OpenSocial Hackathon next week in SF

OpenSocial Hackathon hosted by Six Apart

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 4:00 PM - 11:00 PM

Six Apart 548 4th St,San Francisco, California

Find out the latest news about OpenSocial's 0.6 release and what Shindig and Cajoling can do for your next web application
Work with developers of OpenSocial Social Networks to get your applications up and running.
What to bring:

• Your laptop
• Your web application code or your social networking idea

What we provide:

• Wifi and power
• Help getting into OpenSocial 0.6 sandboxe
• Developers from at least Google, MySpace, Hi5, Plaxo, and Six Apart
• and don't forget pizza!

Hosted at Six Apart's 4th street offices, it's a short walk from Caltrain and indeed the Macworld Expo.
Six Apart's post
RSVP at Upcoming

Identity Theft is not a crime

Fraud however, is.

Jeremy Clarkson scoffed at the UK Government data leak debacle, and published his bank details in The Sun:

"All you'll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I've never known such a palaver about nothing," he told readers.

But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times column.

"I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account," he said.

"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.

"I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake."

Police were called in to search for the two discs, which contained the entire database of child benefit claimants and apparently got lost in the post in October 2007.

They were posted from HM Revenue and Customs offices in Tyne and Wear, but never turned up at their destination - the National Audit Office.

The loss, which led to an apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, created fears of identity fraud.

Clarkson now says of the case: "Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy."

I'm amazed that the normally combative Clarkson has accepted this feeble excuse from his bank, when they have just handed out a huge sum of his money to someone else against his wishes, revealing that they are failing in their primary purpose of keeping money safely.

That their security process can fail spectacularly in this way, enabling fraudsters to siphon off money, is sadly all too common.

What is notable is that the banks have spent enormous sums of money promoting the concept of 'identity theft' through clever TV adverts, diverting their customers' attention from their security cock-ups, despite the fact that they are liable for the fraudulently dispersed funds. I don't understand why the banks continue to use "mothers maiden name" as default password, and enable debits this way, then hide behind data protection legislation when their error is pointed out. Clarkson should be railing at the idiots at his bank, too.

Update:

Thanks to Kerry Buckley in the comments for this excellent comedy sketch that sums it up perfectly:

memes, dreams and themes

Cameo pointed me at this dada album cover meme today:

1. The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band.


2. The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album.


3. The third picture in Flickr's Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days will be your album cover.


4. Use your graphics programme of choice to throw them together, and post the result.

I got the following via this flickr image (which I hope counts as fair use - Suw uses CC images instead)

I just found out via Twitter that my colleague from (mumble mumble) years ago, Nikki Barton, has a blog; she's wise - read her.

Rosie asked me "Was there a Solar eclipse in Yorkshire in 1967?" - the answer was No, but I found this great NASA site, which reminded me of my Astronomy tutor at Cambridge from 1987, who at the time had booked a hotel in Cornwall for the 1999 total eclipse (I hope the clouds lifted for him). I'm re-reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle at the moment, so I am tickled that I can look up an astronomical ephemeris this easily.

Finally, the Edge question this year is What have you changed your mind about? - a lot of food for thought there.

URLs are people too

There is an assumption buried in the collective mind of developers that is hard to remove, and it is that people are best represented by email addresses. Go to almost any website to sign-up, and you are prompted for an email address and password. Signing up usually involves digging out the site's reply from your spam folder and clicking on a link to get confirmed, then giving it a password. Sometimes you get to pick a username too, from whatever stock of namespace is left at the site.

Elizabeth Churchill and Ben Gross looked into this and found out that people find it easier to remember passwords than usernames, because they use the same passwords everywhere, and they end up with multiple different email accounts to handle the problem of having handed them to to all these sites and getting spammed by them.

Meanwhile, over here in the blog world, we've been using blog URLs to refer to people for years, and social network sites have proliferated URLs that are people. I have several that refer to me, my events, my music, my twitters and my photographs linked from the sidebar here. We even have XFN's rel="me" to connect them together, and OpenID to allow them to be used as logins elsewhere, instead of emails.

The underlying thing that is wrong with an email address is that it's affordance is backwards - it enables people who have it to send things to you, but there's no reliable way to know that a message is from you. Conversely, URLs have the opposite default affordance- people can go look at them and see what you have said about yourself, and computers can go and visit them and discover other ways to interact with what you have published, or ask you permission for more.

So, developers, remember that URLs are people too.

Update: This tension between email-as-identifier and email-as-way-to-be-spammed is what makes Scoble's attempt to extract 5,000 people's emails from Facebook for his own use less defensible than it appears at first. Dare Obasanjo recognises the tensions, but strangely dismisses the OpenSocial attempt to abstract out this kind of data into a common API.

Tardy blogging

Between Twitter and my Reader shared items, my blogging impulses have been diverted elsewhere recently; I'll try to rectify this in the new year by writing here more often, but do follow those two links if you want to hear more of my brief observations and recent reading respectively.

Do not fold, bend, mutilate or Kindle

I had some hopes for Amazon's e-book device - after all I buy paper books from Bezos via Amazon Prime weekly, I buy Subterranean Press's splendid editions, and I even end up susbcribing to the Folio Society's offers each year. I spend 8-12 hours a day reading screens and 1-4 reading paper books; I should be right in their target market. So I'm really sorry that KIndle is doomed.

I'll keep this short. Kindle requires DRM. DRM destroys value - it makes things do less and cost more, and means they will break suddenly without warning when the service inevitably goes bust.

If you have $400 to spend on a small gadget to read outdoors on, buy yourself an OLPC and give one away to a child elsewhere too. If you are still tempted by the Kindle swindle, read Mark Pilgrim's literary dismissal of it.

Open Rights Group - Happy ORG day

I'm proud to have been involved with the Open Rights Group since it was an idea at a conference, and to be on the Advisory Board.

Today, the two year report was published.

By using web tech to gather reasoned responses to digital rights issues, ORG has got a lot done in the UK, from helping persuade the Gowers review of intellectual property that copyright should not be extended, to sensibly evaluating and opposing the blind use of e-voting and e-counting equipment in May 2007's ballots, to clearly explaining to the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group that Digital Rights Management is a huge mistake.

You should sign up to support more good work from ORG.

OpenSocial and Social Software history

In the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison have written a very thorough history of Social Network Sites.

Over at the OpenSocial API site we've written what we hope could be their future. Let me know what you think.

All bloggers are above average

Chuq and Joseph are pondering 'active' blogs. Chuq says:

As of today, my feed readership is between 550 and 600. My Technorati authority is 117, my rank is 54,800ish. All things considered, my blogs are small, very much personal.

Yet, do the math. 100 MILLION blogs, and mine is the 50,000th largest in the world?

Or do your own test. create an empty blog, register it with technorati, post a couple of test messages, and do nothing else. Don't advertise it, don't point to it, don't create content. you'll likely find that Technorati will throw it somewhere around 1mm in authority.

He goes on to challenge Technorati's count of 100 million blogs because of this. What is really going on? Well, links to blogs follow a Long Tail distribution. You can debate whether it's a power law or an exponential, but it isn't a gaussian. Here's a 2005 links vs rank log chart, and here's a 2006 one (if Technorati want to run my old script that generates these we could have a 2007 one). Technorati's 'Authority' is the number of inbound links in the last 180 days. So, as Chuq notes, if you have a new blog with no links to it, it is ranked about 4 millionth, tied with every other blog with no inbound links. So yes, everyone is above average - they're all on the 96th percentile.

But what happens when you start getting links? I have a couple of old blogs that have a few. With 2 links, my rank goes up to 2.6 Millionth; with 3 to 1.9 millionth, with 5 to 1.2 millionth, up to this blog with 141 inbound links ranked at 44,734. This is a very easy hill to climb in percentage terms, though clearly getting into the top 100 is still relatively hard.

So what of Chuq's contention that the other 96 million blogs with no links are "abandoned, stillborn, or some kind of spam blog" ? A lot of blogs are made for specific events, and don't need further posts adding (and so may not have been linked to in the last 180 days), and a lot have a low posting rate, sure. But, as Dave Winer once said, by that measure every book and magazine article is abandoned. Not all blogs are interested in links - many are personal journals or for a small group of friends to read, and achieving those goals well.

So Chuq's accusations of "playing fast and loose wiht the numbers" are really his misunderstandings of Long Tail distributions. In the Blogosphere, like Lake Woebegon, everyone really is above average.

AtomPub is an RFC

The Atom Publishing Protocol is now an IETF RFC standard. RFC stands for Request For Comments, but if you have any comments, it may be a ittle late. You could add them to a comment feed using AtomPub though

Bladerunner and Middlesbrough

Steelworks
Originally uploaded by andy martin [interzone]

Ridley Scott on Bladerunner:

I don't think all directors do, but I certainly draw from personal experience — sometimes I remember things, sometimes it will come out from the back of my head and I'm thinking, I never knew where that came from. And then I can analyze afterwards and realize that's what it was. Funny enough, the beauty in industry, which is probably killing us, but actually nevertheless is beautifully like Hades, is one reason why you start to feel the beauty in the godawful condition of the red horizon and the geysers of filth going into the air. I used to go to art school in West Hartlepool College up in the north of England, which is almost right alongside the Durham steel mills and Imperial Chemical Industries, and the air would smell like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it's steel, and it's probably particles, it's not very good. But I'm still here. So, you draw back on that. And to walk across that footbridge at night, you'd be walking fundamentally above, on an elevated walk on the steel mill. So you'd be crossing through, sometimes, the smoke and dirt and crap, and you're looking down into the fire. So, things like that are remembered.

See this one too

Storytelling and performance

Alice Mathias in the NYT points out that public profiles are a kind of performance:

Facebook did not become popular because it was a functional tool — after all, most college students live in close quarters with the majority of their Facebook friends and have no need for social networking. Instead, we log into the Web site because it’s entertaining to watch a constantly evolving narrative starring the other people in the library.

I’ve always thought of Facebook as online community theater. In costumes we customize in a backstage makeup room — the Edit Profile page, where we can add a few Favorite Books or touch up our About Me section — we deliver our lines on the very public stage of friends’ walls or photo albums. And because every time we join a network, post a link or make another friend it’s immediately made visible to others via the News Feed, every Facebook act is a soliloquy to our anonymous audience.

It’s all comedy: making one another laugh matters more than providing useful updates about ourselves, which is why entirely phony profiles were all the rage before the grown-ups signed in. One friend announced her status as In a Relationship with Chinese Food, whose profile picture was a carry-out box and whose personal information personified the cuisine of China.

This is of course what danah has been saying for years:

While some early adopters viewed Friendster as a serious tool for networking, others were more interested in creating non-biographical characters for playful purposes. Referred to as Fakesters, these Profiles represented everything from famous people (e.g., Angelina Jolie) and fictional characters (Homer Simpson) to food (Lucky Charms), concepts (Pure Evil), and affiliations (Brown University). Some Fakesters were created to connect people with common affiliations, geography, or interests. The most active and visible Fakesters, however, were primarily crafted for play. [...]

Fakesters had a significant impact on the cultural context of Friendster. In their resistance, their primary goal was to remind users that, “none of this is real.” They saw purportedly serious Profiles as fantastical representations of self, while the Testimonials and popularity aspect of the Friend network signified the eternal struggle to make up for being alienated in high school. Through play, Fakesters escaped the awkward issues around approving Friends and dealing with collapsed contexts, mocking the popularity contest. Their play motivated other participants to engage in creative performance, but at the same time, their gaming created a schism in the network resulting in a separation between playful participants and serious networkers.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Sanderson is explaining the art of video storytelling, and how to stop short of lèse majesté:

I want to write about fakery in television, because there's something odd going on. None of these 'scandals', from naming Socks the cat to having someone stand in for competition winners when the phone line goes dead in the full glare of live transmission, is particularly shocking to anyone who's made videos. Not worked in broadcast, note -- made videos. When I get a bunch of 14 year-olds to make their first short film, they'll frequently assume they can fake stuff, cheat, and generally bend the resulting video to their will.

Now, all it takes is for me to stare at them for a few moments. The light will go off in their heads and they'll say 'Oh, right. OK, yes. Fine. We'll do it for real.' But the natural human affiliation with cheating is sufficiently powerful, it's often the first assumption.

Later in the day, when the same group is putting together their sequence, they'll find me and say 'If we change the order like this, the film makes more sense. But... that's faking, isn't it?'

...which is, of course, the crux of the matter, because all video is faked to some extent or other. Everything you do up to the point where you start editing is just collecting raw material -- your film is made, crafted, shaped, in the edit suite, not in front of the camera.

It has to be this way, because real life plays out excruciatingly slowly. The responsibility and skill in making films, then, lies in telling stories more quickly, and more engagingly, than real time. Which requires that you leave bits out, which in turn requires judgement about which parts are important.

Telling stories honestly is an aspiration, but not a requirement -- the temptation to cheat and edit the material in order to tell an even better story even more quickly is always there. If the story's better, and more people watch, that's a success, right? If teenagers hacking away in iMovie in a school lab face these sorts of dilemmas and compromises, you can imagine the discussions that happen in chic Avid suites in Soho.

We all live in the minds of others through telling them stories about ourselves, but we also live in our own minds that way too - the research on memory shows how we readily confabulate extra detail to flesh out a story, and that every time we remember somethign we reify it further, combining it with new experiences both real and confabulated, so that the tale grows in the telling.

As danah notes, the persistence, searchability and replicablity of these digital environments belie our self-constructed memories with awkwardly concrete virtual histories. Massively Multiplayer Online Truth is an interesting game, and one where we are still working out the rules.

iPod progress

I got an new iPod nano for my birthday yesterday. I considered the iPhone and iPod Touch, but their poor keyboard won't replace my Sidekick, and they omitted the most important features.
Specifically, iPhone lacks instant messaging, and both iPhone and iPod touch have Wifi, yet unaccountably don't support iTunes song sharing.

A bit of context here — back when we were pitching Wifi and Zeroconf to Steve Jobs at Apple, the killer demo was the iTunes + QuickTime sharing of music and videos — Macs in the same room finding each other and making their music libraries and videos mutually available, whether you have a router or not. The underlying protocol here is called DAAP, which is just some conventions for using HTTP 1.1 to play remotely and update the song list.

However, the edition of iTunes this went out in was unfortunately the same one that added the iTunes Store. From our developer point of view, the fact that there were 4 separate open source interoperating implementations of DAAP within a week was a big burst of validation for our efforts, but this caused huge confusion among the Record Labels that Jobs had invested so much time in schmoozing to set the store up. Eventually, after too many arguments with Label execs where he tried to explain "but the songs bought from iTunes Store won't be playable remotely, just the CD-ripped ones", he insisted the protocol be changed, which it was, several times.

The social sharing of music via iTunes is still a new and lovely feature of offices, campuses and coffee shops everywhere. But the iPhone users are left out in the cold. They can't see iTunes libraries, they can't share their own songs. Watching the launch of the "buy the song playing in Starbucks" feature, my immediate thought was "Steve, do you want to change the world, or do you just want to sell sugared coffee to kids?"

