how to save the world

A Crooked Broker Society: The Mainstream Media as Pimps and Panderers

Posted on April 23, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Reader caution: rant ahead
A while ago I wrote an article about Bill Maher’s proclamation that the job of the media is to make what’s important interesting. The media are now so universally loathed that even lawyers and real estate speculators rate higher in public opinion. You can’t blame us, especially after last week’s disgraceful spectacle. The mainstream media have Maher’s advice exactly backwards: They’re trying to make what’s interesting (to the dumbed-down public, in the most lurid and sleazy sense) important in some way, when it’s not. In that sense they have become, in every sense of the word, nothing more than pimps and panderers.

As the chart above shows, the world’s affluent nations are becoming (and North American nations have already become) Crooked Broker Societies. The rich and powerful no longer get their hands dirty actually doing anything of value. They merely use their money and power to intermediate between desperate vendors and weak, addicted buyers. And as James Surowiecki has pointed out, they’re not ‘honest brokers’ either, balancing the interests of vendor and buyer and mediating for a reasonable fee. They have divided up the brokerage role into two parts: an exploiter role, designed to subjugate and oppress the desperate supplier, and a procurer role, designed to pander to and gouge the weak buyer. The exploiters and procurers then collude (and sometimes merge to play both roles), paying the supplier next to nothing and charging the buyer a huge amount for worthless crap. The chart above shows how these roles siphon wealth from both suppliers and buyers, providing nothing of value in return, in just about every sector of our modern society.

You see this in struggling nations, and in areas like North America’s inner cities, where poverty, desperation and lawlessness are endemic. The fact that this same tawdry oppression of suppliers and gouging of purchasers is now occurring everywhere attests to the dysfunction of our political, social and economic systems, and the growing sense of market anarchy, where any behaviour is justified if it is profitable, and where the ends always justify the means. It is evidence of a culture in the terminal stages of decline and disintegration.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the mainstream ‘information’ media. This should probably not be surprising, when these media are owned by a corporatist oligopoly that measures success by profit, not by the quantity or quality of information it delivers. For the past week we have been subjected to the sorry spectacle of these media fawning over a single deranged man who set them up with the video and audio and the violence they needed to justify lazily and irresponsibly passing this off as somehow newsworthy. They were able to play this up for a week and it cost them essentially nothing. The consequence was to stir up enough hysteria to sell a lot of newspapers and attract enough bored ambulance-chasers to make the entire undertaking enormously profitable.

The conservative politicians and corporatists loved it, too — it took attention away from rampant political and business corruption and incompetence, and allowed fear-mongers to advocate more crime laws, conservatives and preachers to lament the decline of moral values in our society, and propagandists of every stripe to exploit the event for the media circus it was. The message for publicity-hounds was clear: If you’re desperate to get a lot of global publicity in a hurry, make sure to (a) kill a lot of people, (b) do it in an affluent nation, (c) do it in a spectacularly gruesome way, and (d) pre-create and edit your own audio and video for the media so they can’t screw your message up. Whether or not it means anything, or there is any lesson to be learned from it, is irrelevant.

In the meantime, between the propagandists, the media conglomerates and the advertisers, lots of profits were made and lots of political points were scored, and the citizenry was left as dumb as ever. Even more dumbed down, in fact, because of all the events that received little or no coverage while the mainstream media gleefully and rabidly pimped for a suicidal loser, political interest groups exploited the ‘event’ by misinforming the public about its ‘meaning’ (with no challenge whatever from the reporters), and shareholders and advertisers raked in the extra dough the publicity generated.

It was a shameful, disgraceful performance but it’s one we are getting terribly used to from exploiters and procurers in every aspect of our lives. Whether it is the misogyny, sleazy product marketing and violence-promotion of rap videos, or the willful broadcasting of blatant corporatist lies in ‘advertising’, or the abrogation of responsibility for investigative journalism (and the ignoring of citizens’ whistle-blowing and investigation, lest it offend advertisers), or the obsession with the crime blotter while crises facing our world remain ignored because they’re too complex or too expensive to work on, the mainstream ‘information’ media show themselves to be nothing more than pimps and panderers, wasting our time and public bandwidth. Fiddling with sensationalist minutiae while the world burns.

