Thursday, 7 February 2008
LIFT Conference starts
Saturday, 26 January 2008
Sheet music redux
But this week, the news was that Rock Band had sold 2.5 million downloaded songs for you to play along with (it comes with 58).
Having researched this thoroughly with my boys, the fun of this game is more in the playing than the listening — the 'guitar' playing is clearly simplified, though the drumming is pretty close to reality, and the less said about my 'singing' the better.
Looking at this in the longer view, it can be seen as the return of sheet music in a new form; before recordings took over, sheet music sold for amateur performers was the dominant form. Here's Douglas Adams again:
during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.
I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’
‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’
‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’
‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’
Friday, 18 January 2008
Fear of the new - the Internet, Tea, and MapReduce
“Al-Qa’eda has prospered and as it were regrouped largely because of the energy and effort it has put into its propaganda, largely through the internet.”
Sir Richard added that the internet had become the main channel for “radicalisation” and coordination between al-Qa’eda cells. He said: “In dealing with this problem, there is no alternative to imposing significant controls over the internet.”
This is what I call the "cup of tea" problem, after Douglas Adams:
Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day.
Some people have been surprised that tea was controversial, but William Cobbett's 1822 'The evils of tea (and the virtues of beer)' had this to say:
It must be evident to everyone, that the practice of tea drinking, must rended the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as I have shown, it deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back. Hence, succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed, and in short, all the characteristics of idleness, for which, in this case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The tea drinking fills the public-houses, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches them idleness.
Which brings me to the attack on MapReduce today, which spectacularly misses the point by attacking a programming technique for not being a database and contains the striking line:
Given the experimental evaluations to date, we have serious doubts about how well MapReduce applications can scale.
(MapReduce is what Google uses to run complex data-manipulation problems on lots of computers in parallel to do things that databases fail at, like building an index for all the webpages it has found, or rendering map tiles for everywhere on earth in Google maps).
Wednesday, 9 January 2008
OpenSocial Hackathon next week in SF
OpenSocial Hackathon hosted by Six Apart
Wednesday, January 16, 2008 4:00 PM - 11:00 PM
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
Monday, 7 January 2008
Identity Theft is not a crime
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:Thursday, 3 January 2008
memes, dreams and themes
- The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band.
- The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album.
- The third picture in Flickr's Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days will be your album cover.
- 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.
Wednesday, 2 January 2008
URLs are people too
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.
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
Tardy blogging
Tuesday, 20 November 2007
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.
Monday, 19 November 2007
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.
Friday, 2 November 2007
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.
Thursday, 18 October 2007
All bloggers are above average
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.
Tuesday, 9 October 2007
AtomPub is an RFC
Sunday, 7 October 2007
Bladerunner and Middlesbrough
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
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:
Meanwhile, Jonathan Sanderson is explaining the art of video storytelling, and how to stop short of lèse majesté: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.
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.