Screenshot of TMP.com

Yesterday, Saturday, January 8th, 2011, a gunman shot – at point-blank range – U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D, AZ) as she was at a meet-and-greet in her home district.

The assassination attempt left six dead, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl, and over a dozen injured, many critically.

Giffords is currently out of surgery, and doing well (considering the circumstances). Long-term prognosis has not even been mentioned.

A couple of quick notes:

• There can be no excuses – just explanations – for this carnage.

• I’m appalled by all this senseless slaughter. A representative, doing what reps do on weekends – making themselves available to constituents and the press – was, apparently, targeted for a cold-blooded assassination. Have we come to this?

• This was a relatively unknown member of the House of Representatives. Yes, a Democrat in a red state, but not some politico who gets attention (pro/con) like, say, former half-term Governor Palin, President Obama, Senator John McCain and so on. Why her? That’s one of the scary aspects of this. Obama – as the first African-American president – will, sadly, get a bunch of death threats. But Giffords? Or any other below-the-radar government official/aide. Why?

Lots of talk on the intertubes about this, obviously.

There is no upside to this for anyone, yet there is a lot of finger-pointing.

Taking a longer view of the situation, HuffingtonPost.com’s Howard Fineman puts his finger on the bigger picture – while not ignoring the incredible suffering this shooter has inflicted on individuals, the community and the nation as a whole.

The shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is a watershed event in many ways, some of which we cannot yet know, but one of the clearest and simplest is this: Congress and its members are about to be permanently quarantined, physically isolated, from the people it and they represent.

Thirty years ago, there was no such thing as security on Capitol Hill or for members. Members of the public were free to roam the halls, and police presence was practically invisible. There were no barricades around the grounds, and even the leadership rarely had any form of protection.

The Hill was the very model of the People’s Place — and in that respect it was an inspirational symbol of our democracy.

— Howard Fineman, The End of Access

I was in DC this summer, and it had changed in so many ways since I was last in the district (over 30 years ago, granted).

The White House is now a fortress: Lockdowns for foot traffic when a helicopter is inbound, police with M-16s everywhere, barricades are the norm.

It’s sad, but it’s – unfortunately – a reaction to reality. And it’s in evidence across federal buildings.

Yesterday, many individuals died, and many were injured.

One of the casualties was at least one facet of democracy: the idea that an individual can meet – face-to-face – with those who represent that individual.

Going to be much harder moving forward.

I’m not minimizing the loss of life or those who were physically injured yesterday, but this event has far-ranging consequences.

This is not a year in review piece, it’s just a collection of things that struck me over the course of the year.

Favorite book: This would have to be Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country. This book came out in 2005, but I just became aware of it this year (read my review). Once I did stumble upon it, I purchased and devoured. It’s as close to an autobiography of Vonnegut as we’re going to get (unless there is some manuscript waiting to be discovered…), and while not a true autobiography in any sense, it’s Vonnegut writing about his life/thoughts in the first person. A very enjoyable – albeit brief – read, but good to spend some time with new (to me) Vonnegut.

Favorite musician: Regina Spektor. I saw the movie 500 Days of Summer (more on this later), and the movie had an amazing soundtrack, with a lot of artists I wasn’t familiar with. So I purchased the soundtrack, and two of the tracks – two of my favs – were by Regina Spektor. So I purchased a couple of her CDs, and they are amazing: Soviet Kitsch and Begin to Hope. These are older albums (2004 & 2006, respectively), but new to me. I don’t quite know how to quantify Spektor to those who don’t know her – perhaps a mix between Tori Amos (piano) and PJ Harvey (out of the mainstream folk/pop with balls). I love Spektor’s staccato beat, especially on “Us.” Awesome. I just ordered a more recent – 2009 – release of Specktor’s, Far from Amazon. It got mixed reviews – for some it was bad because it wasn’t as pure/raw (voice/piano); others said it was still all Spektor, just with the full studio feel. I have not received yet; it’ll be interesting. My fav musical artist of this year, even if she has been around for years.

Favorite movie: Saw a lot of good films this year – all on DVD and not necessarily from this year – but the one that stands out is 500 Days of Summer. Quirky, non-linear, great mix of film and illustration, awesome soundtrack (see above). Best movie ever? Of course not. Just a very watchable (over and over) film.

WATCHING:
Run Lola Run
Starring: Franka Potente

This is just what the title says: Lola (Potente) running.

A German film, it won the audience award at Sundance in 1999.

Basic outline of movie: Lola gets a call from loser of a boyfriend; he’s screwed up and – unless he can come up with a lot of money in 20 minutes, he’ll probably be killed. Lola promises to get to him – with the cash (somehow) – in that time period.

Most of the movies is Lola running through the streets, trying to fashion a plan. She runs a LOT.

There are three sequences, all beginning the same (the phone call and her running out of their apartment). Yet each of the three sequences have very slight differences, and those differences make all the difference in the world to Lola and those close to her.

Oddball, artsy film. Not one you’ll watch time and again, but I enjoyed.

All movies

Well, it’s that time of the year: Prognoistications. As I have for the past couple of years (2010 guesses, 2009 guesses), I’ll first take a look back and see how I did for this year before gazing into the crystal ball for 2011.

Here’s what I was expecting for 2010:

• Apple’ll come out with a tablet: Even for Apple, a company known for it’s secrecy re: new products, this was a gimme. I though it would come with an HDMI port – that was my big “guess.” I was wrong. Let’s call this a wash because of this. I should have known better – Nothing the Lord Master Steve loves better than cutting ports…
   
  
• Steve Jobs will announce a deadline to step down as Apple’s CEO: He shows no signs of slowing down. Wrong.
   
  
• There’ll be a lot of fuss about mySql (now that Oracle has purchased Sun, which bought mySql): I think I’m spot on with this one: Lot of concern, but nothing – good or bad – materialized. Correct.
   
  
• Google’s Chrome Browser will end the year with a market share around 10%: This report show’s Chrome’s use about 9.25% at the beginning of December with a strong upward trend. I’m giving this one to myself. Correct.
  Update 1/3/2011: Chrome hits 10%
   
  
• Facebook will have an IPO: Completely wrong. More than anything, they seem to be positioning themselves (via VC cash and other moves) to create the company they want before the IPO and they having to worry about shareholders. Looking to be a smart move. But I was wrong.
   
  
• Twitter won’t have an IPO: Correct, but in part (?) because Twitter can’t figure out its business model. Once they figure that out – and execute on same – may be ready to go public.
   
  
• Ruby (on or off “Rails”) still won’t catch on as the “hot new language” to play with: Kind of hard to quantify this, but Ruby still doesn’t have the momentum of Java or PHP. The new languages that appear to be in demand are JQuery/JSON/HTML5 stuff. One for me.
   
  
• Google Wave still an “interesting idea”: I wrote that Wave was “just too ambitious to take hold” in 2010. Or, apparently ever. Google killed Wave in August this year. I’ll give myself this one (didn’t take hold this year), but – to be fair – I didn’t expect it to be killed this year.
   
  
• Geo-location will have another huge year: Uh, yeah. Foursquare. Yelp. Gowolla. GroupOn. Totally correct.
   
  
• Ebooks’ usage soars: the iPad (not just an ereader) is on pace to sell 7+ million units this year. Kindle is rumored to move 8 million this year. And other tablets/readers (Gallexy Tab; Nook) continue to prosper. And the ebooks associated with them will total approximately $1 billion this year, and are projected to reach $3 billion by 2015. Called this one.
   
  
• Newspapers continue to flounder – badly: I’ll give myself a push on this one. Yes, newspapers continue to flounder, but I stuck my neck out and said Rupert Murdoch wouldn’t put up any paywalls in 201. He put up paywalls in the UK in June, 2010. Not that it helped – now he’s betting the farm on an etablet-only pay-for-news app. So a push.
   
  
• Cloud computing use will continue to grow, but not to the “yeah, most use it” levels: I still stick by this. Lots of chatter about same, but relatively little deployment (by number of users – I do believe the amount of content in the cloud has soared this year, but only for a small subset of internet users.
   
  
• Microsoft will struggle to redefine itself in 2010: Correct. Microsoft is seeing its cash cows – Windows and Office – on the PC marginalized by the surge of Macs and cloud computing (Google Docs, for example). At the same time, Microsoft has missed the biggest tech opening in the last few years – mobile phones – badly. The new Window Phone 7 (or whatever it’s called) is supposed to finally get them close, but they are three or so years behind Apple/iPhone Google/Android in this now-hugely important area of tech. It’s just embarrassing for MS – they used to run a large portion of pre-Smart Phones with Windows Mobile; no more. And there have been public relation disasters with mobile. Remember the Kin? Launched in May 2010 as a social-networking phone (i.e. for 16-year-old girls…), it was killed by MS in June 2010. Less than two months after launch. Ouch.
   
  
• Speaking of Microsoft: Ballmer gone: Wrong – he’s still there, but only by a thread. Ozzie Osborne, the tech visionary who was steering MS after Gates stepped down, left MS this year. Yikes! Balme is a sales guy, not a visionary.
   
  

So how did I do?

• Correct: 9
• Push: 2
• Wrong: 3

Not great, considering some of the topics addressed (newspapers will have a rough year; in related news, the sun will rise tomorrow…).

And some of by ballsier predictions – Job’s announcing retirement, Ballmer getting shown the door – never happened.

Oh well, what’s done is done.

The (possibly) next exciting entry: 2011 Tech Prognostications! Whoo-hoo!

Credit: Screenshot from TalkingPointsMemo.com

Long overdue, to me.

Will it create a ripple effect in the military? Probably.

Did the integration of troops (during the Korean War, I believe), have ripple effects?

Sure.

Still there? (racial/gender etc)

Sure.

Some folks will never accept another gender/faith/ethnicity/sexual orientation of another. True in the military and out of the military.

Will the repeal of DADT wreak havoc on the troops? Well, the troops have spoken, and not so much.

I don’t always agree with the wars we’re fighting, but I’m never against the troops committed there. That’s what they do, and they are doing the work of heroes.

Yet I don’t care who those troops are: black/white, men/women, straight/not, religious/not. Still heroes.

Repeal of DADT is an American step forward.

In a death of a thousand cuts, Yahoo!’s circling of the drain continues with two more cuts over the last two days:

• Death of Yahoo! Video – Unable to compete with YouTube, it has stopped accepting uploads and will turn off downloads on March 15, 2011.
   
• Another round of layoffs – about 4% of the remaining workforce (650-700 employes)
   

Things must be grim there.

Update 12/16/2010: Eep! Many properties getting the ax: Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? [Update: Yes] – Del.icio.us is a service I never used, but many swore by. Acquired by Yahoo! and (to me) instantly neglected. Again, Yahoo! is where start-ups go to die….

Update 12/18/2010 When TechCrunch is saturated with news of your decline (image, right), that’s telling:

• Former Yahoo Engineers Shed Light On Why Delicious And Other Acquisitions Failed
• Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them
• Yahoo Has Hit Rock Bottom And Is In “Absolute Disarray”

I’m still not sure about the whole WikiLeaks mess that’s dominating the news/web.

It’s a complex issue, and there are many facets to the story.

However, I am sure about a couple of aspects of the WikiLeaks story:

The hackers who are exacting revenge (denial-of-service attacks, outright hijacking of sites) over sites that have distanced themselves from WikiLeaks are just dead wrong. Whatever you think of WikiLeak’s founder – Julian Assange – and his actions, there is a lot of gray area in which to say he is doing some good. Impeding the access to Visa’s & Master Card’s web sites because they cut off WikiLeaks is just criminal. There is no upside. Yes, it is civil disobedience, to some degree, but civil disobedience requires a public – not anonymous – act of protest. Just wrong.

Jeff Jarvis is wrong. I usually agree with Jarvis (a professor of Journalism at CUNY, and someone who “gets” the internet), and his defense of WikiLeaks contains many compelling points. However, Jarvis totally misses the boat with this paragraph from the article:

Of course, we need secrets in society. In issues of security and criminal investigation as well as the privacy of citizens and some matters of operating the state—such as diplomacy—sunlight can damage. If government limited secrecy to that standard—necessity—there would be nothing for Wikileaks to leak.

   — Jeff Jarvis, Buzzfeed.com

While I agree with the first two sentences, the third is an incorrect conclusion that totally disregards human nature: Do we need to know why Hillary Clinton is traveling to China to meet with some X person? No. Do we need to know how actor/actress Y is doing in rehab? No. Do we need to know the sexual orientation of this or that public figure? No.

Do we still want to know?

Yes!

If we were an incurious lot, Nick Denton would have to fold up Gawker.com and the other titles he runs and get a real job. Ditto TMZ and so many more.

This has always been the case; Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 classic, Winesburg, Ohio, revolves to some degree around this issue of privacy: In a small town, there are no secrets…even if the so-called secrets are never publicly voiced.

And I think Jarvis is wrong for a second reason: In the case of politics – why we went to war etc – there are real reasons to want to see the secret documents. Think Watergate and the Pentagon Papers.

If we just complacently accept that what is secret is of no import to us, we are implicitly trusting government.

And ever since Watergate, the average US citizen has had issues with implicitly trusting government. The war in Iraq – i.e. how did we get here? – has made many citizens even more skeptical of government actions.

But, again, I can’t quite figure out what side I come down on with Assange’s actions. It’s a turning point in journalism and the web, however. I’m sure of that much – just not sure which way we’ll be turning.

Or if that direction is the correct one.

Well, the rumor running around the web this week was the possible acquisition of Chicago-based GroupOn.com by the tech giant Google.

Initial reports had it as a $2.5 – $3 billion deal; later reports doubled this buyout offer.

While there are no concrete confirmations, yesterday insiders reported that GroupOn spurned Google’s offer, possibly in favor of doing an IPO in the next year or so.

I have a few thoughts on this:

• I like GroupOn – I subscribe to the daily newsletter; have used it twice so far (Art Institute of Chicago renewal; restaurant discount). I think it’s a brilliant concept – now widely copied, of course – that, once you see, you smack your head at the sheer obviousness of it. Duh! Why didn’t I think of that?
   
• There were reports earlier this year that Yahoo! was trying to acquire GroupOn; that frightened me: Yahoo! – to me – is where promising start-ups go to die.
   
• When I first heard about the possible Google purchase, I wasn’t surprised, but I kind of wished that they (GroupOn) had remained independent and continued to innovate in a way they couldn’t under the new Lord Masters.
   
• Wow. GroupOn turned down a reported $5+ ($6?) billion. It must be 1) Crazy; or 2) Have a lot of faith in the products and its direction.
   

GroupOn just introduced some new tools, and – with these tools – they are actually moving into what is, to me, a Googlish direction. Among other things, it allows merchants to enter – online – various deals (I’ve only read an overview; may have some details wrong).

This is important for two reasons:

• The current deal structure made potential deal partners wait for months before getting a listing, and it took a lot of human (salespersons) time/effort. Now more deals, can post a deal faster, less human intervention per deal. All of that goes right to GroupOn’s bottom line.
   
• Is it just me, or does this sound a lot like Google’s Ad Sense, but for deals??
   

In other news, Amazon just invested $175 million in what is probably the No. 2 (after GroupOn) deal site, LivingSocial.

Fad? Flame-out? Over/underhyped?

Too early to tell, but investors are opening their wallets like it’s 1999.

Are we on the top of another internet bubble?

Just a few quick thoughts about the current state of TV and movies. I’m in no position to offer anything of substance on these issues; just my opinions about a handful of TV/movie issues I’ve been thinking of lately. Always fun to return to entries like this in a few years to see how stooopid I sounded:

• How will studios cut costs?: Studios – and networks – are in trouble. We all know it; they all know it. How to retain control in this internet world? (Hint: You can’t). What horse should you get behind/try to kill to maximize profits? Well, I have one suggestion that might help: Why are stars still getting $20 million or so per movie? That’s crazy. Don’t get me wrong, I think being an actor is difficult, tedious and makes you do things (on screen and off – the latter like the talk show circuit etc.) that you may not want to do. But $10-$20 million per movie? Think of how many decades/centuries I’d have to work – and I work hard – to make what many make in one movie. Nutty. Ditto for the $ per episode for some TV actors. Again, nutty. Just a thought – won’t solve everything, that’s for certain.
   
• Divergent quality: When the DVD debuted, it just kicked VHS’ butt. Video and audio. Just “wow!” (and no need to rewind!). Today, we are marching away from DVD quality … in two different directions. On the one hand, HD TV and Blu-ray movies are raising the barr over 480p broadcasting and DVD, respectively. On the inevitable other hand, YouTube, Hulu and movie streaming (i.e. NetFlix) are inevitably inferior to DVDs. Interesting dichotomy. As to the lower-quality march, we’ve seen this before: audio mpeg players. Virtually always a lesser quality than CDs, but no one really seems to care. And after seven years since the intro of iTunes, the bitrate is up, but still inferior to CDs (to me). But virtually on one I’ve talked to about this seems to care. Convenience trumps quality. I think the same is true for video, but as more fiber rolls out and broadband connections get faster, higher quality will evolve over all streaming (online and the NetFlix mode). Maybe – and this is just a “maybe” – at this point consumers will demand higher quality from the laggards.
   
• TV: I virtually never watch TV. This is not a point of pride nor the result of losing a bet. There’s just so little on that piques my interest that I rarely sit and watch. (Note: Yep, I’m fully aware that I’m missing some good stuff – “Mad Men,” for example. Never seen. Want to.) No “Must See TV,” no juggernauts of sitcoms on CBS or NBC as in the past, no mini-series like “Roots” that everyone watched. TV – How are you going to win me back?? Or do I have to get HBO and/or Showtime to watch quality material? I’m intentionally hyperbolic here – but this is, to me, a valid issue.
   
• TV Deux: With the rise of DVRs and time-shifting of TV viewing, there are only two categories that one must watch at the time the networks/cable deliver same: News (daily, but includes special events, such as unfolding events [example: elections]) or sporting events. Don’t have a DVR? Can probably catch whatever you missed online. In other words, networks & cable TV are in a heap of trouble. Mobile compounds the problem. Sure, cut the cord to Comcast, but still catch last night’s “The Daily Show” on the way to work on my SmartPhone/Tablet via ComedyCentral.com. Yeah, a browser. How’s that walled garden working fer ya?
   

I ordered a couple of items from Amazon last Thursday – a book and a CD – and elected for standard shipping.

I think I ordered during lunch, as I read about the book (Patti Smith’s Just Kids) somewhere while I was eating lunch.

Whatever.

On Saturday, I heard something out front of the house, and when I looked out the front window I saw a guy getting into a Penske rental van.

I opened the front door, and there – between the glass door and the regular door – was my Amazon order.

Less than two days, on standard shipping.

And that the guy is in a rental van means Amazon is hiring freelancers to do deliveries – anything to give them an edge in this all-important Q4 ecommerce shopping season.

Impressive.

Tomorrow (10/13/2010) is the 10th Anniversary of the launch of TalkingPointsMemo.com.

I followed Josh early, but I don’t think I followed him from the beginning. I think I ran across him via Kevin Drum – and I can’t remember where he (Drum) was at that point.

Great staff (many that have moved on to other impressive positions); great journalism.

First place I look every day for political news. Left slanted? Yes. But balanced? Pretty much.

Josh – and all – congrats.

Keep fighting the good fight (truth!)

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