Usually I’d be paying more attention to the scenery and taking more pictures, but on this trip, there’s a very clear goal, aside from getting to San Francisco: publishing one new video on Xconomy every weekday, based on our conversations about technology and entrepreneurship with people along our route. We’re calling the video series World Wide Wade Goes West, and you can check out the whole sequence at YouTube.com/xconomywest.

My friend and co-pilot Graham Gordon Ramsay and I made a couple of test videos before we left Boston, and they came out well. But I wasn’t quite sure if it would be possible, logistically or physiologically, to do the same thing every day on the road. After all, we’re compressing the whole shooting, editing, and uploading process into a single day for each video while simultaneously covering 700 to 800 miles of highway. But we’ve managed it so far, at the cost of a certain amount of sleep.

And we’ve had a ton of fun in the process. Our interviewees have all been fantastic, offering great insights and being incredibly generous hosts and good sports on top of it all. It’s been a pleasure and an education to work with Graham, who is always full of creative ideas about how to get the shots we need under the conditions given to us at each site. And I’ve had fun learning how to be an on-camera personality. (I’m keeping the blooper reel under lock and key.)

Check out this Flickr photoset to see pictures from our trip (mostly taken by Graham.) And here are links to the whole video series:

Pilot/Preview Episode (Recorded May 8, posted June 14)
Episode I: Gloucester, MA (Recorded May 29, posted June 28; interviewee: Mark Nelson)
Episode II: Rochester, NY (Recorded June 27, posted June 29; interviewee: David Cook)
Episode III: Who’s Wade? (Recorded June 29, posted June 30; interviewee: Wade Roush)
Episode IV: Torch Lake, MI (Recorded June 29, posted July 1; interviewees: Sharon and Dean Branson)
Episode V: Minneapolis, MN (Recorded June 30, posted July 2; interviewee: Oliver Zhou)

At least two more episodes are coming next week — Wall, SD, and Denver, CO. So keep an eye on Xconomy and the YouTube channel!

A lot of people have contributed their time, effort, generosity, and counsel to this project, and I want to thank them personally:

Fan Bi
Bruce Bigelow
Dean Branson
Sharon Branson
Biyeun Buczyk
Bob Buderi
Greg Calkins
Heinrich Christensen
David Cook
Winnie Dahlgren
Bill Darmon
Richard Freierman
Maria Gentile
Bill Ghormley
Dave Hahn
Bettina Hein
Greg Huang
Erin Kutz
JL
Howard Lovy
Mark Nelson
Jon Pierce
Jules Pieri
Graham Gordon Ramsay
Lauren Ramsay
Patricia Roush
Paul Roush
Alexa Scordato
Gregg Sorensen
Luke Timmerman
Steve Woit
Rebecca Zacks
Oliver Zhou

We put the pilot for the whole series online back on June 14, the day we launched the San Francisco site, and the series will get underway in earnest starting Monday, June 28. You can watch the daily posts at www.xconomy.com/san-francisco or subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/xconomywest. I hope you’ll follow along as we wind our way through Massachusetts, New York, Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and of course California, stopping along the way to talk with real people about how technology figures in their lives, what the climate for entrepreneurship is like in their communities, and whether the innovators Xconomy chronicles daily are serving their real needs.

The debut of Xconomy San Francisco is a big moment for me, personally, because it represents a chance for me to move back to San Francisco after four years away from The City. I’ve loved being back in Boston since 2007; it was the ideal place for a career switch to online-only journalism. The opportunity to work with Bob, Xconomy co-founder Rebecca Zacks, and the whole Xconomy team has been amazingly fun and educational. And it’s been a huge privilege to cover the burgeoning Boston-area entrepreneurial scene, which is full of brilliant and friendly people. But as Jeanette McDonald sang in her paean to San Francisco in the archetypal 1936 disaster movie, “Other places only make me love you best / Tell me you’re the heart of all the golden west.”

