I’ll be at the NY Tech Meetup rally in front of Senators Schumer and Gillibrand’s offices at 12:30 p.m. If you’re in New York and concerned about the future of the Internet, I’d encourage you to join me there.

Jarvis never really defines publicness, and maybe that’s because the book addresses two distinct forms of publicness; personal publicness, and institutional publicness. These don’t really have that much to do with one another, other than the fact that platforms for personal publicness, like Facebook or Twitter, can also be used by institutions to be public. I’m all for institutional publicness, especially disclosure of as much government data  as possible. Any tools that cause governments to divulge materials, whether willingly or unwillingly, are valuable to society.

But the underlying principle driving institutional disclosure — the betterment of society — is not the same principle driving personal disclosure. Individuals are motivated to disclose their own information primarily because it satisfies a base human need for attention. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and other social media services are biased towards self-promotion and ego-stroking. Underlying all the lofty talk about “connecting people” and “creating communities” is the fact that most people’s tweets or Facebook updates are simply subtle or overt statements about how cool they are. That’s not to say that users of these services can’t overcome that inherent bias and have meaningful conversations. But I think it happens a lot more rarely than social media advocates would have you think.

That’s what ultimately disappointed me about Jarvis’s book. As someone who already has had a substantial online presence (I’ve had a website since 1995), I’ve clearly bought into the notion that a public presence is helpful. People can find me easily, and my ideas have a platform that I control. But I find the type of public life advocated by Jarvis — to build one’s personal brand for the primary purpose of marketing oneself for professional and personal gain — treads too far on the side of raw narcissism. He holds Seth Godin up as an example of someone who has a strong brand and therefore someone to be emulated. Godin gives Jarvis unsolicited advice on how the book itself can be leveraged for professional gain:

Godin is to blame for my writing books. He sat me down one day and said I was a fool if I didn’t write one — and I would further be a fool if I thought the book was the goal. No, he said, the book would buiuld my public reputation, which would lead to other business.

The notion that the book is not primarily a conduit for ideas but simply a means to an end, personal gain, is what’s awful. The end state would be a world of pure branding and personal marketing. This is the kind of publicness that I can neither agree with nor wish to emulate.

Sadly, I don’t see the tide turning anytime soon. As much as I may disagree with it, Jarvis’s description of the new publicness is reality. To the detriment of real conversations about real ideas, those who spend the majority of their time actually working are overshadowed by those who spend 10% of the time working and 90% of the time talking about their work. We have met the enemy and he is us.

But what struck me after hearing Sean had nothing to do with Chef. Instead, I came to the conclusion that pure systems administration is eventually going to die out as a profession. The developer is now king (or queen), and that’s not a bad thing.

Let’s step back for a minute and talk about CM tools in general. Traditional CM tools — to the extent that they existed before cfengine et. al. – know nothing about the underlying semantics of what you ask them to do. At CBC, we had a set of elaborate shell and Perl scripts that were written in-house, collectively known as ASC, Application Server Control, to do so-called configuration management of the origin infrastructure. ASC’s sole job was to revision control configurations, perform deploy and rollback operations, and perhaps do some auditing. But it was prescriptive, not descriptive. Most of the time I spent monkeying with ASC was debugging how it was doing things.

Enter Chef (or Puppet, LCFG, cfengine, BCFG2; pick your poison). These are all configuration management tools that allow you to describe your infrastructure  in a fourth-generation language (4GL) way. You describe the features that certain hosts should have, and the tools, using canned recipes, makes it happen. (“Make me a MySQL server,” for instance.) Another advantage of these tools is that they (can) keep track of the state of your infrastructure, and you can query that database to make decisions about new deployments. “How many MySQL servers do I have?” for example. Or even “Which node is the MySQL master?” and then kicking off another job on a new MySQL slave to automatically start replicating from the right server.

Had it not been for the development of IaaS — infrastructure as a service — everything that I’ve told you would not be particularly noteworthy. But IaaS, or “cloud computing”, now allows anyone to provision new (virtual) servers inexpensively. No more waiting around for the system administrator to order a couple servers from Dell, wait a few weeks for them to arrive, rack them up, configure them, etc. Developers, armed with a tool like Chef and its huge cookbook of canned recipes for making many standard infrastructure components, can fire up everything they need to support their application themselves. Therein lies the demise of system administration as a standalone profession and the rise of “devops”.

