Grandiose software projects rarely succeed, and when government’s involved the long odds get even longer. In the new Baseline, Laton McCartney chronicles the disintegration of the vast, multibillion-dollar project aimed at overhauling England’s health system. Four years into the 10-year effort, called the National Program for Information Technology, the original $12 billion budget has already ballooned to at least $24 billion, which is more than it cost to dig the tunnel under the English Channel. Two members of parliament recently wrote that the project “is currently sleepwalking toward disaster. It is far behind schedule. Projected costs have spiraled. Key software systems have little chance of ever working properly. Clinical staff is losing confidence in it.”

On this side of the Atlantic, we’ve had plenty of governmental IT disasters as well, including the IRS’s systems modernization project and the FBI’s ill-fated “Virtual Case File” system. And now we have another to add to the list, and in some ways it’s the most mind-boggling of all. A Senate Committee is scheduled to have a hearing Thursday on the star-crossed “Defense Travel System” (DTS) being built by the Defense Department. Launched in 1998, the project is currently four years behind schedule and has cost $474 million, $200 million more than the original budget. And few people in the Department of Defense show any particular desire to use the system.

So what is DTS designed to do, exactly? It’s a system for booking airline tickets and making other travel arrangements. Yep, the government has spent nearly a half billion dollars to essentially replicate the functionality of the many Internet travel sites that are already up and running and used daily by millions of people. And after eight years, it’s still not working. A spokesman for the main contractor, Northrup Grumman, tells ABC News, “This is a program that the American taxpayer, the Department of Defense can be proud of.” Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn begs to differ. He calls DTS “a hoax on the American taxpayer.” His colleague Norm Coleman, of Minnesota, says, “DTS does not list all available flights and does not always identify the lowest available fares, does not take rail reservations, does not reserve hotel rooms or rental cars.” He says that only 17% of 755,000 trips recently booked by Department of Defense workers were processed by the system; the rest went through travel agents.

What’s incredible is that this is a perfect application to be supplied as a service over the web – all the information, after all, is already out there. Indeed, Rearden Commerce, which yesterday announced a big partnership with American Express, offers a state-of-the-art, software-as-a-service system for managing travel and other personal business expenses. It interconnects with the myriad web-based systems run by airlines, car rental agencies, hotels, airport limo companies, package-delivery firms and so on to provide a one-stop portal for employees. Companies can build purchasing rules into the system, routing employees to preferred suppliers or specially negotiated deals, for instance, while still giving users the simplicity and flexibility they’ve come to expect in booking travel and arranging other services online. I asked Rearden CEO Patrick Grady what he thought about the travails of the DTS project. He offered two words in reply: “outrageous” and “unreal.”

It’s one thing to fail in crafting a complex software system that hasn’t existed before. It’s another thing to waste huge amounts of money and time trying to build a proprietary software system when all you needed to do was launch a browser.

The online journal Edge features a curious essay by Hubert Burda, the German publishing magnate. On the internet today, Burda writes, “The opportunities of personal representation and self-presentation have become democratized to an extent that would have been unimaginable many years ago. Nowadays anyone who wants to draw attention to themselves and communicate to the public an image of themselves can to all intents and purposes do so.”

Burda places the contemporary phenomenon in a historical context. In the early 15th century, when portraiture came into its own as a genre, “Whoever managed to climb the social ladder automatically won the right, so to speak, to have their own portrait painted, which in earlier times had been the preserve of the saints.” A portrait was a “claim to power and status.” In Holbein’s famous painting of Georg Gisze, for example, the subject is surrounded by the trappings of a successful middle-class merchant, from an oriental rug to a gold clock. The portrait marks his place “on the cutting-edge of society.”

Portrait painters flourished for a few centuries, until they were displaced by photographers in the 19th century. “People who wanted to have their portraits taken,” writes Burda, “felt that a photograph could give them a more faithful visual representation of the image of themselves that they wanted to see than a painting could.” But the painted portrait didn’t go away. In fact, it flourished again in the early years of the 20th century, as artists like Klimt and Picasso distinguished their work from the realism of photography by experimenting with new, more abstract forms of representation. Later in the century, Andy Warhol combined painting and photography in his famous silkscreened portraits of celebrities. The portrait became an advertisement of a self that was no more than an advertisement.

