stevenberlinjohnson.com

The Ghost Map Revealed

Amazon has added the cover for The Ghost Map to its page for the book, so I guess that means I can share it here. I'm very happy with it -- it has a nice ominous tone to it that captures the overall feel of the book. But the coolest part is not visible here: the map itself bleeds through the dark area behind the main text, in that the street lines are printed in matte black ink, while everything else is glossy black. (I think I have that right.) The overall effect is almost an optical illusion: the map appears and disappears depending on the light and the angle you're holding the book -- as though the map were some kind of -- what's the word for it? -- apparition? specter? phantasm?

Dean Disappears From Google -- Already An Exile At 9 Days Old

After getting up to around #7 on the Google rankings, our little man Dean has disappeared altogether. What's up with that, Google?

No, seriously, what's up with that? Obviously, I don't really care about Dean's PageRank, but it's not like I was comment spamming to get him a high ranking -- I was asking other bloggers to celebrate his birth with a link. And many people did, with full awareness of their actions. Is that not playing by the rules?

UPDATE 7/31: Okay, he's back, as a number of you have pointed out. Weird.

I was a little busy last Wednesday, and so I missed Nicholas Carr's excellent piece on the Benkler/Calacanis smackdown -- a phrase I never thought I'd type -- which is, in my opinion, much more interesting than the Rose/Calacanis smackdown.

I think that what Calacanis is getting at is that the reason "social media" has existed outside the price system up until now is simply that a market hadn't yet emerged for this new kind of labor. We weren't yet able to assign a value - in monetary terms - to what these workers were doing; we weren't even able to draw distinctions between what they were contributing. We couldn't see the talent for the crowd. Now, though, the amateurs are being sorted according to their individual skills, calculations as to the monetary value of those skills are starting to be made, and a market appears to be taking shape. As buyers and sellers come into this market, we'll see whether large-scale social media can in fact survive outside the price system, or whether it's fated to be subsumed into professional media. Which is mightier - Benkler's dream or Calacanis's wallet?

By the way, I read Wealth of Networks earlier this year, and thoroughly enjoyed it; I've been meaning to synthesize some of my thoughts about the argument and post them here, but haven't got around to it yet...

Jane Jacobs And Atlantic Yards

Fantastic revisiting of Jane Jacobs by Karrie Jacobs, basically arguing that the patron saint of sidewalk culture wouldn't necessarily have been appalled by the Atlantic Yards project. I agree with almost everything here -- part of the charm and dynamism of the Greenwich Village that Jacobs celebrated came out of the fact that it was framed by much larger-scale developments, in Midtown and Wall Street. There's no reason that couldn't work in Brooklyn as well, if it's done right. Brooklyn already has an existing commercial downtown between these various brownstone neighborhoods -- it's just a downtown that doesn't really work. Now, you can make the argument that the Ratner/Gehry plan won't work either, but to object purely to the scale of the project strikes me as being a kind of sentimentalism. Right now, Brooklyn has pretty much everything that makes a great city: a diverse population, artists and writers and other creative types, a thriving sidewalk culture, restaurants and boutiques, movie stars and first-generation immigrants living within a dozen blocks of each other, one of the great urban parks in the world. But it doesn't have a downtown core that anyone wants to visit.

This gets me to the one part of Karrie Jacobs' article that I have a small quibble with:

The biggest drawback to Atlantic Yards, according to my reading of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that it will be constructed atop a rail yard that currently separates the neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. The new development is unlikely to knit together those two neighborhoods; instead, lacking the cross-streets that Jacobs thought were key to urban vitality, it will exacerbate the division, generating more of what she termed “border vacuums.”

Jacobs may well be right, but part of the point is that the border vaccuum already exists. I seriously doubt that even the existing plan will make it worse, and with some thoughtful modification, it could make it much better.

The one major concern I have -- and obviously this is an core objection that's been raised by the critics of the project -- is the traffic impact. Both Ratner and the city seem to be dodging that issue in all the discussion thus far, and it really will need to be solved if this thing is going to work.

Oldies But Goodies

This week's theme seems to be re-visiting my back catalog. First, the folks at Adaptive Path very kindly asked me to revisit my first book, Interface Culture, in a keynote at their User Experience Week in D.C. a few weeks for now. As a lead-in to that, they're running a two-part conversation between Jesse James Garrett and me.

Also, Fast Company has a nice little overview of four books in the vein of The Tipping Point or The World Is Flat that "coulda--and shoulda--been bestsellers." Their first pick is my second book, Emergence, about which they have some very nice things to say. But my favorite part is the grading system they devised, on a scale of one to five. Here's how I scored:

•Gladwellian prose: 3
•Surowieckian reason: 3
•Friedmanian foresight : 4

The good news is that I'm taking night classes in Surowieckian reason, so if all goes well, by the next book I'll score a 5.

#10 With A Bullet

Despite the fact that he is only five days old, and hasn't even fully mastered putting his fingers in his mouth, our little Dean Berlin Johnson is now the #10 result on Google when you search for "dean." When you factor in that a number of the spots above him are not affiliated with individuals (Dean College, Dean Guitars), and that several of the spots are associated with Howard Dean, it works out that our little angel is about the fourth most relevant Dean in the entire world.

He's definitely getting into Harvard with that kind of PageRank.

Dean

I'm very happy to report that our third son, Dean Berlin Johnson, was born yesterday afternoon, weighing in at 9 pounds, 11 ounces (!!). It was a very smooth delivery, despite the fact that this kid is the size of a two-month-old, and both mother and child are doing great. Father, needless to say, is delighted beyond words.

In a strange way, getting to meet him the first time yesterday seemed even more moving than it was with the first two. With your first child, it's just so impossible to imagine that they're going to grow into a little person with such vivid, distinct characteristics. With the second child -- particularly if he/she is the same sex as the first -- you kind of assume that he's just going to be variation on the theme of the first one. But our two boys are just amazingly different in so many ways now, and so when I saw Dean for the first time, I felt this incredible surge of curiosity: so what are you going to be like?

I'm titling this post "Dean" for Google's sake. I think it would be most excellent if everyone would link to this page, and drive this post up Google's results for the word "Dean." I think it would help him get a head start in the world to have a lot of pagerank right out of the gate. So instead of sending flowers or food baskets, just link...

Super interesting -- and to me, reassuring -- cover story on the new science of siblings in Time last week. The fighting between our two boys can be insane some times; I used to say, during a particularly bad stretch a year ago, that if you left them in the same room for fifteen minutes, there was a 100% chance that one of them would try to do something to the other that would get you arrested if you did it to a stranger on the street. But apparently they're learning conflict resolution!

Laurie Kramer, professor of applied family studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has found that, on average, sibs between 3 and 7 years old engage in some kind of conflict 3.5 times an hour. Kids in the 2-to-4 age group top out at 6.3--or more than one clash every 10 minutes, according to a Canadian study. "Getting along with a sister or brother," Kramer says dryly, "can be a frustrating experience." But as much as all the fighting can set parents' hair on end, there's a lot of learning going on too, specifically about how conflicts, once begun, can be settled. Shaw and his colleagues conducted a years-long study in which they visited the homes of 90 2-year-old children who had at least one sibling, observing the target kids' innate temperaments and their parents' discipline styles. The researchers returned when the children were 5 and observed them again, this time in a structured play session with one close-in-age sib. The pairs were shown three toys but given only one to play with. They were told they could move onto the next one only when both agreed it was time to switch and further agreed which toy they wanted next. That, as any parent knows, is a scenario trip-wired for fights--and that's what happened. The experimenters ranked the conflicts on a five-point scale, with one being a single cross word and five being a full-blown brawl. The next year, they went to the same children's schools to observe them at play and interview their teachers. Almost universally, the kids who practiced the best conflict-resolution skills at home carried those abilities into the classroom. Certainly, there are other things that could account for what makes some kids battlers in school and others not. But the most powerful variables--parents and personality--were identified and their influence isolated during the course of the two-year-long observations. Socioeconomic status, an X factor that bedevils studies like this one, was controlled by selecting all the families from the same economic stratum. Distill those influences away and what is left is the interaction of the sibs. "Siblings have a socializing effect on one another," Shaw says. "When you tease out all the other variables, it's the play styles that make the difference. Unlike a relationship with friends, you're stuck with your sibs. You learn to negotiate things day to day."

Great to see some serious research returning to the world of psychedelics. But if I might just draw your attention to the fine print here:

The study volunteers had an average age of 46, had never used hallucinogens, and participated to some degree in religious or spiritual activities like prayer, meditation, discussion groups or religious services. Each tried psilocybin during one visit to the lab and the stimulant methylphenidate (better known as Ritalin) on one or two other visits. Each visit lasted eight hours. The volunteers lay on a couch in a living-room-like setting, wearing an eye mask and listening to classical music. They were encouraged to focus their attention inward. Psilocybin's effects lasted for up to six hours, Griffiths said. Twenty-two of the 36 volunteers reported having a "complete" mystical experience, compared to four of those getting methylphenidate.

I would really like to meet the four people who had a "complete mystical experience" on Ritalin.

A final, meta thought about The Long Tail. One of the excellent things about having a blog is that it lets me comment publicly on books that, for understandable reasons, I wouldn't be able to review in a newspaper or magazine. I'm not exactly social friends with Chris, but we've seen each other many times over the past few years at various events, and always enjoyed each other's company, and of course I'm a semi-regular contributor to his magazine. So I wouldn't feel comfortable writing a proper review of his book for, say, The Times Book Review. All of which is perfectly reasonable, except that friends of authors very often have interesting things to say about their friends' books. You don't necessarily have to trust them on the matter of whether or not you should buy the book in question; that's what the unbiased reviewers are for. But in shedding light on a book, or opening up new avenues for discussion, friends often have the most stimulating things to say. Yet before blogs came along, it was much more difficult to publish that kind of response. You could do it in small intellectual journals -- the Partisan Review crowd in the fifties were always commenting on each other's work. But if you wanted to make a short public comment on a friend's book, the primary vehicle you had was blurbing it on the back cover.