Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, it’s kaput—or, at the very least, terminally ill, wracked by videogames, wikis, recaps, talkbacks, YouTube, ADD, and the rise of a multiplatform, multipolar, mashup-media culture. Hollywood, vendor of Story in its most denatured form, is most at risk: The film industry is slowly but steadily being forced to part with quaint artifacts like the “hero’s journey,” Joseph Campbell’s so-called Monomyth. (Which is just so … well … mono.) Beginnings, middles, and ends are headed for the attic, next to the box marked VCR Rewinders/Beastmaster Franchise. And Tinseltown can kick this chestnut to the curb. You may remember it from high school English:

Concocted 146 years ago by a German philologist, Freytag’s pyramid was long held aloft as the one-size-fits-all narrative template, despite the fact that it describes the tidy Aristotelian side of storytelling (Ben-Hur) far better than its frayed quantum fringes (Memento). Techniques like open-ended conclusion, audience interactivity, and nonlinear chronology “were part of the avant-garde 30 or 40 years ago,” says UCLA film school dean Robert Rosen, “but they’re taken for granted now.”

Fortunately for Western civilization, I’ve developed a new model. Allow me to introduce Brown’s Ziggurat (in 4-D!)^tm. It accounts for all the time-shredding, symmetry-defying, viewer-inclusive wackiness of New Story. To stress-test this innovative system, we revisit one of our most basic, most fundamental narratives. A classic hero’s journey. The ur-Story. I speak, obviously, of Die Hard.

In Freytag-ese, Die Hard unfolds thusly: NYC cop John McClane arrives in LA to reunite with his estranged wife, Holly (exposition), but terrorists raid her office tower, taking everyone hostage except McClane (inciting incident), who escapes unseen and starts picking off the goons (rising action). The terrorists finally realize they’re holding McClane’s wife and gain the upper hand (climax), but McClane frees the other hostages (falling action), goes toe-to-toe with the terrorist chieftain, and prevails (resolution). He celebrates by making out with his wife in the back of a limo. (Awww! And … denouement!)

A little square, no? With the snazzy Brown Ziggurat, however, Die Hard will look like this: John McClane, NYC cop, arrives in LA to reconcile with his estranged wife—but we already know all about their failing marriage from the ARG we’ve been obsessed with for the six months leading up to the movie’s release. (McClane’s potemkin Tumblr blog was especially illuminating.) With exposition rendered obsolete, we open instead on a Sprite commercial, which transitions seamlessly into furious gunplay. We don’t even see McClane in the flesh, but our handsets are buzzing with his real-time thumb-tweets: “in the air duct. smelz like dead trrist in here lol.” The film then rewinds to McClane Googling “terrorists” to read up on his adversaries. We then flash-cut to the baddies’ POV, which we’re familiar with (and sympathetic to) thanks to the addictive Xbox hit Die Hard: Hard Out There for a Terrorist. This is all part of the Action-Happening Plateau, an intensifying mass of things and stuff leading up to the Mymax^tm.

The Mymax is not a lame old Freytag climax but a hot Escher mess of narrative possibilities suggested by you, the audience. With a mere click of your handset (and a charge of 99 cents), you furnish a Youclusion^tm to your liking. This is how McClane somehow ends up defeating terrorists—and winning American Idol—with his ultrasonic melisma. McClane and Holly then celebrate by making a sex tape. (Awww!)

Voilà! The future of storytelling. Hollywood, I await my royalty checks. And you, dear reader, can thank me by providing a Youclusion for this column.

[via WIRED] by Scott Brown

In November, not two weeks after winning the election and still two months from becoming commander in chief, Barack Obama brought the government into the 21st century. Or at least that was what we were told when he released his first Web video address as president-elect. The clip, billed by some as a modern fireside chat, was embedded as a YouTube video on Change.gov, the incoming administration’s Web site. Sitting in a leather chair, framed slightly off center from his chest up, Obama delivered a three-minute talk on the economic crisis, vlog style.

The video quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and within a few days hundreds of blogs were linking to it. Obama’s foray into viral video, the story went, heralded the beginning of a new era in government communication and transparency—”Franklin Roosevelt 2.0,” in the words of The Huffington Post. The Washington Post proclaimed the advent of the “YouTube presidency.”

1 million:
The number of views received by Obama’s first YouTube address as president-elect.

It wasn’t long, however, before savvy observers noted what was missing from this and other Obama videos: the chance for ordinary citizens to talk back. The campaign initially disabled the comment function on YouTube and prevented response videos from appearing alongside. A YouTube video without comments, some pundits groused, is more like a monologue than a chat, fireside or not. “I don’t see how one-way messages provide any more transparency for the work of the White House or government than the current old-style radio addresses,” blogged Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government-transparency watchdog group. “Is Obama ready,” challenged TechCrunch, “to be a two-way president?”

Of course, Obama’s transition team had good reasons for disabling responses. For starters, YouTube comments are typically the intellectual equivalent of truck-stop graffiti. (When the team belatedly allowed comments a couple of weeks later, the site was flooded with insights like “USA susks.”) Also, his team would have zero control over the potentially critical or embarrassing response videos that users would post next to the address. The real reason, however, was that Obama wasn’t actually trying to have a conversation with Americans via YouTube. Like every president before him, he was simply harnessing the latest tools to talk to them, one-way.

Technophiles who watched the campaign closely expected more, and now they are putting pressure on the White House to govern with unparalleled transparency and citizen interaction. Dan Froomkin of the Niemen Watchdog Journalism Project and The Washington Post summed up expectations in a blog post calling for Obama to embrace “wiki culture” in which “major policy proposals have public collaborative workspaces.”

150,000+ subscribers
follow Obama’s Twitter feed.

0 tweets
have been posted by Obama staffers since the election.

Obama has himself to blame for raising such expectations. During the campaign, he embraced every form of social media. At My.BarackObama.com, supporters could create profiles, talk to each other, and—by election day—plan some 200,000 offline dinners and living room fund-raisers. Users could log in from home to get lists of swing-state voters to telephone; this generated 3 million calls in the final four days of the race. Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.

As for John McCain’s efforts, well, he didn’t really have any. According to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, cofounders of the Personal Democracy Forum and the blog TechPresident, Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters, 24 times the Twitter devotees, and three times the visitors to his site in the final campaign week. The public watched about 15 million hours of Obama campaign videos on YouTube. Along the way, Obama collected 13 million email addresses, more than a million cell phone numbers, and a half-billion dollars in online donations.

There’s also another reason to expect a tech-driven presidency: Obama promised it. He said he would expand government transparency by putting more data up on the Web, streaming meetings live, and letting the public comment on most legislation for five days before he signs it. He said he would bring blogs, wikis, and social networking tools with him into the executive branch—all overseen by a new national chief technology officer. Indeed, Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, offers glimmers of a potential digital presidency with its YouTube addresses, issue-based discussion forums, and inside-the-transition videos featuring future cabinet members responding to comments.

But turning his innovative campaign and transition into Government 2.0 won’t be easy. The nimble Obama startup is about to be absorbed into a stodgy, technologically backward behemoth: the federal government. Ahead are bureaucratic obstacles the campaign never imagined, along with the political land mines that transparency brings. Obama will have to preserve the enthusiasm of his supporters while engaging the larger group of people who either didn’t vote for him or didn’t vote at all. His task is to rebuild the personal connection that supporters felt they had with Obama the candidate, assuring them that he is listening to them—without being deafened by the cacophony. If he can do that, Obama can alter how the government engages its citizenry and accomplish what he really cares about: his own policy goals.

Building that intimacy from the Oval Office will be a delicate and complex task, and just letting “AcidTrout” respond to a YouTube address with “Who’s the black guy?!?” isn’t going to do it. “One of the things that gives me ulcers is that there are a lot of high expectations,” says an Obama aide. “But we’re going to have to change how government thinks about the Internet before we can do the things we want to do.”

500+ PDFs
submitted by third parties for viewing and public comment are available on Change.gov.

Still, Macon Phillips, the campaign’s deputy director of new media, who has served in a similar role for the transition, warns: “Day one is going to be a lot different than perhaps day 100.”

