God: “How many times do I have to say it? Don’t kill each other anymore – ever!”

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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.

Hack Yourself

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An oldie but a goodie: Bloodletters: “Hack Yourself”:

…You know whose fault it is that your life isn’t perfect. Your boss. Your teachers. Your ex-lovers. The ones who hurt you, the ones who abused you, the ones who left you bleeding. Or even yourself. You know whose fault it is – you’ve been telling yourself your whole life. Knowing whose fault it is that your life sucks is an excellent way to absolve yourself of any reponsibility for taking your life into your own hands.

Forget about it. Let it go. The past isn’t real. “That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.” If we’re not talking about something that is real and present and in your life right now, then it doesn’t matter. Nothing can be done about it. If nothing can be done about it, then don’t spend your energy dwelling on it — you have other things to do.

I may sound cruel, I may sound simplistic, I may sound like I’m saying you should just “get over it,” by suggesting that you should let go of your past. I’m sorry for that. But life won’t hold still and wait for you to lick your wounds. The race is still being run. Get up and keep moving. You can’t do anything about yesterday.

You can do something about tomorrow. And about the next day. Focus your energies there.

“I don’t have time to write.” “I can’t dance.” “I can’t talk to new people.” “I’m not attractive.”

I hear this all the time. I always hear the people around me sabotaging themselves, drawing lines and borders and boxes around themselves.

To which I say, make the time; dance; just talk to people; be attractive!

Yes, again, it’s simplistic of me to say that. But it’s simplistic of you to so easily say what you cannot do!

We’re excellent pattern-matchers. That’s what the human mind does – it’s a pattern-matching engine. So we look at ourselves, at our history, at our behaviors, and we draw straight lines between the points – we assume that just because we’ve done things a certain way in the past, we’ll always do them that way in the future. If we’ve failed before, we’ll always fail.

Screw that.

From my stuff tagged “texts” at del.icio.us…

I’m 35 As Of Yesterday

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My mom thinks it funny how my birthday falls so close to Labor Day. I actually think it’s kinda great because it gives me time off of work to reflect.

While I certainly have challenges in my life, I have a lot to be thankful for, including some great friends, colleagues, and family.

Love ya Richelle, Emma and Xena 🙂

“Global naming leads to global network effects.”

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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?

New Looks

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Leonard Witt’s blog and PJNet got a great facelift.

So did Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0 courtesy of bokardo.

Doc Searls recently moved into new digs.

Steve Rubel is contemplating a move to WordPress.com from TypePad (I think his reasoning is flawed and so are most of the folks leaving comments for him).

While Rafe recently upgraded to MT4 . I need to get around to doing the same.

Speaking of Scott Karp, he’s launched an interesting new journalism service.

Simple RESTful URLs with JSPs

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Bill de hOra posted an interesting question the other day, that has to do with mapping views to requests, cleanly, in a RESTful way, as Sam Ruby framed it:

it’s easy to forget that Servlets were Java’s response to CGI, way back when. Here’s is the link for Stefan’s entry:

http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2007/08/15/java_web_frameworks.html

I’m wondering how would one produce a URL space for a blog style archive, using Servlets+JSP, and do so in a way that isn’t a CGI/RPC explicit call? That is, the URLs don’t end up like this:

http://www.innoq.com/blog/entry.jsp?id=java_web_frameworks

with one constraint – “just a servlet” that pulls java_web_frameworks.html direct from a “2007/08/15” folder on the filesystem and byapsses JSP is out. All the response is to be generated via JSP. Would we need to a create framework, however ‘micro’?

In Django world, answering such a question is rather easy. And for PHP hackers, you’re probably saying, hey, use .htaccess to route requests, but in Java, this question becomes a bit more complicated.

A Java developer would want solve two problems here: enable “clean” RESTful URLs, and do as little Java coding as possible by distributing responsibility for defining views to a templating language. Hopefully empowering someone who knows just HTML/CSS to work their magic. The benefits to such an approach can’t be underestimated. We we went down such a path at Knight Ridder with the Cofax CMS and it empowered a lot of creativity with little resources on hand (lots of folks know HTML/CSS/JS, few know Java).

Carbon Five discusses an approach that decomposes path info into parameters for Spring MVC controllers: Parameterized REST URLs with Spring MVC. This solves problem one. It still routes requests to a Controller defined in Java, and I’ve seen far too many not solve problem two, which leaves a design where you have a Request, that maps to a Controller that maps to a single View. But this leaves you with an *excellent* foundation to solve the second problem.

Sam Ruby points to URLRewriteFilter as one possible solution. This potentially solves both problems.

Stefan Tilkov explains how to decompose path info and use RequestDispatcher as a solution. In Sam Ruby’s comments, I suggested just such an approach and it’s worked great for me in previous (and current) projects. This potentially solves both problems.

BTW, if you’re interested in a templating language, outside of JSP (and who isn’t?), consider FreeMarker. A huge project I’m helping design and develop is having terrific success with it and Spring MVC. Real magic starts to happen when you decouple Requests from Views. A shortcut to this in Spring MVC is implementing a RequestToViewNameTranslator.

Yahoo! and Google Move to Squeeze Newspapers Further

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Yahoo! has relaunched it’s local search service. It better surfaces community driven participation and feels far more like a destination than before.

Screenwerk: Yahoo! Refreshes, Redesigns Local.

They still haven’t gone as far as I expect them to one day do – integrate Flickr, del.icio.us, and Groups, and Maps into a cohesive whole, but the potential is there.

On the other side is Google, which recently launched its Business Referral Representative program.

Google will now pay you as an independent contractor to collect information on local businesses, telling them about Ad Words, and submitting them to Google Maps. You can read more about it from here and a recent SearchEngineWatch article.

Social Software Rule: “Personal Value Precedes Network Value”

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Bokardo: The Del.icio.us Lesson:

The one major idea behind the Del.icio.us Lesson is that personal value precedes network value. What this means is that if we are to build networks of value, then each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network. In the case of Del.icio.us, people find value saving their personal bookmarks first and foremost. All other usage is secondary.

As people use Del.icio.us more, and in order to gain more personal value, they use tags to be able to find their bookmarks later. Tagging isn’t even the primary function of Del.icio.us. Most of the tagging done on Del.icio.us is done secondarily, and for personal use.

The social value of tags on Del.icio.us is only a happy side-effect. Even though most of the ink spilled about Del.icio.us is about the social value, it’s really not the reason why people use it.

Similar to Google aggregating links that were originally created for taking readers from one document to another, Del.icio.us can aggregate tags in order to find out how people value content. If 1,000 people save and tag the same bookmark, for example, that’s a good sign that they find value in it. But to think that people tag so that this information can be aggregated is to give people a trait of altruism they just don’t possess.
Blinded by the Aggregation Light

Unfortunately, the ability to aggregate has blinded many software developers to think that tags are a cure-all to the success of their software.

Lead in Baby Bibs!!!!!!!!

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Ya know, I’m sure this is a bit of fear mongering, but yesterday I cursed out loud “holy fuck” when I saw this headline in the New York Times: Some Baby Bibs Said to Contain Levels of Lead.

It would appear, every day a new story pops up to remind us that the infrastructure we rely on, to provide us the capacity to do seemingly ordinary things in our lives – from brushing our teeth, to crossing a bridge, to hanging out on a corner with friends in safety – isn’t all that reliable anymore.

We’re No Better Informed About Our World Than In 1989

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Despite the information and communication revolutionary time we live in, Americans remain in the dark about our world.

Pew released a survey back in April detailing Americans knowledge of current affairs, comparing the status quo to that of 1989.

We’ve had a literal explosion of new media and communications services and tools come into being these past 15 years. They have completely reshaped how we get our news and how we connect with our communities.

Social Networks, Blogs, RSS, News Aggregators, Email, Email Lists, Message Boards, Websites, News portals, the Web, the Internet, Cable network 24/hr. news, talk radio, online magazines, collaborative news filters, algorithmic news filters, the list goes on and on.

You would think with so many choices, so many avenues to get informed, we’d actually be better informed.

You’d be wrong.

On average, today’s citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.

In 1989, for example, 74% could come up with Dan Quayle’s name when asked who the vice president is. Today, somewhat fewer (69%) are able to recall Dick Cheney. However, more Americans now know that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is generally considered a conservative and that Democrats control Congress than knew these things in 1989. Some of the largest knowledge differences between the two time periods may reflect differences in the amount of press coverage of a particular issue or public figure at the time the surveys were taken. But taken as a whole the findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge.

The survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs.

I’m among a bunch of folks who tend to trumpet online services as a cure-all for our past lack of information awareness and communications access.

On the opposite side of the bench have been those who have sounded alarm after alarm about how our ever growing media-and-communications-scape will fragment us ever further and result in ever tightening echo chambers, making us less informed about subject matter as a whole.

Turns out both perspectives are wrong.

Here we are, with so much new technology, so much new media, transforming the way we live our lives, and yet we are as informed, as ill informed, as we were in 1989.

Related:

Newsweek: Dunce-Cap Nation

Wired: Infoporn: Despite the Web, Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed