Davos, you may not have been aware, is a place, not a thing – much as Google is a website, not a verb. I know this, because I have been there. My wife, you see, once worked for the aforementioned Forum; a few years back I forewent the Super Bowl so that I might join her for a visit.

In the interest of edification, then, or so that you might imagine yourself to be George Soros, allow me to be your tour guide to the city that, were it not for Mssrs. Obama, Paterno, Gingrich and Romney, would be at the tip of everyone’s tongues this week, save many other more interesting topics.

We’ll do this CIA World Book style, for ease of perusal.

Geography.
Switzerland is in Europe.

Further, it is smallish (comparable to Vermont and New Hampshire, combined) and enclosed by France, Germany, Italy and Austria. If you ever see a movie about a family of Austrian singers escaping the Nazis, it’s likely that they are escaping across the border into Switzerland. And that they are doing so in the summer.

For you see, the mountains that spread across the Swiss-Austrian border are no joke. In the winter, they’re blanketed by multiple feet of snow, making passage nearly impossible. Which, of course, is why the world’s richest and most influential chose Davos, a small village, or dorf, (not to be confused with a short unfunny comedian, or Dorf) therein for their annual winter gathering. If you’re standing on a snowbank in Switzerland, it’s quite possible that Davos is currently located about eight feet beneath you.

Getting to Davos.
Assuming you’ve flown into Geneva, which lies at the lower left corner of habitable Switzerland, or Zurich, the apex of the triangle the three cities form, you have three options. In increasing likelihood of being chosen by the extremely rich: you can drive, you can take the train, or you can take a helicopter. When I arrived in Davos, WEF participants were just heading out, and every few minutes you could hear another chopper pass overhead. If you’re partial to the Korean War, think Radar O’Reilly; if partial to Vietnam, think embassy evacuation.

I took the train which, as its reputation might suggest, was awesome. The only thing that is as punctual in America is Tim Tebow on Sunday morning. I’m also one of the select nostalgists who has (multiple times) taken the Amtrak cross-country (for which delays are measured by the season) so I was particularly awe-struck.

The train runs through beautiful country: along the Zürichsee (a lake into which mountains dip their toes), through bucolic countryside riddled with Helvetica lettering, and finally into the Alps. At about this point, in fairness to accuracy, I fell asleep due to lingering red-eye effects. But I bet it was super cool.

History.
As a tourist from America, I didn’t know anything about the history of the town up until I just looked it up on Wikipedia. It has, it seems, been home to various winter sports competitions, spas and resorts. And, as you may remember from your high school Extremely Obscure History classes, it was home to the League of the Ten Jurisdictions in 1436.

Language and culture.
Switzerland has a French-speaking side (near France) and a German-speaking side (near Germany and Austria). Davos is on the German-speaking side, as you may have noticed. So forget your “ooh la la”s and bone up on your “Ja”s.

Arrival in Davos.
Davos has two train stations. You’ll want to get off at the Davos Dorf stop (pictured), unless you want to get off at the other one (Davos Platz), which I didn’t.

Said station is at the northeastern end of town, just off the Bahnhofstrasse Dorf. Inside is a pleasant little welcome center at which they speak English and do not make fun of you for not speaking German. Across a parking lot, a small restaurant – though, if you can’t wait to be seated, they also have a chicken truck. (Pictured below, rather obviously.) Once filled with chicken, and pointed in the right direction, you’re ready to hit the town.

[A word of warning. The distance between the bathtub and the towel rack in some of the rental houses in Davos is slightly too far to make it easy to grab your towel, and you may, particularly if jet-lagged, fall out of the shower and land heavily on your arm, rendering it useless for half an hour or so. Should this happen, do not call your wife, who is busting her ass working on a major international conference, to indicate that your arm might be broken. She is too busy for such nonsense.]

What there is to do: winter sports
A few paragraphs up, I mentioned snow. When I was there in January, the view from our apartment looked like this:

That white stuff is snow, feet deep. (In front of our building, some kids had built a snow fort with walls taller than my wife.) If you look in the background, you’ll notice the snow-covered mountains – buttressed, at the upper left of that picture, with anti-avalanche barriers.

In the winter, there are two things to do. The first – attending major invitation-only conferences – is probably not for you. So there’s the second – sports.

You name it. There’s an ice skating rink just south of the main road. There are, of course, ski runs. You can snowboard. You can sled. It’s this bounty, legend has it, that drew the conference to Davos in the first place.

Allow me focus on sledding for a moment. Growing up in Rochester, New York, in the heart of the Snowbelt, I used to sled regularly, on hills around our neighborhood. My wife grew up in California’s Central Valley, better know for its orange crop than its luge courses. But we were both taken aback when we decided to go sledding in Davos.

First, you have to take a funicular up the side of the mountain. About halfway up, you arrive at a beautiful hotel, behind which is the sled run. And then you sled down the side of a goddamn Swiss Alp. There’s no fence separating you from rather substantial cliffs – just a small berm of loose snow. It’s breathtaking and a lot of fun – and very, very few people are killed doing it. (None that I know of. But I wouldn’t be surprised.) When you get to the bottom of the hill, it’s about a ten minute walk just to get back to the place from which you rent your sled.

You may recall my mentioning above that the sled run started halfway up the mountain. In the picture of my wife sledding, you can see how far halfway up the mountain actually is: that town in the distant background is Davos. There are actually two more funicular stops before you near the peak of the mountain. From that high, the view looks like this:

(You’ll pardon my skepticism that a nun and ten children schlepped across this, Rolf on their tails or not.) The object in the lower left of the picture is the covered funicular, with a staircase over it to allow skiers access to the other side; the photo itself was taken from the patio of a restaurant at the summit. Well, still a stop beneath the summit itself, which was closed due to inclement weather, and by “inclement”, I here mean “exceptionally frigid and windy.” Have fun skiing!

What there is to do: the town
In theory, Davos has shopping (primarily along the main drag named, appropriately, Promenade), an art museum, and restaurants. Each of these things leave much to be desired. My first night there, we went to get a bite, and everything was closed, save a little cafe in a hotel which didn’t seem to want to sell us food. Quite literally. The exchange of money for goods was somehow distasteful at that late hour – strange for a town that was playing host to the cream of the capitalist crop.