The basement of the General Services Administration building in Washington, with its maze of identical hallways and frosted glass doors, reeks of generic federal bureaucracy. But if the new administration plans to reboot the system, it will find a pair of guides here in Bev Godwin and Sheila Campbell, cheerful doyens of the executive branch’s Web strategy. Godwin, director of USA.gov, the federal government’s all-purpose information Web portal, and Campbell, head of the government’s Web Best Practices Team, know every manacle and chain shackling the government to the 20th century. In a drab conference room one afternoon in late November, they discussed their optimism—and detailed their concerns.

For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date. “Nobody stepped back and asked strategically, how do we do this?” Godwin says. “Whenever there is a new initiative or program, they put up a new Web site.” And the first thing they usually do on that site, she says, is post a bandwidth-hogging picture of the bureaucrat in charge.

3,701 comments
on health care were submitted online to secretary of health and human services designate Tom Daschle.

Godwin and Campbell have been pushing government agencies to treat citizens more like customers, rebuilding their sites to help visitors do things like find loans or obtain passports—rather than serve as static repositories for press releases and personnel photos. “At Housing and Urban Development, for example, one of the missions is to reduce homelessness,” Godwin says. “If you go to HUD.gov, can you find shelter? The answer is no.” If the government can improve itself in these little ways, they say, great. Don’t worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.

Progress has been achingly slow. There have been some notable exceptions—like a blog on the Transportation Security Administration Web site, open to comments and manned by five agency staffers, and NASA.gov’s numerous social media initiatives, including Twitter feeds from 20 missions and projects. But the successes are rare and isolated. “We know that there are a lot of people advocating for more open government,” Godwin says. “We’re saying, absolutely, put the data out there. But I think we have to be realistic.”

For example, many of Obama’s online campaign techniques would be impeded by a collection of obscure and well-intentioned rules. Amendments to the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, for example, require that all government Web content be made reasonably accessible—in real time—to disabled users. Also, six months of negotiations between the General Services Administration and Google to establish a federal YouTube channel have stalled over similarly intricate legal issues. Meanwhile, a Clinton-era law called the Paperwork Reduction Act requires that an agency undergo a laborious approval process any time it “surveys” more than 10 people. The result: “Agencies tend to avoid doing these kind of surveys,” Godwin says. Would having users submit information to a social network or wiki count as a survey? Nobody knows.

20.3 million:
The number of visits to Obama’s YouTube channel since its September 2006 launch.

Even triumphs like Obama’s 2006 Google for Government bill, cosponsored with Republican senator Tom Coburn, have been caught up in red tape. The bill led to the creation of FedSpending.org, a site allowing the public to track federal contracts and grants. Instead of building it in-house, the Office of Management and Budget decided to license something similar from a nonprofit watchdog group, OMB Watch—for just 4 percent of what the government had expected to spend. It was a striking victory for government efficiency, but the process behind the scenes “was extremely difficult,” says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch. After floating the idea of donating the system to OMB (“the government can’t take things for free,” Bass quickly learned), the nonprofit had to sign on as a subcontractor and undergo three rounds, and six wasted months, of bidding before the deal was complete.

Changes to what is effectively the president’s homepage, WhiteHouse.gov, will encounter similar obstacles. David Almacy, a PR executive and new media consultant at Waggener Edstrom who served as the Bush administration’s White House Internet director from 2005 to 2007, recalls that following Hurricane Katrina, he posted the transcript of a speech to the site. In the text, where Bush had directed people to Redcross.org, Almacy helpfully inserted a hyperlink. “Within a few hours,” Almacy says, “I got a call from the White House general counsel’s office saying I needed to take out the link.” Some federal government Web pages, it turns out, are virtually barred from linking to nongovernmental sites to avoid the appearance of endorsing one product or organization over another.

The incoming administration is still working to assess the implications of the Presidential Records Act, the post-Nixon legislation requiring the preservation of all White House written communications. But that means that once any page goes up on the White House site, it can’t be altered, only archived and replaced, greatly slowing down the process of modifying and enhancing pages.

The Obama team was able to sidestep these kinds of troublesome rules on Change.gov, in part because, as a quasi-governmental site, it’s not subject to executive-branch restrictions. They were able to post videos on YouTube, link to outside sites, and even publish content under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be freely shared.

24,000 Web sites
are operated by the US government.

When he does arrive at the White House, Obama or his CTO can lift some of the Internet restrictions with the stroke of a pen. Others will require congressional action or clever technology.

Even if Obama’s tech team gets a free hand to rework the federal webosphere, things can still go awry. Take the 2006 race of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. Both David Axelrod, Obama’s top campaign strategist, and David Plouffe, his campaign manager, worked for Patrick, a little-known candidate who used Internet-driven grassroots support to win. In a precursor to My.BarackObama .com, the Patrick campaign placed the state’s voter list on its Web site, allowing its supporters to download phone numbers and call neighbors. “We believed in people’s ability to organize themselves and get involved,” says Charles SteelFisher, who ran the campaign’s Web operation.

No We Can’t

Barack Obama wants to transform the way the White House connects with the public. But there are plenty of obstacles standing in his way. After the election, the governor’s team launched DevalPatrick.com to keep supporters engaged. On a MyIssue page, registered commenters could propose, comment on, and vote for legislative ideas.

But the administration was immediately blasted when a database feature designed to verify Massachusetts residency was alleged (incorrectly) to reveal unlisted phone numbers. The privacy flap lured a collection of trolls and conspiracy theorists to the site, crowding out earnest discussion on gambling bills and income taxes with 9/11 chatter and religious debates. Critics, meanwhile, said that Patrick’s efforts were less about engaging the public than about running a permanent online campaign.

Eventually Patrick’s Web site recovered, developing a more sophisticated way of moderating comments and creating forums around the governor’s plans to reduce property taxes and add public kindergarten programs. The site also allowed people to create grassroots communities to work on issues they cared about. Still, the public isn’t exactly burning up the site: The leading vote-getter, a bill to promote fathers’ custody rights in divorce cases, had just 1,100 tallies as of mid-December. Offshore wind power, meanwhile, was losing, 16 votes to 15.

Obama’s team has moved carefully as it transitions from campaigning to governing. Between two wars and an economy in shambles, building an Oval Office social network has not topped the priority list. “Day one, do we need a White House My.BarackObama? I don’t think so,” says the Obama aide, who was required by the transition press office to speak anonymously. “It’s more important to step back and ask, what are the goals for the White House? And I think that making the government more accountable and transparent is more important than getting people to act.”

To that end, the transition team served up small accountability stuff first. Change .gov supplemented Obama’s weekly YouTube addresses with periodic videos from inside the transition process, everything from staff meetings to vlog-type updates from advisers. In early December, Obama’s public director of liaison and intergovernmental affairs announced—via video—a Change.gov feature called Your Seat at the Table, through which the transition would post every document received from every interest group and outside person throwing it advice. Users were allowed to comment next to the documents, while the Open for Questions feature let them submit and vote on questions for the transition team. The latter experiment illustrated the double-edged nature of feedback when the Senate-seat-selling scandal involving Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich broke. Supporters began flagging related questions “inappropriate,” and then Obama staffers buried the queries. ABCNews.com jumped on the story and the apparent hypocrisy. Obama Transition Web Site ‘Open for Questions’—Except on Blagojevich read the headline.

Change.gov does feature some Slashdot-like issue forums where user rankings send the most popular comments to the top. The first forum, in which two staffers appeared in a short video on health care policy and asked for comments, garnered thousands of horror stories and policy prescriptions. A week later, one of the staffers reappeared with future health and human services secretary Tom Daschle in a rehearsed-looking YouTube video response. “We are just so pleased that so many of you have written in,” Daschle said, appearing extra-pleased. “I spent a lot of the weekend actually reading the comments … We want to make sure that you understand how important those comments and your contributions are.” The comments the pair selected to discuss, however, seemed serendipitously aligned with Obama’s proposed initiatives.

550,000 responses
came in from supporters after Obama adviser David Plouffe requested feedback about the campaign.

