Category Archives: Communications, Connection, Internet, Web, Media

A few recent thought provokers on living the linked life

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Bruce Schneier: Privacy in the Age of Persistence: We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of.

Nick Bilton: NYTimes: ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web: We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

Anil Dash: CNN: Don’t let Twitter, Facebook, Google be the only game in town: There’s no reason that organizations or individuals who want to use the Web to relay critical information have to rely on Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other giant of the technology industry in the first place. We’ve just forgotten a bit about how the Internet was supposed to work.

Roger Ebert who is living with what his fight against thyroid cancer has dealt him and how the Internet helps him connect: Nil by mouth: So that’s what’s sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I’m alone, it doesn’t involve dinner if it doesn’t involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, “Remember that time?” I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it’s sad. Maybe that’s why I enjoy this blog. You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now. (bonus link read his piece on making out.

More from Daniel Jacobson on NPR’s content management ecosystem

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Programmable Web: Daniel Jacobson: “Content Portability: Building an API is Not Enough”

Previous entries in the series:

Programmable Web: Daniel Jacobson: Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization

Programmable Web: Daniel Jacobson: COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere

You can read much more from the NPR team on their blog at Inside NPR.org. A recent post on the blog from Jason Grosman that caught my attention was “What Happens When Stuff Breaks On NPR.org”.

Related:

Justin Cormack has some thoughts on the above series, in particular on content portablility, that are worth reading.

Also related to content portability (I think – okay – maybe a stretch – but is worthy to think about), is “Dive into history, 2009 edition”: “HTML is not an output format. HTML is The Format. Not The Format Of Forever, but damn if it isn’t The Format Of The Now.”

Also Related:

AIGA: Callie Neylan: Case Study: NPR.org

danah boyd On Facebook, Class, Privacy, and Public-ness

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danah boyd: “Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms”

Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we’ve changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn’t be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don’t have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they’d like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don’t think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don’t want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?

Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don’t have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That’s the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn’t dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?

Related:

Bruce Schneier: “The Eternal Value of Privacy”

Nicholas Carr: Other people’s privacy

New York Times going with the frequency-model?

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I’m cautiously optimistic about this and am excited to see it play out. There is dire need for continued experimentation.

The strategy being discussed this go around is a Financial Times-like metered system (they call it the “frequency-model” – more at Portfolio). This would, theoretically, allow the New York Times to retain its reach and users driven to it via search, links, etc, while deriving revenue from heavy readers:

At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: “At the end of the day, if we don’t get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system.”

But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year’s financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others — that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper’s high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now. The trick would be to build a source of real revenue through online subscriptions while still being able to sell significant online advertising. The appeal of the metered model is that it charges high-volume readers while allowing casual browsers to sample articles for free, thus preserving some of the Times’ online reach.

Read all about it in New York Magazine’s “New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers”.

On blaming the victim

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It used to be common place when a women was raped to blame her in America: to say that she wore the wrong clothes, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, or sent out the ‘wrong signals’. Unfortunately, this attitude still exists in parts of the world.

It is still commonin America to take the default position that when a person loses their job, their house, their lively hoods, to put the blame on their shoulders. Even in the ‘Great Recession’ we are now in. They didn’t work hard enough. They didn’t move with the times fast enough. They were losers or uneducated due to their own laziness.

I have heard, horrifically, when people have lost children, or gotten cancer, or were dealing with mental illness, they simply didn’t *pray* enough. That God must be teaching them a lesson.

All this is echoed in what Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson spewed this week.

I’m a free speech absolutist, so I’m not going to say these creatures don’t have a right to speak.

But fuck them.

You have the power to walk away, turn the channel, delete that bookmark.

Events like the earthquake in Haiti do put things in perspective. In addition they help separate those that actually *care* for other human beings from those that think they are the center of the world or are the marketers of that.

Update: Satan writes Pat Robertson a letter.

As Fred Clark says Pat Robertson would tell Jesus he must have deserved it.

On the China – Google row

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It’s a moment that those into cyberpunk have been looking for, for a long time – when a multinational corporation whose bread and butter is in cyberspace itself confronts a nation-state. When Google posted to their blog “A New Approach To China” it was historic for many reasons: it was an *Internet company* confronting a *country* over *hacking* (try and digest that for a moment), the first most of us heard about this was from Google’s blog post, and it highlights issues of having to do with intellectual property, with free speech, and access to information.

Wow.

You can go on and on with questions, thoughts, concerns, and as usual there is a terrific Metafilter: Metafilte thread to check out.

Related:

NYTimes: Scaling the Digital Wall in China : “The Great Firewall of China is hardly impregnable.”

Bruce Sterling – “Today’s bleeding-edge technology is tomorrow’s broken legacy system.”

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I started to pull together some choice quotes from Bruce Sterling, answering questions about the “State of the World 2010” at the WELL, but realized I’d be quoting far too much. You are better off reading the whole thing yourself. Enjoy.

Okay, one quote! In this he is discussing network-culture:

It’s not that print’s a medium, and the web’s a medium, and you get to migrate between media. The Web is a metamedium that turns everything it grips into network-culture.

*So it’s easy to see that mags are in for it. What’s a little harder is looking at the hollow shell of your once-favorite antique shop and realizing that’s all about eBay. “Gee, I’m on the web all the time now… time for a stroll, it’s a sunny day… Gosh, my neighborhood’s full of spooky holes.” Gothic High-Tech.

Update: Wired: Katie Hafner The Epic Saga of The Well

Two obits at NPR: one worthy, one not

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NPR: In Memoriam: Sweet, Sad Rocker Vic Chesnutt

NPR: The Man Is Gone, But Long Live The Blogosphere (via Garret Vreeland). Jeff Jarvis knows blogging as well as anybody, but NPR should have talked to people who knew Brad Graham, or, as Garret suggests, were at least among his contemporaries in that first wave of blogging. He offered way more than the word ‘blogosphere’ to the history of blogging and way more to the world other than blogging. Check out this related Metafilter thread.