We need to liberate hard-working producers and beleaguered customers from the bullying freeloaders and corporate-welfare bums in the middle two columns of the chart above, fat, lazy, overpaid, greedy, obscenely powerful do-nothing middlemen all of them. Let’s start throwing out the crooked brokers who stand between us and reasonably-priced, socially and environmentally responsible, quality products and services and important, actionable information. Let’s peer-to-peer them all out ofbusiness.

/rant

Categories: Corporatism & Distorted Markets, and The Media

Posted in How the World Really Works | 5 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – April 22, 2007

Posted on April 22, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Cartoon from the New Yorker by Frank Cotham. Buy prints of his amazing cartoons here.

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

Are We Violent By Nature?: Are we more like chimps or bonobos?
Temper Temper: Keeping it under control
Bad Cops
The Pandering of the Media to Criminals, Crime Gawkers and the Conservative Exploiters of Crime News

What I’m thinking about:

My book on entrepreneurship. Time, perhaps, to give up looking for a publisher and just get the thing out.
Love, again.

What are you pondering these days?

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Saturday Links for the Week – April 21, 2007

Posted on April 22, 2007 by Dave Pollard

What it all means this week:

Imaginative Thinking to Address Complex Problems: A fascinating TED talk by 19-year-old biochemist Eva Vertes hypothesizes that cancer is not a disease but an attempt by the body to fight disease and injury. The implications if she’s right are staggering. When Einstein said we cannot solve intractable problems with the same thinking that led to them, this is what he was talking about. Thanks to reader Ed for the link.

Why This is Our Final Century: If you’ve read Flannery and Monbiot, you know that we need to reduce greenhouse gases quickly and dramatically to save our planet from climatic disaster. If you read this blog, you know why I, and others like John Gray, believe such drastic action will never occur. This week, we heard a new report from EU scientists saying that we will have to reduce emissions in affluent nations by 95% in the next forty years. And we heard the Canadian conservative government, ideologically in lockstep with the US Bush conservatives, declare that even the feeble and inadequate Kyoto targets would wreck the Canadian economy and as such are “unthinkable”. At a time when a leap far beyond Kyoto is desperately needed, it looks likely that Canada’s conservatives will choose to fight an election (and according to recent polls, do so successfully) on the grounds of reneging on Canada’s Kyoto commitments, propagandizing against both climate change dangers and the economic benefits of addressing them, and putting the immediate economic interests of the conservatives’ corporatist friends ahead of the survival of our civilization. Shameful, terrifying, and completely expected.

Jeffrey Sachs Hopes Against Hope: The BBC has the broadcast and transcripts of the 2007 Reith Lectures featuring anti-poverty activist Jeffrey Sachs. What’s fascinating to me is the audience reaction to Sachs’ arguments: The majority, hearing the facts of the state of our world laid out starkly, see free-market-skeptic Sachs as a pessimist and ask whether his self-proclaimed optimism is misguided. But the most informed minority, like Sir Christopher Meyer, see Sachs’ almost religious belief in “mass political awareness and social mobilization” as absurdly naive and unsupportable. Thanks to Jutta Ried for the link.

Ways to Go Green: Although it’s a bit bizarre to find on a website that promotes credit cards, Frugalist’s list of 57 ways to live more environmentally responsibly is a good one.

The Need for Debate: Dave Snowden, an accomplished debater, argues that learning and creativity are aided more by informed and articulate debate than by consensus-seeking. I see his point, but in my experience, most debates are neither well-informed nor articulate, and debaters too often have their minds already made up and are poor listeners. But, being Canadian (we are consensus-seekers to a fault) I lack the self-confidence and sense of urgency to debate Dave on the matter.

The Dark Side of India’s Economic ‘Prosperity”: Arundhati Roy, who has tried to explain to the world the horrific life (and suicide rate) of India’s destitute farmers (now mirrored in Australia), explains what’s really happening in India, events that we here almost nothing about in affluent nations. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

China Building a New Coal-Fired Power Plant Every Four Days: The cost of China raising even a small minority of its desperate underclass out of poverty is the destitution of the world.

“Ocean Desalination Does Not Work”: There is no simple techno-fix for looming global fresh water shortages.

