Perhaps the recent $100 Billion Facebook IPO is a few steps up from the Emperor’s New Clothes, but if so, from where I stand, those steps are not that many.

And if money (as in tons of it) was actually the key to happiness, perhaps I would take this nothing-short-of-amazing IPO launch a little more seriously, but in my experience lots of money does not invariably (as in rarely) mean happiness, rather the opposite.

The strange thing, though, is that when an idea catches on—really catches on—it can, and often does, assume pathological dimensions: I’m thinking about the dot com boom and subsequent bust. Grown men and women, experienced investors who should have known a lot better, sunk millions if not billions into this idea, guaranteed to make them immensely rich(er) because the name ended with dot com, and this—so the idea went—dot com idea could not fail.

Pathological.

At the time this reminded me of the way-out-of-proportion coverage and national attention given to both Senators and Congressmen when, during the Clinton administration, our federal bean counters were projecting hundreds of billions of budget surplus: these elected (and respected and trusted) officials were competing for the public light about the best spending plan for money that had not (and eventually did not) materialize. Our elected leaders were seriously and assuming very impressive stances, debating the Emperor’s New Clothes as if they were as real as the ground we stand on—apparently taking themselves way too seriously.

Growing up I always assumed that our elected officials, because they looked and behaved and appeared to wise and dependable actually were wise and dependable. Now that I’ve reached that age (and appearance) myself, I realize that age (and appearance) has nothing to do with wisdom at all, or with dependability. You can easily be (and often are) just as childish and stupid at sixty or seventy as you were at twenty—or ten, for that matter.

And it looks like we’ve just witnessed another pathologically childish and stupid grab for the fictitious in the resent launch of Facebook, which has now, in only two days, lost the average investor at least 16.4% of his investment.

Here, I don’t know which should rank higher, greed or stupidity?

But I do think that whichever lies at the root of this most recent world-wide self-deception, it bears new witness to the seductive quality of the “cool” idea (rather than down-to-earth facts).

Brain Candy

A recent Harvard study under the supervision of Diana Tamir, as lead researcher, and her co-author Jason P. Mitchell has attempted to establish why Facebook is so popular (read: addictive). They discovered that the compulsion to share one’s every thought and movement through social sites such as Facebook or Twitter apparently generates the same sort of pleasure as we derive from eating, from receiving money, or from having sex (even if in a toned-down version).

We like—nay, love—to talk about ourselves and we love to share everything, apparently. It’s like food for us. Hence, brain candy.

There certainly seems to be some truth to this, seeing that recent Internet surveys show that approximately 80% of all such posts simply consist of announcement about one’s immediate experience and doings; assuming (and perhaps correctly) that friends and family do in fact care to know this on an on-going and forever basis.

Confession: I do not visit Facebook often, but when I do I am struck by exactly that—a data-stream of the amazingly pedestrian, five minutes of which tops me up with the commonplace for at least another week or two.

“I think the study helps to explain why people utilize social media websites so often,” Tamir told the Los Angeles Times. “I think it helps explain why Twitter exists and why Facebook is so popular, because people enjoy sharing information about each other.”

Yes, they do. So, if there truly is a narcissistic—perhaps even pathological—need to share everything, and always, perhaps Facebook and Twitter are here to stay for the long haul; perhaps they are good investments at $38 a share.

I am truly in two minds about this: either this is a perfect manifestation of the lowest common denominator of humankind, and Facebook and its many present or future siblings are here to stay, or we will wake up one day to the fact that we are wasting a lot of time and energy saying virtually nothing to a lot of people when a live and compassionate talk with someone we care about gives us ten times the pleasure, and a pleasure much more real at that.

Kindle Store: http://goo.gl/lFqIs

I came across a brief article by Philip Conkling the other day, which set me thinking about the Real Digital Divide as well.

One way or another, I am convinced, and most likely sooner rather than later, broadband Internet will find its way to every household in the nation. Telephone did (also against the prevailing odds at the time).

Maybe Internet access will be wireless in most remote areas, maybe it’ll be expanded cable service, perhaps even fiber for the lucky (and needy) few; but one way or another the day will come when those who don’t have high-speed Internet are those who opted not to do so.

And good money is on the fact that those who don’t join up will not be in their teens or early twenties.

As Conkling puts it: “The biggest fault line along this divide is not as much socio-economic as generational. If you are under 30, there never was a time when computers were not integral to your education and life. If you are under 15, there never was a time when search engines were not integral to wanting to know something—know anything. If you are under eight, there never was a time when you couldn’t post updates on your status to anyone you had ‘friended.’ All parents struggle to keep up and are ultimately unsuccessful.”

How true.