In other words, with everything he’s done so far, Obama has been acknowledging feedback but not necessarily heeding it. And that’s what we can expect from Obama’s plan to post all pending nonemergency legislation online and allow the public to comment for five days before he acts on it. By mid-December, technology advisers were still struggling to determine the best way to implement the idea. The bigger question is, what will it accomplish? Even the system’s own architects concede that it’s unlikely that online comments and voting will sway the decision to sign or veto.

Nor should it. The Obama team, for all its Web enthusiasm, recognizes that an online community—no matter how vibrant—doesn’t represent all of the American public. “A lot of people consider online interactions and communications as representative of Americans. But we have a lot more high-speed Internet lines to drop before that’s true,” the Obama aide says. And even with ubiquitous broadband, online voting would remain the ultimate in self-selected polling. There’s no reason to believe that commenters would reflect Americans as a whole or even that they’d be Americans at all. Citizens also may not be as interested in the daily machinery of Obama’s workaday government as they were in his novel campaign. Case in point: By mid-December, views of Obama’s weekly YouTube address had dropped by half.

Still, the new administration wants to be able to marshal its supporters to act. Obama himself suggested as much last April. “Our database has a couple million people on there who are activated and inspired,” he told a small group in Indianapolis. “And so what I want to do is to continue that after the election.” In mid-November, Plouffe sent out a series of emails to supporters. The first directed them to a detailed survey of their campaign experience and policy interests and told them, “It’s up to you to decide how we move forward.” Later, a Plouffe missive declared that “you’ll be instrumental in generating support to pass legislation that puts America on the road to recovery.” At a closed-door meeting with its leading activists in Chicago in December, the Obama team took it a step further and told activists to be ready to pressure Congress on economic stimulus, health care, and energy legislation. A couple of weeks later, the campaign encouraged its supporters to organize “change is coming” get-togethers to discuss the future of the Obama movement, online and off.

Obama doesn’t want his 13 million-name email list to serve as just another political interest group. He needs it to be a tool to keep people engaged with his politics and policies. “Even if you push through the best government programs,” says Michael Cornfield, a political-science professor at George Washington University, “it’s hard to solve the actual problems” without effort from regular people. A national health care plan, for example, will work a whole lot better if former precinct captains are willing to explain it to their neighbors, just as they explained how to get to the polls. And a presidential Twitter feed, Flickr photos, or WhiteHouse.gov video Q&A sessions may not vastly increase transparency or deeply inform policy, but they create a valuable intimacy with citizens. “People who think they are being listened to tend to respect more the person talking,” says Rasiej.

That may not sound like a big deal. But contrary to what Web evangelists and the incoming administration would like to believe, Obama’s campaign was never a bottom-up endeavor. The incoming president didn’t crowdsource his view on the Iraq war or use Digg to determine how to allocate campaign dollars. He ran one of the most tightly controlled, top-down campaigns in modern history, to the point of pressuring outside advocacy groups not to advertise on his behalf. Rather, he asked his supporters for money and inspired them to get involved, giving them the tools to organize themselves and a message to sign on to.

Instead of turning WhiteHouse.gov into a governmental synthesis of Facebook and Wikipedia, or running a permanent campaign off the White House email list, Obama’s best shot at rebooting the government is to remember how he got there: making people feel that they were part of the solution and then enabling them to talk to one another and take action. “There is a relationship between Barack Obama and each individual, and that’s multiplied tens of millions of times over,” says Joe Rospars, the campaign’s director of new media. “But there are also millions and millions of relationships between our supporters. Both of those kinds of relationships didn’t end on Election Day.”

[via WIRED] by Evan Ratliff

Would you like power with those fries?

A new garage-engineered generator burns the waste oil from restaurants’ deep fryers to generate electricity and hot water. Put 80 gallons of grease into the Vegawatt each week, and its creators promise it will generate about 5 kilowatts of power.

That’s about 10 percent of the total energy needs of Finz, a seafood restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the first Vegawatt is being tested. At New England electricity rates, the system offsets about $2.50 worth of electricity with each gallon of waste oil poured into it.

Vegawatt’s founder and inventor, James Peret, estimates that restaurants purchasing the $22,000 machine will save about $1,000 per month in electricity costs, for a payback time of two years.

“You take this waste resource and make it a profit center,” said Peret, who spent four long years cooking up the project in his garage. “When I started telling people, they said, ‘Someone’s gotta have done this.’ I’d run into more people. They’d say, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done this?’ My only response was, ‘I don’t know; it seems like a good idea.’”

While Vegawatt is a small solution, Peret’s invention is a very clever embodiment of several long-cherished alternative-energy ideas: capturing both the heat and power from fuel combustion, making energy where it’s used, and recycling used resources. Big industrial plants that make paper, for example, have long taken advantage of these concepts to save on their utility bills, but the Vegawatt will be the first product that could turn thousands of fast food restaurants into mini power plants.

“Now the restaurant owners are going to be motivated to put every single drop of waste oil into this thing, because it will pay for itself,” Peret said.

And importantly, it provides convenience for restaurateurs or Burger King managers, instead of subtracting it, like so many green solutions seem to.

Restaurants that fry delicious things like chicken and french fries generate dozens of gallons of waste oil that have to be stored in barrels out back. Because used cooking oil is considered a low-grade hazardous material, they haven’t been allowed to just throw it away; they generally had to pay rendering-plant operators to come. But it is now a sellers’ market for grease.

Higher crude prices have made other types of oil more expensive. Biodiesel makers and renderers have become increasingly willing to pay up to 40 cents a gallon for the stuff. There have even been reports of “biodiesel pirates” stealing fryer grease.

In fact, Vegawatt is derived from the home-brew fuel movement that many trace back to Dr. Thomas Reed, who popularized a recipe to convert waste cooking oil into biodiesel more than 20 years ago. Peret converted his truck to run on straight vegetable oil, or SVO to home brewers. But he was troubled by the inefficiency of the process.

“If you want to run waste vegetable oil in your car, it’s not as simple as going behind a restaurant and filling up,” Peret said. “People that do this spend the majority of their free time collecting fuel from restaurants.”

Peret realized he could use the same engine technology to power an on-site generator and defray a restaurant’s electricity costs.

“It’s not difficult to go from spinning tires to spinning magnets,” he said

So he created a test unit — which you can see at the back of his garage in the top photo — that’s basically a diesel generator hacked to run waste cooking oil. It feeds power directly into the restaurant’s electrical system through a 30 amp hook-in.

Vegawatt is more efficient than a typical coal or natural gas plant. Peret said it can capture 70 percent of the fuel’s caloric value. That’s because the generator captures and uses the waste heat it generates.

“All the water [the restaurant] would send to its boiler, instead of sending it straight there from the city, we run it through our heat exchanger first,” Peret said. “Depending on the flow, [the water] can go into the hot water heater at 120 degrees.” (This non-electrical energy savings is included in the 5-kilowatt rating cited above.)

The big power plants, though technically very efficient, waste most of the fuel they burn. After accounting for all the sources of energy waste “what you are left with … is just 27.6 units of usable energy out of every 100 units you started with,” energy researcher Benjamin Sovacool explained in his recent book, The Dirty Energy Dilemma. “In terms of making toast, it would have been nearly four times more efficient just to burn a lump of coal and place your bread over the flame.”

Biomass energy sources — like waste wood, switchgrass or cooking oil — are best when used right near the source of their creation. Dragging the stuff creates more emissions and raises the cost of the fuel. Vegawatt doesn’t have that problem. By company estimates, the Vegawatt generates 50 percent less carbon dioxide than a comparable amount of electricity from a coal power plant.

“In terms of the amount of energy that it takes to transport this waste, it’s a french fry,” Peret said. “You just feed the guy who is picking up the bucket and pouring it into the system.”

Forest Gregg, an alternative-fuels expert and author of last year’s SVO: Powering Your Vehicle with Straight Vegetble Oil, called it a “nifty application and a great business idea.”