Together with my colleagues—principally, Xconomy Seattle Editor and National Biotechnology Editor Luke Timmerman—I’ll be operating the San Francisco site remotely for a couple of weeks while I wrap up some final tasks here in Boston. (After all, I can’t miss the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship this Thursday!) Then I’ll be hitting the road for San Francisco—and publishing a video travelogue series along the way (details on that here, along with the pilot video in the series).

But as far as I know, nobody has really considered the effect our malpractice system has on the people who inevitably have to decide each case: jurors.

That’s the point of my Xconomy column from yesterday. Last Tuesday, I completed three weeks of jury service on a medical malpractice trial in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston. It was a heart-wrenching case that pitted an elderly pastor from a Boston suburb against three doctors who treated him during an infection-related crisis seven years ago. The plaintiff’s attorney argued, among other things, that the doctors failed to order the proper imaging studies that would have detected the infection that ultimately inflicted permanent damage on the pastor’s spinal cord, leaving him disabled.

Now, obviously the pastor and his family are the ones who have suffered all these years with the consequences of the episode. The burden on the 14 jurors was, by comparison, negligible. But the experience did give all of us a disturbing look inside both the medical system and the malpractice system, and forced us to make an awkward and difficult choice. In the end, what we had to decide was not whether the pastor deserved some kind of compensation for the obvious shortcomings in the care he received, but whether the three doctors named as defendants in the suit were negligent.

Ultimately, we found that the evidence did not support this claim, which meant that the pastor and his family will get no damage award. It was the black-or-white, all-or-nothing nature of the decision we had to make that bothered me and, I believe, the other jurors. It was obvious that the pastor’s various caregivers made decisions all along the line that, in retrospect, were the wrong ones. Yet it was impossible for the jury to conclude in this case that missing a diagnosis constituted malpractice, or to pin responsibility on any single individual in the chain.

In the end, “justice” was served, but fairness was not. I emerged from the trial feeling that we’d performed our duty well as jurors, given the limits within which we were forced to navigate. But I also feel a heightened cynicism about the malpractice system, which (no offense to the excellent attorneys involved in this case) seems mainly designed to prop up the incomes of lawyers. It’s too bad malpractice reform wasn’t a part of President Obama’s healthcare reform package. There might be more pressure for change if it the flaws in the system were exposed to wider view, instead of just 14 jurors at a time.

Two developments last week (the first official week of Mass Mobile Month) were especially exciting. First there was the release of the official Mass Mobile Month iPhone app, a handy portable guide to all of the mobile-related events this month and their venues. Cambridge, MA-based Swift Mobile created the app; it’s a variation on the apps they’re developing for the travel and meeting industry (see our coverage of Swift Mobile on Xconomy).

Second, I had the opportunity last week to meet Kathy Kiely, president of the Ad Club, the trade association for marketing and advertising companies in New England, and record an interview about Mass Mobile Month for The Big Orange Couch, the club’s online video series. I hate watching myself on video, but I think this one actually came out pretty well! It’s embedded below.

One of the highlights of Mass Mobile Month is Xconomy’s own Mobile Madness event on March 9. If you haven’t signed up yet, do it now—last I checked, the event was nearly sold out. Unfortunately, after spending the last few months organizing Mobile Madness, I may wind up missing some or all of it, as I’ve been seated as a juror for a trial in Boston that’s expected to last several weeks.

I want to thank all of the organizations who have joined Xconomy in promoting the Mass Mobile Month events. All of these organizations recognize that by working together, we can take Boston’s amazing cluster of talent and ideas for mobile innovation and make it into something even more remarkable and world-changing.

The main goal behind publishing the e-book was to bring the columns together in one easy-to-read package. In a column published yesterday (which is also Chapter 80 in the book) I describe the process of publishing Pixel Nation in some detail. It wasn’t easy. I’m glad I did it, because I learned a lot of new stuff about text editing tools and the workings of Amazon’s digital publishing platform. But the experience definitely proved that self-publishing an e-book isn’t for the faint of heart. If you’re an author interested in doing this but you’re not versed in HTML, I’d recommend hiring a digital publishing consultant, somebody like Joshua Tallent of eBook Architects. (Tallent’s book Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide to Formatting Books for the Amazon Kindle was an indispensable guide as I went through my project.)