Then again, Davos is a resort town. The center of attraction isn’t fine dining or beautiful sculpture – it’s skiing. So, like the towns near summer vacation spots, these amenities get short shrift. I can plug one aspect of the dining: the fondue joints. The Swiss, who invented the stuff, know how to make a mean melted cheese. Don’t be put off by the smell upon entering a fondue restaurant – years of serving warmed wine mixed with cheese has an impact.

To summarize: if you don’t like winter sports and dislike dipping bread into things, Davos doesn’t have much to recommend itself, at least in the winter.

What there is to do: major international summits
If, however, you’re one of the 1,500-odd folks fortuitous enough to get an invite to the Forum’s conference – different story. In that case, there’s plenty to do, from schmoozing, to participating in discussions, to observing the discussions of others, to piano bars. They take the invitations seriously – when I was there, the day after nearly everyone had left, the Congress Center (pictured on the map) was still ringed by two levels of chain-link fencing and patrolled by armed guards who are essentially members of the local police force.

These bobsledders predate the WEF

The reason for the security is obvious – heads of various countries regularly attend, as do protestors. For the residents, though – what few don’t head out of town – the two main streets running through this long, narrow town are knotted up, right in the middle. The disruptions fan out from that knot, encompassing the hotels on the outskirts of the secure area, the restaurants that serve them, the stores selling “I went to Davos and…” t-shirts. When the claim is made that the city is taken over by the conference, that is meant literally.

I have to say, by the way: the conference gets a bit of a bad rap. Yeah, the headlines are about the celebrities and CEOs and heads of state. But there are also hundreds of people from companies and non-profits of a range of sizes for whom this is a remarkable opportunity to talk about their work and learn about global issues. Is it always framed I would choose? Probably not. Can one justifiably question the gathering’s ability to positively impact global finance? Yes. But conversation is a good thing, is it not?

In summary.
Our last day there, we saw Jet Li walking down the street and then we rode up to the top of a mountain.

And that’s Davos.

(H/T Philip Bump)

If anyone could do it, Adobe could. Company founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke brought the world desktop publishing – a concept now so familiar that it doesn’t require explanation. Create a document, hit print; what comes out is what you see on your screen. Adobe would now bring that simplicity to print, the web, video, mobile devices – without having a separate workflow for each medium.

To accompany this bold vision, Adobe developed a press toolkit and embarked on a worldwide tour to share the vision with publishers in Munich, Paris, London, and Tokyo. (Then an Adobe employee, several others, and I joined him.) The effort was summed up with this video:

Create once, publish anywhere.

It was ambitious. Including mobile devices was premature – part of the wizardry of the live demonstration on the tour was showing a brand-new Nokia model that could actually display a very low-res video.

Then came the iPad. Last year, the company produced this video.

That value proposition seem familiar? Using Adobe tools, you can port your magazine content – now, to a mobile device that can handle it, the iPad.

If only it were that easy.

Earlier this week, the New York Observer blasted Conde Nast – and, in particular, Scott Dadich, the company’s vice president of digital magazine development – for the “stalling out” of the company’s much-touted strategy to transition its properties from print to the iPad.

When that strategy was first proposed, though, Dadich was seen as a “savior” to the company – at least according to… the Observer. The hagiography went something like this: Dadich (in a San Francisco coffee house, natch) has a vision for an interactive version of Wired that could leverage a then-nonexistent tablet. He sketches it on a napkin, and the company signs on.

Dadich starts working with Adobe on a demo, running on the Adobe AIR platform, powered by Adobe Flash. A demonstration of what an interactive Wired could look like debuts at SxSW in March, 2010 – to rave reviews. A star is born.

By that point, Apple had announced the iPad – and that the iPad would not run Adobe Flash. The ubiquity of Flash meant that Wired’s in-house designers already knew the technology; it’s what traditionally powers online interactivity. Now, though, a version of Wired for the iPad will have to come in another form – a form that’s novel for both Conde Nast and Adobe. The first edition of Wired for iPad comes out in May 2010; lauded by Adobe and to decent reviews. In October, the companies form an official partnership.

Meanwhile, Adobe is struggling to make its value proposition real. It pledges to Conde Nast that it can use variants of its existing publishing suite, including InDesign, to produce magazine versions for the iPad (and other platforms). Create once, publish anywhere. But as they’re developing the first Conde Nast apps, Apple keeps changing the rules for iPad publishing – at one point, even specifically disallowing Adobe’s nascent publishing tool. Developing software takes time, even when the rules are set. Here, Adobe was trying to adapt existing tools to present content on a platform that was brand new and outside of its control. Meanwhile, the company had to continue to assert that it could make the Conde Nast transition happen to demonstrate the value of the tools it was still building.

Dadich clearly didn’t expect these roadblocks. The Observer notes:

Mr. Dadich made it all sound simple. “What we’re going to do is have workflow specialists come in, so it’ll be actually less work,” a source recalls him saying.

Those “workflow specialists” aren’t identified. But it’s easy to assume that they came up from Adobe’s San Jose headquarters. A report from Business Insider goes to an an insider who says that “while ‘there was a real collaboration between his team and Adobe’ and ‘[Dadich] really oversaw the design,’ Adobe handled the technical details.” Which they’d have to: the in-house team couldn’t create interactive tools natively in Flash, so they’d be reliant on Adobe’s still-in-development Flex platform.

In the initial video promoting the tablet version of Wired, Dadich notes that it’s “just adding one more avenue” – though the complexity of the displayed belies the simplicity of that statement.

At the SxSW presentation, Dadich lauded the existing team who’d be tasked with producing the multiple versions. Reuters’ Felix Salmon noted:

Dadich kicked off his presentation by showing a photo of the large art and design team at Wired, and noting that the website can’t boast anything like that kind of staffing dedicated to making articles look good and read well online.

