Microformats and media

A few weeks ago at Web2Open, Mary Hodder and I gave an audience-led talk on Microformats and Media Info. Fumi Yamazuki videoed it and posted it on YouTube. The web connection was a little unreliable, so I started out typing up examples by hand...

Every high school graduate?

An unctuous lexicon for the loquacious, wrought through nomenclature hubris for pecuniary chicanery. Is using "should" like this obsequious or supercilious? The taxonomy oligarchy could have been more abstemious with the latinate and greek terms, though no doubt they'd call me a vacuous jejune xenophobe for daring to abrogate their homogenous hegemony.

Even Steve Jobs can't ignore the web

When Jobs introduced the iPhone, it was clear that the platform they could not afford to ignore was web developers - however closed the platform was, having a crippled web browser was not an option. Jobs confirmed that today by saying that the SDK for iPhone applications was Web 2.0 Internet standardsWeb 2.0 + Ajax. Jobs also announced Safari 3 for Windows, so Webkit is now a platform that runs on all computers and a lot of phones.

This is another step in the Innovators Dilemma disruption of the PC computing platform by web-based applications, where learning lessons from the web, and reusing others work are important principles.

Compare and Contrast

Here's Andrew Keen's talk at Google - you can hear me asking questions and reading out that Douglas Adams quote from the front row:

In contrast, here's David Weinberger's tour de force about "Everything is Miscellaneous", which I am proud to have helped arrange.

If you only have time for one, watch Weinberger.

Keening for Culture

Andrew Keen turned up at Google today to plug his book The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. I was too late to get a copy of the book, so reviewing that will have to wait until Amazon delivers me one later this week. Instead, I listened closely and read some of his soi-disant polemics on his blog.

Like Nick Carr, and before him Andrew Orlowski and John Dvorak, Keen is a professional troll. He has realised that combining overblown rhetorical attacks on the internet with a smattering of erudite sounding quotation gets him both newspaper commissions and a lot of links from bloggers, and he is making the most of it. Listening to his arguments, I had the feeling that he was clutching at so many straws so he had enough to build his straw man.

Among the things he said were that he's nostalgic for big media, that the web is not a viable economy for artists, and we need middlemen. Talent is scarce - the value is finding talent. Web 2.0 flattened media lends itself to corruption - media without official gatekeepers is untrustworthy. Youtube is becoming one long commercial break, where the 'best content is sponsored', that most of his evidence is anecdotal, people aren't as smart or as media literate as we'd like them to be and that online anonymity is corrupting (yet he plays along with the wholly fictitious Strumpette).

Andrew Keen's real sleight of hand is that he evokes the best of newspapers and contrasts that with the mass of the web. He says that most musicians won't make money from the web, ignoring that hardly any make money from the label system he defends. Like Carr, his worldview is wholly coloured by survivorship bias.

Now, I recognise a lot of this - being an Englishman in America makes it very tempting to play the Cultural Erudition card - having recently watched the excellent The History Boys, he reminded me of Irwin, the master keen to use gobbets of quotations to support an arbitrarily contrarian premise. This kind of Oxbridge cleverness for its own sake is part of the Guardian/BBC Platonist culture that sees its role to lead the uneducated masses to better themselves, while sneering at their plebian interests. Keen continually calls Google "Orwellian", while ignoring the emotional core of 1984, which is the tension between Winston's day job at the (BBC-derived) Ministry of Information, controlling the party line, and his private diary, written "to the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different for one another and do not live alone". Michael Warner's essay "Styles of Intellectual Publics" expresses this yearning well, and Keen's denial of it to those outside the clerisy of the professional media is a betrayal of the enlightenment principles he professes.

So what did I like? I liked that he said the web was a mirror of ourselves, but I see him as a Caliban cursing his reflection, as I said five years ago:

The web we see is a reflection of ourselves individually as well as collectively.

With 2 billion pages and counting, we can never see it all, and when we venture outside the well trodden paths of the personal web we know, we are more likely to make mistakes in our maps, and come back with 'here be dragons' written across entire continents and tales of men with no heads.