He then goes on to say, “Twenty years ago, a digitally precocious 10 year old tried to convince his father to buy Apple Computer stock that was then selling for around $8 a share. His clueless father figured Apple was about to go out of business. A number of years later, the precocious teenager, now with an attitude, tried to convince his father to invest in the initial public offering for Google. His clueless father still did not 'get it,' partly because Wall Street Journal commentators were certain that the stock was overpriced in the now famous Dutch auction that launched the company into the stratosphere. Lately, another opportunity looms with an imminent Facebook I.P.O. Who wants to let their lamentably limited network of friends know what book you had just finished or movie you had just seen, he asked? I mean, who could possibly care? And even if they cared, who could ever make money from knowing this?"

I have to confess that if I were looking for an investment opportunity these days, I would not opt for Facebook, and be wrong for the same reasons the clueless father in the above paragraph was wrong: there’s no way Facebook is worth nearly $100 Billion. No way. Still, from what I read, the offering is already oversubscribed.

Not by forty-year-and-ups, I bet you. I can see my daughters getting on board, though. And I can see them laughing all the way to the bank a decade or two up the road while I will admit, yes, I should have known better.

The point, though, is that I was not born into the digital world. My roots are not in the digital world. My roots are very much analog, and my sap is analog. My life, to a large extent, is analog. This entire digital universe still strikes me as some atmospheric disturbance that eventually will go away (I hope, viscerally) though I know (rationally) that it never will.

Yes, I enjoy a good Netflix stream as much as the next guy and I don’t think I could live without email and Microsoft Office these days. No, let me correct that, I could live without them, but it would be a darn nuisance, tracking down an IBM Selectric II typewriter for my writing, and then having to snail-mail (or fax) the result to my respective editors. It could be done, but I’m certainly not pining for the Selectric.

But I must confess that I am very remiss when it comes to keeping my Facebook page current, or when it comes to Tweeting my current whereabouts once an hour or so (I know many who actually do, much to both my amazement and consternation); that is digital blood, and it runs not in my veins.

I guess the best way I can put this is this: I (and I believe many of my generation) have adopted those aspects of the Digital Universe that serves our mostly Analog Lives. I am under no compulsion to go all digital just because it’s there and is, younger-generationally speaking, the thing to do.

From where I stand I see the young’uns softly dissolving into bits and bytes while I stubbornly bury toes and feet in moss and dirt.

Perhaps you, or anyone born in an English-speaking country, did not have as romantic a relationship with English dictionaries as I have had. No matter, I think you may enjoy what follows anyway.

As we humans tend to name the things we know, whether we can touch them or not, a good dictionary is, by logical extension, a collection (and in some ways a history—especially in the etymology studies) of all human knowledge. It is a book that should be revered, and I do.

Not initially, however. Back in the late 60s, my first English dictionary was actually of the English to Swedish (and back) variety. I was still thinking in Swedish, and my forays into English territory was for the first year or so done by Swedish troops.

Someone then informed me—and I’m forever grateful for the tip—that if I ever hoped to learn English properly, I would have to ditch the Swedish part, and get an English to English dictionary; I would have to begin thinking in English.

Okay, so I ditched my English to Swedish and back dictionary. Now what?

I started where many an American pupil also started, with the Thorndike-Barnhart series: first the Junior, then on to the Intermediary, finally landing in the Advanced dictionary (which introduced amazing things like etymologies and synonym studies).

As my grasp of English grew, however, I realized that the definitions even in the Advanced version were still too “fuzzy” to my liking, they did not nail the meaning the way I wanted. Enter the Webster’s New World, Second Edition, and the Third, and then the Fourth. A great dictionary,that, maybe even a little too precise. Too dry in places, but very well informed.

Still, for two decades the New World dictionaries plotted my path to learning and knowing English better and better, but all the while I kept looking for something better, more suited to my needs; something I could call perfect.

Then I found it (or so I thought), and for quite a few years I regarded my penultimate dictionary as that perfect one: the Microsoft Encarta. I bought one or two hardbound versions, and near enough wore them out; then I discovered their digital version (as part of the PC Encarta Encyclopedia) and I guess the right word about this discovery is “bliss.” Just about perfect.

Easy to work with as I wrote my fiction and non-fiction; nice Thesaurus as well. There at your digital fingertips. Just about perfect, but not quite. Coming up a little short on precision. Not that I was complaining, mind you, I loved it. Still, if only.

Then, oh, about ten years ago now, Oxford released the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD), and it was pretty much love at first sight. Although big—and I mean heavy—I gladly lived with that. It was clear and comprehensive. Made for me, I thought. If only I could find a digital version of it.

Fast forward another few years and there it was, at last: perfection.