Thought for the Week, from Brian Eno (thanks to Andrew Campbell for the citation):

“One of the things I’ve formulated recently, as a little rule of thumb for myself, is to say, a computer program should always allow you to continue working in the physical world that that activity suggests anyway. So if you’re working with a music program, you don’t have to keep going back to typing and using your mouse. People think that’s being kind of picky, and rather stupid, but I’ve always had this theory that the body is the large brain; it’s not like, this bit of you doesn’t matter and this bit does. The whole physical experience is what you make things with. Anyone who works with any tactile art form knows this. And with any tactile instrument. They know that a lot of your intelligence about what you’re doing is not happening, here [the head], it’s happening all over other parts of your body. It’s how your body feels about this sort of thing. Well, unfortunately, computer interfaces are so crude they’ve completely ignored that possibility. So, if I want drawing programs that automatically work with a pad or a pen or whatever – I have one in fact! – then I want music programs and I want synthesizers that give me that same kind of physical relationship, that physical musical relationship.”

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 11 Comments

Innovation in eHealth

Posted on April 20, 2007 by Dave Pollard

I attended a presentation last week put on by Paul Artiuch and Tim Warner of Don Tapscott’s group New Paradigm, talking about the most important trends in Web 2.0, and in eHealth in particular. Some of the content is proprietary to members, but most of it was reasoned opinion, pointers to interesting websites, and intriguing trends and observations from their research that I thought might be worth sharing with readers. If your organization is one of the collaborators in the New Paradigm IT & Competitive Advantage program, you might want to contact your organization’s representatives in the consortium, and get involved.

What I like about them is their pragmatism ñ for example, they explain the value of social networking tools in a way that is accessible to senior executives and anticipates and addresses most executives’ lack of knowledge, common misconceptions and security/control fears about them. And they encourage multiple parallel small-scale experiments using these tools, in the context of addressing specific organizational problems, so that participating organizations can actually become leaders in the use of new technologies and ideas, instead of just abstractly understanding their potential.

Here were, for me, the shareable highlights of the presentation:

Focuses for New Paradigm’s current research include producer/customer/consumer co-development and peer production, the self-managed organization, implementing social networking applications in organizations, and understanding the buying and working behaviours of Generation Millennium.
Sermo.com ñ This is a free website used by US doctors (you have to be an AMA member to get in) where they share clinical information, ideas and problems. Sermo was credited with the first detection of a recent e coli outbreak in the US. It is primarily used as a self-help, peer-to-peer information-sharing and second-opinion forum among small town and rural MDs in the US (urban doctors presumably have stronger physical networks they can call on to do this). It’s now monitored by the CDC and the FDA.
theStatus.com ñ This is a free, global public website which allows family members to post the status of convalescents (in hospitals, long-term care facilities, or even at home), and receive condolences, messages etc. It includes a blog-like interface for the patient or their rep to send messages once, that everyone can read (so the patients can save their energy to get well, and their families can save their energy to be caregivers, instead of having to tell 100 callers the same news). Very simple, very innovative.
Organized Wisdom ñ This site enables peer-to-peer matching of health care information against stories of healthcare problems. Very imaginative use of stories (as context-rich problem definitions) and natural language algorithms to do the ‘matching’ to possible health solutions.
New Paradigm sees further evolution of the Web towards a self-managed, collaborative space. Sites that merely offer content without conversation (collaboration tools embedded), mobility (access anytime from anywhere), broadband (full multimedia capability) and pervasiveness (ability to interact with sensors and other machines in real time and space) will not survive.
Revolution Health Group ñ Steve Case (ex AOL-Time Warner) plans to make his site(s)/tools/media the premiere destination for the entire US healthcare system, and is investing millions to do so. It is free (ad-sponsored), but offers a $129/year intermediary/concierge service that will do all your searches, news synopsis and answer all questions for you, including creating and maintaining a personal electronic health record for you and interfacing it with other systems as required. Revolution Health has just bought Wondir’s Health categories and ported them to their site (Wondir is a website that lets people ask and answer questions on any subject peer-to-peer on a caveat emptor basis, and Health was its #1 category). Interestingly, Wondir Health users seem unhappy with the new, less intuitive Revolution Health interface ñ is there a lesson here? Meanwhile, the top 5 healthcare web destinations remain: WebMD, NIH, About.com Health, Yahoo Health/Yahoo Health Answers, and (sigh) the South Beach Diet site.
Nike+ ñ Nike plans to put its Nike+ RFID sensors in all their shoes ‘standard’ by next year (over three million sold already). These sensors send wireless GPS and other information to your iPod and other equipped devices, which info can then be relayed anywhere else over the Internet (and as the link above shows, can also be used to keep tabs on you). This could be the fore-runner of environmental/health/security sensors everywhere, that can be monitored by automated environmental, health and security information systems 24/7 (and by Big Brother). Note: The US apparently has more Nike shoes than cellphones.
Some of the big healthcare e-challenges and e-opportunities:

auto-detecting medical errors at point-of-care (“beep ñ you have just attached the patient’s anesthesia tube to a non-anesthetic tank”)
reducing unnecessary visits/treatments (teleheath and other technology-enabled ways of pre-screening)
comparative public ‘ratings’ of doctors and hospitals
enabling more home-based end-of-life care (’cause folks, we’ll soon be running out of room in nursing homes and hospices, big time)
auto-alerting of flare-ups of chronic diseases (carrying the drug monitors in Japanese toilets to the next level)
enabling health self-management to reduce walk-in visit costs (monitoring, measuring, diagnostic and even therapeutic devices you can hook up to your laptop and the Internet)
accelerating the development of generic drugs
collection and publication of more accurate waiting-queue numbers and average wait times (since what gets measured gets action)
better, automated coordination of medical activities involving multiple specialties/institutions (synchronizing schedules automatically)

Research to date has found no evidence that introducing electronic personal health records (where a ton of money is being spent these days) have any impact on ultimate health outcomes, except for the detection of adverse drug reactions.
It would appear that healthcare quality and cost are adversely affected by what New Paradigm calls ‘demand distortions’ (the expectation and insistence on unnecessary interventions) driven largely by (a) drug and healthcare device supplier advertising hype (“ask your doctor if zybloxithon is right for you”), (b) some medical laziness (over-prescription), and (c) our ‘learned helplessness‘ culture (“Iím sick, give me a drug”).

New Paradigm is quite positive on social networking applications in organizations, especially internal applications within healthcare organizations (rather than aimed at the general public), and especially blogs, wikis, IM and social networking apps similar in approach and structure to Sermo, theStatus, and OrganizedWisdom.

As mentioned in a previous post, if you’re interested in a summary of Tapscott’s book Wikinomics, it’s available free online as a 2-hour videopresentation here.

Category: Industry-specific Innovation

Posted in Working Smarter | 2 Comments

The Language of ‘Uncivilized’ Cultures

Posted on April 19, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Last week’s (April 16th) New Yorker presented an article The Interpreter by John Colapinto (not online, abstract here, photo above by Martin Schoeller from this portfolio), describing the language and culture of the Amazonian Pirahã.The article reviews the research of ex-missionary and linguist Dan Everett into the unique language of the Pirahã. The language nominally contains eight consonants and three vowels, but words and conversations between Pirahã who know each other well dispense with the consonants and vowels entirely.So, for example, when the Pirahã are introduced to someone new, they talk among themselves and agree upon a name for the newcomer, and then iteratively whittle that name down to a single agreed-upon tone, stress and duration combination, one note. In essence, then, they sing rather than speak, and their language has more in common with music than with language. Or, to put it another way, it has more in common with the language of birds and other animals than with the dominant human languages of the planet, which are so structurally similar to each other that, as Chomsky has put it, an alien landing on the planet would have no doubt that all human languages came from a single root. Chomsky has spent much of his life writing the ‘rules’ to this language, and argues that the human brain is ‘hard wired’ for it.Not surprisingly, the discovery of a language which does not appear to follow any of these rules has stirred up a lot of controversy and denial. Yet a language based on the principles of music seems entirely natural to me, especially for a people who have lived for millennia in a rainforest replete with the musical language of thousands of birds and other species. I suspect that what is troubling the linguistic establishment most about Everett’s findings are these three things:

The language lacks tenses, and therefore suggests that, like wild creatures, the Pirahã live in ‘now time‘, not in the clock time that the rest of us live in. Life in now time does not need tenses or terms related to clock time; in fact they would make no sense to such people. The study of whale sounds indicates that whales, and probably all non-human creatures, likewise ‘speak’ in a prosodic language based on tone, stress and duration (i.e. a musical language) rather than a highly synthetic, syntactic one. We might well discover that the 350 Pirahã, uniquely, might have the capacity to understand and communicate with non-human creatures in their own, related, language. What a remarkable, and immensely threatening to the status quo, possibility! If they tell us what the raven is really saying to us, what basis would we have to argue with them?

