web

Martin Heidegger’s 1954 piece, The Question Concerning Technology transformed the way I look at technology (it’s really dense, and the translation is heavy-handed). I read it in 1995, a decade before I got implicated in the web, and 40 years after it was published. When I first started writing on the web in 2004, I had a draft post, consisting of one sentence, called “The Question Concerning Digital Technology,” which was to be an attempt at an update of the Heidegger piece for a networked world. That draft has long since disappeared, but I’ve been thinking about it again of late.

A rough summary of Heidegger’s argument is:

• the purpose of technology is to order nature for human use
• humans are part of nature
• in ordering nature through technology, humans become part of that which is ordered
• in becoming part of the ordered universe, humans lose humanity
• this is a bad thing
• we might be able to save ourselves, by appealing to the greek root techne, which means, in part: “art”

It’s a compelling description of technology in general, and the web in particular: that the prime driving force is ordering “nature” (in a broad sense), with the result being, more or less, efficiency. If you look at what we’ve all been doing over the last few years on the web, much of the most exciting things had to do with ordering - specifically information, for more efficient access:

• google as a high-level orderer of information on the web
• RSS as an orderer of information sources I want to stay aware of
• del.icio.us as an orderer of information I want to keep track of & share with others
• flickr as an orderer of photos
• wikipedia as an orderer of encyclopaedic information

The list can go on and on, and of course “technology” does many different things, beyond “just” ordering, but in general the force propelling technology often seems to be mastery of the world around us for our use, one way or another. Which, as Heidegger points out, has worrisome implications for all of us.

I’ve always come at technology from something like this angle: I’m not particularly interested in technology per se, I am interested in the ways we might use it to make our lives richer and more meaningful. And in general, I think that creating things is the activity that gives humans the greatest sense of meaning and richness in their lives. Certainly that’s the case for me, and from my beginnings on the web, it was the confluence of free software (that is, the building and dissemination of free tools), collaboration, and unlimited distribution that excited me. “Everyone” could create things now, and share those things with the world. The projects I am most proud of (LibriVox, Atwater Digital Literacy) are platforms for people to create things that, I hope, bring richness into their own lives. I’ve always considered LibriVox as most important for what it does for our volunteers: it gives them a way to deepen their connection to a text they love, to read it and record it, and give it away; to make connections with literature that they might not have made otherwise. That we’re also making a free library of audio literature for the world is in some ways a fringe benefit. [Interestingly, and as a side note, coding itself is, to coders, a deeply creative and satisfying enterprise].

Of late, I’ve been feeling cold about the web. So much of what is going on is the ordering of nature, which, if you believe Heidegger, is the inevitable drive of technology. And “dangerous” for our humanity. I know many people involved in working on tranches of this ordering, and I have a few projects along this line as well (datalibre, earideas, collectik). Just off the top of my head: Evan’s Wikitravel tries to better order travel info; Vinismo order’s wine information; Dopplr tries to better manage your travel, and intersections with others who are moving around too; pal mat is working on google maps, ordering geography; the praized guys are building a better system to organize places and preferences. More will come. All of it is “good,” in the sense that it makes it easier to do the things we want to do, but I often hear Heidegger’s warning echoing through my mind: in ordering nature, we are becoming that which is ordered, and so we risk losing our humanity.

Here are some of the things that are coming, I think, from the inevitable drive of technology to order nature, and our human desire to have efficient sorting systems:

• We’ll continue to cataloging everything (from books to people to places) online, and find better ways to sort all that information, using objective authority (eg authoritative incoming links, aka google juice), personal network authority (links/preferences from your chosen network) as relevance indicators.
• We will map this network on the web, and increasingly apply it to physical space (starting with google maps, and becoming more customized and personalized)
• Mobile technology will mean both that our access to cataloged information becomes ubiquitous, and our efforts to catalog things will be unconstrained
• RFID, or something like it, will mean that this sorting of physical objects will move from its current general state (eg. tracking & finding something like “any copy of a certain book”), to specific (eg. tracking & finding something like “a particular copy of a certain book”), and will touch people too
• We’ll get all the media we want, when we want it
• We’ll get most of the data we want, when we want it
• Our mobile devices will increasingly interact with our physical surroundings (point at an object, get info on it; buy it; sell it), and will become our bank, and keys, our thermostat, and more, as well as everything else it already is (telephone, email, library, map etc).
• All data on the web will become structured, and mostly available
• More data sets (eg government-owned) will arrive on the web, and more people will participate in using that data to understand the world, and make decisions, to order nature
• Data about people will become structured, and mostly available [For a well-networked human in my circle, this has already happened: I can track their interests, on a daily basis (del.icio.us, google reader shared items, digg etc.), their movements (dopplr), their public thoughts (blogs, twitter), books they like (librarything, gutenberg bookshelf), things they buy, etc etc.]

Lots of money will be made (if all goes well, some of it by friends of mine) finding new and different ways to do all this, and more and more. In essence, we’ll continue to use the web (and increasingly, mobile devices) to better order nature. And we’ll become better ordered at the same time.

Looking at this very brief list of what’s going to happen, I can’t help but think: “so what?” Is any of this going to make people’s lives richer or more meaningful?

My suspicion is “no.” I say this as a digital native, if a relatively recent, adoptive native (starting in 2004). For myself, I have found that the price of the benefits of the web has been heavy: while the web has allowed me to do all sorts of things, to build things and relationships, and projects, I find the quality of my time on the web so often unsatisfying. In a comparison of value to me between a random “leisure” hour on the web and a random hour doing something else in the real world, the real world trumps the web almost every time. Yet the web still usually wins the battle for my time (this says as much about me as it does about the web, of course).

I had a dinner a while back with Mike Lenczner, of Ile Sans Fil, and Jon Udell and some others, and this was the question MIke was asking, more or less: “so what?” Is free wifi access for all really such a great thing for people? Free encyclopedia? Free audio books? That’s not to say there is no value in those things, but we in the tech world imbue this stuff with a magical capacity to improve people’s lives, and I don’t think it’s clear that it has. Much less RSS feeds and online bookmarking. Free Software we see as a moral victory; OLPC as a revolutionary project that will save Africa; global voices online, as a dialogue builder that will transform our understanding of each other. All these things are good, great even, and there are countless other examples of wonderful online projects. But part of me agrees with Michael: it’s not clear that on balance they are truly improving people’s lives in any real sense.

But the point of all this is not really to criticize the web, nor to gnash teeth about the things people, including me, are building with it. Rather it’s a call to look at technology from a different angle, a call to designers and technologists and webbies and to consider a different approach, inspired by Heidegger’s solution of technology as art.

The web provides us enormous and efficient access, but a problem seems to me that it strips away the intimacy of our connection. Consider reading a book, versus reading on line; conversing in IM versus having a coffee; viewing a photo versus touching an object. This is not to criticize any of these experiences, or to say we are stuck with the modes and interfaces and tools we have now. I’m not saying that the web means less intimacy, exactly.

But what if we, those of us trying to make the world better with what we do on the web, rethink our projects in these terms. Leave the ordering for a moment, and consider intimacy instead.

What can we, as a community interested in making lives richer and more meaningful, do with technology to help humans experience more intimacy with the things that are important to them?

I don’t really have any answers, but it seems to me that it’s a challenge worth considering.

The web, and technology, will continue to order the world, there is no doubt about that. Your participation in this process is fine - and probably lucrative. But there is more, and more exciting things to think about.

A truly radical and creative use of technology, will find ways to help humans become more intimate with the things that matter to them. Those things might be art, books or songs; and people; probably food, and family. I don’t really know what else, and I don’t really know what I expect this to mean, but I think it’s worth thinking about.

Busy night tonight.

First, pal Nora Young, of CBC’s Spark, will be at the Blue Met, hosting a panel, 7pm at DELTA CENTRE-VILLE - RÉGENCE A:

OUT OF THE BOX: ADVENTURES IN ELECTRONIC LITERATURESince the computer was invented, writers have been using it to forge new literary forms. From the early days of hypertext fiction to the latest in narrative gaming, these authors write beyond the book and way outside the box. - Hosted by Nora Young.

J. R. Carpenter
Jason E. Lewis
Jeff Parker
Alice Van Der Klei

Next, impresario Boris, will be presiding over the 5th installment of Pecha-Kucha Montreal, 8pm at SAT:

What is Pecha Kucha Night?

Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.

Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each - giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

Dan Hill has a wonderful posting of Monocle design notes. There’s much good and thought-provoking stuff in there, particularly if you are interested in text as a medium, and the thinking behind the next generation of media, which sees web and print as different, and complementary, and builds both accordingly. This struck me particularly for some reason:

In terms of user generated content, or user discussion of Monocle pieces, my view was that we didn’t need comments on the site as people increasingly have their own spaces to talk, discuss, comment - whether that’s blogs and discussion fora, or the social software of Facebook et al. So a more progressive approach would be to ensure that everything is linkable and kept online - with clean, permanent URL structures - thus encouraging people to point to articles from the comfort of their own sites. At some point, we could begin to aggregate responses to Monocle editorial, Technorati-style, perhaps (it’s a development of a strategy I’d outlined at the BBC, which there was also predicated on ‘tear-off strips’ of content as well, enabling people to grab BBC media and build a blog entry around it).

Adam Greenfield wasn’t so taken by Monocle, which echoes my reaction years ago to Tyler Brulé’s previous magazine venture, Wallpaper: basically, a fancy mag for rich people who like to covet well-designed, and really expensive, things, and travel to exotic places to have experiences other people aren’t smart/rich/good-looking/adventurous/enlightened enough to contemplate. (Which is fine, but usually doesn’t interest me for all that long).

I’ve never read Monocle, and though I admire the web site, it’s never pulled me in for whatever reason. It might just be because the bespoke tailoring is for a kind of suit I don’t like to wear.

This is great: internetisshit.org.

Of course in lots of ways it isn’t shit, but in many ways it is. So, what do you and I do about it? We can either: a) cut back our time on/commitment to the web, or b) find ways to make it less shit; find good, important things to do on the web, and do them.

From the New Scientist:

Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums.

[more…]

Leaving aside the problem that posting about your own work on Wikipedia, violates two policies (no original research, and don’t edit articles about yourself or your work) … this is an interesting showdown.

Open Access journals, free and open to web linking, is the way science publishing has to go, for the same reasons NYTimes can’t keep its articles behind registration walls. Value is increasingly defined by network authority (is there an agreed term for this, or can I claim coinage of “network authority”?), aka google juice; and if you are out of the network, you are out of the authority. Scientists realize this - hence the desire to get their stuff on Wikipedia … Journals realize that it chips into their control of information, which it does. But like all other businesses, fighting it won’t make it go away, and the sooner they rejig their business models, the better.

Which opens the question: with the web as publishing platform, is there really a need to have academic journals running as businesses? Or is there a better way?

Norman Doidge (channeling McLuhan):

Electronic media are so effective at altering the nervous system because they both work in similar ways and are basically compatible and thus easily linked. Both involve instantaneous transmission of electronic signals to make linkages. Because our nervous system is plastic, it can take advantage of this compatibility and merge with the electronic media, making a single, larger system. Indeed, it is the nature of such systems to merge whether they are biological or man-made. The nervous system is an internal medium, communicating messages from one area of the body to another, and it evolved to do, for multicelled organisms such as ourselves, what the electronic media do for humanity — connect disparate parts.

I am launching a contest: the Worst About Text on the Web. First paragraph only. Comment below with your entry, and a link to the offending text. An expert panel of Judges from Around the Universe will decide on the winner, announced one month from today (if anyone submits anything).

Winner gets a free beer from me, possibly something more exciting.

Here is my entry, from Everyzing.com:

EveryZing is the most powerful digital media merchandising platform available today. Media companies of all sizes leverage our unique ability to drive the volume of online content consumption and create new and powerful revenue streams. Through our speech to text, search and optimization technologies, and consumer-facing website, we create greater opportunities for consumer and advertiser access to online content. The company’s best-in-class technology and comprehensive set of advertising services enable our partners to profit from their content by launching digital channels that deliver the entertainment, news and information that consumers crave.

Join the fun!

you know, if i were smarter than I am, i would do something about this email i got:

Dear Webnames.ca Customer,

Gung Hei Fat Choy!