Perfection is also known as WordWeb Pro, a PC dictionary comprised of a set of dictionaries under one roof, including a very good Thesaurus (Chambers).

WordNet Database

Without any added optional dictionaries (and included in the free version, I believe) WordWeb comes with the Princeton Universities WordNet database.

Here is the description from the Princeton Site:

WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept.

Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing.

WordNet superficially resembles a thesaurus, in that it groups words together based on their meanings. However, there are some important distinctions. First, WordNet interlinks not just word forms—strings of letters—but specific senses of words. As a result, words that are found in close proximity to one another in the network are semantically disambiguated. Second, WordNet labels the semantic relations among words, whereas the groupings of words in a thesaurus does not follow any explicit pattern other than meaning similarity.

The rest (well worth reading) you can check on the site. It is, quite frankly, and amazing product.

WordWeb Pro

In addition to WordNet, the WordWeb Pro product offers a selection of additional dictionaries, including the current version of the New Oxford American Dictionary, and the Chambers Dictionary and Thesaurus.

Not only that, once installed on your PC, you can also link to the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, Dictionary, and Thesaurus as well (if you have them installed); and for further study, there’s a tab that links directly to Wikipedia: just click the Wikipedia tab, it brings the word you’re looking up along, and makes the query for you.

In Context Lookup

Whatever you read, whether a Word document, a Web Page, or a pdf, if you run across a word you don’t get, an alt-right mouse click on that word will look it up in WordWeb Pro. Instantly.

True Love

I told you I was/am romantically involved with dictionaries, and this, the WordWeb Pro product, is my best and final, my true love (at least so far).

I have used it now, both in writing and researching, for a couple of years, and it never ceases to amaze. It works that well.

So if you, in any way, resemble me in your liking/love of a good dictionary, digital or otherwise, I am happy to announce that your search might indeed be over.

Hop on over to WordWeb and check it out. You won’t regret it.

If you have ever wondered how long it takes to listen to 20,000 tracks of digital music, the answer is (according to Google Music, anyway) “Over 65 Days” — and by a day I assume they mean a 24-hour period since us digital music marathon listeners never take a break, not for any reason.

This is my way of reporting that Google Music is true to its promise of 20,000 free uploads to their music service.

Well, there was one hiccup: at around 18,500 or so I got the error message that I had just surpassed 20,000, but their support staff was very helpful, and (while they were working on the permanent fix to this known problem) they supplied me with a workaround, I happily soon uploaded the 1,500 remaining tracks to hit 20,000, on the nose no less.

Why Upload 20,000 Tracks?

Why on earth did I do this? Why did I upload the most of my CD collection (including all that I ever would want to listen to these days, including most of the jazz and classical) into the Google Cloud? Thanks for asking. Here’s the answer:

Listen as I might these days (my hearing is not at peak anymore) I cannot detect a significant (if any) difference between the CD player output quality and the quality I get from Google Music’s built-in mp3 player. So now that I have all the music I can conceive of ever wanting to listen to going forward up there in the cloud, all in acceptable quality, why should I hang on to 2,000 some CDs that do take up a significant amount of space, even if stripped of their cases and long since housed in CaseLogic binders?

It is a question of ownership versus use.

At one time in my life I would never have considered giving away, or selling my CD collection. I simply loved “owning” them, seeing them there in the book cases, bearing silent witness to my music-collection prowess of such very long standing.

Over the years, though, the emphasis has softly—as in barely noticeably—shifted: away from owning toward listening. And these days I find that I am only interested in easily finding and hearing what I have a mind to listen to, CD or mp3, I no longer care. Ownership or not.

And since my Internet connection is up 99 plus % of the time, and since Google is up about 100% of the time, I realize that I now have constant access to a searchable database of all my music a quick login away. And with that realization came another: I no longer need all these CDs.

So—long story short—I am now giving the whole bunch of them to my daughter (who is very, very happy about that—I guess she’s still in the “owning” stage, much as I was at her age).

Digital Unclutter

The upshot of all this is that I end up with all my music a few keystrokes away, while my cabin suddenly grew larger, and less cluttered, for I no longer need my CD player, either, or the speakers—instead I’m buying a set of smaller wireless speakers that I can place anywhere I need within 300 feet of my laptop.

Simplify, simplify.

And to then discover that Google has written a very nice Google Music application for my iPod Touch’s Safari Browser with an interface that looks and works very much like the iPod’s internal music application, well, that’s some bonus: I now have access to my entire CD collection via my iPod and some nearby Wi-Fi — as in a Starbucks or some airport.

To be perfectly honest, at times I feel like I’ve just arrived in some benevolent Twilight Zone, not that I’m complaining, mind you.

