Can I have an inclusive?

The CBS memos case known as 'Rathergate' has been picked over for months in the blog world, so it was a bit of a surprise to me that only now have CBS issued their report.

When told that the memos were fake, Rather said "If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story." He is thinking of a story he can put EXCLUSIVE on. But whom would he be excluding? Presumably other big media organisations.

More reflective journalists, such as Dan Gillmor, are instead thinking how they can put INCLUSIVE on their stories - they are measuring success by how many people they bring into the conversation, and they recognise it doesn't necessarily start with them.

Tags: Big Media, Citizen Journalist

Silly names department

A taxonomy is designed for putting things in a single place. They work for libraries where there is one copy of a book. Tags are designed to mark things you want later, without moving them. But, as if by magic, you can call "Accio" later and bring them to you.

So how about we call it a 'Tagsonomy' ?

Technorati developers contest winners

Congratulations to Joshua Tauber and the other entrants. Go see what they have made and try them out.

Gillmor gets Hayekian

In Distributed Journalism's Future, Dan Gillmor says:

In a posting yesterday about how bloggers helped keep the pressure on U.S. House Republicans to reconsider an ethical issue, I mentioned the way two bloggers convinced average citizens to call their members of Congress and ask how they'd voted on the issue (it was a secret ballot). The inquiring citizens then let one of the bloggers know, and he posted the running results of the tally.

I said this was an example of something I'm calling "distributed journalism." Chris Nolan called today to ask what I meant by this, and here's some of what I told her. (Here's her eWeek story on the subject.)

I think of distributed journalism as somewhat analogous to any project or problem that can be broken up into little pieces, where lots of people can work in parallel on small parts of the bigger question and collectively — and relatively quickly — bring to bear lots of individual knowledge and/or energy to the matter. Some open-source software projects work this way. The important thing is the parallel activity by large numbers of people, in service of something that would be difficult if not impossible for any one or small group of them to do alone, at least in a timely way.

This is a very good summary of Hayek's 'spontaneous order' idea — that individuals acting independently can achieve more precisely because they are working parallel on their own goals. Dan's 'people versus government' subtext here is an interesting aspect of this, reminding me of Jane Jacobs' 'Two moralities' too.

Suppose, for example, that we assemble a nationwide group of volunteers — lawyers who are familiar with statutes — and ask each of them to take a small section of one of those immense congressional bills that the members of Congress don't even read themselves. Suppose, further, that we could get this analysis posted before the House and Senate did their final votes. We might catch a lot of sleazy stuff before it became law. Today we're lucky if we know about any of it before it actually passes.

This is promising, but it is still a bit too top-down and hierarchical — someone in the middle is parcelling out the bills to lawyers to analyse, and somehow has to match each lawyers expertise with a legislative area. There is a better way, and Joshua Tauberer has already built it.
govtrack.us collates all US Government bills into a more readable form than the official sites, and it also collates and adds weblog comments on each bill (see the sidebar on this copyright bill). This way we don't need a central co-ordinator, we just need to encourage lawyers, or indeed other citizens, to review bills that they have expertise or interest in, and blog the results with a link.

Semantics in translation

Finding translations of foreign writing can be tricky.
Tim Oren writes a requirements list:

[...]a small and pragmatic first step towards the inter-language blogosphere I've been writing about recently. Specifically, the idea of an RSS tag or something of the sort that would denote posts saying the same thing in different tongues, and be bait for aggregators and crawlers interested in that information.

This set off my semantic XHTML radar. Surely we can express this with a rel attribute on a link?
A quick rummage finds me existing specification text at w3c:

Alternate

Designates substitute versions for the document in which the link occurs. When used together with the lang attribute, it implies a translated version of the document.

Lets see how this fits in with Tim's list:

Quicky Requirements

• Need both TRANSLATES and TRANSLATED-BY flavors. Since the former can be spoofed, the latter form embedded in the original doc will have more credibility.

Bidirectional links can affirm an authoritative translation, as in XFN's me attribute. We could perhaps add a original and translation values for rel if we define a new profile.

• Need Source and Target URLs. Should be able to point at whole docs or tagged spans (posts) within docs. Arbitrary linkage problematic due to limits of good ol' HTML.

The rel does this, with an implicit reference to the document you are reading. If you want subsections a <blockquote cite="..."> could be used.

• Source and Target languages, in ISO-639.2

The lang does this, in the head of the document you are reading, and as an attribute on the link.

• Translation type: Manual, Automatic. More flavors?
• Translation authority: Who or what did it. What existing designators can be coopted?
• Translation time and date stamp, and perhaps an MD-5 hash of the original. This is a placeholder for the whole versioning can o' worms. If the original is edited or updated, we have a state consistency problem...

