Just a heads up if you’re not aware: “releaseConnection() does not explicitly close the connection, unless there is a Connection: close header”.
How to set your Proxy properties within a Java app.
Monthly Archives: February 2005
Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe) – Wired 1996
Sometimes it takes a look back to look forward. With all the talk going on about folksonomies, a re-read of this was in order for me.
…Created in 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, two disaffected electrical engineering and computer science
grad students from Stanford University, Yahoo! lists more than 200,000 Web sites under 20,000 different categories. Sites that track pollution, for example, are listed under Society and Culture:Environment and Nature:Pollution. These categories form what the people at Yahoo! a bit pretentiously refer to as their ontology – a taxonomy of everything. Their ordering of the Web is precise enough – and intuitive enough – that almost 800,000 people a day use Yahoo! to search for everything from Web-controlled Christmas trees to research on paleontology. In almost every way you can measure, Yahoo! has successfully exerted order on the chaotic Web.…But how much longer can its hold last?…It’s a concern that Jerry Yang, the less publicity shy of the two founders, had been thinking a lot about lately. …As he told me, leaning back and raising his arms in an exaggerated shrug, “I like tough problems. The harder to solve, the better. And organizing the Web is probably the hardest information science problem out there.”
That may be, but Yahoo!’s technology, at least, is relatively straightforward. Yahoo! works like this: First, the URLs of new Web sites are collected. Most of these come by email from people who want their sites listed, and some come from Yahoo!’s spider – a simple program that scans the Web, crawling from link to link in search of new sites. Then, one of twenty human classifiers at Yahoo! looks the Web site over and determines how to categorize it.
Really, the only hard part – the only part that your average high-school geek couldn’t do – is developing the classification scheme. The ontology.
…To solve this problem, Yang and Filo hired Srinija Srinivasan as their “Ontological Yahoo!” Another former Stanford student, Srinivasan is unfailingly helpful, quick to answer any question in her relaxed California accent. Perhaps that’s why Newsweek claimed she was trained in library science when including her among the 50 people who matter most on the Internet.
…A few months ago, Srinivasan told me, she was adding categories and making changes to the ontology almost every day. Now major adjustments are becoming much more infrequent. She pointed to this as support for Yang’s assertion that “at some point, our scheme will become relatively stable. We will have captured the breadth of human knowledge.”
…a story he and Srinivasan told me about recent events at Yahoo! left me convinced I would have to look elsewhere for the answer.
The story began when the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America submitted its Web page to Yahoo! A classifier quickly reviewed the site – which contains everything from Stars of David to articles about Israel, not to mention the word “Jewish” in its name – and placed it under Society and Culture:Religion:Judaism.
But here’s where things got tricky. True, MJAA members are born of Jewish mothers and are hence, by definition, Jews. But they also believe that Jesus Christ is the messiah. In the eyes of most Jews, that makes the MJAA a bunch of heretics. Or at least Christians.
So when a few vocal and Net-savvy Jews saw the MJAA listed under Judaism, they let loose a salvo of email demanding that Yahoo! remove MJAA’s listing. A bit taken aback by the protesters’ virulence (“threats of boycotts,” Yang said with amazement), Yahoo! yielded and reclassified MJAA under Christianity with a cross-reference from Judaism. Of course, this caused the MJAA to protest that they were now being incorrectly labeled. After a modern-day Solomonic compromise, the MJAA and a few similar groups can now be found listed under Society and Culture:Religion: Christianity:Messianic Judaism – which is linked by a cross-reference from Judaism.
Yang looked at me sheepishly when telling this story. After all, he believes in truth, justice, and the Internet way. Hell, he even gave me a mini-sermon that morning about how the Net is egalitarian – the little guy can publish just as easily as the big guy. Yet, he knows the MJAA was pushed around because it didn’t have mainstream Judaism’s clout.
But the MJAA story is interesting not just for exposing the realpolitik of classification. It’s proof that no ontology is objective – all have their own biases and proclivities. Yang was quick to admit this: in fact, he referred to Yahoo!’s ontology as the company’s editorial. “Organizing the Web is sometimes like being a newspaper editor and inciting riots,” he said with a touch of exasperation. “If we put hate crimes in a higher level of the topic hierarchy, well, it’s our editorial right to do so, but it’s also a very heavy responsibility.”
Yahoo!’s success, Yang argued, is evidence that point of view and knowledge classification are not incompatible. Just as we learn to automatically compensate for right-wing bias while reading The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, we can also learn to adjust for the perspective that Yahoo! embodies. …The real problem, Yang and Srinivasan agreed, is making sure that Yahoo!’s point of view remains consistent even as the company expands to keep up with the growth of the Web.
After all, Yahoo!’s point of view comes from having the same 20 people classifying every site, and by having those people crammed together in the same building where they are constantly engaged in a discussion of what belongs where. Lose that closeness and the biases will start to become more diffuse. Yang admitted as much, saying, “It’s hard to expand Yahoo!, because you end up with too many points of view.” Instead of the Journal’s editorial page, you end up with something like CNN, where prejudices are masked by a pretense of objectivity. For Yahoo!, that translates to a category scheme where users have a hard time guessing where they’ll find what they’re looking for.
…In my mind, Yang identified the problem with Yahoo! when he noted that “it is much more of a social-engineering problem than a library or computer science problem.” By relying on human intelligence to organize the Web, Yahoo! falls victim to subjectivity.
The Age of Egocasting
I don’t know how much I agree with all the assertions in this article. Some of which are almost insulting. But no doubt, it provoked a response. I bet it will be thought provoking to you to.
…The creation and near-universal adoption of the remote control arguably marks the beginning of the era of the personalization of technology. The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake?the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod?have created a world where the individual?s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books “on demand.” We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences.
… By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. And they contribute to what might be called ?egocasting,? the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one?s personal taste. In thrall to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality.
…The remote control has influenced not only how we watch television?turning us into savvy consumers, postmodern artists, or herd-like grazers, depending on your perspective?but also what we watch on television. Television programmers reacted swiftly to the change in viewing behavior facilitated by the remote control. As Susan Tyler Eastman and Jeffrey Neal-Lunsford have found, producers soon realized the importance of “grabbing the viewers? attention at the beginning of a program,” with the goal of instilling “a sense of loyalty or commitment” as quickly as possible. The remote control made television programming a more Darwinian enterprise. Turnover rates for new programs are high, and there “is an even shorter time for new programs to establish an audience before cancellation.”
…The ability to ?time-shift? by recording a program to watch later was one of the main appeals of the VCR, which became inexpensive and popular in the 1980s. But recording one show while watching another often seemed to require a small army of video recording devices or a Ph.D. in computer programming; even then, the technology was limited. This changed with the advent of the digital video recorder (DVR), a technology that has given us even greater control over television viewing than the remote, but is also impossible to imagine without it.
…If our advertisements are any guide, we are using devices such as TiVo less as efficient, multi-tasking, modern assistants than as technological enablers that help us indulge in excesses of passive spectacle. TiVo does not free us to watch less TV by eliminating waste; it seduces us with more TV by making television a more perfectly self-centered experience.
…Even if you don?t believe that there is such a thing as “television addiction,” Robert Kubey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi have compiled some startling statistics about our viewing habits: they found that “on average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a day” to watching television, which is half of their total leisure time. We spend more time watching television than doing anything else but sleeping and working.
…The remote control and TiVo are not the only ultra-personalized technologies to captivate us in recent years. One of the earliest technologies of individualized entertainment was the Walkman, the portable radio and cassette player introduced by Sony in July 1979. Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Walkman recently, a writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer recalled his enthusiasm for the “mix tape” that the Walkman promoted:”Countless new soundtracks beckoned. I made running tapes, sunning tapes, sauntering tapes, strutting tapes.” He was no longer “a prisoner of Donna Summer or Molly Hatchet on the radio.” He created personal, portable soundtracks for life.
Not everyone was pleased by this new development, however, and some critics expressed concern that the Walkman would dramatically transform our experience of music for the worse. As music columnist Norman Lebrecht argued, “No invention in my lifetime has so changed an art and cheapened it as the Sony Walkman.” By removing music from its context?in the performance hall or the private home?and making it portable, the Walkman made music banal.
..Like TiVo, control is the reason people give when asked why they love iPod. In a February 2004 interview with Wired News, Michael Bull, who teaches at the University of Sussex and writes extensively about portable music devices, argued, “People like to be in control. They are controlling their space, their time and their interaction…. That can?t be understated?it gives them a lot of pleasure.” Like TiVo, this degree of control, once experienced, inspires great loyalty; the praise of iPod users echoes that of TiVo owners, both of whom often remark on how they can?t believe they ever lived without the devices. But because the iPod is a portable technology, just like the cell phone, it has an impact on social space that TiVo does not.
…What ties all these technologies together is the stroking of the ego. When cable television channels began to proliferate in the 1980s, a new type of broadcasting, called “narrowcasting,” emerged?with networks like MTV, CNN, and Court TV catering to specific interests. With the advent of TiVo and iPod, however, we have moved beyond narrowcasting into “egocasting”?a world where we exercise an unparalleled degree of control over what we watch and what we hear. We can consciously avoid ideas, sounds, and images that we don?t agree with or don?t enjoy. As sociologists Walker and Bellamy have noted, “media audiences are seen as frequently selecting material that confirms their beliefs, values, and attitudes, while rejecting media content that conflicts with these cognitions.” Technologies like TiVo and iPod enable unprecedented degrees of selective avoidance. The more control we can exercise over what we see and hear, the less prepared we are to be surprised. It is no coincidence that we impute God-like powers to our technologies of personalization (TiVo, iPod) that we would never impute to gate-keeping technologies. No one ever referred to Caller ID as “Jehovah?s Secretary.”
…TiVo, iPod, and other technologies of personalization are conditioning us to be the kind of consumers who are, as Joseph Wood Krutch warned long ago, “incapable of anything except habit and prejudice,” with our needs always preemptively satisfied. But it is worth asking how forceful we want this divining of our tastes to become.
The New Atlantis: The Age of Egocasting: Jan 2005 issue
Concentrated Trackback attack hits bloggers
An undetermined large number of blogs were hit with Trackback spam yesterday. It occurred across blogging toolsets, and judging from comments threads, this attack was wide ranging:
Burningbird
dangerousmeta
pesky’apostrophe
This site has a broken trackback implementation that I’ve been meaning to fix. BTW – I hate seeing my friends getting abused like this. Makes me angry. Mac says it better than I can!
Microsoft Search launches and Google becomes a domain name registrar
Slashdot threads on both big happenings:
Is Groovy a lost cause? Things to watch for open source project managers
While I’m not a user of it yet in any real sense, I can say with confidence that I expect Groovy to grow and become a stable platform. The ideas and people behind it are terrific. However, there appears to be some problems with the project as it attempts to get over the hump. There are potential lessons here for open source project mangagers. I hope people share how they get past this point.
High schoolers on free speech
Our students aren’t being prepared for the future, and they aren’t being prepared to understand their rights.
Conservatives should join liberals in teaching the meaning and value of the Constitution – all of it.
Our rights seem to be going away slowly, piece by piece, while no one watches – or gives a damn.
More at Lower Merion Grassroots (Philly Future’s blogger of the week btw).