Dadich clearly thought that team, in partnership with Adobe, would be enough. From the Observer:

[T]here would be no dedicated hires. Instead, existing art and production staffers from the print side would be responsible for making two iPad layouts (one in portrait and one in landscape, per Mr. Dadich’s vision) on Adobe’s platform.

The core question is: why would he think the existing team would suffice?

The expectations put on Dadich were massive, to be sure, and he appears to have made a commitment to bringing in tablet versions of Conde Nast properties with a substantial injection of resources. But he was working with a partner that, for the past decade, has predicated its value to publishers in large part on facilitating precisely these sorts of transitions. (It is worth noting that the first iPad app of Wired was nothing short of a huge success, selling more than 100,000 downloads at full newsstand price, which outpaced the newsstand sales of its analog version.)

Network publishing, after all, never really worked. There are significant platform differences between print and the web, and obvious content differences between video and text. Having a pool of assets from which different media could draw is valuable, but the presumption that you could create once and publish anywhere – in a way that is easier and less resource intensive than having different production streams – hasn’t panned out. And doesn’t seem likely to any time soon – particularly on immature and new platforms. What tablets bring to the publishing world is a both new platform and new forms of content. It’s adding to the difference pool, not reducing it, and differences add time.

Caught between lofty expectations from his employer (and his peers in publishing) and a company publicly committed to using Conde Nast as a proof-of-concept, Dadich had very little room to maneuver. Publishing on the iPad hasn’t stopped; Wired and the New Yorker keep appearing to customers, as expected. But the grand vision of a simple multi-platform publishing system powered by Adobe tools has been elusive.

Just as it has been for a decade.

Philip Bump is an expert on many digital publishing platforms. He used to be a senior designer at Adobe Systems, Inc., makers of inDesign, Flash and Photoshop.

It paid off. In the bottom of the ninth, with the Mets trailing the Angels by a run at Shea Stadium, a pinch-hitting Marlon Anderson drove a 3-1 pitch into right-center. The outfielder misplayed it. Anderson, not known for his baserunning, motored around the bases, meeting the tag at home plate. He smashed into the catcher, busting his lip – and forcing the game into extra innings.

In the top of the tenth, a Darin Erstad single put the Angels up a run. In the bottom of the inning, with two outs, two runners on and a full count, Cliff Floyd drove a ball over the right field fence, winning the game for the Mets.

That game in June 2005 rewarded patience – and baseball fans. Well, Mets fans anyway. It rewarded Anthony De Rosa, a New Jersey native, Rutgers grad, and Mets fan in the original sense of the term: fanatic. De Rosa outlasted several of his friends that night, watching every pitch.

At the time, De Rosa was writing regularly for MetsBlog.com; he would go on to found his own Mets blog, HotFootBlog. The guy loves the Mets, and the way he expressed his love at that point was by writing about them.

It was an offshoot, in a way, from his early days exploring the Internet. He is enough of an online veteran to draw a distinction between the old Internet, with its BBS‘s (Wikipedia is helpful on that one, youngsters) and online communities like Compuserve and Prodigy, and the Web. He particularly notes pre-Huffington, pre-Time Warner AOL – a once-dominant force that seemed determined to bring the bite-sized web in-house. That community was formative for De Rosa.

“I think the point I realized [the web] was a mass medium was when AOL came around,” De Rosa told me recently. “You started to see people use it more as a way to put up things that they were interested in. You started to see people gather around celebrities or world politics or technology…. Now the communities were dictating what was interesting to them. They were talking amongst themselves.”

An engaged De Rosa joined those conversations: “I started to see that that communication about information would start to be a more social thing – that it would be going from top-down to flip that on its end.”

Little did he know he’d be one of the people doing the flipping.

From writing casually for a few Mets blogs, he’s now a juggernaut in the world of social media and – particularly of late – in using it to curate the news. He’s been an invited speaker at industry conferences like SxSW, Social Media Week, and Toronto’s Mesh. In the past two months alone, he was quoted by David Carr in the Times, cited by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, interviewed Times‘ chief Bill Keller (generating a maelstrom of discussion online), and been praised by the editor of Salon.

He has 8,200-plus followers on Twitter (impressive for a non-celebrity), is included on 626 Twitter lists (very impressive for a non-celebrity) and has a stunningly high Klout score of 81 (what comes after “very?”).

But what he’s perhaps best known for is Tumblr, a platform now seeing 8.4 billion monthly pageviews. The Times proclaimed him “the undisputed king” of Tumblr, deservedly so. Mashable named his blog, SoupSoup, one of the best tumblogs of 2008; it’s currently one of the top 250 blogs in the world according to Technorati. It has nearly 30,000 posts, with an average of 22 posts per day since its inception in late October, 2007. The number of followers a blog on Tumblr has isn’t public; De Rosa indicated that he’s currently “just short of 25,000.”

In other words, between his Tumblr followers and his Twitter audience, more people see De Rosa’s updates than attended that Mets game. That’s what you call a platform.

SOUP AT WORK

De Rosa does have a day job. He’s Product Manager for Reuters Media, a position that affords (necessitates?) such a robust online life. Where other bosses might shy away from an employee so active on social media, De Rosa and his employers saw the advantages – particularly, increased engagement with Reuters content, including assuring that De Rosa had his own space to write. A recent interview he conducted with outgoing Times editor Bill Keller on that Reuters blog, next to Reuters’ ads, created a maelstrom of online commentary and sharing – in part because of Keller’s steadfast commitment to keeping social media at arm’s length. Reuters opens doors for De Rosa, to be sure, but his personal platform pulls back the window shades.

Actually, De Rosa seems them as platforms, plural. Each is distinct: the content he pushes out to Twitter is not necessarily the content he shares on Tumblr. This isn’t a ploy to force people into using Twitter or Tumblr – it’s a recognition and utilization of each platform’s strengths. (He admits that he’s less active on Facebook, in part because of the time demands produced by generating unique content on two platforms already.)

A decision to build audiences on two platforms doesn’t automatically create a large combined audience, of course. De Rosa seems as mystified at how the audience arose as anyone else, attributing it to the regularity of his updates and his reblogging and retweeting. But, again, that doesn’t automatically create an audience either.

Here’s Salon’s Editor-At-Large, Joan Walsh, describing her media diet to The Atlantic Wire yesterday:

The crazy thing that happens on Twitter–it’s an old school journalist’s worst nightmare–is that people are just spreading rumors. So having good journalists (Anthony De Rosa comes to mind) who are filters and say either “I got someone on the phone to confirm this” or “The New York Times has confirmed ‘X’” is important.

What she calls filtering, others (myself included) might call curation. It’s picking out interesting items of information, sharing, validating and correcting them on the fly. “Filter” is passive. What De Rosa does isn’t passive.

The genius of Twitter and Tumblr as platforms is how easy they make curation. In each, a single click pushes a single bit of information out to one’s own followers. It’s as immediate an implementation of Dave Winer‘s law of the Internet – “the more you send them away the more they come back” – as you can get. But you have to send them somewhere good.

That’s what De Rosa excels at. As Walsh notes, you can trust where he sends you. And if he shouldn’t have sent you there, he explains that, and explains why. If he’s not sure the information is accurate, he tells you that, too. That’s the authority at the heart of Walsh’s statement.

Then, there’s finding things to share. De Rosa has an experienced eye for what’s interesting in global politics, and the media, and the web, and sports, and cultural events, and New York City – and so on. He also has sophisticated streams of information. There’s the Reuters wire, which must be the equivalent for De Rosa of giving The Wire‘s Bubbles a heroin IV. There’s who he follows on Tumblr.

And there are the 1,300 people he follows on Twitter. I asked him about that one; the stream from the 400 or so I follow is often overwhelming. His secret is lists. He’s maxed out his twenty personally-selected lists (“…the thing that kind of annoys me about Twitter is you’re only allowed to have twenty lists…”) and follows another… well, a lot. Lists allow him to filter out the noise from the raw stream; he isolates those focused on particular topics as a “monitoring tool.” He considers Twitter lists to be fairly equivalent to the Reuters wire – even in terms of early accuracy. “At the end of the day, the messages that are being posted [on Twitter] aren’t any different than when you go to sources and you talk to them,” he points out. “You still have to connect the dots and make sure that information is reliable.”

(After I’d interviewed De Rosa, ReadWriteWeb posted an article indicating that Twitter itself had only a small number of “power users” working for the company. They defined “power users” as those with more Twitter lists. Oh, and I found that link on De Rosa’s Twitter feed.)

The roadblock, then, is the old-fashioned journalism, that work that Joan Walsh values. Like others – including NPR’s Andy Carvin, with whom De Rosa is sometimes compared – De Rosa wishes that Twitter had a better system for separating the wheat from the chaff more quickly.

It has one. Users like @AntDeRosa.

EXPLORING THE PLATFORM
In July of 2009, De Rosa was hired at Mediaite as one of the site’s inaugural columnists; in March of last year, sports blogging juggernaut SBNation picked him up as editor-in-chief of the site’s Tumblr. “Anthony was one of the first people hired because of what they achieved on Tumblr,” says Rachel Sklar, Mediaite’s editor-at-large – originally hiring DeRosa – and advisor to start-ups including SBNation. That’s in part because of how closely tied to Tumblr his identity was: “For a long time, I only knew him as ‘Soup.’”

Like Mark Coatney, who was spirited away from Newsweek’s Tumblr to work for Tumblr itself, De Rosa positioned himself as both master of the platform – and innovator in how it was used.

In 2009, De Rosa partnered with Richard Blakeley (then editor-in-chief of Gawker.TV) on Neighborhoodr, a Tumblr-based local news tool. The mandate of Neighborhoodr is simple: empower local residents to share updates about their communities quickly and easily. The site now covers 113 cities in the United States and 32 cities internationally. In 2010, TheNextWeb declared that “Neighborhoodr gets it right as a hyperlocal news source.”

De Rosa gets it right as a news source, too. In February, NBC New York pegged him as one of the twenty best local news sources on Twitter in NYC. And then there’s that Klout score. Debate aside, the tool reflects a genuine level of influence. De Rosa’s score of 81 compares favorably to the New Yorker‘s Susan Orlean with a score of 67 and the Times‘ David Pogue at 76. He’s far closer, in fact, to the Klout score of 85 maintained by none other than Ashton Kutcher.

And on Twitter, Kutcher has 735 times as many followers. (Between the time this piece was finalized and when it was published, SBNation announced a new advisor: Ashton Kutcher.)

WHY HE DOES WHAT HE DOES

Now, the story behind his tumblog’s name, SoupSoup.

Short version: his friends have called him Soup since middle school. Long version: it’s because he saved someone from choking.

One day at school during lunch, Anthony was sitting at the same table as a girl who began to choke on a chunk of chicken from her chicken noodle soup. Somewhere (a movie? TV show?) he’d come across the Heimlich maneuver. He came up behind her and, after a few unsuccessful attempts, forced the chicken loose. From that day forward he was Soup. Old friends still call him that; he answers to it.

(Why SoupSoup? Why doubled? It’s an Internet tale told so many times before: “Soup” was taken.)

The point of the story is this: a simple piece of information that he’d come across potentially saved someone’s life.

Not to be melodramatic, but sharing similar bits pieces of information has become something of an obsession of De Rosa’s. If you’ve just recently come to know him, it’s probably because of the curation he’s done around the events of the Arab Spring. He’s vastly broadened his audience by performing that simple task, passing on information – particularly about what’s happening in the Middle East and North Africa. During Tahrir Square, during the run-up to military action in Libya, now with the crackdown in Syria – De Rosa has been a whirlwind of links from sources in multiple languages, moderating and refining on the fly. There’s an urgency to it that makes clear he’s not simply sharing news to build his Klout score.

I asked him why he expends so much effort on these events.

I think it’s a combination of newsworthiness and how big an effect that particular news can have on the world as a whole. I think the Middle East and what’s happening in North Africa is having a wide-ranging effect. I try to focus on things I think have will have a lot of scale and be of interest to as many people as possible.