I admit that when I first heard the concept of “devops”, I snickered. “Give developers the keys to the infrastructure and they’ll surely break it beyond repair and expect the sysadmins to fix it,” I thought. But it’s finally dawned on me that “devops” isn’t just some buzzword concept that someone has thought up to make sysadmins’ lives hell. It’s the natural evolution of both professions. By bringing development and system administration closer together, it does two things. First, it makes developers operationally accountable for their code, because they are the ones that get paged in the middle of the night, not some “operations team” upon whom they can offload that responsibility. And secondly, it makes those on the systems side of the house better at their jobs, because they can use newly-acquired programming skills to manage infrastructure resources in a more natural way.

So will IaaS and sophisticated configuration management tools kill the system administrator? I believe so — but that’s not a bad thing. System administrators have got to stop thinking of servers/disk/memory/whatever as “their resources” that “they manage”. Cloud computing has shown us that all of that stuff is just a service, dedicated to nothing more than serving up an application, which is what really matters. If sysadmins want to remain relevant, they’ll get on board and start learning a bit more about programming.

Today, Brisbane wrote a blog post entitled Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante? An unfortunate headline, to be sure, if you’re talking about the New York Times. Unfortunately, many readers and media commentators failed to read beyond the headline and understand what Brisbane is really asking, which is not whether reporters should be dogged in their pursuit of the truth. Of course they should. What he’s asking is whether a hard news reporter should be calling out potentially untruthful statements made by sources, or whether the reporter’s job is to simply quote the source accurately.

It’s easy for everyone to pile on Brisbane. After all, if a reporter is certain that a source is lying, and has the evidence to back it up, then it’s incumbent on them to say that, right? But rarely is reality so neat and tidy. This isn’t “Law and Order”, after all. The example Brisbane uses is whether Clarence Thomas was to be believed when he stated that he “misunderstood” a financial disclosure form by failing to report his wife’s earnings from the Heritage Foundation. This is not something that can be proved truthful or not, unless one were able to get inside Thomas’s head.

Brisbane, in response to a question from Jim Romenesko, says that “in this case a lot of people responded to a question I was not asking.” I completely agree. So let me offer my opinion on the question that Brisbane was asking. I think reporters should avoid inserting their own judgments as to the truth of a source’s statement, unless they are absolutely certain one way or another. While it may be unbelievable to some readers that Clarence Thomas, a sitting Supreme Court judge, could misunderstand a financial disclosure form, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. It should be up to the reader, not the reporter, to decide whether Thomas is either lying or an idiot.

The public already likes to criticize reporters for a perceived lack of impartiality. Having them add opinions about their sources’ credibility to stories would only create even more noise, especially on such hot-button topics as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The resultant letters that would invariably land on Brisbane’s desk would make today’s pile-on seem like a vacation day.

Initial reviews of the actual device were certainly positive. Ginny Miles of PCWorld wrote a glowing review, saying that it’s the first device that truly shows off the beauty of the Windows Phone 7 operating system. And Matthew Panzarino of TheNextWeb wrote:

 If the Lumia 900 was judged completely on its own merit, it would stand as one of the most beautiful and well designed phones in the world, as it deserves to.

Lumia 900 at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. (Photo: VentureBeat via Creative Commons)

But it won’t have the luxury of standing on its own. The smartphone marketplace is dominated by Android and iPhone, and Microsoft/Nokia have yet to develop a killer way to surmount their underdog position. Microsoft, surprisingly, hasn’t closely tied the phone to its desktop Windows operating system, which is probably one of the only levers it can pull to convince consumers to buy the device, similar to how it achieved market dominance in web browsers by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. TNW’s Panzarino goes on to note that:

350 million units of Windows needs to be leveraged to give people a reason to buy a Windows Phone. Find a way to do that and the battle is largely won.