The language lacks taxonomy. It has no terms for colours, numbers, or other absolute distinctions or hierarchies. In Pirahã language, everything is relative, contextual. Something that we might call ‘red’, using that abstract construction, they would describe by comparing it to what it is like, right now, in a variety of comparative contexts. The nuance of what aspect of ‘likeness’ they are referring to might be difficult for us to grasp, but if this was your native language it would not be difficult. There is a misconception that indigenous Arctic peoples have dozens of words for ‘snow’, when in fact these words describe practical, useful, necessary qualities of snow in a particular context. The distinction is not taxonomic, it is contextual and pragmatic. This would suggest that language has no need for conceptual taxonomy, and hence complex language is possible (and if so, I would say it is certain) among creatures who are less skilled at (and who have no use for) abstract conception. This is also a terribly threatening idea. It means that the way other creatures communicate might be just as sophisticated if not more sophisticated than our own clumsy, unmusical, unintuitive way. It means our human communications capability is nothing special, and may in fact be inferior. Rather than having developed uniquely ‘sophisticated’ languages because we had the large brain for it, perhaps we developed complicated, poor languages (or, if Chomsky is right, one complicated, poor proto-language) because, like novices trying to work with complicated machinery, we just couldn’t handle our brains very well and weren’t able to come up with simpler, more effective languages. Perhaps our dumb language is like the awkward, inefficient, digital, complicated made-up machine language of clunky old mainframe computers, while the Pirahãs’ and other creatures’ languages are like the music from an iPod ñ natural, elegant, analog, intuitive, at once simple and complex.

The Pirahã have no interest in our language or our culture. Unlike cultures more closely akin to our own, the Pirahã are uninterested in our artifacts or our knowledge. It has no use for them, so why would they want to learn it? They don’t need it. Everett describes how the Pirahã laughed at a King King film shown to them, and clearly understood it, but showed no interest in or grasp of its cultural message. To them it was just pictures, slapstick. It meant nothing. We have nothing to teach these people, for all our study and learning and technology. They tolerate us, but apparently (and I think understandably) see us as an inferior, maladapted species. Repeated attempts to teach them farming have been completely unsuccessful ñ why should they want to give up a resilient life for one of great fragility? They have no creation myth (to them, life has always been as it is now) and hence they have no need for religion. Or for civilization.

calvin nature I sense that wild creatures, including those who visit my bird feeder when it’s convenient for them, feel the same way about us that the Pirahã do. They feel sorry for us, perhaps the same way we feel sorry for big, clumsy, maladapted King Kong, or the dinosaurs. We’ll put up with these big dumb creatures, but if they were to all disappear suddenly once and for all, that would be just fine with us, too. Perhaps their instincts, much more nuanced and attended to than ours, have made them prophets. We just can’t hear their warning.

Categories: Understanding How Gaia Works, and Our Culture

Posted in Collapse Watch | 10 Comments

Sorrow

Posted on April 18, 2007 by Dave Pollard

My latest short story, entitled Sorrow, about the differences between how(some) men and women conceive of romance and value relationships, is here.

Category: Short Stories

(Photo: Tom Hsiang, U. of Guelph Dept. of Environmental Biology)

Posted in Creative Works | 2 Comments

The Language of ‘Uncivilized’ Cultures (teaser)

Posted on April 16, 2007 by Dave Pollard

No post today, as I’m working on my short story. But if you have time today, pick up and have a read of the article The Interpreter by John Colapinto in The April 16th New Yorker (not online, abstract here, photo above by Martin Schoeller from this portfolio), describing a culture, that of the Amazonian Piraha, whose language seems to defy all the rules of what a language should be (i.e. an instrument of civilization) and whose people have absolutely no usefor our culture. I’ll have more to say on this later in the week.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off

Sunday Open Thread – April 15, 2007

Posted on April 15, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Image: Album cover of Rickie Lee Jones’ Pirates CD

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

Are We Violent By Nature?: Are we more like chimps or bonobos?
Temper Temper: Keeping it under control
A short story about the difference and overlap between male and female conceptions of romance

The short story may take a few days, so if posting is sporadic this week, that’s why.