Americans have a short attention span. But I think it’s an important story to monitor because it’s affecting us in ways we may not even realize. Maybe I try to advocate a little, but I think you can acknowledge you have biases to sorts of news you think are important.

On social networks, there’s no need to worry about ratings or attracting an audience. People are more interested in getting information.

He went on.

If people are informed – even if it’s just showing them that the rest of the world supports what they’re doing – I feel like that’s where I could do my life’s work. Continuing to be part of that conversation that allows others with more influence or power to enact change.

He’s saying, in effect, that there’s always something worthy of our attention there. To the extent that he can keep presenting those bits of news – mixed in with information about a lot of other things sometimes, in a homogeneous flood at others – he can keep American (and other Western) eyes flitting, however quickly, over something that he recognizes as important. And the people on the ground know that they’ve been seen.

Doing so effectively requires something of the curator as well: tenacity predicated on real interest. That’s the standard De Rosa brings to his curation. It’s his sweet spot.

After all, this is the guy whose favorite baseball game was one where he had the passion and will to stick with it through a long rain delay, because he loves the game and he loves the Mets. God knows that sticking with the Mets doesn’t always bear fruit. But sometimes it does. Sometimes it’s a game that you remember the rest of your life.

There are a few ways to determine if a photo has been doctored.

*EXIF data*

One way is to compare the content and source of the image with the EXIF data, which is information about the creation of the photo that is carried along with the image itself. (To learn more about EXIF information, read this previous post. In the case of the Weiner image, the image that has been shared online is a screen capture of an image sharing site – meaning that any EXIF information would be from the creation of that screen capture, not the image itself. In other words – it’s not useful for determining the authenticity of the Weiner photo.

Even if the original image turned up at this point, I should note that EXIF data can be altered – or, if you prefer, faked. It’s just text data that is embedded in the file, like the artist and song title that it buried in an MP3. So if the EXIF data of a newly-discovered image indicated it had been taken at Weiner’s office (sometimes, geographical data is included) two minutes before the image was posted – there’s no guarantee that information is accurate. (EXIF data could be more helpful here in an exculpatory scenario. If the picture had been taken in Tuscaloosa on Christmas Day, it would certainly indicate it weren’t likely from Weiner. Though not conclusively)

…And sure enough, even before this article posted, a full version of the image with EXIF information turned up, from its original “discoverer”.

Reuters‘ Anthony De Rosa looked at the data for the photo at issue and notes that it doesn’t match previous images uploaded by the Congressman – the type of camera is different, as is the content included.

In fact, in the data for the contested image certain information that would be important for verification – such as the modification date of the image – is missing entirely.

*Image Manipulation*

Some have indicated a belief that the screen captured image posted at Big Government showed signs of manipulation. Another blogger at Daily Kos runs through the argument: a software tool that compares compression artifacts in images seems to indicate that the Congressman’s name shows evidence of manipulation. But what’s noteworthy about this analysis is that the name shows the same level of manipulation as other text in the image. Meaning, then, that if the name were forged, it is likely that the site’s “Popular” and “Upload” links were also forged. Which, of course they weren’t.

No one disputes that the photo was doctored to display underwear-covered genitalia. For which I’m glad, because I’d rather not spend a lot of time assessing that claim.

*Motive and Context*

This is the most important consideration when assessing a forgery. Why would someone have faked an image? What would they be trying to fake?

In this case, Rep. Weiner readily admitted that his account had been hacked. That being the case, there would be no need to forge the screenshot. If the image had never appeared on Weiner’s account, he could prove that in other ways – contacting the image host, etc. He admits that the image could possibly have been on his account, meaning that the DailyKos’ analysis is moot. There was no reason to fake such a screenshot.

In final analysis – the screenshot posted by Big Government shows an image that appears to have been posted to Weiner’s image hosting account. It’s worth noting, too, that this is entirely consistent with what Weiner has said all along.

Philip Bump is a Photoshop Expert. He used to be a designer at Adobe Systems, Inc., makers of Photoshop. Among other things, he worked on the Photoshop user’s manual and designed chapters for the Photoshop Classroom in a Book.

He couldn’t have had better timing.

At a time when nearly one-in-five people were unemployed, Delano appealed to the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program that, in an ongoing effort to put people to work, sponsored public art throughout the country. Eventually, over 5,000 artists created 225,000 works of art for the program.

Hundreds of those works came from Delano. His charge from the Farm Security Administration was, like Robert Frank a decade later, to capture the American culture and people. He did.

In 1941, at the Vermont State Fair in the town of Rutland, he took the photo below.* (If you click it, you can see a larger version.)

It’s a remarkable picture – one that captures a moment and a culture in a way we don’t often see. Against the backdrop of the green Vermont hills and in front of a small town is a freak show, garish yet elegant; in front of that, an empty ride. Only a few people are visible – it’s the ride and the house at right that command attention.

But what makes the photo so wonderful are the signs – the typography, the illustrations, the commercialism. And the acts. The pain-proof man. The backward boy. And just to the right of the Roll-O-Plane, partly obscured by a light and over a drawing of a man holding his arm over two small figures – ‘Zip’ and ‘Pip’.

Meet Zip and Pip, born Jenny Lee and Elvira Snow. Sisters from Georgia, they suffered from microcephaly, a disorder that causes the circumference of the head to be abnormally small. In the language of the side show, they were “pinheads.” At the time Delano’s photograph was taken, they were 29, on tour from their regular gig at Coney Island. You can see them at about 1:40 in the video clip below, shot the prior year along the boardwalk.

But by 1941, Zip and Pip were already famous. Nine years before, they, along with another microencephalic named Schlitzie, were featured as characters in the now-infamous movie, Freaks. The fictional romance story was, at best, exploitative, featuring about a dozen actual sideshow performers. The film is now in the public domain.

It wasn’t well-received. Beyond the presence of the unsettling cast, the story line, which revolves around a trapeze artist marrying a midget for his money, preceded strict enforcement of Hollywood’s Production Code, when sexual innuendo and violence were considered acceptable. In the full version of the movie’s climax, the “freaks” descend upon the trapeze artist and mutilate her. One audience member blamed the film for causing her miscarriage.