Gregg also drew attention to a strong part of Vegawatt’s pitch: that it won’t require “intervention or maintenance by restaurant staff.” That’s because when users buy a system — or lease it for $450 a month — they get a service contract with the company for cleaning and maintenance.

The owner of the very first Vegawatt, George Carey (pictured above), seems pleased with the unit, too. He heartily endorses the company on its website, saying, “The Vegawatt system enables me to significantly reduce my energy costs, generate clean energy on-site, and very importantly, reduce the heavy energy footprint of my restaurant.”

See Also:

• Tapping the Vortex for Green Energy
• Global Energy Network Depends on a Few Vulnerable Nodes
• How A Google Engineer Hacks His Energy Usage
• Biofuel Startup Strives to Meet Obama’s Green Ambitions
• Obama Voices Biofuel Doubts
• Biofuel Solution at Sea, not on Land
• DOE Invests $125 Million in Synthetic Life to Develop Biofuels …
• Food vs. Fuel: Saltwater Crops May Be Key to Solving Earth’s Land …

[via WIRED] by Alexis Madrigal

Inspired by Apple’s success in creating a mobile application marketplace, nearly every major smartphone platform now has an accompanying app store.

Seeing these stores launches has begun to resemble watching a marathon: Just when you think everyone’s crossed the finish line, you can see a few stragglers making their way to the end.

On Tuesday, Palm became the latest handset maker to launch its own marketplace to distribute mobile software from independent developers. It’s the third to do so, after Apple and Google’s Android. And it’s not the last. Application stores for BlackBerry and Microsoft phones are still waiting in the wings.

“For consumers it is a bit like being in a candy store now,” says Rana Sobhany, vice-president of marketing for Medialets, a mobile analytics firm. “They can figure out what they want and get it immediately.”

Mobile-phone software development has been around for a long time. But before the application stores made their debut, finding and installing the apps was rather complicated. The challenge for developers was to bring their apps to the attention of users, while users often had to attach data cables and download the software, explains Deepen Shah, chief technical officer for Buzzd, which is working on apps for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Even Java applications, which could be distributed through web downloads, were tough to get into users’ hands when it was difficult to get people to visit a website on their handsets.

As a result, mobile-application developers depended on hard-to-get bundling deals with carriers. If you could strike a deal with a carrier to get your software preloaded on its phones, you were in like Flynn — if not, you were out in the cold. And needless to say, with that much power, carriers could dictate their own terms.

All that changed when Apple launched its App Store, which offered a centralized discovery, distribution, download and payment platform. And it was all relatively accessible; even though Apple has to approve anything that appears in the store, the barrier is much lower than it was in the days when carrier pre-loading dominated the mobile software business. As a result, thousands of iPhone apps bloomed, and some developers have even made serious money from their iPhone apps.

But now Apple’s iPhone App Store has some serious rivals to contend with. Here’s how the four biggest app stores stack up.

iPhone App Store

The big daddy of them all, Apple’s App store is breathtaking in the simplicity of its interface and the ease with which users can search and download programs onto their phones. In the five months that the store has been live, about 13,000 apps have been added to it, says Medialets.

About 75 percent of all applications have fees. Yet free apps see 10 to 50 times higher download rates compared to those users have to pay for, says the firm. Not surprisingly many developers are releasing lite versions of their paid apps for free. Example? DigiDrummer and DigiDrummer Lite, which allows users to play drums on their iPhone.

Apps are classified into one of the 20 categories and cross-referenced against a top 50 list of free and paid apps. Where the App store scores over its rivals is not just the easy click to find and download an app, but also paying for it through iTunes.

For developers, the App store is the best bet to make some money. Apple offers 70 percent of revenues from the store to the developer of the application and keeps 30 percent.

On the downside, Apple is the gatekeeper of what gets into the store and what doesn’t — and it can take weeks to get Apple to approve an application.  Video: Jobs Unveils App Store

Wired: Can you imagine life without Super Monkey Ball, Urbanspoon and iBeer? For now, the App store is far ahead of the pack. No doubt.

Tired: All the drama around first having an NDA for developers, then getting rid of it, setting an approval process for apps and then seemingly rejecting it. The divaness of the App store would make Mariah Carey seem modest.

Android Market

It’s the anti-App Store. It’s free. There’s no approval process for developers to add their software. It’s like YouTube — just upload your software.

There’s also no revenue split with Google, which created the Android operating system, and that means developers get to keep everything they might earn from selling their apps. Unfortunately, there’s also no payment system, which means developers are on their own when it comes to trying to make some money from their apps.

It’s everything the iPhone App store is not.

However, there are very few apps: Medialets estimates that just about 500 apps are available in the Android Market.

Part of why the Android Market is so sparsely populated is that its apps currently run on just one phone: T-Mobile’s G1. And while other Android-based phones are in the works, there’s no guarantee that they will have the same features or specifications as the G1.

For developers, that means a games app that uses the G1′s accelerometer might not work on other devices that come out next year. Until more devices appear, most developers are taking a wait-and-see attitude.

For now the Market has 12 categories, though it doesn’t have list of chart toppers. Instead at the top of each app is a range, such as 10,000 to 50,000 indicating the number of times it has been downloaded.

Next year, Android hopes to have a payment system in place, potentially using Google’s Checkout service, to support paid apps. Video: Android Market

Wired: No approval process so developers can have all the fun they want.

Tired: Where are the apps? Unless you want Wrath of the Fungi or The Weather Channel as your favorite app, there’s little choice there. No Yelp, not even the popular Pandora app.

Palm Mobile Software Store

The newest kid on the block, Palm’s mobile software store launched earlier this week. Despite its clunky name, its user interface has much in common with the iPhone App store. That should not be a surprise, considering that Palm has hired a number of Apple executives over the last 18 months.

Already Palm says it has approximately 5,000 apps supporting 25 Palm devices across the company’s portfolio. Palm says about 1,000 of those apps are available for free.

Application authors who want to sell their software will get a 50-50 revenue split with Palm.

For now, users have to go online on their PCs and install the software to their Palm devices using a data cable. But with the buzz that Palm is set to debut a new Linux-based operating system named Nova, along with new handsets based on it, it is likely that newer devices from the company will come with the Mobile Software Store integrated into the phones, perhaps allowing wireless-app downloads.

Wired: Palm has a loyal developer community, and giving them a neatly packaged Software Store could be one way to re-start interest in its fading platform.

Tired: Palm needs to fix its handsets first. Palm’s Software Store can get little traction if consumers aren’t buying Palm phones in the first place.

BlackBerry Application Storefront

There are more phones out there running the BlackBerry platform — about 20 million — than Apple’s iPhone or T-Mobile’s HTC G1.

BlackBerry creator Research In Motion hopes that will lure developers who are hungry to reach a big audience. The usual suspects — Facebook, Gmail, MySpace — have all said they will offer BlackBerry apps. But the company is hoping to set its storefront apart with the availability of more productivity and business-focused software.

The Application Storefront won’t go live until March 2009. But when it does, BlackBerry hopes to cut developers a better deal than Apple. Through RIM’s partnership with Paypal, programmers will get 80 percent of the revenue from the app sales, while RIM  holds on to the rest.

Wired: RIM has promised a lot.

Tired: Where’s the store? Seriously. Even Palm has beat RIM to the finish line on this one.

[via Wired] by Priya Ganapati

Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it’s a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.

The eye he’s considering replacing is not a working one — it’s a prosthetic eye he’s worn for several years. Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around.

“If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?” he asks.

Spence, who calls himself the “eyeborg guy,” will not be restoring his vision. The camera won’t connect to his brain. What it will do is allow him to be a bionic man where technology fuses with the human body to become inseparable. In effect, he will become a “little brother,” someone who’s watching and recording every move of those in his field of vision.

If successful, Spence will become one of a growing number of lifecasters. From early webcam pioneer Jennifer Kaye Ringley, who created JenniCam, to Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell, to commercial lifecasting ventures Ustream.tv and Justin.tv, many people use video and internet technology to record and broadcast every moment of their waking lives. But Spence is taking lifecasting a step further, with a bionic eye camera that is actually embedded in his body.

