Perhaps I’m overgeneralizing. To be more specific, what has always bothered me is her vocals on “Hips Don’t Lie“. They’re too loud for the rest of the song. She overpowers the trumpet, the drums, even Wyclef—with whom she’s supposedly dueting. Even when she’s soft (because her fantastically expressive singing does occasionally make use of a wide dynamic range), she’s still louder than other tracks at their peak. Each time I’d hear the song, it drove me closer to crazy.

I had always attributed it to human error. A difficult explanation, as I’m sure Shakira spends more paying people to keep her pants extra-shiny than I do on my entire music studio (I dabble). Clearly she’d have the best studio engineers that money could buy. I as at a dead end. Then I signed up for Zipcar.

Zipcar is only a minor player in the plot to unravel the Shakira Code, but getting me back in the driver’s seat (I haven’t owned a car for years) exposed me to something that had been missing in my life. Radio. I literally do not own a radio. All of my music comes from the internet. Once in a while I’ll go to Amoeba to see what other people are into, but radio had disappeared completely.

In a car, with no access to my beloved internet, I was adrift. Wait? What was that my friend Brant had said? Something about a channel that plays all Hyphy-Reggaeton mash-ups? Yes, “La Kalle“… what was the frequency? I desperately hit scan and trusted my rented Toyota Matrix to come through for me.

What I found was a version of “Hips Don’t Lie” that I had never heard before. It had trumpets, accordians, latin percussion, and Shakira’s vocals were correctly mixed! I realized, with a start, that I was probably hearing the original version and that the one I had been exposed to for so long was the White People Version.

It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened. When an artist records a song, it’s normally embellished with a great manner of assorted accompaniment, only some of which make it to the “final mix”. I can recall how Amy Grant, when she first broke out of the Christian Country category and into Adult Contemporary with her songs “Baby, Baby” and (not her song) “Big Yellow Taxi“, had to remove all slide guitars from the mix. They were simply too country for non-country radio stations. She sent different versions to different stations and shot up the charts.

No doubt Shakira does something similar with her songs. Actually, it’s probably Shakira’s label that does it—I have a hard time seeing Shakira in the studio saying, “Can we turn down the accordian on this part, I don’t want people to think I’m Mexican!” That seems a little low.

Sarah, with whom I now live in the heart of San Francisco’s Spanish-speaking Mission District, has been a Shakira fan since back before she bleached her hair and started singing in English. We’ve often discussed the gentrification of ethnic music, though I have yet to engage her on my Chocolate Umbrella mash-up (which I consider the marriage of two songs deeply laden with troubling yet compelling messages about race). I was very happy that my sharp ear managed to contribute something in the on-going “Has Shakira sold out?” question, though I’m not sure which side it supports. It’s clear that the White People Version was just an after-thought (though wildly more popular) and some studio engineer couldn’t be bothered to pull the slider on her vocals down 2dB so it would sound right. Way to stick it to The Man, by driving him slowly crazy (see above).

Maybe this issue hasn’t quite hit mainstream news yet, but almost every blog I read is weighing in and I’ll be damned if I don’t use my position of privilege (by which I mean “a Mac user”) to contribute on the subject as well.

The most recent uproar began when Mike Monteiro called out Carson Workshops for it’s ovewhlemingly white list of presenters. Jason Kottke poured gasoline on the fire, presenting gender percentages of various web conferences.

A backlash began from the event organizers. Eric Meyer heroically blamed the system, saying “Call that decision a manifestation of old-boy clubbiness if you want, but it isn’t.” He cites the research they did about who would attend an event with X, Y, Z speakers… lo and behold, the “A-List” was mostly men.

Trying to cite Micki Krimmel in this whole affair gives me a “circular reference” error, because back to back posts from Mickipedia praise Monteiro and critique the recent rise of the word “poser” in tech circles. Violet Blue recently got called one, Leah Culver has come out in favor of the word, and Leah and Micki both shared spots on Violet’s Sexiest Geeks of 2006 list.

I bring up the poser discussion to illustrate the vastly different understandings of what an “expert” in this industry might be. Eric Meyer knows more about floating divs than I may ever, but his site is not nearly as nice looking as Becca Wei‘s, a top designer of WordPress themes (currently, two of the five “featured” themes are hers). Is he an expert because of the books he’s had published? Because of the panels he’s spoken on? How much of his success under these criteria are tied to his race, sexuality, or gender?

Before I jump in and tear anyone claiming that 0% of presenters at a conference being women is justified a new vagina (my first instinct), I should make sure my own house is in order. Of the blogs in my feedreader with single authors (so not Boing Boing, for instance), 41% are female. Yay, me. I am not a pig.

However, a closer look reveals most of the female blogs I subscribe to are people I know, not “experts” (though exceptionally talented writers, artists, designers, and otherwise crafty people). I really have as far to go as everyone else.

This is really what it comes down to: who do we, as a community, hold up as our experts? Who’s contributions do we say have value? While it’s easy to say, “don’t blame me for saying so, but this is the way the world works”, I can only say, “don’t blame me for saying so, but that puts you squarely in part-of-the-problem and not part-of-the-solution“. How should the world work, and what can you/I/we do with the power we’re afforded as white, heterosexual males to make it that way?