Freaks has had a lasting impact on American culture, or, perhaps more accurately, subculture. It’s likely that if you hadn’t seen the movie before now, Zip and Pip may have looked familiar for another reason: Zippy the Pinhead.

Zippy the Pinhead is a cartoon by Bill Griffith, the eponymous character of which was based on Freaks‘ Schlitzie and another microencephalic, Zip the Pinhead. (Zip, also a featured act at Coney Island, died in 1926.) The cartoon amalgam of these real-life characters anchors a strip that’s not anchored by much else. Celebrating absurdity and non sequitors, it’s often baffling and rarely funny – but regularly amusing.

Which was the goal of the old side shows, too, of course – not to invoke laughs but instead bewildered amusement. The freaks were meant to send a chill down your spine, meant to get the girl you liked to bury her head into your shoulder. In a world without 4chan, they were all frisson, no irony.

As you may know, there still exists a sideshow at Coney Island, but, being in Brooklyn, it’s populated mostly by self-aware hipsters, exchanging their dignity for cachet. What you may not know is that the older, exploitative form of sideshow still exists in New York as well.

I used to live on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. Each September, the street becomes useless for residents, transformed into an ersatz Italian carnival, the Feast of San Gennaro, that covers the roadway and sidewalks with food booths, souvenir stands, and a healthy dose of kitsch.

Where we lived was near Canal Street at the entrance to Little Italy, on the second floor of a walk-up brownstone. In the year that we lived there, 2007, the blocks-long Feast of San Gennaro took over the parking lot across the street, transforming it into a side show for the duration of the nine-day festival.

This being New York City in early September, it was hot, meaning we needed to keep our windows open. And, given that we lived on the second floor, it meant that the recorded patter that blared from the loudspeakers atop the wagons contained the two sideshow acts – Little Lina and the Angel Snake Girl – blared directly into our apartment, in overlapping waves of feral enticement. For twelve hours a day, our living room sounded like this:

Finally, on the second-to-last day of San Gennaro, we ventured over, paid our dollar, and saw Little Lina.

The signs leading to her, enticing us with her exoticism, informed us that she was from Haiti, that she was so many inches tall, weighed so many pounds. We turned a quick corner, and there she was – not exotic, not interesting, just a tiny person sitting on a pillow, grinning broadly and grasping for any money we might care to offer. It was shockingly banal. We smiled, greeted her awkwardly, and left. During the time the trailer was across the street from us, we never saw anyone leave at the end of the day – the trailer was also her home.

Which brings me back to the photo that started all of this. Jack Delano, born Jacob Ovcharov near Kiev, found work in 1941 taking pictures of America for the American government. In doing so, he captured an incredibly American scene – a small fair in a small town at the brink of a tumultuous time.

And somewhere behind the scenes, down from Coney Island, were two women whose deformations gave them careers, of a sort. Made them entertainers, movie stars.

In Delano’s photo they’re unseen. The only people we see, torsos blocked by the orange and red signs that advertise the freaks, are the backs and legs of the folks from Rutland who, crossing the railroad tracks to get to the fair, paid their dimes looking to be amused.

* The Flickr Commons recently added a number of color photos from the era, including a number more Delano took at the same fair. I came across the photo above in this blog post about the collection.

Follow Philip Bump on Twitter here.

And the labor movement rose up and beat him silly.

That fight in 2005 was led by the state’s teachers and nurses. They hounded Arnold wherever he went – protested outside fundraisers, at speaking gigs. I remember standing with thousands of men and women outside San Jose’s Fairmont Hotel waiting for Arnold to show up; a diverse crowd from a broad array of occupations and income levels.

Eventually, Californians rejected every one of Schwarzenegger’s proposals. The pension initiative never even made it to the ballot.

Why is this story relevant today? Because NYT contributor Natasha Vargas-Cooper has decided that the reason people care about Wisconsin is because of the manly firefighters.

Or… something. To be frank, I’m not clear on the point of the piece in today’s Times. There’s an undertone of disempowered service sector women being carried across the finish line by muscle-choked studs wearing suspenders. That female union members, who live shadowy existences, are being protected by society’s protectors, in the name of solidarity.

But that’s not the situation on the ground in Madison. The impacted unions in Wisconsin aren’t predominantly service sector – it’s government workers and teachers. While the latter may be predominantly (or stereotypically female), the former aren’t.

And to portray teachers as needing rescue ignores decades of history. Teachers, alongside police and firefighters, get enormous good will from the public. Deservedly. They’re politically strong because no one wants to be seen as opposing the guys who save lives and the women who teach our kids. Until, that is, the right learned that teachers’ unions were an obstacle to privatizing education (read: charter schools) and began a campaign that has (only slightly) diminished that status.

What people think when they think of unions are burly, manly people like steelworkers or Teamsters. What the labor movement would like them to think is of cops and firefighters, nurses and teachers – the unions most popular with the public. The union members that every kid wants to be when they’re young.

What the labor movement actually is, of course, is increasingly female, increasingly of color, and increasingly in the service and public sectors, by percentage. In this regard, Vargas-Cooper is right: that it is imperative that these members have strong representation and the ability to have a voice on the job and in public.

Where she’s wrong is that they need to rely on studs in uniform. It’s a disservice to the strong women of the labor movement – the nurses and teachers who trounced Arnie six years ago, those who stormed the Wisconsin Capitol before any police or firefighters there actually got engaged in the fight.

It’s a disservice to the solidarity of the labor movement itself.

Philip Bump does communications work in Washington, DC. For five years, he worked with the Labor movement in the Silicon Valley. He’s also the founder of TerribleMovieNight.com. Find him on Mediaite here and on Twitter here.

Image: AP via Huffington Post.

The problem was, however, that the story didn’tt hold up. Each of the eleven other jurors swore under oath (something the original complainant refused to do) that her version of events was erroneous, that the emails were out of context and misrepresentative. The Times ran their follow-up story on a Saturday, on page A18.