“The eyes are like no other part of the body,” says Spence. “It’s what you look into when you fall in love with somebody and [influences] whether you trust someone or not. Now with a video camera in there, it will change how people see and perceive me.”

It’s an interesting and innovative idea, says Yonggang Huang, a professor in the departments of civil and mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. Huang, along with University of Illinois professor John Rogers has developed a web of micro-sensors to enable eye-shaped cameras. Huang is not involved in Spence’s project.

“It’s very clever,” says Huang of Spence’s quest. “It is not a true eye but it provides the way for people to record images in life as they see [them] and store [them].”

Spence lost his right eye at 13 while playing with his grandfather’s gun on a visit to Ireland. “I wanted to shoot a pile of cowshit,” he says. “I wasn’t holding the gun properly and it backfired, causing a lot of trauma to the eye.”

This short video by Rob Spence shows the operation in which surgeons removed his sightless eye.

Warning: Graphic imagery may be unsettling to many viewers.

After the accident, he returned to Belleville, a small town two hours east of Toronto, where he grew up. Spence became technically blind in the eye, and over the years, his vision deteriorated completely. Three years ago he had his eye removed and a prosthetic one inserted. Ever the filmmaker, he even made a movie out of his surgery. But it wasn’t an easy decision.

“When you completely lose an eye it is a difficult thing to let go of,” he says. “The eye has an emotional attachment. It is a window to your soul.”

Spence wore an eye patch for a while, which he says looked cool. But once he started thinking about having a camera in his eye, Spence got in touch with Steve Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto. Mann is one of the experts in the world of wearable computing and cyborgs — organisms that blend natural and artificial systems.

“There are a lot of challenges in this,” says Mann, “from actually building a camera system that works, to sending and receiving images, to getting the correct shape of the camera.”

Even in the age of miniaturization, getting a wireless video camera into a prosthetic eye isn’t easy. The shape of the prosthetic is the biggest limitation: In Spence’s case, it’s 9-mm thick, 30-mm long and 28-mm high.

While that might seem like plenty of room in an age when digital cameras are squeezed into unimaginably slim and compact phones, it actually isn’t. The average area available inside a prosthetic eye for an imaging sensor is only about 8 square mm, explains Phil Bowen, an ocularist who is working with Spence.  Also, a digital camera has many more components than the visible lens and the sensor behind it, including the power supply and image-processing circuitry. Getting a completely self-contained camera module to fit into the tiny hollow of a prosthetic eye is a significant engineering challenge.

That’s where Professors Huang and Rogers’ research could come in handy. Three months ago, the duo published a paper that showed how a new sensor built out of a flexible mesh of wire-connected pixels could replace the traditional flat imaging chip as the light sensor for a camera. The mesh is made from many of the same materials as a standard digital-camera sensor, but it has the ability to conform to convoluted, irregular surfaces — like the back of a synthetic eyeball.

“Our cameras might more naturally integrate with a prosthetic eye, due to their hemispherical shapes,” says Rogers. “One might also argue that they can provide a more human-like perception of the world.”

Then there’s the question of how the prosthetic eyeball (the outer shell for the camera) will be made. The eyeball chassis has to close shut and be watertight.

Traditional prosthetic eyes are single pieces made with polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA), a flexible polymer that is also used in dentures. To fit a camera in, Bowen redesigned the prosthetic eye into two pieces that could snap shut.

But with a camera inside there’s something new to worry about. The modified prosthetic eye will be heavier than traditional ones and that could affect the eye socket, says Bowen. “The weight might stretch out the lower lid,” he says, potentially disfiguring the face.

Assuming the size, weight and water-tightness issues can be solved, Spence has a vague idea of how he thinks it can work. A camera module will have to be connected to a transmitter inside the prosthetic eye that can broadcast the captured video footage. To boost the signal, he says he can wear another transmitter on his belt. A receiver attached to a hard drive in a backpack could capture that information and then send it to another device that uploads everything to a web site in real time.

If it sounds rather cumbersome and complicated, it is. Spence and his team are still working to find the right answers.

He hasn’t been able to get the bigger camera companies to work with him. “Part of problem is if you cold call somebody it sounds like there is a maniac on the other end of the phone,” he says. “This whole idea confuses and overwhelms most people.”

“Right now I am begging, borrowing and stealing camera modules from different cameras to make a stage one prototype,” says Spence.

Spence is not the only one attempting to implant a video camera in his eye socket — artist Tanya Vlach is working on a similar project — but if he’s successful he will be more than just another cyborg. The documentary film he’s making about his efforts, plus the experience of living with a video camera in his eye, could help build greater awareness about the culture of surveillance in our society today, he says.

“No one is going to ban surveillance cameras,” says Spence. “It’s more about being aware of it. It’s about giving a shit in the first place.”

Having a bionic eye doesn’t mean Spence will be recording all the time, he says. Unlike lifecaster Justin Kan, Spence is not promising to broadcast all of his life’s moments. (Even Kan reneged on his promise within a few short months, as soon as a romantic opportunity presented itself.)

Spence is willing to turn off his camera in spaces such as gyms, theaters or private events. But he will be making many of those decisions on the spur, every day. “I wouldn’t behave that differently than someone with a cellphone today,” he says.

Even though his project is still in its early stages, Spence says many people have already told him they wouldn’t be comfortable being filmed.

“People are more scared of a center-left documentary maker with an eye than the 400 ways they are filmed every day at the school, the subway, the mall,” he says.

He hopes he will help  get people thinking about privacy, how surveillance cameras and the footage they record are being used and accessed.

“Sometimes I run a little experiment,” he says. “I tell people around me, ‘Did you know there are 11,000 new video cameras being installed in our country every day?’ Then I will exaggerate and say there are 50,000 new video cameras going in everyday,” says Spence. “Most of the times I get the same answer: ‘That’s interesting. Now what’s for lunch?’ or ‘The weather is nice today.’

“I wonder what those people will say when they are staring back into the video camera in my eye?”

[via Wired] by Priya Ganapati

Photos: Steve Mann

WIRED Magazine put together a great comparative of Obama and McCain’s policies that are important to their readers – here’s the wrap-up.

Topic Covered:

1. Broadband
2. H1B issues
3. Investment in green tech
4. Net neutrality
5. Spectrum

Broadband

The Issue: The United States is becoming a tortoise in a world of hares. One of the world’s most Wired nations a decade ago, we now lag behind most of our peers. In France, broadband access is half the price and four times as fast. The main cause for the debacle is a lack of competition in telecommunications. Most communities have, at best, one cable choice and one DSL choice. This situation came about through the mass consolidation of the industry, and through the non-enforcement and then repudiation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which mandated that entrenched telecom companies lease their lines into people’s homes to smaller companies.

McCain’s Position: As argued here and here, McCain has consistently been on the wrong side of this issue. As Senate Commerce Chair, he supported the mass consolidation in the industry. He also consistently voted the wrong way on whether entrenched competitors should be forced to lease their lines. The one point in his favor is his support of the Community Broadband Bill which would help cities offer wireless Internet, even when the local companies try to crush them.

Obama’s Position: Obama wasn’t around for the major votes on this issue. And while he is advised by all the right people, he hasn’t come out with a specific plan to open up the industry. His big proposal is to take money currently used to subsidize rural phone use and, instead, use it to subsidize rural broadband use. This could be helpful. But if the markets aren’t made competitive beforehand, it could also end up as little more than another subsidy to the same giant companies that have served us so poorly.

Grades:
McCain: D
Obama: B

H1B Visas

The Issue: Many people skilled in technology around the world want to work in the United States, but it’s tough to get in if you don’t have a family member already living here. One good way to increase American productivity would be to increase the quota of skilled workers allowed under our H1B visa program. Opponents counter with mostly bogus concerns about spies and job loss for Americans.

McCain’s Position: Though his immigration policies shifted during the Republican primary, he has been a long proponent of allowing in more high-skilled technology workers. Here’s his plan: “John McCain will expand the number of H-1B visas to allow our companies to keep top-notch talent –- often trained in our graduate schools -– in the United States. The Department of Labor should be allowed to set visa levels appropriate for market conditions. Hiring skilled foreign workers to fill critical shortages benefits not only innovative companies, but also our economy. For every foreign worker hired, corporations generally hire five to ten additional American workers.”