That said, I am a big fan of the 206 dpi screen on the new iPod nano. I did the maths, and that implies a full HD screen (1920x1200 with room for a controller bar) that is about 9.5 inches by 6 inches - sounds like a nice new Apple subnotebook for MacWorld January. Three and a half years ago, I pointed out the very rapid growth of storage per buck. I now have an iPod that is half the price, a tenth the weight and volume, and that plays video as predicted.

Bubbles and Facebook

A few days back, danah asked:

I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There's no doubt that Facebook's F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer's wet dream. (Never mind that I don't know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don't understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why is the tech crowd so entranced with Facebook?

This made me think of my sure-fire bubble indicator:

When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble.

[...}The trouble with this indicator is that if you aren't looking for it it seem like the natural order of things - of course having personable young things hanging on your every word is to be expected - finally you're getting the recognition you deserve!

In practice, however, the finely-tuned herd instincts that get selected for in the Ivy League or the posher UK universities make them flock to the latest bubble

By this measure, we are well into a bubble in the Valley, (Google being the top company of choice for MBA's is one example), but Facebook has a perfect conjunction here - growing out of Harvard and the Ivy League, it started out with the very crowd of high-achieving conformists that danah called hegemonic teens, who make up my leading indicator, so when they connected with the tech crowd the mentos hit the coke.

Journalists slumming online

I've realised why I got quote so cross with Andrew Keen and the way he portrays the net as 'corrupting'. Pagan Kennedy's essay on MySpace reminded me, and Tom's passionate defence of his blog against PR slummers who want to use him as a mouthpiece confirmed this thought. There is a temptation online, and that is to go slumming - to pretend that you can abuse people's trust and emotions without fear of personal consequences, that people online are somehow not real and so you can toy with them and remain above it. A while back at Making Light, Lucy Kemnitzer explained this well:

Slumming isn't going to a seedy place. Slumming is taking your superior attitude and your certainty that the world is your Disneyland in with you. It's looking at the people who work there as performing monkeys putting on a show for you. It's being cushioned by your privilege. It's thinking that if the place is raided, surely you will be passed over because you're not one of those people. It's running a narration in your head where you are the normal observer, and those guys are the freaks.

You can do it almost everywhere. I've seen people do it on an ordinary residential street in a city, going into a corner restaurant or working man's bar as if it were the Exotic And Dangerous Gangsta Exhibit at a Los Vegas theme hotel. I've seen people do it at a flea market in an ordinary rural town. Or at the weekly get-together of a community, where they danced and sang and gave each other presents (a pow-wow). I saw people doing it at my college, thanks to a former Governor and President calling it a cross between a hippie pad and a bordello.

Here's a clue about how not to go slumming when you enter a place: shed your privilege and your pretensions to superiority. If they play music that isn't to your taste, maybe it's because they hear something in it that you don't, so listen. If they're presenting an image you find disturbing, maybe you're not looking at it right. If you can't get out of your own skull while you're there, maybe you belong somewhere else.

When Keen (p76) cites Michael Hiltzik and Lee Siegel (both journalists who got caught in sock-puppetry online - posting hagiographic comments about themselves through pseudonyms), it is not their perfidy he condemns, but the Internet as enabler. In fact, it is their slumming and condescension that is the problem - their longing for freedom from consequences of their actions that led them astray. Keen himself is a knowing troll, trying to be the Simon Cowell of Web 2.0, and behaving like a pantomime villain to get web conferences to boo him. The ultimate example of this kind of slumming was Michael Skube's polemic against blogs, profoundly rebutted by Jay Rosen. Pagan Kennedy's tone is dancing around the edges of slumming - she starts out with "OMG drunk teenagers", but the article comes to realise that people online are human too, and makes fun of her own original attitudes.

abi sums it up:

The girls in question would not have been slumming if they had been going to drink the drinks, chat to the patrons, or see the dancers. They weren't. They were going to watch themselves drink the drinks, chat to the patrons, and see the dancers. It's like Kundera's definition of kitsch - the last layer of self-observation determines the definition.