Tag Archives: web

I love the smell of Web mobs in the morning

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It’s been an interesting week and a half in American politics, but today, the Web is going to take a special role, the blogosphere in particular, and in an a real ugly way.

There are pictures floating around of some MySpace pages, with titles and comments that are easily misunderstood not given appropriate context.

And based upon our biases we will automatically believe what we want to believe about them.

While we all take special delight in exposing hypocrisy, as we should as it reveals much about character, sometimes things go way, way too far. And I have a feeling this is about to.

We’re all flawed human beings and the sooner we each recognize that, and be understanding towards that, the better this world will be. From all sides of the political isle.

I think Obama’s speech last week was a bit of an inspiration. And this is an expression of that.

Social Media/Software Links for Today

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There’s a theme going on here that is a bit hard to place… but it’s there.

Jon Udell: Homophily, anti-recommendation, and Driveway Moments , shout out to Global Voices Online:

Recommendation systems don’t help me much. They only suggest things similar to other things I’ve shown interest in. Increasingly that just frustrates me. The most delightful recommendations are those that connect me with things that interest me in unpredictable ways. That happens serendipitously, and I haven’t yet found a reliable way to manufacture the serendipity.

Crooked Timber: Blogs, Participation and Polarization:

So whether you like political blogs will depend to some extent on whether you prefer deliberation across party lines to participation, or vice versa. Personally (at least as regards political efficacy in the current era), I’m on the vice versa side, but we leave this question deliberately open, as people from different perspectives may disagree &c &c.

NYTimes: via rc3.org: Undecideds More Decided Than They Think, Study Says:

Voters who insist that they are undecided about a contentious issue are sometimes fooling themselves, having already made a choice at a subconscious level, a new study suggests.

Wired: Presidential Election Already Decided … in Voters’ Minds:

The electorate has already made up its collective mind who it will vote for in November. Even many of those all-important and highly coveted undecided voters aren’t really undecided.

They may think they are carefully weighing their choices, but their decision is rigged in advance by their subconscious minds, say psychologists, and they just aren’t aware of it.

CJR: Echo Chamber: How blogging failed the war in Georgia:

There are, of course, many others. The point is not that some blogs covered the conflict well, and fulfilled the promise of a blog network that transcends the spin and amplifies ignored voices: it is that the majority of blogs did not. Watching the most prominent blogs turn into their own worst enemies largely deflates much of their egalitarian mystique–and drives home just how important it is to remain a skeptical reader.

Slate: What’s Really Killing Newspapers: Not that long ago, the daily newspaper was an indispensable coiner of social currency, and it gave its readers piles of the stuff in each edition.

Corante: Transforming American Newspapers (Part 2):

It is almost impossible to overstate how utterly the supply of news and information available to most Americans has changed during the past 35 years. Within a single generation, the Supply & Demand equation has gone from relative scarcity to certain surplus. People now have so much access to information that some are complaining about ‘data smog’.

Bubblegeneration: Data is a Commodity, or How Not to Revolutionize…:

This is an old question. We discussed it at USV Sessions two years ago – I think it was phrased, “What’s the value of data in an open world”. And even then, little insight was generated.

It’s the wrong question. Data isn’t the valuable.

In fact, data’s a commodity. We’re drowning in data.

Think about it this way: the lower the cost of interaction, by definition, the more abundant data is – because every interaction creates reams of data. More data is created tomorrow than was created yesterday. And so on.

What is valuable are the things that create data: markets, networks, and communities.

Chicago Tribune interviews Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock.com and Django: Cyberstar.

Current issue of Scientific American deals with privacy and identity: How I Stole Someone’s Identity, Internet Eavesdropping: A Brave New World o Wiretapping, Data Fusion: The Ups and Downs of All-Encompassing Digital Profiles, Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?, Cryptography: How to Keep Your Secrets Safe.

And Apple bans a… comic book.

Dare Obasanjo: “Don’t fight the Web, embrace it”

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A must read: Dare Obasanjo: Explaining REST to Damien Katz:

There are other practical things to be mindful of as well to ensure that your service is being a good participant in the Web ecosystem. These include using GET instead of POST when retrieving a resource and properly utilizing the caching related headers as needed (If-Modified-Since/Last-Modified, If-None-Match/ETag, Cache-Control), learning to utilize HTTP status codes correctly (i.e. errors shouldn’t return HTTP 200 OK), keeping your design stateless to enable it to scale more cheaply and so on. The increased costs, scalability concerns and complexity that developers face when they ignore these principles is captured in blog posts and articles all over the Web such as Session State is Evil and Cache SOAP services on the client side. You don’t have to look hard to find them. What most developers don’t realize is that the problems they are facing are because they aren’t keeping RESTful principles in mind.

It’s important to speak out

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louisgray.com: Seeing The Web’s Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking

Why does everything suck?: Does Anonymity Lead To Social Anarchy?

Sexism Runs Rampant on Reddit (and maybe the rest of the social web)

Wha, that last link threw you a bit? Why is that? Is it that we are more comfortable confronting racism then sexism? And has the Presidential campaign reflected that? Why?

How we go about fighting racism and sexism, while protecting free speech is confusing territory.

I figure the best way is by speaking out loudly, and clearly.

PS – Make a donation to the Thomas Jefferson Center for free speech in George Carlin’s name.

What does it mean when our media re-writes itself?