Obama’s Position: Obama supports a temporary increase in skilled immigrants allowed here under H1B visas. But he doesn’t mention the issue in his technology plan. And, in interviews, he has hemmed and hawed about highly skilled immigrants taking jobs from Americans. In an interview with Michael Arrington, he said, that the country can “go a long way toward meeting industry’s need for skilled workers with Americans. Until we have achieved that, I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively.

Grades:
McCain: B+
Obama: C

Green Tech

The Issue: Technology is the best, and only way, to get us out of our environmental mess. Government’s best bet at solving this problem isn’t to pick and fund specific winners. Instead, it should try to create as fertile a marketplace as possible, while ending subsidies to dirty technologies. Five-dollar gas, after all, is good for clean tech.

McCain’s Position: McCain talks loudly about green technology, but he carries a small stick. He wants to invest $2 billion annually for research into clean coal, and he wants to offer a $300 million prize for developing an advanced battery technology. Like Wired, he does strongly support nuclear power.

Obama’s Position: Obama’s stick is bigger. He calls for an investment of $150 billion over the next decade in clean energy. He wants to extend tax credits for clean energy producers, and he has proposed an annual 410 billion investment in a Clean Techhnology Venture Capital Fund. Like McCain, he favors a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Unlike McCain, his supporters don’t chant “drill, baby drill” at his rallies — suggesting that he’ll be less likely to extend the subsidies to oil companies that have played such a big role in limiting green tech. It no surprise that the green guys love him.

Grades:
McCain: B
Obama: A

Net Neutrality

The Issue: The question here is whether the telecom companies can pick and choose what they send over their pipes. Without a regulation mandating that the pipes remain open, Verizon, for example, could decide to start messing with your Vonage or your Bittorrent.

McCain’s Position: According to his technology plan “John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like ‘net neutrality.’” He does however support the notion that technology companies should voluntarily proclaim their support for “freedom of access to content.”

Obama’s Position: Here’s the first specific point in his technology plan: “A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.”

Grades:
McCain: D
Obama: A

Spectrum

The Issue: Spectrum is the technological equivalent of the roads over which our technology travels. Right now, clunky companies that use oxcarts own many of the widest highways. Meanwhile, tiny alleys—like the 802.11 band—are used for rampant innovation, like everything that uses WiFi. Soon the government is going to have a choice over whether (and how) to auction off extremely valuable, and fast, spectrum: the unused bits in between broadcast TV channels one and 52. Google and other most other tech companies believe that the spectrum could be the basis for a future of super-fast wireless communication. The broadcast companies naturally want to keep it in their top drawer. Joel Osteen is terrified that his sermons won’t come through cleanly if the spectrum is auctioned off.

McCain’s Position: McCain has, sensibly, long opposed giving away the airwaves. “They used to rob trains in the Old West. Now we rob spectrum,” he once said. He initially helped push through the last big spectrum auction, and he takes a strong, positive stand in his platform: declaring that we should “auction off inefficiently-used wireless spectrum to companies that will instead use the spectrum to provide high-speed Internet service options to millions of Americans.” The bad news is that he hasn’t said anything good on spectrum since the beginning of the primaries. He didn’t push for rules that would mandate competition over the last batch of spectrum auctioned off. He is also worryingly close to (and almost always sides with) the telecom industry, which is packed with spectrum offenders.

Obama’s Position: Obama has stated vaguely that we should review our spectrum policies and look for opportunities to open more up. But he has been reluctant to take a stand on the white spaces, perhaps because he fears a fight with the National Association of Broadcasters. He did, however, take a very good position in his interview with Arrington, declaring his support for all the right goals and then specifically criticizing the most recent auction. “We must make sure the nation’s airwaves are licensed to maximize their public benefit. Auctions have most recently been conducted without sufficient incentives to encourage full use and competition.” Perhaps partly because of this — and partly because he seems generally more tech savvy — employees of the companies that want to open up and use the white spaces massively favor him.

Grades:
McCain: B
Obama: B

[via WIRED] by Nicholas Thompson

This bird’s-eye view of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania was the first image ever seen by the GeoEye-1, the world’s highest-resolution commercial satellite sponsored by Google, when it opened its camera door earlier this week.

The 4,300-pound satellite collected the image at noon EDT on Oct. 7 while moving from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour, or 4.5 miles per second. The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 centimeters — close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond, according to Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications and marketing.

Even though the GeoEye-1 satellite sports a colorful Google sticker, its key customer is actually not Google but rather the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a U.S. government agency that analyzes imagery in support of national security. The NGA is paying for half of the development of the $502 million satellite and has committed to purchasing imagery from it. Google is GeoEye’s second major partner.

“This is the opposite of a spy satellite,” Brender said in a phone interview. “Spies don’t put info on the internet and sell imagery. We’re an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground.”

Since around the late 70s, the military has used high-resolution spy satellites capable of reading newspaper headlines in Red Square. But only in recent years the technology became available to the public and businesses while concurrently making dramatic strides in coverage and resolution. For example, when Google Earth launched in 2004, its imagery was low-res and spotty. But by March 2006, a third of the world population could get a bird’s-eye view of their own homes in high resolution.

There’s one catch for Google: While the GeoEye-1 will provide imagery to the NGA at the maximum resolution of 43 centimeters, Google will only receive images at a 50-centimeter resolution because of a government restriction, Brender explained. However, Google’s partnership with GeoEye is exclusive, meaning the search-engine giant will be the only online mapping site using the satellite’s photos.

“We’re commercializing a technology that was once only in the hands of the governments,” Brender said. “Just like the internet, just like GPS, just like telecom — all invented by the government. And now we are on the front end of the spear that is commercializing this technology.”

Considered the world’s most-accurate commercial imaging satellite, the GeoEye-1 had been undergoing calibration and inspection since it was launched on September 6 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

A second satellite, GeoEye-2, slated to launch in 2011 or 2012, will have a resolution of 25-centimeter, company representatives promised. However, Google’s satellite imagery will not likely get more detailed because of the 50-centimeter regulation.

[via Wired Magazine] by Brian X. Chen

Meet Julia Allison. She’s made a brand of her own name, via self-promotion. What does she does? Well she models, posts her entire life online, and let’s the world watch. Her LIFECAST. In other words – she’s famous because she’s famous.

Here’s a great article on Julia in WIRED MAGAZINE:

I am five minutes late to catch Julia Allison’s latest publicity stunt — literally five minutes — but I can see from two blocks away that she has already drawn a crowd. There she is, at the epicenter of Times Square. About a dozen tourists surround her, and more join every minute. All around them, theater marquees and building-sized billboards jostle for attention, but they are no match for Allison.

She has asked a few friends to join her this afternoon — former hedge-fund analyst Meghan Asha, handbag designer Mary Rambin, and Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. They are all dressed in 1980s Jazzercise outfits; Allison wears purple spandex, leg warmers, and glittery eye shadow. Strains of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” waft thinly from Rambin’s iPod speakers. The four women bounce around, giggle, and shout encouragement at one another. Their audience is captivated.

Allison has enlisted a couple of cameramen to document the event. Her new Web site, xojulia.com — like her previous sites, juliaallison.com, itsmejulia.com, and juliajuliajulia.com — is dedicated to sharing almost every waking moment of Allison’s life. Visitors to xojulia.com can follow her schedule of bachelorette parties and fancy dinners, see photos of her latest outfits, and read her dating advice. They can watch videos of Allison playing with her dog or horsing around with friends. If readers want an extra shot of Allisonana, her Twitter stream provides periodic updates like a postmodern news ticker.

After about 15 minutes, a police officer wanders by to bust up the party. Allison doesn’t have the required performer’s license, and her admirers are clogging up Times Square. No problem! The mob follows her a couple of blocks uptown, looking for another vacant patch of asphalt where she can make a scene. As we cross 44th Street, a passerby squints at us. “You guys are famous?” she asks. “What do you do?”