Most fatal to the whole enterprise, however, is Microsoft’s inability to overcome its serious image problem with both the “Windows Phone” and “Zune” brand names. (The Windows-based Zune software is the equivalent to iTunes, needed to sync files to a Windows Phone.) Earlier versions of the Windows Phone OS were slow and suffered from poor design, like a “Start” button ported from the desktop equivalent. And Zune is the name of Microsoft’s failed portable music player, which was hampered by their proprietary DRM framework.

One can argue that Microsoft merely has a branding problem. The company continues to use brand names even when consumers have poor associations with them. And they also confuse end users by mutating brand names from one product into another, as with Zune. But more than just a branding problem is the fact that the company makes so many missteps. In a fast-moving technology marketplace where first impressions matter more than ever, Microsoft has made too many poor first impressions.

Both Nokia and Microsoft have put incredible effort into developing a product that technically might be better than the iPhone or any Android device out there. But if the sales figures from the Lumia’s European predecessor are any indication, the product will wither because of consumers’ allergic reactions to the Microsoft name.

Nothing illustrates the magic of a physical book like this fun stop-motion video from Toronto independent bookseller Type Books.

Ironically, the fact that books are becoming a niche product will revive the fortunes of the small, independent booksellers who have been hammered over the last 10-15 years by competition from major chains. If they are smart, the independents will remain nimble and provide services that the Amazons of the world can’t: namely, curation. Type, for example, leans towards architecture & design, although they do carry a decent selection of general fiction/non-fiction. The reason they remain a going concern is because the owners have successfully identified the kinds of books read by people who love physical books, and they aggressively stock those.

Note that these two qualities aren’t inexorably linked. I’m waiting for the day when an independent bookstore offers e-books alongside their physical products, thereby enabling them to both serve a niche via actual books, and a general audience via digital download. However, such a day will not come so long as e-readers like the Kindle are closely tied to a major chain, with all of the DRM shackles that such an association implies. How long before we see a truly open-source e-reader? And what aspects of the bookselling market will need to change before that happens?

Yesterday, Poynter reported that the Associated Press and 28 other news organizations have launched NewsRight, “an ambitious venture to license original news content and collect royalties from aggregators.” Ambitious is right. The fact is, articles no longer have significant monetary value; otherwise, a system like NewsRight wouldn’t need to exist. AP and other legacy media organizations are trying to reverse a trend that’s irreversible.

At the same time as I read AP’s announcement, I was also reading Clay Shirky’s prognostications on what 2012 will bring for newspaper paywalls. One of Shirky’s main points is that newspapers and other content creators are having a difficult time transitioning from the paper being the product, to the article being the product. But the shocking reality to many journalists is that the article never really had any inherent value. Its value was implied, by being inexorably tied to a closed distribution ecosystem. Now that everyone effectively has a printing plant in their Internet-enabled computer, the article is exposed for what it is: something that has immense societal value (if the reporting behind it is well-done) but little monetary value.

Philosophically, I can see why this set of facts is disturbing to reporters. They put immense effort into newsgathering and understandably expect a reward at the end. But one of the reasons I decided to leave journalism is that the return-on-investment of my time versus the payout in the end wasn’t worth it to me. It doesn’t mean that it won’t be for some reporters. And by payout, I don’t even mean a monetary payout; I just mean that a reporter can spend hours, even days, gathering information for a story that might only be a few hundred words — or, at worst, end up on the cutting room floor. That’s life, though. The effort expended on something has no correlation with its reward in the end. It’s a reality that journalists now have to face, and no amount of propping up the value of articles by paywalls or licensing systems is going to change the fundamental economics.

I’m saying all of these things as someone who ranks very highly on Shirky’s “God Forbid” index. (“God forbid the Sun-Times not be around to keep an eye on the politicians!”)  I still get the New York Times in print form every Saturday and Sunday, and I will probably continue to do so as long as they make a print product, because I love the medium. But I also see myself as an anomaly, something many journalists don’t. “Porous” paywalls, like the Times’, are made to monetize the 2% of people who are news junkies, not the other 98% who will never reach a 20-article-a-month limit. And I see no way to pay a newsroom — yet — out of that 2%, unless it’s a very, very small newsroom.