To give you a sense of what’s in the book, here’s the table of contents.

Introduction
1: Reinventing Our Visual World, Pixel By Pixel
2: The Coolest Tools for Trawling & Tracking the Web
3: Google Earth Grows a New Crop of 3-D Buildings, and Other Web Morsels to Savor
4: Turn Your HDTV into a Digital Art Canvas
5: Unbuilt Boston: The Ghost Cloverleaf of Canton
6: An Elegy for the Multimedia CD-ROM Stars
7: The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Screens
8: Science Below the Surface
9: Gazing Through Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope
10: Megapixels, Shmegapixels: How to Make Great Gigapixel Images With Your Humble Digital Camera
11: You Say Staccato, I Say Sfumato: A Reply to Nicholas Carr
12: Space Needle Envy: A Bostonian’s Ode to Seattle
13: You’re Listening to Radio Lab—Or You Should Be
14: Can Evernote Make You into a Digital Leonardo?
15: Are You Ready to Give Up Cable TV for Internet Video?
16: Turn your iPhone or iPod into a Portable University
17: In Defense of the Endangered Tree Octopus, and Other Web Myths
18: Pogue on the iPhone 3G: A Product Manual You Won’t Be Able to Put Down
19: Photographing Spaces, Not Scenes, with Microsoft’s Photosynth
20: What Web Journalists Can Learn from Comics
21: ZvBox’s Unhappy Marriage of PC and HDTV
22: GPS Treasure Hunting with Your iPhone 3G
23: Boston Unblurred: Debunking the Google Maps Censorship Myth
24: Four Ways Amazon Could Make Kindle 2.0 a Best Seller
25: Playful vs. Preachy: Sizing Up TV’s New Science Dramas
26: Is Brown the New Green? Why Boston’s Ugly, Expensive Macallen Condos Shouldn’t Be a Model For Green Buildings
27: The Encyclopedia of Life: Can You Build A Wikipedia for Biology Without the Weirdos, Windbags, and Whoppers?
28: In Google Book Search Settlement, Readers Lose
29: In the World of Total Information Awareness, “The Last Enemy” Is Us
30: Attention, Startups: Move to New England. Your Gay Employees Will Thank You.
31: Springpad Wants to Be Your Online Home for the Holidays, And After
32: Speak & Spell: New Apps Turn Phones into Multimedia Search Appliances
33: Former “Daily Show” Producer Karlin is Humorist Behind WonderGlen Comedy Site
34: The 3-D Graphics Revolution of 1859—and How to See in Stereo on Your iPhone
35: Ditch That USB Cable: The Coolest Apps for Sending Your Photos Around Wirelessly
36: Have Xtra Fun Making Movies with Xtranormal
37: E-Book Readers on the iPhone? They’re Not Quite Kindle Slayers Yet
38: WonderGlen Comedy Portal Designed to Plumb Internet’s Unreality, Says Karlin
39: How I Declared E-Mail Bankruptcy, and Discovered the Bliss of an Empty Inbox
40: Public Radio for People Without Radios
41: Plinky: The Cure for Blank Slate Syndrome
42: Massachusetts Technology Industry Needs a New Deal, Not a New Brand
43: Three New Reasons To Put Off Buying a Kindle
44: Top 9 Tech Updates: Photosynth, Geocaching, Google Earth, and More
45: Google Voice: It’s the End of the Phone As We Know It
46: Tweets from the Edge: The Ins and Outs (and Ups and Downs) of Twitter
47: Will Hunch Help You Make Decisions? Signs Point to Yes
48: Boston Can Survive, Even Thrive, Without Today’s Globe
49: RunKeeper’s Mad Dash to the Marathon Finish
50: Cutting the Cable: It’s Easier Than You Think
51: Why Kindle 2 is the Goldilocks of E-Book Readers
52: People Doing Strange Things With Soldering Irons: A Visit to Hackerspace
53: Will Quick Hit Score Big? Behind the Scenes with Foxborough’s Newest Team
54: Are You a Victim of On Demand Disorder?
55: German Web 2.0 Clothing Retailer Spreadshirt Finds Boston Fits It to a T
56: Boston’s Digital Entertainment Economy Begins to Sense Its Own Strength
57: The Eight (Seven…Six?) Information Devices I Can’t Live Without
58: Personal Podcasting with AudioBoo, UK’s “Twitter for Voice”
59: Art Isn’t Free: The Tragedy of the Wikimedia Commons
60: Project Tuva or Bust: How Microsoft’s Spin on Feynman Could Change the Way We Learn
61: Shareaholic Becomes the Link-Sharing Tool of Choice
62: Startups Give E-mail a Big Boost on the iPhone with ReMail and GPush
63: Why It’s Crazy for Authors to Keep Their Books Off the Kindle
64: A Manifesto for Speed
65: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part One
66: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Two
67: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Three
68: Ansel Adams Meets Apple: The Camera Phone Craze in Photography
69: How to Launch a Professional-Looking Blog on a Shoestring
70: Facing Up to Facebook
71: The Kauffman Foundation: Bringing Entrepreneurship Up to Date in Kansas City
72: Sony, Google Point the Way Toward a More Open Future for E-Books
73: Is it Real or Is It High Dynamic Range?
74: Using Google’s Building Maker to Change the Face of Boston
75: Digital Magazines Emerge—But Glossy Paper Publishers Haven’t Turned the Page on the Past
76: Tablet Fever: How Apple Could Go Where No Computer Maker Has Gone Before
77: Entrepreneurship May Work Like A Clock, But It Still Needs Winding
78: The Apple Paradox: How a Company That’s So Closed Can Foster So Much Open Innovation
79: What’s So Magical About an Oversized iPhone? Plenty—And There’s More to Come
80: Kindle Conniptions: How I Published My First E-Book

