IT and Society
April 28, 2006
The Participation Spectrum
Ross Mayfield has an excellent essay on the spectrum of participation, the choices we have about how much of ourselves to put into any given activity on the Web. He points out that high engagement activities like leading, moderating and collaborating build a sort of collaborative intelligence that’s greater than the collective intelligence we get from low-threshold activities like tagging or commenting. Writing—blogging—is somewhere in the middle because you can use a blog merely to comment or you can use it to refactor, moderate, and lead. Your choice…
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April 20, 2006
It's Not 500 Channels Stupid
I remember reading an article in 1996 about “what is the Internet and what does it mean to me?” in one of those airline magazines that are always sitting in the seat pocket when you get on a plane. The bottom line of the article was that the Internet would bring 500 TV channels into every home.
I remember thinking that this poor author just didn’t get it. The Internet would bring millions of channels into our homes. I used to try to characterize this as a everyone as a media creator, but that didn’t really capture it. Now Robert Young has written a great essay at BTL that captures the real vision very nicely. In Young’s world, we’re all media programmers of highly distributed micro-channels. I’m adding that to my resume.
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April 12, 2006
Social Playground or Media Sandbox?
Thomas Barnett, who I interviewed on my Technometria podcast a while back, has an interesting perspective on how technology influences geopolitics. In a recent post, he claims that online trends will ensure that ten years from now, the Web “will be more the New Core social playland than the Old Core media sandbox (not that Disney-ABC aren’t trying).”
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March 08, 2006
George Dyson on Turing's Cathederal (ETech 2005)
Ester Dyson introduces her brother George. She says that his job as a historian is to determine what is worthy of our attention. George talks about the “prophets” of the computer age. People who saw things long before their time.
George recounts some of the early 20th century thinking about artificial intelligence. In contrast to some of these earlier ideas are ideas about collective intelligence.
Alfred Smee defined ideas about bit-mapping and search engines in the mid 19th century. Thomas Hobbes, in 1651 posited automata and the question of whether they have a life of their own (in addition to inventing recursive functions).
Leibniz proposed a marble and track based binary computer in the mid 17th century. Von Neumann used his work in making the first binary shift registers.
Godel contributed the key idea that any mathematical function can be given a number and manipulated before computers even existed. Ross Ashby’s
George shows some of the original papers that start to develop the language of computing. von Neumann taught his wife, Klara to code before ENIAC was even done and she became one of the first computer programmers.
George makes an interesting comment relative to some early comments by Barracelli that the numbers were just numbers. George says that the numbers were a genotype looking for a phenotype. Software developers by applying programming to problems have given them a phenotype by allowing them to affect the physical world.
The meaning is less and less in the code and more and more in the data: links, as an example.
Ross Ashby’s design for a human brain (old book) is the architecture for Google. We don’t have to understand an intelligent machine in order to build one. This reminds me of something Alan Kay said about engineers being successful at building things long before science had anything to say about it. We might eventually realize that we’ve been building search engines, but at some point they became intelligent. Turing said that intellectual activity consists mainly of various kinds of search.
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Joel Spolsky's Report Card (ETech 2006)
Joel Spolsky is speaking on creating blue-chip products. His formula:
- Make people happy (control)
- Think about emotions
- Obsess over aesthetics
AJAX is an example of something that can make people happy by giving them instantaneous feedback. He points to the Ambercrombie Web site as an example. He gave the example of cars for emotion and the iPod for aesthetics.
How are people living up to the formula? He brings up reddit. It uses AJAX, has a cute alien as a mascot (large eyes and bald—looks like a human baby). The alien creates cartoon stories that create an emotional bond. There are points for posts and what people think about them, that make you go back and use it. The report card: happy: A, emotion: A, aesthetics: B, final grade: A.
He brings up a Motorola phone from last year and shows the Razr. Motorola has obviously thought about this. The Motorola Pebble is the same. Grade: happy: D (no control), emotion: A, aesthetics: A; final grade: B.
What about Internet Calendars? He decided that scheduling flights was the ultimate test. Yahoo Calendar gets a failing grade. He brings up AirSet. Aesthetics aren’t good, but it’s very functional. Grade: happy: A, emotion: B, aesthetics: C, final grade: B.
On aesthetics: All Web design is ugly. Enough with the pastel arial fonts! You’re all copying Google. That’s not what made Google Google. Google’s minimalist design works as a revolt against the old-style portals. It’s not good in and of itself. Google was making a statement. When you copy their fonts, you’re not making a statement. So, Web site design in general gets a F.