Interestingly, in his kicker, Poynter reporter Rick Edmonds ultimately shows himself as someone unable to see the economics of the article. He comes down on the side of AP, expressing in his own way the Rupert Murdoch-style “thundering against news aggregators”:

The venture will likely be greeted with derision or yawns by the digital intelligentsia, who have long decided that fences around content are retro and futile with the Internet providing users so many avenues to free news access.

He, and other journalists, need not worry about the digital intelligentsia (presumably he means the FON Junta) deriding NewsRight. It’s an idea that’s destined to fail all on its own.

In Toronto, the Eastman Kodak Mount Dennis facility in Weston once employed thousands, but it closed suddenly in 2005 and was demolished two years later. (Excellent photos of the plant’s demise, by Robert Burley, are available on the Stephen Bulger Gallery website.) Then, in 2009, Kodak announced the end of Kodachrome, its iconic slide film — a harbinger of things to come, as Kodachrome, like Polaroid’s discontinued SX-70 film, was once widely used by professional photographers everywhere.

It’s an ignominious fall for a company that invented low-cost photography. In the 1890′s, photography was expensive, and subjects had to come to studios to have their pictures taken on light-sensitive glass plates. George Eastman changed all that, selling the portable camera and rolls of film to such success that the practice of taking snapshots on the street — often of unwilling subjects — was once known as “kodaking”. The portable film camera had a profound effect on society, too. Jeff Jarvis, in ”Public Parts”, writes about how Eastman’s invention inadvertently started the first serious discussion of privacy as a legal right in the United States, a debate that continues vigorously today.

I’m saddened by Kodak’s inability to adapt to changing technological realities, but at the same time, they failed to anticipate the speed at which technology changes. In the 1990′s, they rested on their laurels for too long rather than embracing the digital revolution with both their powerhouse engineering talent and ubiquitous brand. At this point, I’m not sure what assets Kodak has left that they could sell off in a bankruptcy filing, other than their patents. Like Nortel Networks, Kodak seems to be a company that the world has passed by, and the end might come in the form of liquidation.

This is a tough post for me to write. But in the interests of not burying the lede, I might as well come right out and say it. I have decided not to continue my master’s program in journalism at the end of the semester.

I can boil things down to three points:

1. Journalism is a really hard profession to be in. You have to truly love the thrill of the hunt to ignore all else that is challenging about being the profession: the long hours, the low pay, the constant rejection of your work. Most people on the “outside” don’t see the amount of effort that goes into an article, a radio item, or a television broadcast. I can tell you that the return-on-investment is very low indeed.
2. While I am good at doing the work, I am not that kind of a person. I hate all the aspects of reporting: talking to strangers, chasing down sources, in-depth research, convincing reluctant (or hostile) people to give you information. Some folks, including my professors, have told me that the “bootcamp” style of journalism education isn’t representative of the real world, and I should just push through it. But once I realized that no matter if I was given the choice of subject material, story length, or beat, I would still hate it, it was time to depart.
3. I realize that I’m actually a technology guy who is an enthusiast and consumer of journalism, and not someone who wants to make it his life’s work.

I know many of my classmates have expressed surprise that I’m leaving the program, and for that, I am humbled. It represents a vote of confidence in my work that I frequently feel is undeserved. And I wanted to make it clear that my departure should not be interpreted as a judgment against CUNY’s program. It’s still the best journalism program among all the ones I considered, and the school is well-positioned to tackle whatever upheaval the media industry faces in the coming years.

I’d like to return to technology, but in a less technical role than as a system admin or operations manager. I’m hoping I can find a position that’ll let me use my communications skills: perhaps in product management, perhaps as a technical architect, perhaps something else. I’ll be taking some time off to figure out what exactly these jobs entail and whether they’d be a good fit.

Finally, Meredith and I are staying in New York for the foreseeable future. She has a great job that she loves, and the technology scene here is fabulous. I would be remiss in not trying to take advantage of all the opportunities that the city offers. So, to all my New York friends, please keep in touch and I’ll see you around.