Good Question. Allison may not be famous by the traditional definition; certainly nobody here seems to recognize her. But to a devoted niche of online fans — and an even more devoted niche of detractors — she is a bona fide celebrity. She says that more than 10,000 people read her blog daily, and gossip sites like Gawker, Radar Online, and Valleywag detail her every exploit. An anonymous blogger has set up a site, Reblogging Julia, dedicated to parsing Allison’s posts. The New York Times has profiled her, and New York magazine has called Allison — a dating columnist for Time Out New York and former editor-at-large for Star — “the most famous young journalist in the city.”

But with all due respect, Allison’s renown has little to do with her day job. Indeed, it’s hard to describe exactly what she’s famous for. She’s not an actress or a singer or a misbehaving heiress to a hotel fortune. She hasn’t recorded any meme-ready videos like Tay “Chocolate Rain” Zonday or Tron Guy or the “Leave Britney Alone!” dude. She doesn’t flaunt tech knowledge like bloggers Robert Scoble or Dave Winer. She is undeniably pretty — flowing black-coffee hair, sparkling eyes, gamine physique, broad smile — but beauty alone can’t account for her celebrity.

Allison is the latest, and perhaps purest, iteration of the Warholian ideal: someone who is famous for being famous. Like graffiti writers who turned their signatures into wild-style gallery pieces, she has made the process of self-promotion into its own freaky art form. Traditionally, it takes an army of publicists, a well-connected family, or a big-budget ad campaign to make this kind of splash. But Allison has done it on her own and on the cheap, armed only with an insatiable need for attention and a healthy helping of Web savvy.

“She used this medium and became unstoppable,” says Choire Sicha, former managing editor of Gawker. “She just made it happen in a way that seemed seamless and kind of magical.”

It’s easy to dismiss Allison as little more than a rank narcissist — and many of her vocal online critics are happy do just that. But come on, admit it: You’ve spent a good half hour trying to pick out the most flattering photo to upload to your MySpace page. You struggle to come up with the mot juste to describe your Facebook status. You keep a bank of self-portraits on Flickr or an online scrapbook on Tumblr or a running log of your daily musings on Blogger. You strategically court the gatekeepers at StumbleUpon or Digg. You compare the size of your Twitter-subscriber rolls to those of your friends. You set up Google Alerts to tell you whenever a blogger mentions your name. See? Self-promotion is no longer solely the domain of egotists and professional aspirants. Anyone can be a personal branding machine.

Julia, Julia, Julia! Allison has raised her profile by getting photographed with celebrities, including (clockwise from top left) Arianna Huffington, Henry Kissinger, Richard Branson, Wired editor Chris Anderson, and David Blaine.

“People have been so paranoid about having any presence online for such a long time,” says David Karp, founder of the Tumblr blogging service and a friend of Allison’s. “A lot of them have gone through that transition of ‘Well, shit, it’s out there. I’m searchable on Flickr or Google.’ The cat is out of the bag, and the only way to take back that control is to get out there and have a presence, have an identity that you feel represents you.”

Like it or not, we are all public figures now — famous, as the new cliché goes, for 15 people. “By actively keeping a blog and using Twitter and maintaining my social network profiles, I am shaping my image,” says Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, an Internet marketing firm in New York and LA. “Maybe not for the general public, who couldn’t care less, but for the 500 or so people who care about me and are actively or passively paying attention.”

And nobody gets people to pay attention quite like Julia Allison. In the week after her midtown dance party, reactions will pop up on blogs across the Internet. One typically tart comment refers to the tableaux as “suburban girls gone wild.” Valleywag, Gawker’s Silicon Valley sister site, publishes an entire gallery of photos.

Chalk up another win for the Julia Allison juggernaut. “This technology gives us direct power over our own brand,” Allison says. “In the past, I would have had to go through a reporter or a PR rep. Now we are all our own publicists. And we all have to learn the tricks.”

Step 1
Get Noticed

When she was a junior at Georgetown University in the fall of 2002, Allison decided she had a thing for medical students. They were smart and driven and a little older than she was, all big turn-ons. So she got a job at the medical school library, where she had the opportunity to meet the entire class — and date several of its members. Before long, she was getting invited to med student parties. She was given a nickname — the Medstitute — which she chose to interpret as affectionate. At the end of the school year, during graduation ceremonies, her photo popped up in a slide show retrospective. It was all very flattering.

In late 2004, Allison moved to New York to break into the Manhattan media world and — as she wrote on a list of goals she brought with her at the time — “become a cult figure.” It wouldn’t take long, and she would accomplish it using the same strategy she employed to become the Medstitute: Discover a niche, position herself at its choke point, and stay there until people start to notice.

For Allison, that choke point was Gawker, Nick Denton’s media-gossip site that pulls in millions of readers every month, many of them fellow journalists. It was the equivalent of the medical school library — the place where Allison would be seen by everyone in her target audience. She began writing a dating column for AM New York, a free commuter newspaper, and peppered Gawker’s tip line with links to her articles. Nothing. Then she started commenting on Gawker’s stories; the site’s editors banned her for “gratuitous self-promotion that makes even the gratuitous self-promoters at Gawker blush.” It wasn’t until she showed up at Nick Denton’s 2006 Halloween party dressed as a “condom fairy,” complete with a low-cut bustier festooned with Trojans, that Denton decided to act. The next morning, he met with managing editor Chris Mohney and demanded that he write an item about Allison.

Meatspace party-crashing may sound like a low tech way to meet the online cognoscenti, but Timothy Ferriss, whose skill at reaching bloggers helped turn his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, into a best seller, says it can be effective. “It’s a matter of ensuring you have the channel with the least competition,” he says. “Email is by far the most crowded channel, followed by phone. The least common is in-person.”

Mohney’s piece, “Field Guide: Julia Allison,” was a vicious character assassination. In 800 words — a monster tome by Gawker standards — it charged Allison with exploiting a long-ago dalliance with then-congressman Harold Ford for its publicity value, published her given surname (Baugher, which she dropped when she arrived in New York), accused her of plagiarizing iVillage in one of her columns for the Georgetown paper, and said that “her habit of purring and flirting with taken or married men frequently brings the claws out from those menfolk’s significant others.” The piece garnered more than 17,000 pageviews and scads of vitriolic remarks from Gawker’s notoriously harsh commenters. “I sure hope this is the LAST Gawker post we see about this useless ho-bag,” one wrote. Allison says she cried for three days after reading the story. She begged Denton to take down the article (a fruitless effort that she would continue for more than a year). She considered sending a point-by-point rebuttal. Instead, she posted a photo on her blog of herself in her condom dress, displaying her shapely rump. “Dearest Gawker,” she wrote. “Kiss my ass.”

Allison’s trick is to think of herself as the subject of a magazine profile, with every blog post or Twitter update adding dimension to her as a character.
Photo: Platon

And so a complicated symbiosis was born. Allison befriended Gawker’s writers, dropping by the office in Chelsea or sending instant messages with passive-aggressive story suggestions — an upcoming date she was looking forward to, or the fact that Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz used to babysit her, or some faux humiliation. “She’d send these notes and say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe I posted this, it’s so personal, please don’t link to this,’” says Emily Gould, who wrote for Gawker at the time. “And I’d say, ‘Are you sure? Because now I kind of want to.’” The writers, facing an unrelenting 12-posts-a-day workload, couldn’t resist the easy productivity of a quick Allison item, although they usually took great pains to layer each story with a healthy coating of snark. Gawker’s readers ran up the pageviews, even as they filled the comments section with requests to please, please stop covering Julia Allison. And Allison grew an ever-thicker skin, clinging to the freude and eschewing the schaden. After a few laps around this feedback loop, Allison could cross “become a cult figure” off her to-do list.

Step 2
Keep Them Hooked

A week before flying out to see Allison, I sign up to get her Twitter feed sent to my cell phone. I regret it almost instantly, as my inbox fills with mini-updates. Bzzt. “At sushi.” Bzzt. “In the car on the way to the Hamptons.” Bzzt. “In the Hamptons with the girls.” I can see my wireless bill shooting up like a taxi meter on the Autobahn.

