We maybe on the eve of a new war (USAToday: Poll finds Americans split on taking military action in Iran). Do *you* think you’re doing all you can to inform your fellow citizen of facts or opinions? Do you think it matters? Do you think people are informed enough to weigh in on this? Why do you think that is and who gets the praise or the fault?
Category Archives: Communications, Connection, Internet, Web, Media
How Can This Be?
The greatest book about the Web, bar none, is David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined. I think the book nailed the nature of the Web, and the motivations behind how we use it and why it has become such a large part in our lives. So when I quote the following, I really believe it. It’s one of the things that motivates me to continue in the line of work I am in.
David Weinberger: Small Pieces Loosely Joined – Kids Version:
So, here we have two worlds. In the real world, people are kept apart by distance. Because of the vastness of the earth, different cultures have developed. People live in separate countries, divided by boundaries and sometimes by walls with soldiers and guns. On the Web, people come together – they connect – because they care about the same things.
The real world is about distances keeping people apart. The Web is about shared interests bringing people together.
Now, if connecting and caring are what make us into human people, then the Web – built out of hyperlinks and energized by people’s interests and passions – is a place where we can be better at being people.
And that is what the Web is for.
Taking that as gospel, and taking the following as the truth most of us agree on (most folks still think Saddam had something to do with 9/11), can it be that the Web as an information platform has failed? And if so, what can be done about it?
Salon: Michael Massing: “What Orwell Didn’t Know::
Orwell had expected advances in technology to allow the ruling elite to monopolize the flow of information and through it to control the minds of the masses. In reality, though, those advances have set off an explosion in the number and diversity of news sources, making efforts at control all the harder to achieve. The 24-hour cable news channels, the constantly updated news Web sites, news aggregators like Google News, post-it-yourself sites such as YouTube, ezines, blogs, and digital cameras have all helped feed an avalanche of information about world affairs. In Iraq, reporters embedded with troops have been able via the Internet to file copy directly from the field. Through “milblogs,” soldiers have been able to share with the outside world their impressions about their experiences on the ground. Even as the war has dragged on, it has given rise to a shelf-full of revealing books, written by not only generals and journalists but also captains, lieutenants, privates, national guardsmen, and even deserters.
In short, no war has been more fully chronicled or minutely analyzed than this one.
…Yet even amid this information glut, the public remains ill-informed about many key aspects of the war. This is due less to any restrictions imposed by the government, or to any official management of language or image, than to controls imposed by the public itself.
…In his reflections on politics and language, Orwell operated on the assumption that people want to know the truth. Often, though, they don’t.
Why I’ve kinda disappeared as of late – the new comcast.net
Take a gander at the new Comcast.net (we’re still in beta) home page 🙂
As some of you know, I’m part of the development group that builds the systems that drive and support comcast.net.
I’m excited about this latest release – it’s been my pleasure to be part of an awesomely talented team and on this project, I’ve been a primary contributor to the architecture as well as code. In a way, it’s a return to my previous role at Knight Ridder Digital.
I think we’ve built a platform that will enable our product teams to rapidly get new, working features and functionality to customers, where previously, doing so was a chore. This system really sets our UI team free – no longer requiring server side developers to create new functionality or even present new content.
Hopefully I’ll get the chance to to post about the technologies and techniques we’ve employed in its development, like Arpit has about The Fan.
I think it’s safe for me to mention the Web tier using Spring MVC and FreeMarker, with a back-end that resembles something akin to CouchDb, and feeding it all is a very modular, extensible CMS. Each tier is usable in different projects, together or independently. It always comes down to implementation details and I hope to share a few sometime, either here, or on a team blog someday.
You can visit our community blog to track changes to the site and get a short summary here.
I have seen the future, and it is rotten
Or should I say – RottenNeighbor.com.
Takes participatory media to new heights…errrr lows.
This service allows you to query by zip code your neighbors and reports that have been posted about them.
Dive right in. It’s a world where everyone is a HO or a WHITETRASH CRACK HEAD.
Good book: “RESTful Web Services”
Labnotes: “RESTful Web Services: the book you already decided to read”:
If you think the idea of using services as building blocks for your software is the best thing since 30″ displays and free schwag, then you already know this book exists. You also know that SOA is some serious stuff best left for trade magazines looking to sell more ads. Out there in the real world, we can’t get anything done without our power tools. And you heard of the one called REST, they say it’s the best brand around. So anyway, you already decided to read this book, now you just need to make it happen.
Here’s a link to buy the book from O’Reilly or click here to buy it from Amazon and help Labnotes (a terrific blog in its own right).
Honestly, this book reinforces long held beliefs of mine about Web development, while giving me a useful vocabulary and set of examples to use in discussion.
That means it’s invaluable 🙂
More from Jon Udell and Linux World.
Rafe: “I am not a systems administrator”
rc3.org: “I am not a systems administrator”:
I’m beginning to feel like every time I touch anything, I have planted the seeds for a future outage.
The more systems administration tasks I perform, the more I understand why systems administrators tend to hate programmers.
I relate.
In which I disagree with Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen posts thought provokers all the time on his must read blog, but this once, I just have to comment. In “The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet” he attempts to clear up confusion about the concept of “platforms” and how they relate to the Internet. Specifically, he describes three “levels” of platforms that you find on the Internet. Go read his post for context. But let me just say that I feel his descriptions are spot on. But the examples he gives for “Level 3” platforms miss a biggie…
The Web itself is a Level 3 platform according to his definition.
It looks like Fred Wilson agrees with my point of view on this.
1 in 3 Americans Still Believe Saddam Involved in 9/11
Unbelievable isn’t it?
Editor & Publisher: “Hit and Myth: Poll Shows 1 in 3 Americans Still Believe Saddam Involved in 9/11”.
Wow.
The sad thing is, predictably, pundits and experts on both sides of the new media debate (something I have yet to understand) will inevitably point fingers.
Nick Carr: “The people formerly known as informed”.
Dan Gillmor: “Journalists Failure to Dispel Saddam-9/11 Myth is Media Scandal”.
Mathew Ingram: “News flash: Digg headlines not “real” news”.
Fact: Despite the information revolution, despite the advent of 24/7 cable news, despite the advent of 24/7 talk radio, despite the Internet, set aside the Web and participatory media for just a minute, it’s already been determined we’re no better informed about our world than in 1989.
So those who long for the good old days can point your fingers at bloggers all you want.
And those who say today far better than the past can point your fingers at ‘traditional’ media journalists all you want.
The failure is complete. It is across the board.
And it portends terrible things for our democracy and society as a whole.
God: “How many times do I have to say it? Don’t kill each other anymore – ever!”
The Onion: September 26, 2001: “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule”:
Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.
“Look, I don’t know, maybe I haven’t made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again,” said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. “Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don’t. And to be honest, I’m really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand.”
Worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, God said His name has been invoked countless times over the centuries as a reason to kill in what He called “an unending cycle of violence.”
“I don’t care how holy somebody claims to be,” God said. “If a person tells you it’s My will that they kill someone, they’re wrong. Got it? I don’t care what religion you are, or who you think your enemy is, here it is one more time: No killing, in My name or anyone else’s, ever again.”
…Growing increasingly wrathful, God continued: “Can’t you people see? What are you, morons? There are a ton of different religious traditions out there, and different cultures worship Me in different ways. But the basic message is always the same: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Shintoism… every religious belief system under the sun, they all say you’re supposed to love your neighbors, folks! It’s not that hard a concept to grasp.”
“Why would you think I’d want anything else? Humans don’t need religion or God as an excuse to kill each other – you’ve been doing that without any help from Me since you were freaking apes!” God said. “The whole point of believing in God is to have a higher standard of behavior. How obvious can you get?”
“I’m talking to all of you, here!” continued God, His voice rising to a shout. “Do you hear Me? I don’t want you to kill anybody. I’m against it, across the board. How many times do I have to say it? Don’t kill each other anymore – ever! I’m fucking serious!”
Upon completing His outburst, God fell silent, standing quietly at the podium for several moments. Then, witnesses reported, God’s shoulders began to shake, and He wept.
The Onion: September 26, 2001: “American Life Turns Into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie”: “In the movies, when the president says, ‘It’s war,’ that usually means the good part is just about to begin,” said hardware-store owner Thom Garner of Cedar Rapids, IA. “Why doesn’t it feel that way now? It doesn’t feel like the good part is about to begin at all. It feels there’s never going to be another good part again.”
The Onion: September 26, 2001: “Report: Gen X Irony, Cynicism May Be Permanently Obsolete”: “This earnestness can’t last forever. Can it?” No. It didn’t.
