A year and a half ago, just
before and after the Dean campaign
meltdown, I
floated a proposal for an RSS-based assertion processor, followed by a
series of exchanges with the redoubtable Ben Hammersley
regarding how one might build
such a thing. The resulting thread is listed in
these 24 Google returns, and the ever-insightful Bill Seitz has
summed
up many of
the relevant points in the top link of those 24.
Dear Jim and John,
For the life of me, I can't figure out how to make money on
RSS, but maybe there's a useful, half-century-old analogy. Dwight
Eisenhower, one of my heroes,
convinced the nation to invest in free Interstate highways, surely
disappointing many well-heeled politicians and bureaucrats and
roadbuilding relatives planning new privately owned tollways. People as
visionary as you probably realized then that it was the time to invest
in long haul trucking equipment.
I'm presuming on our acquaintanceship to wonder if you'd take
on a project that may not be a fit for your new fund, but in my
defense, I'm not seeking the funds directly, but rather to inspire a
public good. Since you're committed to ventures based on the emerging
RSS superhighway, maybe this idea deserves attention as an upgrade to
the highway's signage. I suggest that you consider the Assertion
Processor concept as a candidate
for your new RSS-oriented
venture fund, though it should be done
quickly and cheaply, inventor-style, rather than professionally and
systematically, venture-style. My nutshell summary
on 12/15/03 was:
I suggest that someone could
extend RSS
to allow authors, editors or reviewers to annotate articles to
point out the elements that strike them as, well, striking.
Such elements cry out to
include the reserved words of Journalism 101: who, when, where, what,
why, how. It's the subelements that seem interesting. Who meets with
whom when and what common threads are lying around begging to be pulled
out of the sweater simultaneously? TheyRule.net
does some of the
associating, but it's out of date and limited to SEC data, with links
to assertions which 404 as often as not. A centralized site is not the
answer, however noble the intentions.
If we're to have a way
to scan and aggregate striking assertions, only an RSS feed will do.
The point of any RSS aggregator is to present a theme, whether
it's the
work of a single author or magazine or, on demand, I suggest, a series
of assertions
with supportive or refuting links that, taken together, make a
compelling point.
Theme Parking
The problem with teasing a meaningful theme out of a haystack
of otherwise unrelated links is that it's a lot of work. In journalism,
"a lot of work" means a lot of investigative journalism and few news
organizations have those budgets any more. Even if they do the
research, the scarcer resource is the courage to publish the disturbing
juxtapositions that powerful people don't like. That kind of red meat
journalism was once the ruling passion of the Perry Whites of the
world, but we're not seeing a lot of in-your-face bravado emanating
from the legal departments of main stream media these days. So why not
make it easy for the rest of us to publish assertions for the rest of
us?
We owe it to ourselves to make it trivial for
anyone–an
amateur "tagger" if you will, not just a journalistic research
organization–to assemble a set of links that, by their
juxtaposition and attributional authority, compel the reader toward the
conclusion that the tagger has come to. Open source journos, scooping
the City Desk.
Jim Moore and John Palfrey, is that a mission your new venture
fund might be willing to accept?
From 12/19/03:
I want
RSS bread
crumbs to help our country find its way home. Each author or editor or
reviewer
tags an article, not completely, but with the elements that make it
interesting
and that validate its point. Like blogs, no assertion is to be trusted
on
its own merits, but rather by how it's been honored by the Linkosphere.
This troubles governments and big time journalism, but is the only
reasonable
basis for fact-based governance.
It doesn't seem necessary to
build a centralized repository
tying every mention of <actor>Richard
Perle</actor>
in the Hersh article
to all other instances of <actor>Richard
Perle</actor>.
I'll leave
that up to whoever hosts the Richard Perle Assertion Aggregator.
Inquiring
minds want to be able to find the articles in our news readers and
we'll
also be hoping that someone assembles the most authoritative ones among
them
into a timeline.
My ignorance of the
mechanics allows me to imagine that properly
tagged assertions would allow a script to generate a timeline like this
example, suggested by assertions I found at a Google cache of a page at
the Project
for the Old American Century. Without
attribution, these assertions
are uncompelling, especially if you're new to the Iran Contra scandal
(and
the press mindset that made it a scandal, and the Greatest Generation
mindset that gave Reagan the conojes
to admit, finally, that he'd erred). As Dr. Dean says, "We can
do
better than this." I want RSS feeds, not collected and served
from
a central
database, but available for post-processing so that better timelines
than
this can be generated automagically. I don't want actual
magic–just a sufficiently
advanced technology.
Imagine that the following
contains links to the supporting information:
|
IRAN
CONTRA SCANDAL
|
|
"October
Surprise" |
10/80
|
Reagan-Bush
campaign makes secret pact with Iran to delay
release of the Embassy hostages until after the November election, in
return
for future covert arms sales. |
|
|
|
|
|
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|
Reagan takes oath of office. |
1/20/81
|
Hostages
held in the American Embassy in Iran released.
Reagan takes oath of office. |
|
|
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|
|
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|
An Israeli official suggests a deal with
Iran to then-national security adviser Robert McFarlane |
7/85
|
...saying the transfer of arms
could lead to release of Americans being held hostage in Lebanon.
McFarlane
brings the message to President Reagan. |
|
|
8/30/85
|
The
first planeload of U.S.-made weapons is sent from
Israel to Tehran. |
|
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9/14/85
|
The
first American Hostage is released. |
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Reagan secretly signs a presidential 'finding,'
or authorization... |
12/5/85
|
...describing
the operation with Iran as an arms-for-hostages
deal. |
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Etc.,
etc., etc.
|
Open Source, not Open Sores
I'm not interested in fanning the phony conservative-liberal
flames here. I'm motivated by the possibility that there are compelling
arrangements of assertions that, if they were available, in parallel,
to whatever Michael Jackson-type story is ascendant, might attract and
engage the American public in ways that we cannot imagine.
My other agenda is to help the starry-eyed romantics among us
to understand that, uncomfortable though the message might be, power
absolutely corrupts. That message was once, supposedly, the passion of
the Perry Whites of our nostalgia. It's time that the idealistic
American public learn again how cynical politicians have always been,
and that, the more they seem to have the people's interests at heart,
the less likely they are to care about the people they have conned into
electing them.
To be so credulous and docile in swallowing the patriotistic
pablum being spoon fed to our people is, well, un-American. ReallySimpleSense may be a way
back to our roots.