Which brings us to the present, in which, as Burda puts it, “the better known your face is in the new economy of attention seeking, the higher your market value and your personal rate of return. ‘How many entries in Google do you have?’ is a question that today’s twentysomethings ask each other in order to check how important they are. The aim of other questions, such as ‘How many people read my weblog and respond to it?’ or ‘How many photos are there of me on the Flickr platform?’ is to ascertain how one’s role and standing are being portrayed and relayed.”

At that point, frustratingly, Burda’s essay peters out. He doesn’t illuminate what the past might tell us about today’s “democratization” of self-presentation, other than to say “the claim to representation made by the aspiring classes has remained and can serve as a marker for the development of portrait forms over the course of the 21st century.”

I’m not sure that I see, in today’s self-portraits on MySpace or YouTube or Flickr, or in the fetishistic collecting of virtual tokens of attention, the desire to mark one’s place in a professional or social stratum. What they seem to express, more than anything, is a desire to turn oneself into a product, a commodity to be consumed. And since, as I wrote earlier, “self-commoditization is in the end indistinguishable from self-consumption,” the new portraiture seems at its core narcissistic. The portraits are advertisements for a commoditized self, though they’re presented without Warhol’s cruel and clarifying irony.

In a comment on Burda’s open-ended essay, Douglas Rushkoff writes, “While the original renaissance celebrated the ‘individual,’ we may be moving into a cultural era that favors the collective or the network over individuality. No, we don’t see a whole lot of evidence for this in the current, adolescent, exhibitionist culture of YouTube. But I do believe it is the logical next step for a generation growing up with fame and individual recognition as such clearly temporary and ethereal phenomena … As the millions of former ‘individuals’ reproducing their images online get used to this temporality, their attention will turn instead to the project they are building together. The network itself will become more interesting as a collaborative creation than any particular individual within it – just as museums became more interesting than any of their individual works. And it’s then – during our own version of the Baroque era – that we’ll find out what mass enlightenment might really be about.”

Even discounting the surpassingly strange idea “that museums became more interesting than any of their individual works,” Rushkoff’s comment seems deeply wrong, an expression of a vague personal yearning disconnected from the reality before him. It is the very tissue-like quality of the online self, its ready disposability, that is the source of its appeal. And a merging of nothingnesses creates not mass enlightenment, whatever that might be, but simply a greater nothingness. “In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote Yeats. But it’s in the online dream-self that responsibilities end.

The commercialization of Second Life has hit a speed bump. A new software program, called CopyBot, allows residents of the virtual world to make exact copies of other residents’ creations. The knockoffs threaten the livelihoods of the many entrepreneurs, as well as big companies, that have set up shop selling clothes, trinkets, and other goods in the popular fairy land. As an irate Caliandras Pendragon writes at Second Life Insider, “Those people who are living the dream that is promoted in every article, of earning a RL [real life] income from SL creations, are now living a nightmare in which their source of income may soon be worthless. That’s not to speak of big commercial companies who have paid anything up to 1,000,000 dollars to have their product reproduced in loving detail, who will discover that every Tom, Dick or Harriet may rip off their creation for nothing – and then sell it as their own … If someone wanted to destroy the economy of SL I don’t think they could have found a better way.”

The furor took an ugly turn late last night when, according to the Second Life Herald, a “seething mob” surrounded a CopyBot operation run by Second Life resident GeForce Go. The mob shouted that Go was “ruining their Second Life.” Fearing for her safety, Go closed down her shop and sold her land. In a subsequent “tumultous meeting with dozens of angry and fearful residents all talking at once,” Second Life official Robin Linden “sought to allay fears of any further concern about mass copyright violations.”

Now officially banned by Linden Lab, the company that operates Second Life, CopyBot was, according to reporter Adam Reuters of Reuters’ Second Life bureau, “originally created by libsecondlife, a Linden Lab-supported open source project to reverse engineer the Second Life software … Amid increasing criticism, the group moved to pull the Copybot source code, but on Monday evening Copybot was put up for sale on the online marketplace SLExchange, raising the prospect that it could become widespread.” The resident who is selling the bot, Prim Revolution, demonstrated the machine’s ability by making a precise clone of Adam Reuters himself. Revolution defended the use of CopyBot, saying, “I think the idea of clones and bots is very cool, and I’ll be adding more new features for things like automated go-go dancers at clubs.”

Second Life watcher Kevin Lim, of the University of Buffalo’s School of Informatics, compares CopyBot to the revolutionary Replicator in Star Trek, which “can create any inanimate matter, as long as the desired molecular structure is on file, but it cannot create antimatter, dilithium, or a living organism of any kind.” Lim notes that “after such a machine was invented, currency as we knew it ceased to function. Since everyone had the capability to create (replicate) anything they desire, capitalism as we knew it died, and the new dawn of perfect Marxian philosophy was adopted by the Federation.”

The CopyBot controversy seems to herald a deeper crisis in Second Life, a struggle over the identity, the very essence, of the virtual land. Will it remain a freewheeling utopian community operating by its own rules, or will it follow the pattern of the web itself and become an essentially commercial operation, a virtual shopping mall filled with advertisements and staged PR events? Is CopyBot a ripoff machine that threatens to destroy Second Life, or is it a sharing machine that would save the community’s soul?

More.

“Hyperlinks,” David Weinberger wrote in the Cluetrain Manifesto, “subvert hierarchy … Hyperlinks have no symmetry, no plan. They are messy.”

I found those words through – surprise – a hyperlink. And I found that link, via another link, on Doc Searls’s blog, where today he writes, as I wrote yesterday, on Ted Leonsis’s strategy of using a blog to manipulate what people see when they google his name. I had called Leonsis’s strategy Machiavellian, and asserted it ran counter to the conversational ethic of the cluetrainers. Searls agrees, and disagrees: “Ted is being both Machiavelli and Cluetrain compliant. (It isn’t like the guy isn’t getting clues, is it? He’s not bunkered down in what Dr. Weinberger aptly called Fort Business.)”

The Cluetrain Manifesto was written at the end of the 90s, and it catches and reflects the spirit of that heady time. Back then, the hyperlink did feel like a subversive tool, a virtualized and more subtle version of a Molotov Cocktail. There didn’t seem to be much symmetry or plan to linking. It was messy – a free-for-all. And for those of us who aren’t fond of bureaucracies or artificial hierarchies, it was liberating. Or, at least, fun.

But can we still say that hyperlinks subvert hierarchies, that they have neither symmetry nor plan? I think Doc Searls needs to look a little more closely at what Leonsis’s blog strategy is telling us. He was able to control the conversation, to get the content he wanted to the top of Google’s results, through a simple, three-pronged strategy for attracting links: use his position as a leading business executive to gain attention, use his meetings with celebrities to gain attention, and use links to popular bloggers to gain attention. Leading business executive, celebrities, popular bloggers: This is entirely about using social or professional hierarchies to manipulate hierarchies of information. It’s about understanding the plan and the symmetry that have come to define – not entirely, but in large part – the flow of information on today’s PageRanked web. It’s about seeing the structure in the mirage of messiness. It’s about being “clued in,” though not at all in the cluetrainers’ sense of that phrase.

What Leonsis is doing, in short, is working the system. And isn’t that what climbing and controlling hierarchies have always been about?

When it comes to CEO blogs, I’ve long been a skeptic. For one thing, most CEOs are godawful writers. For another, they don’t have much spare time. And for another, a blog, for a top executive, usually just ends up making you a better target. As is so often the case in life, it’s better to hold your tongue.

But an article about AOL’s Ted Leonsis in today’s Washington Post is giving me pause. Leonsis was miffed “to see that whenever he typed his name into Google’s search box, the results were a hodgepodge of news stories.” He wasn’t in control of the message, and for a topdog executive, losing control over how you’re viewed is a very dangerous thing. So he decided that he would “figure out a way to manipulate Google’s complicated search engine to put the information he wanted people to see at the top of his results.” He quickly realized that blogging would be a great way to accomplish that goal. He knew that a blog by a bigwig like himself would attract a lot of links from other bloggers, and thus lift his blog toward the top of search-engine rankings. To magnify the effect, he wisely started dropping into his postings the names of all the celebrities he meets as well as a lot of links to other popular blogs, both of which drew even more links to his blog.

Bingo. Now, his blog and his official biography are the first things you see when you google his name. “My job is done!” he says, with well-deserved pride.

Leonsis is what you might call a defensive blogger. His main goal isn’t to enter into a “conversation” with the AOL “community,” but just to gain more control over the results that show up when people google him. In fact – and this really turns the whole corporate blogging ethos on its pointy little head – Leonsis is blogging not to increase the flow of information but to narrow it, for his own professional benefit.