These belong as metadata in the translated document, probably as explicit human readable text. The XOXO definition list model might be useful here.

• Should do something useful in contemporary browsers, shouldn't be relying on having RSS readers/aggregators available in all target languages

Well, exactly. That is the whole point of semantic XHTML. You can deploy all this today. Please do!

Online maps for cyclists and pedestrians

Here's a nice simple idea for any company that does online route-finding - create a version that finds routes optimised for cyclists or pedestrians.
I realise this will complicate your routing algorithms that seem to be 'head for the nearest freeway as soon as possible', but cyclists and pedestrians have different needs:

• Prefer roads with cycle paths and pavements (sidewalks)


• Take steepness into consideration as well as distance (this one is specially true for San Francisco


• Allow for short-cuts through alleys and going the wrong way up one-way streets


• Show contour lines or gradient markers


• For extra credit, link in public transport timetables - especially ones that carry bikes

Go on Jeremy, see if Yahoo maps can do this for us.

A strange view of reality

Chris Anderson passes on this David Foster Wallace quote:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

This is partly true, but I think there is something else going on too - the reality TV explosion is more than just chasing ratings through prurience. When I look at most reality TV shows, I am reminded of Greek mythology. The TV network looks down from Olympus, and plucks some ordinary mortal from obscurity, and gets him to do strange things for our amusement, unsure whether he'll see a shower of gold or be chained to a rock for eternity.

I think that the reality TV trend plays to the networks' need to feel powerful, and as they lose the wholesale power of swaying opinion and determining conversation topics, they reach for the power over individuals in a more direct and insidious way.

The notion of 'reality TV' bears some examination - 'reality' apparently consists of obeying arbitrary and complex rules, lying to your family or backstabbing your competitors, twisting the truth to put you in the best possible light in the rare hope of getting a million dollars instead of them. Anyone who has been through the TV commissioning process will see where this model of reality comes from.

Of course, this just suggests a few more possible reality shows:

• Sisyphus rocks


• Augean stable hand


• Pandora's dilemma - "take the money", "open the box"


• Blind Date with Zeus - what animal will you get?

New python toys

Bob has released PyObjC 1.2, which lets you build Cocoa apps in Python. I made my zero configuration IRC app with this last year - I must check out the new version.

Bob is also looking for a blogging tool that lets him automate markup
- he should try Ecto, which Ado added a great new feature to - it will call your Python code to filter the text before posting (also perl, shell or AppleScript).

New year's resolutions

My New Year's Resolution is to blog more.

St Luke's News

A while ago I overhauled the St Luke's website, and added a blog, but it was only tonight that I finally got together with Michael Penfield to show him how to use it. St Luke's Chapel News will have regular updates from now on.

If you're looking for an Anglican service in Silicon Valley this Christmas Eve, do come along - it is a little gem of a church in the Los Altos Hills, and has the services that feel right to the expatriate English like me.

Shiny new beginning

Congratulations to Adam and the ops team for the efficient and successful move of all the Technorati servers to their new home.

This gives us a solid hardware foundation to build new Technorati services on for the future, and Joi has news of some.

Obfuscatory marketing

I'm disappointed by Ed Felten's 15 line p2p app.
Ed is a great communicator, and a smart programmer, but in this case he has abdicated explanation for a sound-bite.
He could have written his minimal p2p app clearly and used it to teach, but instead he fell into the Obfuscator's trap of optimising for lines of code, to make a marketing splash.

Peer to Peer communication is a natural part of programming these days; writing code that looks as cryptic as that fails to make the point clearly.

Squared Circle

Flickr's Squared circle tag. It's pretty, but there is this odd feeling that there is a joke here I'm not in on.

charming leakage

When I saw Suw's announcement that she and Chris had met and were in love I was happy for them, but not surprised. Sure, I had seen them talk in chatrooms, but the real clue was some information leakage from iChat AV.
It's presence information shows you when people are online, and when they are available for audio and video chat. So for a couple of weeks beforehand, I would glance at my buddy list and whenever Suw & Chris were online, they'd both have their A/V icons dimmed, as they were together, video-chatting. Congratulations.

Ocean's boiled to order

I was asked last night where the phrase 'Boil the Ocean' came from in Tantek and my presentation on lossless xhtml - Can your website be your API?

I wasn't sure, so I searched a bit, and found this:

Will Rogers’ response to a reporter’s question on how he would deal with the Nazi U-boats:
"Boil the ocean."
"But how would you do that?" the reporter continued.
Without a beat Rogers replied, "I’m just the idea man here. Get someone else to work out the details."