I think this effect, rather than malice or wilful misrepresentation is what is behind such things as journalists' clueless articles on weblogs or congressman fulminating against the net consisting mostly of porn and piracy.

I also liked his call for media literacy, though his assumption that internet users are children who don't have it was more de haut en bas posturing. Douglas Adams put paid to this back in 1999:

Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

Update: Larry Lessig points out many of the inaccuracies of the book:

And then it hit me: Keen is our generation’s greatest self-parodist. His book is not a criticism of the Internet. Like the article in Nature comparing Wikipedia and Britannica, the real argument of Keen’s book is that traditional media and publishing is just as bad as the worst of the Internet. Here’s a book — Keen’s — that has passed through all the rigor of modern American publishing, yet which is perhaps as reliable as your average blog post: No doubt interesting, sometimes well written, lots of times ridiculously over the top — but also riddled with errors. Keen’s obvious point is to show those with a blind faith in the traditional system that it can be just as bad as the worst of the Internet. Indeed, one might say even worse, since the Internet doesn’t primp itself with the pretense that its words are promised to be true.

Larry has a wiki page for further corrections

Unceremonial writing

I was listening to Cory's podcast while cycling home, and while talking about writing, he said something that resonated strongly with me. He said that the danger with writing is that you make it ceremonial, that you have to have a cigarette, or a cup of tea, or the right music playing before you write, and that it is easy to keep accumulating ceremony, until you don't get to the writing part.
That struck home, because I stripped the styling from my blog 2 months ago, and said to myself that I'd convert it to a new template with hAtom support and revamped CSS before I posted again. I had put a ceremony in the way of writing here, so I'm going to start writing again, and maybe get around to titivating the markup later. I've been reading and listening and talking a lot over the last two months, just not writing it down here, so I'm going to start doing so again.

Cory dropped by at Google a couple of weeks back, and gave a very thoughtful talk on the future of copyrights and politics.

Also, his new novel "Little Brother" is a splendid blend of polemic, practical advice on information security and a rollicking tale with characters you can believe in, where he takes his "science fiction is imagining the present" idea to heart and gives a series of recipes for culture clashing. Cory has made writing habitual and frequent. I'll try to do so too.

CSS Naked Day

I cleared out my CSS for today, to see how clean my HTML is. I think it is time to revisit my template to make it more semantic

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the

Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Support ORG - party

The Open Rights Group' are having a Support ORG (and Party!) event in London, with public domain DJs, free culture goodie bags and a geeky raffle. The special guest speaker is Danny O'Brien, fresh from his Powerpoint Karaoke at eTech. It's a free event, but you should bring someone who could become a new ORG supporter.

If you can't make it, then you can still support ORG by buying a raffle ticket for just £2.50 (link to PayPal is at the bottom of that page). Prizes up for grabs include:

• a signed copy of Code 2.0 from Lawrence Lessig
• £150 in O’Reilly book vouchers
• a signed copy of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property from Andrew Gowers
• a signed copy of Bruce Schneier's Beyond Fear
• a set of a dozen Beatpick compilations
• a signed author's galley of Cory Doctorow's next novel, Little Brother and the opportunity to be written into it
• and even a 'very battered keyboard with a key missing and everything!', signed by our Patron, Neil Gaiman.

Many thanks to everyone who has donated! Buy your tickets on the night, or online via PayPal for £2.50 each.

Technorati Tags: Open Rights Group, ORG, party, politics

EFF BoF talk at eTech

I did a live webcast of this and recorded it, some very interesting discussions on legality of various web 2.0 services.

Technorati Tags: death threats, EFF, etech, etech07, openID, podcasting

death and rape threats are criminal

Kathy Sierra has cancelled her appearance at eTech because of death threats she has received online. I am shocked to see this happen, and I am particularly shocked because some of the people who brought me to blogging in the first place are connected. I have seen a rise in mysogynistic nastiness recently, from the casual asides on lonelygirl15's youtube comments to attack blogs like Violent Acres, but this is way beyond that, and we need to help track down those making the threats.

The history I know is that Chris Locke and Jeneane Sessum began commenting on some of Tara Hunt's posts, particularly this one, and when the conversation got heated, and 'mean kids' were discussed, Chris (and some others) set up meankids.org as a place to comment without being deleted. It became a place to post ad hominem rants.

In a post there attacking Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero, Frank Paynter pointed to the unclebobism.wordpress.com blog that Kathy mentioned specifically as making threats. Paul Ritchie mentions specifically being invited to unclebobism as the successor to meankids, then posts links to his vandalism of Kathy's Wikipedia entry. (Some links are to Technorati caches of deleted posts).

Thats what I have found out, hopefully those who know more will talk about it too.

When I am at conferences like eTech, I always pay extra attention to the female speakers, because I know how much extra work they have had to do to get up there in this field. I can't believe it has come to this.

Update: Chris and Frank have posted, distancing themselves from the comments. However, if "You Own Your Own Words", how about identifying the 'owners' of the threats and nasty posts on the blogs they administered?

Technorati Tags: death threats, Kathy Sierra

How many Newspapers did you deliver today?

So, how many podcasts did you download today? I didn't download any, Tim. My computer downloaded 4 episodes for me from different shows, and when I plugged my iPod in, it synchronised them so I had something to listen to. That's the whole point.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, podcasting

My talk at VON

I gave a talk on video, the net, feeds an microformats at VON today - I also answered questions with other panellists, but I'm only posting my bit here as I didn't get their permission. Here are my VON slides.

Thanks to Denise Howell for holding the camera for me while I spoke.

Technorati Tags: 2007, Live TV is Dead, microformats, video, VON

Social network narcissism

I just read a very thought-provoking post on narcissism by danah. It reminded me of lots of things bubbling around in my head before, such as Danny's essay on the death of privacy online and Chris Locke's ongoing documentation of the self-esteem virus (including this latest post). As for reality TV, I also see it as a grab for extreme power over a few instead of diffuse power over many by the broadcasters.

I'm also reading Publics and Counterpublics on danah's recommendation, which makes a distinction between the notion of the general public, and the different publics we are each addressing when blogging or making profiles on Social Network sites. In these activities we are performing to a public of our own, and we can feel invaded when a wider public pays attention, as in Danny's discussion above - danah has said that children's MySpace public includes 'everyone except parents and teachers'. Coping with fame becoming a smooth continuum rather than a sharp dichotomy is something else we need to work on in a power-law distributed long tail world.

Update: John Scalzi is grappling with simialr issues in his SFWA campaign.

Technorati Tags: long tail, power law, social, software, tagcamp

Hot news - people lie

Danny Ayers posts a demonstration that you can't always trust assertions people make on webpages. He seem to think that assertions people make in the <head> are somehow immune from this. But then, he is a big fan of another technology that is all about trusting assertions on webpages.

Technorati Tags: data formats, microformats, RDF, semantic web

Misunderstanding the Innovators Dilemma

Don Dodge, in saying Microsoft Will not Fall into the Innovators Dilemma, compares Google Apps for Your Domain to Office Live, but he misses Christensen's point on how successful businesses gets stuck making only incremental innovations.

The real technology disruption here is that Google Apps for Your Domain (and Google Docs, the free version) use HTML as their native format, not Microsoft's crufty legacy format, nor the equally crufty XML data-dump. Writers who use Word every day, like David Weinberger and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, get stuck trying to make it behave and judging by the comments on both those posts they aren't alone. When my friend Maf was working on Microsoft Office, he summed it up by saying "every time I tell someone I work on Word they tell me it's far too complicated, then ask for 3 more features".

Most people use Word because it is the default - they have to use it because others do too. They do not use its advanced features, they just type stuff in. Fifteen years ago, I was a keen Word user, and spent hours working out how to do well-laid out tables in it, and carefully constructing style sheets so that they behaved right. Nowadays I do those kinds of things with HTML and CSS, which are open technologies that anyone can implement and use.

HTML is now the default document format, and an easy wysiwyg editor for it is long overdue. GMail's automatic conversion of attachments to a hosted document with version control is just the kind of 'worse is better' disruption Christensen documented so well 10 years ago.

Oh, and by the way Don, Nintendo Wii is the disruptive innovator in consoles too.

Technorati Tags: HTML, Innovators Dilemma, Word, writing