It takes no imagination to see how this story has echoes in the current environment. The Journolist emails, of course, and Drudge’s speculative front page story yesterday about “improper contact” between Google and the Administration. The absolution of the scientists in the “Climategate” incident, similarly maligned for selective emails, has also been criticized for lacking follow-up from the media outlets that trumpeted the original accusations.

Here, I’ll admit my bias. I was one of the eleven jurors; an excerpt of one of my emails appeared in that front page Times article. And, after many affidavits back and forth, the court has not yet ruled on the solitary juror’s original claims. But as I said, the story echoes, this week in particular.

We may have entered a golden age of email scandals. There are a number of reasons that emails, in this moment, are a tool ripe for employment – or exploitation – in politics, the law, and relationships.

Email is still new.

In the context of human history, obviously. But even in the context of communications.

Think about how it differs from older forms of communication. There’s the immediacy, of course, but there’s also the simplicity of archiving it. One’s desk drawers don’t have to overflow with old correspondence – it just sits there, on your desktop or in your organization’s backup files, waiting for someone to search “Weigel” or “die in a fire.” And as it travels across the internet, it often does so without encryption. The old saw about email being like a postcard that every mailman can read has an element of truth.

Here’s another way in which it is different than older forms of communication. There’s an implied letterhead on every email sent from a company or organization, that little trailing domain after the @ symbol. If you send an email from an army.mil domain, you are sending an email from the Army. From foxnews.com or from nytimes.com – those emails can be interpreted as though you are acting on behalf of those companies.

The end result will probably be less candor, and perhaps less immediacy, in emailed communications. When this happens, it will spell the end of this golden age.

But that candor and immediacy will transfer (and has transferred) to other media – instant messaging, texts, BBMs – where the same problems will soon start to crop up. In the legal case I mentioned at the outset, a text message was used in an affidavit responding to the isolated juror’s claims. In two years time, I’m going to re-release this post, doing a find-and-replace for “email” and “text”.

An individual email is often just an excerpt of a conversation.

What Andrew Breitbart was to the Sherrod video, the Daily Caller is to “Journolist”. Each broadcasts only the most incendiary parts of a discussion, with all of the subtlety of tossing a grenade.

It is rare that a stand-alone, one-off email will be of much interest. Usually, those emails that elicit a furor are part of an ongoing conversation between the sender and recipient.

Presenting only part of a discussion to make a political or personal point may be effective over the short-term, but over the long-term the audience is owed the full context for the conversation in order to fully assess its impact.

Contrast email in this regard with, oh, I don’t know, voice recordings. In addition to the overhead in recording and storing a conversation, surreptitiously or not, a snippet of recorded conversation demands release of what preceded and followed it. RadarOnline couldn’t release only Mel Gibson’s furious invectives, they had to release the whole thing, because they knew people wouldn’t accept only his side as representative. Yet, for some reason with email, they do.

Voice recordings do have an advantage over email in this regard: emotion. Were Gibson’s words type-written, it’s certain they would lack the emotional power they carry when you hear them in his familiar voice. But again, that lack of emotion can make email a tool for triggering scandal.

There was a sketch comedy show about a decade ago that had a skit in which a witness at a trial was examined. He confessed to the crime with heavy sarcasm to the amusement of the jury and audience. But when the prosecution had his words read back, the cold statement (something like “Oh yeah, I killed him.”) shifted meaning.

It was a comedy sketch, but we’ve all had that experience – an email being misinterpreted when the tone of it is misunderstood. Now imagine that email being read by someone who you’d never intended to read it, perhaps someone looking for evidence of wrong-doing. Perhaps someone with the improbable name of “Tucker”.

The Freedom of Information Act just got a lot more robust.

It used to be that FOIA requests took time to compile. When it became law in 1967, responding to a request was not trivial. Even if the respondent wanted to do so as quickly as possible, it still took a long time to look through old documents and filings.

Not so anymore. While still more complicated than searching one’s hard drive, it’s much easier for the government to respond to even the most far-reaching of requests. This is very much for the good of democracy, of course – but, as in the Drudge-linked example above, it’s also much easier for those trying to rake muck. With access to a wide range of communication, it’s easy to succumb to confirmation bias. (Lawrence Lessig wrote an excellent essay on the dangers of too much openness last year that is worth revisiting.)

The moral of the story is this: as much as we hold the Administration to account for overreacting in Shirley Sherrod’s case, we should exercise the same restraint when the next email scandal breaks. I say this in part from self-interest, of course, but the point remains. Our relationship with email is still evolving, and we live in a moment in which it can easily be misunderstood. We owe it to ourselves to take isolated emails out of context with a grain of salt – no matter the source, no matter the topic.

We’ll only see more revelations like those of recent months. It is up to all of us to assure that we understand why we’re seeing them.

Or to get everyone to give a sworn statement about it. I can go either way.

Starting with a segment from one of his first interviews, in which an incredulous ABC reporter asks if he’s “up for this,” the video jumps quickly into the hip-hop track that makes it so catchy. (N.B.: Your definition of “catchy” may differ from mine.)

Here, for the first time ever – the lyrics.

When I say “Alvin,” you say “Greene.”
Alvin! Greene! Alvin! Greene!
When I say “Alvin,” you say “Greene.”
Alvin Greene for Senator!

Listen up everybody, ’cause I’m here to say
If you’re tired of the government you have today
And you wanna big change in a major way
Then vote Alvin Greene on Election Day!

Jobs! Education! Justice, too!
My man Al knows what’s best for you
So come together party people, both red and blue
And don’t believe the rumors that are just not true.

Well, Greene’s a new face in politics,
And he don’t show porno to college chicks.
But he’s got some ideas that’ll fix the state,
So open up your minds and stop the hate.

Time to dig down deep in your wallet or purse.
It can only get better and it can’t get worse.
Shake up DC, sat in the church,
And put me, you and Alvin Greene back to work!

Well, let’s talk about the issues one time -
Makin’ sure the punishment fits the crime!
And if you don’t think that’s cool enough -
He’s gonna give lots of money to the schools and stuff!