What I’m thinking about:

Taking Sides: What can we do when we love two people who hate each other, and force us to take sides, to choose between them? Whether because of divorce, a feud, or a rivalry, why can’t people just let us love people they hate? And even if they do, what do you do when you’re hosting anevent and you want to invite them both?

What’s driving you crazy these days?

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week – April 14, 2007

Posted on April 14, 2007 by Dave Pollard

What it All Means This Week:

Relocalization Movement Gains Momentum…: The Post Carbon Institute has created a global relocalization network with a substantial toolkit and speakers’ group behind it. They’re thinking way ahead of the curve, and their program is daunting, as this one-hour video by the network’s founder reveals. Thanks to Elisabeth Frankish of the network’s Karamea NZ chapter for the link.

…And There’s a New Wiki for Those Trying to Make the World a Better Place…: Appropedia is the site for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development. Thanks to my friend Lugon of the Fluwiki for the link.

…And Entrepreneurship Has a Role to Play Too: A new study by SustainAbility (free registration required to download report) says social and environmentally responsible, sustainable enterprise is on a roll. The report is encouraging, a good summary of what’s happened so far and worth the read, but it’s devoid of imagination and innovation, with too much preoccupation on getting funding and political support. Just as we need to stop thinking of ‘the environment’ as something apart from human culture, we need to stop thinking of ‘social entrepreneurs’ as a separate, altruistic class of entrepreneurs. There is no reason why leading-edge socially and environmentally responsible, sustainable enterprises can’t be joyful, profitable, natural ways to make a living. Thanks to Innovation Weekly and Joel Makower for the link.

Chronic Auto-Immune Diseases and Oxidative Stress: The medical community is starting to learn approaches to complex system issues. In a recent Canadian-Iranian study, researchers have found a strong correlation between inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis, which I suffer from) and oxidative stress. If the oxidative stress is a cause, then anti-oxidants might be a preventative or treatment, but what causes the oxidative stress? And if it’s just a symptom, what’s the cause and why is oxidative stress a consequence? You know my hypothesis (illustrated above), and this is an encouraging sign that it’s plausible.

Selecting Compact Fluorescent Bulbs: Popular Mechanics rates ’em all and finds them better made than incandescents as well as more energy efficient. Best buy: Philips Marathon at $3. Strategy: Buy in bulk, and as each old incandescent gives out, replace it with a compact fluorescent. The old magazine is looking a lot greener these days: Here’s their advice on weaning your lawn off artificial, toxic chemicals.

Failed States Index: The map above shows the Fund for Peace’s failed states index scores for 2006. The site has full details of the methodology, which gauges political and economic stability, but arguably not environmental/energy sustainability. If Canada were listed as ‘sustainable’ on that score, we’re all in big trouble. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

Join Us Thursday April 26 for the Innovation Bloggers Virtual Forum

I’m one of eight bloggers in Jeff De Cagna’s annual online Innovation Forum. Here’s the line-up:

Morning Forum Roundtable (11 am EDT)
Renee Hopkins Callahan, IdeaFlow
Chuck Frey, InnovationTools
Jeffrey Phillips, Innovate on Purpose
Dave Pollard, How to Save the World

Afternoon Forum Roundtable (2 pm EDT)
Dominic Basulto, Endless Innovation
Sanjay Dalal, Creativity And Innovation Driving Business
Mark McGuinness, Wishful Thinking
Joyce Wycoff, Heads Up! on Organizational Innovation

This is a really extraordinary group, and I’m honoured to be a part of it. If you’d like to listen in, e-mail me or say so in the comments below, and I’ll send you the dial-in details. Also, let me know if you’re going to the SLA Conference in Denver in June. The best stuff at these conferences happens at the edges.

I Need Some Technical Help: I’ve been trying to import my Thunderbird E-mail Address Book into my Google Mail account. I’ve vetted every line of the .csv file I created but Google still rejects it, without telling me why. Anyone grappled with this? Anyone actually exported their entire Thunderbird inbox to Google Mail? And… I notice a lot of bloggers have added Snap (snapshots of their link pages when you scroll over) to their sites — anyone know what would happen to page load time if I added it to my pages with a 400+ line blogroll?

Thought for the Week: From my work colleague Marie Muir: Spanish Flu is only Spanish if you’re not.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 8 Comments