The Onion: September 26, 2001: “Bush Sr. Apologizes To Son For Funding Bin Laden In ’80s”: “I’m sorry, son,” Bush told President George W. Bush. “We thought it was a good idea at the time because he was part of a group fighting communism in Central Asia. We called them ‘freedom fighters’ back then. I know it sounds weird. You sort of had to be there.”
POSTSCRIPT: The Onion: October 3, 2001: “A Shattered Nation Longs To Care About Stupid Bullshit Again”:
“The United States is a free country, a strong country, a prosperous country,” Schuitt said. “Many veterans gave their lives so we would have the right to focus our attention and energies on the DVD release of Joe Dirt, the latest web-browsing cell phones, and how-low-can-you-go hip-hugging jeans. It is a sign of our collective strength as a nation that we genuinely give a shit about the latest developments in the Cruise-Cruz romance. When Mariah Carey’s latest breakdown is once again treated as front-page news, that is the day the healing will have truly begun.”
POST POSTSCRIPT – Six years later, Bin Laden is still free, our troops are deployed in a nation building exercise in a previously dictator led country we decided to dismantle that had nothing to do with the attack – and Afghanistan is sliding back towards the Taliban.
And the day before the sixth anniversary of the attacks headlines were dominated by Britney Spears.
The biggest blogs these days are actually getting TV shows – Perez Hilton and TMZ.com.
And according to Technorati, well, the rest of the known blogosphere is focussed on gadgets and making money.
God bless our troops. God bless the world.
And good day everyone.
“Global naming leads to global network effects.”
First, a reminder about what makes the Web, the Web….
W3C.org: Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One: 2. Identification:
In order to communicate internally, a community agrees (to a reasonable extent) on a set of terms and their meanings. One goal of the Web, since its inception, has been to build a global community in which any party can share information with any other party. To achieve this goal, the Web makes use of a single global identification system: the URI. URIs are a cornerstone of Web architecture, providing identification that is common across the Web. The global scope of URIs promotes large-scale “network effects”: the value of an identifier increases the more it is used consistently (for example, the more it is used in hypertext links (§4.4)).
Principle: Global Identifiers
Global naming leads to global network effects.
This principle dates back at least as far as Douglas Engelbart’s seminal work on open hypertext systems; see section Every Object Addressable in [Eng90].
What are the global – public – URI’s of Facebook? What are they in regards to any social network for that matter?
This is an important train of thought to consider when debating how Facebook and other social networks influence our relationship with Google, and the entire Web.
Facebook’s growth devalues Google’s utility – it devalues the public Web – at least how it is described in “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” and the Web’s own architecture document.
This is why Scoble can’t be more wrong when he says “Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years” because Facebook and other social networks are going to not only affect how we use Google – but will eliminate the utility of the Mahalo’s and TechMeme’s of the world – because they too rely on a robust and growing *public* URI ecosystem.
Dare: Why Google Should be Scared of Facebook:
What Jason and Jeff are inadvertantly pointing out is that once you join Facebook, you immediately start getting less value out of Google’s search engine. This is a problem that Google cannot let continue indefinitely if they plan to stay relevant as the Web’s #1 search engine.
What is also interesting is that thanks to efforts of Google employees like Mark Lucovsky, I can use Google search from within Facebook but without divine intervention I can’t get Facebook content from Google’s search engine. If I was an exec at Google, I’d worry a lot more about the growing trend of users creating Web content where it cannot be accessed by Google than all the “me too” efforts coming out of competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo!.
The way you get disrupted is by focusing on competitors who are just like you instead of actually watching the marketplace. I wonder how Google will react when they eventually realize how deep this problem runs?
None of this invalidates Scott Karp’s riff on Scoble’s main point – there is a growing role for “Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web”. Our friends, our families, our communities. Not just machines and algorithms.
My favorite and fellow bloggers, Slashdot, Salon, the home page of the NYTimes, Philly Future, Shelley Powers, Scott himself, my news reader subscriptions, are all trusted humans, or representations of trusted humans, filtering the Web for me.
There’s nothing new to that fact that people play a direct role in how we discover what may interest us on the Web. It goes back to Yahoo!’s earliest days. Back to links.net, back to the NCSA What’s New page. It goes to the heart of what blogging is all about.
People have been way too hung up on Digg’s voting algorithms and forget that what makes Digg, Digg is its community of participants.
People forget Slashdot outright. As they do Metafilter.
So it still comes down to trust – What organizations do we trust? What systems do we trust? What communities do we trust? What people do we trust?
And just how do we share that with each other?