My question is: How can Google afford to give this amount of storage away, seemingly out of the sheer goodness of their hearts? I have no answer to that, but, as I said, I’m not complaining.

A while back I ranted a little at the cost of Kindle e-books. I had gotten used to the Amazon ceiling of $9.99, and was suddenly confronted with e-book prices higher than the paper backs (each with a note at Amazon saying, apologetically, that the price had been set by the publisher).

That was the result of several major publishers ganging up on Amazon to force the e-retail giant to accept the “agency model” if they wanted to continue carrying the publishers’ ware.

The agency model stated that the publisher, not the seller, would set the e-book price, and the seller would then get a set, negotiated, commission from the publisher on every book sold. Prior to this, Amazon had bought the e-books from the publishers at wholesale, and were then free to set whatever price they saw fit—and never, so Amazon vowed, higher than $9.99 even if they took a loss on that sale.

And then that story faded into the background, until:

Last week, when US antitrust lawyers filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc. and two publishers—originally five publishers, but three of them (seeing the e-writing on the wall, I gather) settled pretty much on the spot—alleging they conspired to inflate the price of e-books, at an estimated cost to readers of $100 million.

And so, Apple Inc., and now two of the nation’s largest book publishers are charged with conspiring to artificially inflate the price of e-books. Apple, Macmillan and Penguin Group—thinking I don’t know what about Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster for buckling—promise to fight on.

“During regular, near-quarterly meetings, we allege that publishing company executives discussed confidential business and competitive matters—including Amazon’s e-book retailing practices—as part of a conspiracy to raise, fix, and stabilize retail prices,” Attorney General Eric Holder told reporters in Washington.

“With today’s lawsuit, we are sending a clear message that competitors, even in rapidly evolving technology industries, cannot conspire to raise prices,” added Sharis Pozen, acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

“We want to undo the harm caused by the companies’ anticompetitive conduct and restore retail price competition so that consumers can pay lower prices for their e-books,” she said.

It is not often that I come down squarely on the side of anything that the government is up to, but here I’ll even found the fan club, if asked. Of course I enjoyed the Amazon $9.99 cap as a consumer, but even more importantly, I see this fight as between an attempt by Amazon to rip neither publisher nor reader off and the greed of publishers who see a chance to maximize profit and who live and die by the sterile bottom line.

To me, the fact that e-books (which cost very little, if anything to produce) cost more than paperbacks that not only had to be printed, but also packaged and shipped from printer to wholesaler to retailer to customer—with a sizeable carbon footprint, to boot—speaks volumes.

According to a good article in the Christian Science Monitor, “Publishing executives were worried that Amazon’s deep-discount pricing of e-books might significantly undercut their ability to continue to sell hardcover books for $25 or more.

“In addition, they worried that if e-books became too popular, upstart digital publishers – including Amazon itself – might enter the e-book industry and push the long-dominant publishers aside, according to court documents.”

The suit itself then goes on to say, “Amazon’s move threatened the publisher defendants’ traditional positions as the gate-keepers of the publishing world.” And to rein Amazon in, the suit says, executives from the five book publishers decided to change the way they sold their books to book retailers, i.e., to change from wholesale agreements to the agency model.

Also according to court files, in meetings between the publishing executives—which reportedly took place in private dining rooms at exclusive Manhattan restaurants, sans corporate counsel (I know, this reads like a conspiracy novel), agreements were reached to simultaneously (key word that) end their use of their wholesale business model and to shift instead to an agency model, according to court files.

According to the Christian Science Monitor article, “No single book publisher acting alone would have the market clout to make such an arrangement stick. But, according to the suit, all five publishers agreed to impose identical terms on Amazon and all other e-book retailers.

“To provide extra pressure on Amazon, the five publishers also cut a special deal with Apple’s Steve Jobs, who was preparing to launch the company’s latest product, the iPad. Jobs was anxious to obtain a competitive advantage over Amazon’s Kindle book reader, the suit says.

“We allege that these executives knew full well what they were doing. That is, taking steps to make sure the prices consumers paid for e-books were higher,” Ms. Pozen said.

She added: “Let me be clear, when companies get together and conspire to enter into agreements that eliminate price competition, it crosses the line. This kind of agreement is illegal and anticompetitive.”

I think that this battle, and this war, might be more about who controls publishing in this country and in the world. If, indeed, e-books take off and eventually replace printed books, who will be at the helm?

Admittedly, good writing needs good editors (as a tour among the self-published mountains of fare will soon convince you), but should that editor remain with the bottom-line fixated corporate publishing machine, or perhaps shift to the up and coming independent e-publishing industry?

The jury is (literally) out on this.