What makes being Slashdotted a special joy, though, is that the Slashdot community is notoriously questioning, critical, and sometimes even a little biting. So when you find out you’ve been Slashdotted, you’re simultaneously praising the gods of cyberspace and bracing for an onslaught of snark.

If a visitor from Slashdot doesn’t like the look, feel, or style of your site or your article, they won’t hesitate to let you know. One Xconomy article that got Slashdotted a while back was a multi-page piece, and all of the comments from Slashdot visitors were complaints about how annoying it was to have to hit “next page” three or four times to read the whole piece. Today, the very first comment on my Apple article from a Slashdot visitor—in fact, the comment that tipped me off that we’d been Slashdotted—focused on an (admittedly gratuitous) neologism in the first paragraph (the word was “mediasphere”) and on how amateurish the column logo looks. (I know that, but in my defense, the goofiness is partly intentional. And I’m planning on finding someone to design a better logo.)

So far the Slashdot entry about my piece has generated 526 comments on Slashdot, compared to about 20 comments on Xconomy itself. Sometimes I wish readers would stick with Xconomy’s own comment section to talk about our pieces. But on the other hand, a lot of the discussion over at Slashdot boils down to vituperative name-calling—as is the case with most online discussions involving Apple or Microsoft (not just those at Slashdot)—so it’s probably best kept within Slashdot’s walls.

I laughed at David Pogue’s lines today, in a blog post about reader response to his review of the Google Nexus One phone: “Veteran tech columnists know one thing very well indeed: If you write anything positive about an Apple product or negative about a Microsoft product, you get buried by hate mail and personal attacks. The only worse result is if you say something negative about an Apple product or positive about a Microsoft product, in which case you get exposed to the true ugliness of the human spirit (and sometimes, in fact, physical threats).” All true—and I guess I feel like I escaped today relatively unscathed.