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Boing Boing decided to un-publish, remove from public view, Violet Blue related posts.

What does it mean when our media rewrites itself?

NYTimes: Link by Link – Poof! You’re Unpublished

Boing Boing on the matter.

Violet Blue (NSFW) on the matter.

There are quite a few fellow bloggers who have linked and commented about this – but without more info, it is just conjecture and I don’t wish to add to any of it.

However, I do want to stress the importance of the de-linking – note that the first two pages of Google search results on this subject don’t point to Violet Blue what so ever. You would think they would, but they don’t.

As Rafe states – links are currency on the Web. When we reach a certain level of influence, we’ve earned a responsibility, whether we want to own up to it or not. When we don’t live up to that responsibility, we lose credibility.

Boing Boing, in my book, has lost some.

Related:

Jeff Jarvis: Media is Singular (about time folks come around to this)

Politico: Media hype: How small stories become big news (what happens when new media take on old media mores or old media takes on new media mores or… well.. see above)

Garret Vreeland: “The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.”

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Emily Gould, formerly of Gawker wrote of her experience sharing her life online in the NYTimes. It’s a weekend must read.

The piece has drawn interesting reaction from here and there, but the response that stood out the most to me was Garret’s:

NY Times, you got snookered. You need editors who’ve had a history on the internet, with experience of the weblogging phenomena going back to the beginning of the revolution.

Why is there such a strong reaction among webloggers to this piece? To us, the lessons gleaned from this article were new eight or nine years ago. Now they’re reflexive, done without thought: Revealing personal information online, is like lending your favorite books. Only lend what you don’t mind losing. Never lend what is valuable to others, without permission. Don’t expect to be forgiven if you do, because you cannot ‘take it back.’

Repeat after me: The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.

Again, louder.

The Internet is personal, pervasive, and permanent.

The sooner you memorize and understand that, the better.

“the 110 AC outlet”

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There’s a good piece in the NYTimes on cloud computing for the uninitiated: Cloud Computing: So You Don’t Have to Stand Still

Traditional companies are also beginning to adapt their computing infrastructure to the cloud. Reuven Cohen is founder and chief technologist at Enomaly, a software firm in Etobicoke, Ontario, that helps companies do just that. While most of its clients are technology businesses, Mr. Cohen says Enomaly is working with a New York-based bank that uses cloud computing to develop and test applications. He says that another customer is a large media business that uses the cloud to process video.

He sees this kind of need-driven use as a “fundamental change in how we manage technology.”

In fact, cloud computing is poised to do for technology what the electrical grid did for power, says Nicholas Carr, author of “The Big Switch,” which compares the rise of the cloud to the rise of electric utilities. The electrical grid streamlined operations for companies; when every home had cheap power and outlets, “you had incredible innovation in how to put all that cheap power to use,” Mr. Carr says. He thinks that cloud computing will prompt a similar cycle over the next decade.

There are practical problems that could turn the cloud into a thunderhead. The technology is still emerging: Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) went offline for a couple of hours in February.

Peter O’Kelly, an analyst at the Burton Group, a technology research firm, says he thinks that many established companies will not save money by moving to the cloud. And Alistair Croll, a partner at Bitcurrent, a consulting firm that specializes in Web and cloud technologies, says companies will not be able to put data willy-nilly into the cloud because of security concerns.

At the same time, Mr. Croll says the cloud is here to stay. “The Web has become the interface” for computing, “the 110 AC outlet,” he says. That is a fundamental shift that could power a new cycle of technological innovation.

It’s never as simple as either/or

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There are far too many who like to paint the future of quality filtered media as either entirely driven by ‘the wisdom of the crowds’ or entirely by ‘the experts and the elite’.

Both these extremist views are wrong as hybrids that combine the best of both have already proven successful and will continue to do so over the long haul, no matter the fashion of the moment.

Newsweek.com: Is User-Generated Content Out? | Newsweek Technology (Stupid)

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.

Here’s a thing that’s been disturbing me about Facebook and Social Networking services…

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Tim Berners-Lee, as quoted by Jon Udell in a piece that greatly influenced me back in the day, called the web “a shared information space through which people and machines could communicate.” . The original piece in which Tim Berners-Lee said that is still up for all to read, titled “The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future”. I found the piece by typing the quote in Google. Give it a try.

As we share our knowledge, collectively with one another, across blogs, message forums, email lists, and any other services that permit indexing, and reinforce that knowledge via hyperlinking, we are, collectively, building a space that benefits humanity.

It is this collective space that helped me learn what I needed to learn to build a career.

And all this happens, not because of altruistic reasons, but because the architecture of the Web empowers, via the hyperlink, a certain form of communication and collaboration.

The conversations that occur on Facebook, and on most social networking services, happen in the public-private.

In places not indexed by Google, not indexed by Yahoo!, yet are public to selected communities that have access and privilege to them. Gated communities. Islands.

Certainly, there has always been places out of reach of search engines (and there will always be a need for some), but until the last few years, the call from the digerati was to surface these databases of knowledge to the public, behind whatever proprietary walls that may have kept them out of reach. Whether they be newspaper archives, or email lists.

Don’t get me wrong – there’s a lot celebrate when it comes to social networking services. I’m a participant in more than a few, to be sure.

But if they come to define the Web, as they are to some in the media, then I fear we are taking a great step backward.