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Clay Shirky on Moderation Strategies (ETech 2006)
Clay Shirky is speaking about pattern languages for moderation strategies. A pattern is a combination of a goal and strategy combination that’s detailed enough that you can see how to build it, but not so detailed that you can’t repurpose it to a different domain. This has come into vogue in the object oriented world.
Clay suggests a pattern strategy for moderating discussion. He shows a graph that has “freedom to create group communications” vs. “Annoyingness”. The problem is there’s a steep knee in the curve, meaning that there’s a point where as soon as you get a certain level of freedom the annoyingness of the group skyrockets.
Clay uses Slashdot as an example of defending against this. Slashdot has managed to not be swamped by negative activity over the years. The basic trick is that Slashdot members defend readers from writers. He describes the karma system. The average reader never see posts rated 0 or -1. That accounts for 20% of the comments. Moderating is done by logged in users with high karma, randomly selected to moderate, who have chosen to moderate. That’s a daunting chain of decisions.
Slashdot isn’t easily replicated, even by using the using the actual code base. Neither the gestalt of understanding nor the actual code is sufficient, so we need a pattern.
The problem Slashdot faces is the tragedy of the commons. Each poster has a motive to hurt the commons to gain notoriety for themselves. Here’s the pattern:
- Move comments to a separate page
- Treat readers and writers differently
- Let users rate posts
- Use defensive defaults
But who guards the guardians? A second pattern solves the problems that the first pattern creates:
- Treat users and members differently
- Measure good behavior
- Enlist committed members
- Judges can’t post
Clay points to the Bronze Beta, a Buffy the Vampire fan site. He describes it as the simplest group blog you can imagine. It works, despite its simplicity, or maybe because of it. He makes the pattern explicit:
- Don’t have features
- Make Comments central
- Make login optional
This is the experimental wing of politic philosophy. As group conversation and cooperation move the the digitally mediated environment, we are encoding the methods of interaction. We need to get it right. We have a duty to get it right. Society needs us to get it right. having a language to talk about this is a place to start.
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February 23, 2006
Alan Kay: The 100 Dollar Laptop and Powerful Ideas
 Alan Kay preopares for his talk (click to enlarge) |
Alan Kay’s evening talk is entitled Learners, Powerful ideas, and the $100 Laptop. He says that he’s never found the right order for the ideas in the title.
Computer companies in the 1960s thought Moore’s law meant that they’d get higher margins. Web presses are amazing pieces of technology, but when you look at it, you don’t see anything that tells you about how it changes things. Similarly, looking at the DynaBook in 1968 doesn’t tell you the most important things. Thus, the idea of a $100 laptop isn’t important because of the technology.
Half the price of a typical laptop is the marketing and distribution. Get a non-profit and drop that. Half of the remaining cost is Microsoft, or more generally commercial software vendors. Free and open source software more than adequately covers the computing needs of most people, particularly children. The fact that there are $122 DVD players says you can build a $100 laptop. The cheapest hard drives are too expensive; so use flash memory.
One big problem is the grey market. They’ll be diverted from children unless you do something to protect the laptop. A few ideas: an RFID card keyed to the specific owner helps. The device is networked, so the owner of the device has to log in every few days to get a token to keep it working. The color (green) helps. The child’s picture could be embedded in the plastic case.
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Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron?
 Alan Kay (click to enlarge) |
Alan Kay’s title slide, up during the intro says Is the Best Way to Predict the Future to {Invent,Prevent} It? with the {Invent,Prevent} alternating between each other. He jokes that this afternoon’s talk can be summed up by the fact that he has to wear two microphones to speak instead of one. The talk was billed as “Software Engineering vs. Computer Science, so I’m anxious to see how his title relates to that. I have some more photos too.
Much of what is wrong about our field is that many of the ideas that happened before 1975 are still the current paradigm. He has a strong feeling that our field has been mired for some time, but because of Moore’s law, there are plenty of things to work on. The commercialization of personal computing was a tremendous distraction to our field and we haven’t, and may not, recover from it.
Almost nothing exciting about computing today has to do with data structures and algorithms One of Alan’s undergraduate degrees is in molecular biology. He can’t understand it anymore despite having tried to review new developments every few years. That’s not true in computer science. The basics are still mostly the same. If you go to most campuses, there is a single computer science department and the first course in computer science is almost indistinguishable from the first course in 1960. They’re about data structures and algorithms despite the fact that almost nothing exciting about computing today has to do with data structures and algorithms.
The Internet is like the human body. It’s replaced all of its atoms and bits at least twice since it started even though the Internet has never stopped working. Attacks on the ‘Net aren’t really attacks on the ‘Net, they’re attacks on machines on the ‘Net. Very few software systems, maybe none, are built in ways that sustain operation in spite of being continually rebuilt and continually growing.
The future five years out is easy to predict because all of the forces acting on computer science are trying to keep it the same as it is now. Likely, the future will be more of what we have now.
Are computer science, software engineering, OOP, etc. oxymorons? Alan reminisce about Bob Barton, an early Utah professor. Bob said that “systems programmers are the high priests of a low cult” and “there are few things know about systems design, but the basic principle of recursive design is: make the parts of the same power as the whole. Bob Barton has a classic paper that contains seven of the most important things that people know about software today. Another quote: “My job is to disabuse you of any firmly held notion you held when you came into this classroom.” The best way to get people to think is to destroy their current thinking. Preconceived notions are largely reactions to what vendors are saying. Alan says that his course from Barton was the most valuable one he took in college because Barton garbage collected their minds.
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December 28, 2005
Winer Nails It
This is so true:
If the people promoting an idea say nasty things about people who differ with them, and if they have to take their swipes anonymously, they must not have a lot to say that’s substantial, and they clearly aren’t willing to stand behind their own thinking.From Scripting News: 12/26/2005
Referenced Wed Dec 28 2005 19:03:49 GMT-0700 (MST)
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December 16, 2005
Tech State or State Tech?
John Palfrey, Executive Director of Harvard’s Berkman Center, made some remarks a few days ago on the proper role of government with respect to open standards. He did so in the context of Microsoft trying to use the Massachusetts Legislature to do an end run around the Massachusetts CIO on the issue of adopting open standards. John talks about the proper role of Government in this struggle:
That job is not to choose between competing technology vendors, circa 2005, in a fast-changing marketplace. The elephant in the room is the struggle between Microsoft on the one hand and IBM and Sun on the other. But that struggle is not, and cannot be, the real story on open standards policy. It’s essential to bear in mind the state’s proper role vis-a-vis this marketplace — a marketplace which may in fact establish, and re-establish, other open standards over time, all plausibly based off of the same concept of XML. Consider, for instance, the “web 2.0” version of this discussion and witness the dramatic changes in the syndicated technologies space — with RSS, Atom, OPML, the MetaWeblog API, and their ilk over the past few years — which, to all but a few visionaries, were unthinkable as possible “open document formats” a short while ago. The key is to ensure enough flexibility in the process so that those who know the technologies and the implications of any changes can help the state to adjust its approach on the fly as progress, inevitably, marches on — and such that citizens, or users, are not the ones left behind in the long-run.From John Palfrey :
Referenced Fri Dec 16 2005 08:43:02 GMT-0700 (MST)
There’s an interesting tension here between a legislative process that typically takes years and numerous iterations to come up with solutions to tough and vexing problems and a technology landscape that shift dramatically over the course of a single legislative session.
Legislators are big believers in democracy (duh!) and in their zeal sometimes try to apply the slow deliberative process to problems where it may not be the best choice. I think technology choices are an example of that. Legislatures should set establish broad legal frameworks and then appoint and empower the executive branch to run more flexible public policy processes to set actual rules.
As far as I can tell, that was what was happening in Massachusetts until Microsoft found a few legislators who they could rile up on the issue. If the legislature jumps in and changes the decision that the public policy process developed, I think it will be a big mistake. The public policy process made a decision to use open standards, a decision that is in the citizen’s best interest. In overturning that, the Massachusetts Legislature will be making a decision against the interests of its citizens and in favor of a single, large company.
John concludes:
Information technologies are increasingly important to our democracy. A policy that seeks to ensure a citizen’s access to information and a citizen’s ability to transform data with as few constraints by those who make technology as possible is a worthy one. These goals should not be pursued by the state without the active involvement of the technical community; the legislator needs to get to know the technology developer, and those who set technology standards, much more intimately if the state is going to play in this game.
The question before the Commonwealth today is not whether to strive for such lofty goals, but rather how to meet the challenge of crafting and implementing a policy that will in fact achieve them over the long run. If the Commonwealth gets this policy right, others will follow. If the Commonwealth gets this right, it will be good not only for our state’s economy but also for our democracy.From John Palfrey :
Referenced Fri Dec 16 2005 08:57:33 GMT-0700 (MST)
Amen.
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December 13, 2005
Wikibooks
Wikibooks is an effort to do to books what Wikipedia did to the encyclopedia: build them using shared, open source collaboration. I think this could have some real application to texts and class notes.
From the few I checked out, it seems like it’s still more idea than reality. Books are bigger than encyclopedia entries, so they will be more likely to be incomplete. This will negatively affect user’s perception of quality. Wikibooks could probably use some way of segmenting works in progress from those in production and some community based way to promote books from the draft bookshelf to the production bookself.
Since I found out about this in print, I have to assume it’s old news. Still, it was new to me, so it might be to you as well. One question I still have is how this is or could be related to MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative.
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November 27, 2005
Free Sheet Music by Sally DeFord
I sing in the choir at church. This morning as we were practicing, I noticed this at the bottom of the music:
Copyright 2005 by Sally DeFord
Making copies for non-commercial use is permitted.
This and other DeFord sheet music may be downloaded free at: http://www.defordmusic.com
I was curious, so I visited the site when I got home. What I found were dozens of pieces of music, all nicely typeset, some with sample MP3s, free for downloading. Some are original compositions and some are arrangements of familiar hymns. Some are specific to the LDS church, but most would be suitable for all sorts of choirs. The two pieces I’ve heard so far were excellent.
Sally doesn’t solicit or accept donations. Why does she give her music away? In her words:
I guess it’s just because I can. The Lord has placed me in circumstances that currently don’t demand extra income, he has inspired the creators of technology to produce programs that I can use to publish the music without the assistance of typesetters, and he has given me a gift that I did nothing to earn. Sharing seems logical.From Sally DeFord Music: FAQ/Contact Information
Referenced Sun Nov 27 2005 12:13:39 GMT-0700 (MST)
People who do good work and make it freely available deserve thanks and recognition. And so, Sally DeFord, this is my thanks to and recognition of your good work.
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November 21, 2005
DRM, TiVo, and the iPod
I put a little piece at Between the Lines on TiVo’s announcement that they future versions of TiVoToGo will have support for creating iPod ready video. While you’re there, check out David Berlind’s article on Sony and DRM. Apparently Sony is rethinking DRM as a strategy. In related news, the rootkit and other CD DRM techniques can be defeated by scotch tape. Cool.
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November 18, 2005
Cringely on Sony and Grokster
Robert X. Cringely on the Sony rootkit capper and Groksters last days:
The rootkit of all evil: As if foisting Mariah Carey on us wasn’t bad enough; Sony (Profile, Products, Articles) BMG Music Entertainment has been caught installing a rootkit — a tool typically used by malware. If you play a copy-protected Sony CD on your PC, it installs a digital rights management scheme you can neither detect nor remove. After security wonks revealed the rootkit could be used to compromise systems merely by appending the prefix “$sys$” to the name of any rogue program, Sony and software partner First 4 Internet issued a steady stream of denials, along with a patch that removes the rootkit. Everybody in the music biz wants to be a gangsta, but Sony seems to be taking those dreams literally.
It’s only grok ’n’ roll: File-swapping network Grokster has closed its doors and agreed to pay $50 million in damages to the record companies (although, given Grokster’s subzero bank account, the companies may have to accept payment in Monopoly money). So, to recap: Making it possible for consumers to illegally swap music is very bad. Making it possible for hackers to illegally hijack your computer, however, is just an average day in the record business.From Sony discovers its roots, Grokster gets the boot | InfoWorld | Column | 2005-11-11 | By Robert X. Cringely®
Referenced Fri Nov 18 2005 18:24:28 GMT-0700 (MST)
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November 15, 2005
DRM Day
Today was DRM Day at Between the Lines. David Berlind posted three excellent stories that all had something to do with DRM:
- The DRM grinch who stole Christmas
- The day the broadcast died
- How to stop Hollywood and Congress from trampling on your constitutional rights
In addition, I posted a personal story about DRM that claims that the DMCA (yes, I got it wrong at BTL and wrote DCMA) is more about protecting TiVo’s (and other company’s) business model than it is about protecting the rights of copyright holders.
I was especially intrigued by the post on broadcast. What would really make this take off is Apple putting support for BitTorrent in iTunes. They won’t do it. Hollywood has done such a good job of convincing people that file sharing (and particularly BitTorrent) is evil that Apple can’t do it. Again, this is much more about protecting entrenched interests than it is about protecting intellectual property.
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November 11, 2005
Approaching Omniscience
I attended Paul Allen’s keynote at eBusiness Day. He spoke on “Approaching Omniscience.” Paul gave an amazing talk and I wrote it all up in a blog post but then a errant click killed the page where I was writing. Argh!
Paul started with a quote from Robert Browning: “Grow old with me; The best is yet to be.” This aptly reflects Paul’s natural optimism. He ended by saying that we are empowered like no other generation to lift the poor and help people and giving suggestions about how people can change their lives and do that.
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September 21, 2005
Accelerating Change 2005
Accelerating Change is an awesome conference. I’ve never been in person, but I love listening to in at IT Conversations. Maybe next year…
In the meantime, Scott Lemon went and blogged about it (day 1 and day 2). I hope we’ll get a brain dump from Scott at next week’s CTO Breakfast.
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September 16, 2005
Default to Open: Cyberspace is a Bad Metaphor
A lot of what happens on the Internet happens because of a simple principle: if it’s online, we assume that it’s permissible to access it. We take for granted the ability to link to and access page and other data on the web. Mash-ups are an example of applications that rely on this principle.
Wired magazine has an article explaining why this principle may be in danger.
In a few years, legal doctrines being aggressively pushed by corporations and law enforcement officials might prevent something cool and useful like this from ever happening again.
In a variety of cases, courts are holding that people can’t access Internet computers without first getting authorization from the computer’s owner. Judges are assuming that the public has no right to use unsecured computers connected to the Internet, and are requiring the public to get permission first.
For example, many ISPs and some prosecutors are arguing that it’s a crime to use unsecured wireless access points without the explicit permission of the owner. Antispam crusaders advocate blocking any e-mails that haven’t been whitelisted first. Airlines like American and auction sites like eBay — which want customers to visit their websites, view their ads and “join the community” — have won court injunctions against companies that collect price information on plane fares or auctions to help consumers comparison shop.
Under ancient legal theories like “trespass to chattels” and ill-advised modern laws like the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime statutes, courts are holding that if you don’t have authorization, you can’t access computers.
And if you can’t access computers, you can’t collect data about airfares, auctions or evacuees.From Wired News: Open Internet, We Hardly Knew Ye
Referenced Fri Sep 16 2005 09:28:56 GMT-0600 (MDT)
I believe that much of the trouble comes from the metaphor we’ve used to describe the ‘Net for so long: cyberspace. As Michael Swaine described in a recent column in Dr. Dobbs, cyberspace is a metaphor of place whereas the ‘Net has increasingly come to be able information flows.
Technometria isn’t about a “homepage” (another place metaphor)—it’s an ever changing stream of information. Likewise, RSS, mash-ups, and Web services are about information flow.
Allowing people to block access to their public sites without prior explicit permission isn’t analogous to allowing people to have privacy in their homes—even if the door’s not locked. It’s more like letting anyone with water rights permanently divert the water from the canal, or block their downstream neighbor from getting to the water. (I recognize this analogy may not translate if you’ve never lived in the rural west and had to take your turn at irrigating your yard or crops—still, I think it’s apropos.)
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August 31, 2005
IT and Katrina
Yesterday I posted a piece at ZDNet’s Government IT blog on turning hopeless victims into smart mobs. This was a reflection of some interesting ideas that David Stephenson has been posting about how IT can help in homeland security and disaster preparedness. He’s not the only one obviously.
Doc Searls, at the IT Garage, is asking “how does IT help with Katrina recovery?” and offering a place where IT folks can post stories about their experiences with Katrina. He’s also pointing to the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog.
The Slidell blog is maintained by Brian Oberkirch who lists his contact information prominently on the front page. Slidell is near the Northeast corner of Lake Pontchatrain, about five miles West of the Mississippi border and 20 miles Northeast of New Orleans. The blog contains photos, announcements, updates from county officials. This blog is a perfect example of what smart mobs can do to help in a disaster.
There are also katrina tags at Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technorati.
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July 28, 2005
Playing Games
The LA Times has a response to Sen Clinton over her call for a study of the effect of playing video games on children. TechNation has a great interview with Henry Jenkins on this very subject at IT Conversations. I’ll admit to having worried about the amount of time that my kids seem to spend on video games, but Jenkins makes a good case.