“Think about the books you have at home and how you organize them,” Orwant said. “Some of you may not organize them at all. Some of you may organize them based on the person who reads them—Mom’s books, Dad’s books, the kids’ books. Some may organize by subject or genre. I’ll tell you one way you don’t organize them: you don’t say, ‘Here are the books I bought from Barnes & Noble, here are the books I bought from Amazon, and here are the books that were given to me as gifts.’ We need to be very careful to make sure that we don’t create an environment in which digital books end up that way.”

What Orwant was talking about, of course, is the siloing going on in the nascent e-book industry—the fact that if you buy an e-book for your Amazon Kindle, you can’t read it on a competing e-book device such as Barnes & Noble’s new Nook, or vice-versa. That’s because book publishers, who are understandably spooked by the music industry’s implosion, are worried about losing revenue if people can copy, transfer, and share their digital content too easily. It’s also because many of the companies getting into the e-book market aren’t happy just selling you a gadget or a couple of megabytes of digital content—they want you to buy into a whole ecosystem (i.e., the Kindle family of devices and the 360,000 books formatted for them, or the Nook and its claimed one million titles).

Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-book deviceAnd so far that plan is working, at least on early adopters like me. I bought a Kindle 2 in May, and since then I’ve purchased about $120 worth of books for the device, plus subscriptions to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and multiple Sunday editions of the New York Times. All of this content is protected by digital rights management (DRM) technology that would prevent me from opening it on, say, a Nook or a Sony Reader device—and that quite likely will prevent me from reading my books 10 or 20 years down the road, when my Kindle will be dead or obsolete and reading technologies and content formats will undoubtedly be completely different. But those restrictions haven’t kept me from scarfing up more e-books: since I became a Kindle user I’ve bought about 20 Kindle editions and exactly four physical books (two that weren’t available as Kindle editions, and two that were gifts for other people).

But while I’m not particularly concerned about the fact that my Amazon e-books are tied to my Amazon hardware (hey, I’ve also bought hundreds of songs and videos from Apple’s iTunes Store that only play on my Apple MacBook and my Apple iPhone), a lot of people are more skeptical toward the Amazon model. As e-books gradually catch up to and surpass physical books as the main way many people access book-length content—which they will, mark my words—continued reliance on proprietary formats and DRM could wind up fragmenting our common literary inheritance in exactly the way that Orwant warned about.

But I have a feeling the story isn’t over, and that market pressures may eventually push all of the big players in the still-young e-book business toward a more open future…

This is an excerpt from the October 30, 2009 edition of my “World Wide Wade” column on Xconomy. To read the rest, please proceed to Xconomy.

Internet Archive director and co-founder Brewster Kahle made the announcement at the end of a presentation about the organization’s philosophy of open e-book publishing. OLPC being local, it was a hot story—and thankfully, the Boston Public Library has excellent, free Wi-Fi , so I was able to file a story right from the auditorium. (Which reminded me of another OLPC-related scoop that I filed live from an auditorium, on the unveiling of the foundation’s second-generation laptop design. That one brought Xconomy a huge amount of traffic after it got Slashdotted.)

The e-book session was hosted by prolific New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. I got a chance to meet Pogue in person after the event, and was impressed (as always) by his friendly, extroverted, at times hyperkinetic demeanor.

Pogue took a moment from the e-book session to perform a little musical number parodying Steve Jobs and Apple, and I’ve included my video of the performance below. The enigmatic company is rumored to be working on a tablet-sized device that could become a competitor for existing e-book reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook. Pogue said that as far as he was concerned, the Apple tablet is still just a rumor—but he couldn’t resist using the occasion of the panel to do a rendition of a song he once wrote about Jobs’ departure from, and return to, Apple in the 1990s.

[Update, 10/30/09: My full writeup of the Boston Book Festival session, including material from an interview with Sony Reader president Steve Haber, is up on Xconomy -- see "Sony, Google Point the Way Toward a More Open Future for E-Books."]