Real family values those are rad –
He loves family and lives with his mom and dad!
November’s coming, it’s time to choose -
And Jim DeMint should be ready to lose!

Alvin Greene, is on the scene.
Gotta get out and vote, if you know what I mean.
Alvin Greene is the one for you.
He knows how you feel ’cause he’s unemployed, too.

Alvin Greene is the natural choice.
Don’t listen to the folks that make fun of his voice.
Alvin Greene, his campaign’s legit,
And you know this great nation will benefit!

(The final verses are over footage of Greene and… LeBron James, who is thanked in the credits.)

When I say “Alvin,” you say “Greene.”
Alvin! Greene! Alvin! Greene!
When I say “Alvin,” you say “Greene.”
Alvin Greene for Senator!

When I say “Alvin,” you say “Greene.”
Alvin! Greene! Alvin! Greene!
When I say “Alvin,” you say “Greene.”
Alvin Greene for Senator!

…and so on.

The video credits list Greene himself as producer and director, and his father as the first cameraman. The video was posted to YouTube by user virgiltexas, which seems odd, so I’m coming to this with a little skepticism. But if The Times considers it legit, who am I to argue with the paper of record?

South Carolina voters, your choice just got a whole lot harder.

UPDATE: Too good to be true? Yes, most likely. The YouTube video indicates that it was produced by WeGotSplashers from the Bay Area.

That it even seemed plausible certainly says something about Mr. Greene.

This bold pronouncement from Andrew Breitbart follows a story at Tucker Carlson‘s Daily Caller blog that outlines, as the title describes it, the “media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright“ in the aftermath of the April 16, 2008, debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Mediaite’s Steve Krakauer provides a good overview of the issue, noting – correctly – that “the pay off largely isn’t there.”

What the Daily Caller proves is that many liberal opinion columnists, not necessarily supposedly-unbiased reporters, didn’t like the mainstream media talking about Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That’s not surprising.

The irony, of course, is that the Daily Caller (founded by conservative pundit Carlson and Neil Patel, former chief policy advisor to Vice President Cheney) is using journalism in an attempt to shift the political landscape – which is the exact charge they level at the forty “mostly liberal journalists and bloggers” who co-wrote the letter criticizing ABC’s debate moderation. The descriptive quote about the journalists, incidentally, is from the New York Times‘ contemporaneous article about critique of the debate. In other words, when it came out the letter was understood to be representing a political position.

One should take the same understanding into reading the Caller‘s article.

Outspoken conservative Andrew Breitbart (he of BigJournalism fame) last night offered a prediction to those he sees as representing the left: “Get some rest. Tomorrow’s gonna be long day & first of many in a row.” Today, he has an opinion piece that sits alongside the Caller‘s story from which my introductory quote was taken. In the piece, he writes:

No journalistic steadfast rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare.

Breitbart proclaims this day as the death of American journalism because he sees American journalism as inextricably partisan – and not partisan in the same way that he is. Or, anyway, because he claims to see it that way.

He masks a valid point with his vituperative language. As I’ve discussed before, there’s a shifting understanding of how journalists deal with their own personal biases. It’s not that journalists “lie” about being objective – it’s that it’s almost impossible to actually be objective.

The takeaway for today: a group of journalists who have a tacit bias seek to undermine a narrative they disagree with. But that takeaway is as much about the Daily Caller and Breitbart as it is about the subject of the original article. Those who think that there wasn’t the same email back-and-forth between Caller staff and Breitbart as there was between those who signed the letter the Caller criticizes are, I’m afraid, a bit naive. If those emails came to light, what should we think of them?

And that brings us to the key question in this tempest. Which is worse: a journalist who strives to be objective but is seen as partisan – or one who strives to be partisan and is seen as objective?

The fall-out: Williams has been booted from the National Tea Party Federation, according to spokesperson David Webb this morning on Face the Nation. CNN reports:

“We, in the last 24 hours, have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote,” Webb said of the blog post by Williams that satirized a fictional letter from what he called “Colored People” to President Abraham Lincoln.

Webb called the blog post “clearly offensive.”

Even more offensive, but less noted, were Williams’ responses to the comments the post received. Outside of the contrived context of black people writing to Lincoln, Williams spoke freely:

Where in that article do you see me addressing American Blacks, or any black people for that matter?

I am mocking those people who call themselves “Colored People” and who are now fighting to be kept as government owned pets, whilst hurling charges of racism at those who embrace freedom and civil rights.

It is in your head that the term “Colored People” means “Black”.

…and:

Such is the crippling power of PC that otherwise freedom loving people cave at the first whiff of what somebody else might think. I personally do not care what the lowest common denominator thinks of me, they are the current administrationʼs power base and are kept like favored house pets. They are fighting against your and my right to think and speak, and they are winning.

…and:

…“massa” owned slaves. The group that calls itself “Colored People” want government to be the new massa.

Try thinking for yourself instead of getting all hung up on whatever baggage filled with guilt youʼre carrying around. The entire point of my book “One Tea Party at a Time” is that you are crippled – mentally and emotionally by political correctness and thus powerless to defend yourself. You are at the mercy of whatever you fear somebody else may think of you.

Williams’ original blog post (now removed), with those comments, is preserved below:

Williams’ post was, of course, prompted by the Tea Party/NAACP kerfuffle this week. But if it hadn’t come out at a moment that the Tea Party was conscious about charges of racism, or if Williams hadn’t poured gasoline on the fire in the comments section, I’m curious what, if anything, would have happened. After all, the infamous Dale Robertson “niggar” sign is still available in high-resolution on the Houston Tea Party’s website.

In the Times this morning, Matt Bai notes that much of the racial tension around the Tea Party may stem from generational differences in perceptions of race. May be. But whatever the cause, racial politics are an ongoing challenge to a movement that seeks to speak for all Americans while only rarely expelling those whose definition of “Americans” is related to skin color.

Booting Williams should be seen as a good sign by all sides. For leaders of the Tea Party movement, the only question is: was there even any debate?

(UPDATE) Tea Party Express Mark Williams responds below: