’ll suggest something that anyone who has owned a boat knows for a simple fact – when you skimp on maintenance and upkeep of the basic systems, they fail.

In our case, we have one party – the Democrats – who want to spend the maintenance money on transfer payments and ridiculous pension plans for public employees. We have another – the Republicans – who want to give it away in corporate welfare. They both seem very good at giving it away to family, friends, and campaign donors.

I wrote about it a while ago supporting “sewer socialism”; both parties ought to be damn focused on fixing the systems and keeping the bridges, roads, and sewers working. If they aren’t, we need to change them until they are.

Update: The Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

The highway bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River on Wednesday was rated as “structurally deficient” two years ago and possibly in need of replacement.
…
eanne Aamodt, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, said the department was aware of the 2005 assessment of the bridge. “We’ve seen it, and we are very familiar with it,” she said.

Aamodt said the department plans its bridge repairs using information from the Bridge Inventory database.

Many other bridges nationwide carry the same designation that the I-35W bridge received, Aamodt said.

Politicians – well-meaning, honest, decent ones – killed those people by making bad decisions about priorities. We have a backlog of bad decisions about priorities built up, and if we don’t clear it out, we’ll wind up killing people until we get politicians who get it.

Once again, we’re dealing with the issue of conditions in Iraq, which those who oppose the war (most of whom opposed the war from the beginning and are proud to have done so) saying things like the comment left by John Quiggin in the post on News, Good, Bad, and Fake:

Interesting. On the one hand, the point that the general situation in Iraq is so terrible as to make disputes over minor points in a single story irrelevant is dismissed with “fake but accurate”.

On the other hand, the point that this is a huge waste of effort if all you are concerned with is minor points a single news item is rejected because such items are indicative of a pervasive MSM bias.

I addressed exactly the same point last year, and don;t think I can improve on my argument. Rather than linking back to it, I thought I’d reproduce the post and see what kind of discussion we can kick off.

From December, 2006:

Jamail Hussein and Karen Toshima

In the thread to my first Jamail Hussein post below, commenter Andrew Lazarus says:

A.L., you seem to be seizing on this fire incident as an indication that the MSM coverage of Iraq is way off. But at the same time, neither you nor anyone else is suggesting that the counts of maimed corpses, or dead soldiers, or explosions is in any way exaggerated. The impression of Iraq as some sort of hell on earth really doesn’t depend on this one gruesome story…any more than our perception of the Holocaust depends on the discredited story of Jews turned into soap.

I happen to think that this particular story – and the other stories – coming out of Iraq matter a lot because our policies on the war will be driven by our perceptions which are in turn driven by – the stories we read.My reply to Andrew started this way (with some amendations):

The problem, Andrew, is [we don’t know] whether [Iraq is] hell on earth or heck (or Beaumont, Texas); that’s the point I keep trying to raise and that keeps getting slapped aside.

I spoke with Greg Sergeant today about all this, and we had a friendly chat in which I tried to explain why it is that one reported tragedy like this matters so much (and why the aggregation of small tragedies matters so much) and I asked if he’d ever heard of Karen Toshima.

He hadn’t so let me explain here.

I did a fast experiment – someone with Lexis-Nexis could do better – and searched the LA Times website archive (which has stories searchable since 1/1/1985) and looked for some word combinations…

Mentions of ‘gang murder’ in the L.A. Times in 1987: 297
Mentions of ‘gang killing’ in the L.A. Times in 1987: 192

Mentions of ‘gang murder’ in the L.A. Times in 1989: 649
Mentions of ‘gang killing’ in the L.A. Times in 1989: 435

Annual increase (both terms summed) from 1987 to 1989: 60.8%

Mentions of ‘murder’ in 1987: 3,893
Mentions of ‘killing’ in 1987: 3,585

Mentions of ‘murder’ in 1989: 5,686
Mentions of ‘killing’ in 1989: 5,117

Annual increase (terms summed): 22.2%

The underlying numbers look like this:

Overall Homicides in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County in 1987: 975
Overall Homicides in Los Angeles and Los Angeles County in 1989: 1,053

Annual Increase: 4.0%

Gang Homicides in Los Angeles County in 1987: 387
Gang Homicides in Los Angeles County in 1989: 554

Annual Increase: 21.5%

Note that the increase in gang homicides – 167 – is greater than the increase in the number of total homicides – 78. This suggests the possibility that some homicides that would otherwise have been classified as ‘normal’ were instead classified as ‘gang’ – something I’ll take up with my law-enforcement friends.

What changed? Why did the coverage go up so much more than the underlying numbers?

Karen Toshima was murdered, that’s what changed.

In 1988 in Westwood Village, then the ‘Third Street’ of Los Angeles, where young upper middle class people went to dine and catch a movie or listen to some music or dance, two gangs opened fire on each other and Long Beach resident Karen Toshima died.

Suddenly in the consciousness of the upper-middle-class of Los Angeles – the class that produces TV news and newspaper columns – gang murders, which had been confined to streetcorners and alleys in South Central and East Los Angeles were vividly real.

And if you lived in Los Angeles then, you locked your doors and bought guns. I must have taken half a dozen friends to the shooting range and then the gun store that year.

For most of the next decade, as gang crime rose, peaked in 1995, and then fell dramatically, the narrative of life in Los Angeles was the omnipresent fear of gang violence.

That fear was fed by sensational media – first news, then movies and television – and it defined and limited life in Los Angeles.

Was gang violence a real issue in Los Angeles before 1988? Of course. Was it something worth spending significant resources on and attempting to suppress? Yes.

But the monomaniacal focus on Los Angeles as the “Gang Capital of the World” created a false impression that Crips and Bloods ruled the streets. Where did that perception come from? From reporting the, like a hip-hop drumbeat, regularly pounded home the point

In a few small pockets, for a few years, yes. But the vast majority of people in Los Angeles – people like me – drove throughout the city, ate in restaurants throughout the city (three of my favorites are in South Central and two in East LA).

But the perception of the city changed. Policies changed as a result – policies that may or may not have been good ones.

In Iraq the stakes are much higher. But the mechanisms we’re using to sort them out really are no different. Wouldn’t it be nice if they were?