Disclaimer: I bear Eric no ill-will; these are really tough, personal, and often emotionally-charged issues. His follow-up post acknowledges as much.

It’s not the first time O’Reilly has expressed his unmitigated hate toward the city of San Francisco. Almost exactly a year ago, he told Al Qaeda, “You want to blow up Coit Tower? Go ahead.” This time, his current rhetoric is more aimed at our gay pride parades, “pot shops”, and mocking of Christianity.

I should know better than to assume anything O’Reilly says is rooted in reality, but assertions that San Francisco is some sort of secular playground is ridiculous. I’ve attended services at Glide with a Jewish friend and managed to make it to a Solstice or Beltane party every once in a while, too. Further, the Mission District is very Catholic and there are neighborhood celebrations around Confirmations or Baptisms every week.

So what exactly are “San Francisco Values”?

He’s hitting on something with the gay pride parades. San Francisco definitely values diversity. The tremendous Chinese New Year Parade has been named one of the world’s top ten parades. I loved going last year and seeing all the little kids dressed like puppies for the Year of the Dog. Last week’s Dia de los Muertos celebration was a beautiful colored stone in the mosaic of cultures that is San Francisco.

The “pot shops” crack may be a crack at our hippie heritage and I’m pleased to say that the treehugger’s have left a lasting legacy. San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland are all in the Top 20 greenest cities in the U.S. according to the Green Guide. Personally, I take one of the four excellent forms of mass transit San Francisco has (none of which use gasoline) to work every day.

One thing that Bill has left out, however, is San Francisco’s value of innovation. I’ve long said that the DNA of San Francisco contains, across the board, the “I wonder what’s West of here?” gene. That spirit of imagination and adventure has given the world some amazing things. Considering just the illustrious internet marvels, the Bay Area is home to Apple, Craigslist, Flickr, Google, Yahoo, and YouTube among many, many others. Let’s not forget popsicles and fortune cookies!

One more invention that had its root in San Francisco that Bill O’Reilly may be especially thankful for and not even know it. On a foggy day in September, back in 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth brought to life a device without which the world would never come to know the No Spin Zone, the motherfucking television.

Diversity, sustainability, and innovation? Those are San Francisco values and Congress could sure use all of them.

My particular project was inspired by James Surowiecki’s amazing work on the wisdom of crowds. It seems that, given the right circumstances, crowds can be remarkably intelligent—quite contrary to popular opinion that, while a person is smart “people” are stupid. I’ve seen other people replicate the “jellybean jar” phenomenon and thought I would give it a try at my office.

Out comes a really big jar and lots of malted milkballs. One hundred seventy-six (176) of them in fact, though I was tempted throughout the process to, uhm, abbreviate the total. The general idea is that, despite the wide range of guesses from the staff on how many milkballs are in the jar, the average of our guesses should be very, very close. Hopefully (since that’s the point of the project) closer than any one guess.

Next I go office to office, stopping people in hallways as need be, and give them the pitch: “Fill out the piece of paper with your name and your guess, using any method you wish for guessing—other than removing the top and counting them one-by-one, however it is of the utmost importance that you discuss neither your guess nor your strategy with any other staff member.” Yes, it was a run-on sentence, but by the end of the morning, I had it down pretty well.

It turns out we had guesses as low as 86 and as high as 275. That’s quite a range. Still, when I averaged all the guesses together, I got 178—only two away from the correct number! That beats both the closest guess (at 168) and the “panel of experts”, meaning the average of the five closest guesses, (at 164). Yes, including the outlier “noise” actually made the guess more accurate.

When people are asked to make a decision, they do so with a certain amount of bias. If they discuss their decision with others, this bias spreads to others. However, in a diverse crowd operating as individuals, these biases cancel one another out, making the group more intelligent. I;’m sure that a memetic analysis would involve memes and anti-memes colliding and exploding.

The staff was overall very appreciative of the experiment/celebration and immediately saw its implications with how we both interact in group decision-making and how we receive feedback from our activist network. They were also quite happy that the lesson ended with the average being closer than any one guess, because that meant we got to split the malted milkballs.

The story begins with an anonymous article posted to IndyBay, an independent online news source. Here’s the long and short of it:

Our job at Tomkins and Scott, my job specifically, was to monitor Craigslist and summarily flag all postings which reflected negatively upon the city in any way. I am going public with this because, after 3 years of being a censor for Craigslist, I believe what we are doing is totally wrong.

I definitely have an axe to grind with the PR industry in general, so this article sucked me right in. Could our vision of online democratic utopia truly be so easily torn asunder by this “Black PR” strategy? Is the emerging global community just the latest playground for powermongers to co-opt and exploit?

But I was quickly reminded that the internet is a fundamentally more diverse and thus more healthy media environment than newspaper or television. The very first comment to the article was:

I’m checking to see if this is for real.

Craig

By the time the article from IndyBay got to Digg, it was already being sorted out. Writes one commenter:

I just googled Tomkins and Scott and found nothing (except this post). One might attribute this to the fact that the company is “underground” because it does “black PR,” but the wording of this post is very strange. It really sounds like a 12 year old trying to sound like a 30 year old.

Which was followed shortly afterward by:

I don’t know about the rest of Diggers, but I don’t like to go off half-cocked. Dugg nonetheless for a cool conspiracy theory. Also marked as possibly inaccurate. Let’s see some proof.

And finally:

I sure wish someone would have asked me, I asked the guy, and he admitted it’s a hoax.

There are people doing really nasty PR stuff, and netvocates and also fls-dci have been accused of very ugly stuff. Check out the investigative journalists at patriotproject.com, look up their work on swiftboaters.

Craig

One way to look at the whole situation is that an untrue story like the original post would never have been published in traditional media. Another is that the article itself was describing how easy it is to fool the new media. But at the end of the day, community feedback took a dishonest article about a dishonest practice and managed to uncover the truth of the situation (i.e. while this particular instance was a hoax, it is describing a real threat). That feedback simply doesn’t exist in traditional media. Which is why we get things like half of America believing that Iraq had WMDs and bad math on the cover of Business Week.

In essence what we’ve seen are sources of increasingly less authority all safeguarding the validity of whatever they exist in contrast to. Craigslist keeps watch on mainstream media, IndyBay keeps watch on Craigslist, Digg keeps watch on IndyBay, and the commenters keep watch on Digg. The truth seems to be a recursive function.

The warning signs were visible before I even ran into problems with tech support. I took out the cable modem and got it running pretty quickly. I didn’t even need to install all of the fancy Flash demos from the “Manual” CD. However, I was immediately given pause by the curiously labelled button “Internet On/Off”. This could get me in real trouble. What if my cat accidentally bumped it right in the middle of a Japanese professor publishing his important findings on cancer research! And I would be getting calls all day long from kids trying to upload pictures of their boobs/biceps (or both) on MySpace, “Stan! Did you turn off the internet again?”

Exhibit 1: A very dangerous button.

The next major flag was when I put in the installation CD. Not only does it tell me to turn off all firewalls, anti-virus software, and poke holes in all my condoms… it then has the audacity to not let me actually install anything unless I do it using Internet Explorer. Even Microsoft tells Mac users to just use Safari instead. I, very reluctantly, click “yes” to continue. The installer then asks me for my administrator password. “Why?” I ask. “I just wanted to change your internet settings,” it says. “Can’t you just tell me what they should be?” I ask. “No, it’s really better if I do it myself,” it replies. I type in my password.

It gives me an error and quits.

Exhibit 2: Please drink poison before continuing this installation.

At this point I ask my roommate if it looks like I’m doing anything retarded. She confirms my sanity, so we engage in a lively text chat with Comcast’s finest. His advice… Turn off the modem and turn it back on 5 minutes later. I do that. Same error. I fire up the Mac’s diagnostic software and see that the installer keeps resetting the network settings to something ridiculous. I set it to DHCP by hand. Now every website redirects to Comcast. I consider this progress.

We text chat with another technician. His advice… Do you have Flash? Seriously. I am trying to install a modem and he asks me about Flash. “Flash?” I ask, “Like, the plug-in?” “Make sure you have version 9,” he offers. “How exactly will that prevent Comcast from rerouting all of my HTTP requests to your website? I don’t think that’s the problem.” “You can see the Comcast website?” “I just told you that.” “Oh, then just click on the installation link at the bottom of the page.” “Fine.” No, I was not actually that snippy.

I do. It downloads and installs the same damn thing that came on the CD. I am back to square one. I switch over the ADSL and surf around a bit. I learn about “Walled Gardens” and “Modem Provisioning”. I get educated. I decide to call back and tell them that the problem is that their installer is not sending the MAC address for my modem and that they need to add me by hand. This solution is made possible by people other than Comcast publishing information about Comcast’s network. It scares me completely that if network neutrality isn’t made law that I could be completely prevented from accessing sites Comcast considers offering information to “hackers” or something.

Exhibit 3: Yes, the majesty of the Comcast High-Speed Internet

I wish this story had a happy ending. When I called Comcast again, I got a very friendly woman who, unfortunately, couldn’t do much more for me than fill out an Escalation Ticket. “It’s too bad you can’t just flip it on for me,” I say. “Well, we could a month ago, but that privilege has since been removed. Honestly, we’re kind of frustrated about it.” “Me, too.”

The final dystopian vision came while I was flipping through the Comcast brochure while on hold. It is entitled “A fast look at all you can do with your new Comcast High-Speed Internet service” and is filled with popular internet destinations like: Comcast PhotoCenter, Disney Connection, The Fan (which lets me watch “clips”!), and Rhapsody^TM. No mention of Flickr, Homestar Runner, YouTube, or Last.fm. No, sir. Why would anyone want any of those when we’ve got all the Comcast approved services… that would inevitably run faster than their more diverse counterparts if Comcast gets their way?