To be honest, Allison isn’t exactly a power Twitterer. She has 1,300 followers and sends 10 or so updates a day — a paltry sum compared to entrepreneur Jason Calacanis (28,000 followers) or Robert Scoble (27,000 followers) or blogger Scott Beale (12,000 followers), all of whom average at least 20 daily updates. “For some people, it has replaced blogging,” Beale says. “More people are going to see a link I post to Twitter than on my blog.”

In the past, celebrities meted out photos and interviews to favored sources, carefully cultivating their public images by controlling the flow of information. Today, lifebloggers like Allison and Justine “iJustine” Ezarik deluge their fans with data. “I post 10 to 15 mobile photos to 10 different sites a day,” Ezarik says. “I try to post one video a day. I usually collect all my posts on MySpace and Facebook. I have a live show on Sunday and a Nokia phone that lets me stream live video throughout the day. It’s kind of never-ending.”

Allison’s greatest accomplishment isn’t the volume of content she creates; it’s that she gets anyone to care about it. Her trick, she says, is to think of herself as the subject of a magazine profile, with every post or update adding dimensions to her as a character. “I treat it like a fire,” she says. “You have to add logs, or it’ll be like one of those YouTube videos that flame out.”

One way to add logs: blog about your active love life. Allison cemented her status as a Gawker target when she started dating Men’s Health editor Dave Zinczenko in January 2007. Six months later, Allison began seeing Jakob Lodwick, a founder of CollegeHumor.com and Vimeo and another regular subject of Gawker gossip. They documented the courtship on their blogs, posting photos of themselves cuddling, videos of each other frolicking on the beach, and emails in which they debated the finer points of dating. One painful video, in which Lodwick accuses Allison of being too “demanding” and she fights back tears, was featured on Gawker, under the headline “Hey, Quit Paying Attention to Julia Allison and Jakob Lodwick!” In November, they started jakobandjulia.com to chronicle the “inner-workings of a real relationship, with all its flaws.” Flaws, indeed; the couple broke up three weeks later — via blog post.

Soap opera aside, readers have been drawn in by the question of whether Allison is in control of her fame or victimized by it. Critics may pan her as a narcissist, but Allison regularly shows a savvy self-mockery. After Radar named her the third-most-hated person on the Internet — she placed just above the marine seen on YouTube tossing a puppy off a cliff — her knowing response won over even the most hardened Gawker commenter. (“I want to thank my agent, who has been with me since I was just mildly annoying,” she wrote. “Of course I want to thank my self-promotional narcissism and my incessant desire for infamy at any costs. Thank you so, so much.”)

But sometimes Allison’s critics heave rotten fruit at her head with such force that even she can’t make lemonade out of it. After she disclosed an ex-boyfriend’s bipolar disorder in a Gawker Q&A, irascible vlogger Loren Feldman posted an anti-Julia rant, calling her a “vapid, vapid, cruel, mean monster” and “one of the saddest train wrecks in the history of the Internet.” In January, Reblogging Julia launched to provide “a critical analysis of the public ramblings of the creature formerly known as Ms. Baugher, who provides a manic amount of content to parse.” And after Valleywag ran photos of Allison canoodling with Digg cofounder Kevin Rose — publicity that Allison says killed their burgeoning relationship — she declared she had enough. “I can’t do this anymore. It’s ruining my life,” she wrote on her blog. Gawker’s Denton personally marked the occasion with a four-word item: “It’s over. For now.” The mini-post brought in 11,000 pageviews and 160 comments. Allison’s site brought in more than 17,000 readers that day, a new record.

Don’t worry. It wasn’t over. The next day she followed up with a postscript: “I may have overreacted a bit.” Three weeks later, she posted a video of herself lip-syncing 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” on a ski lift. And three months after that she officially resumed her regular blogging schedule.

Step 3
Extend Your Brand

“I thought that Gawker post about you today was very nice,” Allison tells Rambin over lunch salads at a Greenwich Village café. She speaks soothingly, like a mother comforting a child after a deflating T-ball game. Allison spends a lot of time encouraging Rambin, whom she befriended a year ago. She persuaded Rambin to take up blogging after signing her up for a Tumblr account last December. She linked regularly to Rambin’s posts and uploaded pictures of the two of them together as a way of directing her site’s visitors to Rambin’s page. And when Allison went on hiatus, even more of her readers started following Rambin as a surrogate for their Allison fix.

And now, if Allison has her way, she will turn Rambin — and their friend Asha — into true Web celebrities, just like herself. In the same way that Denton used his platform to make Allison a proto-celebrity, she is now using her public profile to do the same for her friends. But this is not charity; it’s her attempt to build the Allison brand. “Two C-list starlets can get together and make one B-list couple; this is very similar,” she says. “Mary can meet with five people, and I can meet with five other people, and Meghan can meet with five other people, and all the press we get individually builds the team as a whole.”

In July 2007, having conquered — and perhaps oversaturated — the Manhattan media market, Allison set her sights on a new target: the Silicon Valley startup world. In a flashback to her Gawker breakthrough, she flew to the Bay Area to attend the annual TechCrunch party thrown by influential blogger Michael Arrington. Dressed in a flattering Diane von Furstenberg dress, Allison made an immediate impression among the blue-shirt-and-khaki-wearing attendees. The next day, Arrington posted a video on his site of Allison cooing for the camera, telling her audience that she had a thing for geeks, and urging them to call her. Soon Allison had become a Valleywag staple, befriended the likes of CNET’s Caroline McCarthy and Sequoia Capital’s Mark Kvamme, and — like Jack in the Box opening a new crosstown franchise — introduced her brand of ignore-me-if-you-dare provocation to the Web 2.0 startup world. When she left town at the end of the weekend, the Valley-based blogosphere reacted as if it had just survived a flash flood. “We are all in awe,” one blogger wrote, “and quite honestly left scratching our heads over how someone, in such a short period of time, could make an incredibly controversial impact — with an entire community breathing a sigh of relief at her departure.”

Newly reinvented as a tech-world ingenue, Allison began entertaining plans to launch her own business. Instead of using her outsize personality to drive pageviews to Gawker and Valleywag, she thought, why not capitalize on her reputation to launch her own Web portal? She signed up Rambin and Asha to act as cofounders of the site — nonsociety.com — and began developing content: lip-sync videos, a talk-show series modeled after The View, and the collected musings that the trio were already posting on their own blogs. They enlisted Shane Parrish, a marketer who had helped design Web strategies for Barneys New York and Project Runway, to serve as their creative director. In mid-June, Allison signed a deal with Bravo to follow the women’s startup adventures and broadcast them as a reality show called IT Girls.

Can Allison really win an unironic fan base? Can someone who’s famous for being hated convert that loathing into love? Allison insists she can — and readily forwards emails from fans who have been won over. But even if she can’t, even if her new site is good for nothing more than providing continued fodder for the cannons that are pointed at her, that will be its own kind of success.

“There’s no scandal that won’t make her bigger,” says Sicha, the former Gawker editor. “She could be dumped by whomever. She’s crossed every line already. Nothing bad can happen to her.”

Well, unless people stop paying attention. But that doesn’t seem likely. One evening after trailing Allison for most of the day, I return to my hotel to see that she has sent me an email with a link to Gawker. It’s the day’s Gawker Stalker, a list of celebrity sightings emailed in by anonymous tipsters. Already, it looks like Allison’s plan to celebrify her friends is paying off: “Union Square today around 2 pm. Saw julia allison and her 2 other friends mary and megan, noticed the other two first, dressed very well.”

But it’s the next sentence that makes my heart beat a little faster. “Julia Allison following them, talking to some guy.” Hey! That’s me! For a second, I confess, it’s a thrill, to have my spectral presence broadcast to thousands of readers. But then I get annoyed. “Some guy”? That’s it? No mention of my outfit, or my dulcet baritone, or even my height or weight? Not the slightest curiosity as to who I might be? Come on. What’s a guy got to do to get noticed around here?

[via WIRED]