Now I realize that a lot of people out in the blogosphere will take offense at what Leonsis is doing. He’s not exactly taking a ride on the old cluetrain here. But you have to admit that from a business perspective it’s a brilliant strategy. It’s exactly what Machiavelli would have done if there’d been a blogosphere around back in the early 16th century. Other executives that want to gain more control over how they’re portrayed on the Net are going to have to give this idea a hard look. The best defense may be a good blog.

If Yale professor Yochai Benkler woke up with a nasty hangover this morning, we can forgive him. He was probably out late last night at some posh New Haven nightclub celebrating the latest, and some might say greatest, manifestation of his beloved “social production” model of creating cultural goods. The Ladybank Company of Distillers, in Ladybank, Scotland, has announced it is pioneering the communal, Internet-enabled production of Scotch whisky. “As a ‘co-creation’ company,” explains a press release, “Ladybank enables a group of like-minded people to create a product, service or even a community that is free from the normal rules of commerce, because it is driven by their shared passion and shaped by their lifestyle choices.”

The company is setting up an “online boardroom” to facilitate the harnessing of collective booze-making intelligence. Speaking proudly of a growing “virtual community of whisky lovers,” James Thomson, the founder of this wikipedia of tipple, says, “At Ladybank we believe the community spirit we have created among the members will really inform what we do as a business and our online presence will also encourage members to engage with the Ladybank community and exchange their thoughts on how the project should progress.” On its blog, the company says that its “real foundations” are not its physical plants but “the people we have and how they are behind the project and interacting with it.” We are the Web. And now we are the Distillery, too.

No word yet on whether they’ll open source their recipes.

Web 2.0 is so over. First came the tepid reviews of the third annual 2.0 boondoggle. “If you were looking to learn something new,” sniffed GigaOm’s Liz Gannes, “this week’s Web 2.0 Summit was not the place to be.” Wrote a jaded Scott Karp, “there were few revelations, few moments where you had the exhilarating experience of seeing something that was about to change the world. Every conversation I had began with discussing the underwhelming nature of Web 2.0.” “I didn’t come away from the conference having learned much,” confessed Richard MacManus, who felt the highlight of the event “was seeing Lou Reed play live.” It was Lou himself, though, who put it most bluntly, telling the Web 2.0ers, “You got 20 minutes.”

But the nail in the coffin comes in tomorrow’s New York Times, which features a big article by John Markoff on – yes! – Web 3.0. Formerly known as the semantic web, but now rebranded for mass consumption, Web 3.0 promises yet another Internet revolution. It would, Markoff writes, “provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion … In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.”

Personally, I’m overjoyed that Web 3.0 is coming. When dogcrap 2.0 sites like PayPerPost and ReviewMe start getting a lot of attention, you know you’re seeing the butt end of a movement. (There’s a horrible metaphor trying to get out of that last sentence, but please ignore it.) Besides, the arrival of 3.0 kind of justifies the whole 2.0 ethos. After all, 2.0 was about escaping the old, slow upgrade cycle and moving into an age of quick, seamless rollouts of new feature sets. If we can speed up software generations, why not speed up entire web generations? It doesn’t matter if 3.0 is still in beta – that makes it all the better, in fact.

But, seriously, Markoff’s piece is a thought-provoking one. As he describes it, Web 3.0 will be about mining “meaning,” rather than just data, from the web by using software to discover associations among far-flung bits of information:

the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

Web 3.0 thus promises to be much more useful than 2.0 (not to mention 1.0) and to render today’s search engines more or less obsolete. But there’s also a creepy side to 3.0, which Markoff only hints at. While it will be easy for you to mine meaning about vacations and other stuff, it will also be easy for others to mine meaning about you. In fact, Web 3.0 promises to give marketers, among others, an uncanny ability to identify, understand and manipulate us – without our knowledge or awareness. If you’d like a preview, watch Dan Frankowski’s presentation You Are What You Say and Oren Etzioni’s presentation All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Google, and then connect the dots. (Thanks to Greg Linden for those links.)

Markoff quotes artificial-intelligence-promoter Danny Hillis, who calls Web 3.0 technologies “spooky.” If Danny Hillis thinks they’re spooky, they’re spooky. But I’m looking on the bright side: At least I’ll have more material for the old blog.

One last thing: I’m claiming the trademarks on Web 3.0 Conference, Web 3.0 Summit, Web 3.0 Camp, Web 3.0 Uncamp, and Web 3.0 Olde Tyme Hoedown.