In celebration of Chinese New Year, Webnames.ca has slashed prices on new .CN registrations.

——————————————————–
REGISTER A NEW .CN DOMAIN FOR ONLY $1.99/ONE YEAR (USD).
——————————————————–
Offer expires February 29th 2008, 11:59pm PST.
*Price applies to new registrations only. Renewals at Webnames.ca regular pricing.

Why Register a .CN?
- China has the world.s second largest population of Internet users
- 80% of enterprises with an online presence in China use a .cn domain
- With 5 million+ domains registered, .CN is now the 2nd most popular country code worldwide

GO TO WWW.WEBNAMES.CA TODAY TO SEARCH FOR YOUR .CN

Sincerely,
Webnames.ca Inc

From New Scientist:

A bunch of sources are reporting on a University College London study into how people born after the arrival of the internet - sometimes dubbed the Google generation - handle information. The top line is, they’re not very good at it.

Although skilled at quickly searching for information they are bad at processing it, the study concludes, mentioning their “impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs”. This worries the researchers who say libraries and educational institutions have to react.

Forgetting “good” or “bad” … what will this mean, I wonder? I notice all these symptoms in myself, and I grew up on books and playing outside.

Kevin Kelly writes about what values start becoming more important when copies are free:

The internet is a copy machine….

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order….

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied….

Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, you’ll always prefer to deal with someone you can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy saturated world.

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy….

From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free…

[more…]

The eight categories are: Findability, Patronage, Embodiment, Accessibility, Authenticity, Interpretation, Personalization, Immediacy.

[via: Open Access News]

I worry for the children …that with all of this information, they will not have the chance to be aware of their own lives… Head for the hills! Go to the woods, get away from all these people! Go to a place where boredom is available to you; there’s where you will start to remember all the things that have ever happened to you.

– Garrison Keillor, on the Book Show.

Indeed. There is so little time to really think these days, what with the constant processing processing processing processing of information. New, surface, ephemeral information, constantly updated and replaced by more.

Mike and I and a few others had dinner with Jon Udell the other night, and Mike raised, convincingly, this big spectral question:What are we really doing, we digital do-gooding evangelists? To what degree will these “improvements” we wish to bring to people’s lives actually bring improvements? Mat’s complainging about the SNR on the web.

Ursula Le Guinn thinks books are doing OK (subscription only), and while I agree with her, I haven’t finished a book in months (this happens occasionally).

So: Is your life improved by the web? By your mac? Your iphone? I mean, I know you love the web and your mac and your iphone, but have they truly improved your life? For me the answer is a very big yes, and a very big no, and they compete furiously. (Though I don’t have an iphone yet, so maybe I should wait to make final judgments).

So, one thing that would make OpenID really useful, I think, is if there was a way to track blog comments made across the web, while logged in with my openid.

That is, have an RSS feed of “Comments made on all blogs by hughmcguire.myopenid.net” …

There have been a few of (non-openid) efforts at this over time, but all of them clunky. Mike still tracks his comments by tagging them “mycomments” on del.icio.us … and i think there is a plugin called cocomment or something.

But those are “extra” hacks, and most people haven’t bothered.

If by logging-in (using openid) to leave a blog comment, i were also pinging another server (maybe myopenid.com’s) to tell them that I was commenting *here* … it would be easy, and useful to make a feed. myopenid.com ought to be able to do that because (privacy spideysense tingling) they know every time I have logged in somewhere?

From Matt:

Goodhart’s Law:

Once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role.

Translation: once people know what you’re measuring, they start to game the system. Read about it here.

All sorts of institutions are in big trouble because of the internet, and they’re scared as hell. Newspapers can’t figure out how they’ll keep making money; the music business is terrified that its business model is evaporating. Britannica has faded to irrelevance for anyone with an internet connection. I think that’s the tip of things, and anyone who has anything to do with information (schools, governments, book publishers, television, public broadcasters, among others) are all going to see their apple carts upset with fruit rolling all over the place in the next decade.

I’ve been thinking about this particularly in my role as President of the Board of Directors of the Atwater Library, where we are struggling (as many libraries do) to try to articulate why we are important, why we should get funding.

The big problem, I think, is that institutions tend to be wrong about what they are actually for.

That is, they have defined their existence by various functions they perform within a given ecosystem. In the context here, these institutions grew up in an ecosystem where information was scarce, and information distribution limited. The ecosystem has changed (info distribution & access is abundant), and institutions are having a hard time adapting. So: music labels think they sell CDs to people; newspapers think they get writers to make news articles, and get people to read them; libraries think they give people access to books and computers; universities think they provide a place for people to learn and do research; governments think they try to improve society by implementing policies wanted by the people … etc. But I think they are all wrong.

All those kinds of definitions get you tied up in the functional stuff you do, and they don’t really get to the core of what’s important, what the real thing is that you are doing. I don’t have answers, but any business/institution that thinks like this is going to get creamed in the next ten years, unless they take a look at what they are really for.

It seems to me the porn business, one of the most profitable businesses in the Universe, gets this in a way no one else does. Because the porn biz understands exactly what it is for:

Pornographers don’t sell pornography; they provide orgasms.

Looking at it that way, they don’t seem to care much about how they do it - they’ll just find ways to give people the orgasms however people want them given. Dirty postcards, magazines, prono theatres, VHS and Betamax, phone sex, online photos, online videos, chat lines, webcams, cybersex and God knows what else. You don’t hear the porn business whingeing about Intellectual Property and illegal downloads, and consumers as thieves, because they don’t have time: they’re too busy trying to give the world what it seems to want, more orgasms.

So, stepping out of the peepshow and back to the respectable world, why are newspapers, for instance, having such a hard time? I think it’s because they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what they do.

The value of a newspaper is not that it gives me information; the value of a newspaper is how it selects information - what it puts in and what it leaves out.

So: Newspapers are not for providing information; newspapers are for selecting what information I should get. (And maybe: for helping me make decisions? - not sure about that one).

And the problem is that newspapers, for the most part, are in a tizzy because they ask: how can we compete as information providers in a world where there is unlimited information available on the web? And the answer, I think, is that they should stop competing as information providers, and start focusing on their real skills and usefulness, which is information selection. Note, by the way, that this does not mean that newspapers should stop providing information, but rather that that task might necessary in order to do a good job of selecting information.

I keep coming back again and again to something I heard Joi Ito say a couple of years ago on some podcast or other:

mp3s are just metadata associated with a musician.

That’s pretty big, pretty heavy. I don’t think I quite have it fixed in my brain yet, but the idea is that a thing’s value is defined by how well people know it, and how highly they consider it. Mp3s are meta data that allow people to “find” an artist, and allow them to determine how much they value that artist. (What that means for the music biz I’m not sure, but we’ll find out in the next ten years).

For newspapers, you might say the same thing: news articles and columns are just metadata associated with the newspaper. But the real value a newspaper performs is not giving me good articles, it’s putting it all together. The mere provision of information is worthless now, because anyone can do it (even me).

This is why blogs - at least in the techno-intelligencia - win. Blogs are excellent selectors of information, while newspapers are pretty clunky at it - because for the past 300 years they existed in an ecosystem where information was scarce. Now information (and access to it) is abundant. So a site like BoingBoing becomes one of the most popular on the net: their craft is not providing information, it’s selecting it. And they’re good at it.

And given the huge overabundance of information on the web, we need all the help we can get in selecting. So newspapers need to work harder at providing that service, bringing that core skill (which they have always had - the Editor is the God of the newspaper) to bear on the web. Have a flip thru the Gazette, or, God help you, visit their web site, and is it any wonder they’re having a hard time? Half of it is the same generic wire-service information that’s in any other paper or news site on the web. That’s not giving me much value. It’s lazy selection and boring, and lazy and boring are a dime a dozen these days. So work harder at finding and selecting interesting content (from the web, there’s tons of it), take down you stupid registration system down, put up a decent navigable web site designed by someone who understands the Internet, and get on with things and stop whingeing.

This was the idea behind earideas: that what’s missing is not good audio out there, but a really good way to find and hear the good audio. (I hope we’re succeeding … anyone have any comments on earideas? Have you checked it out yet? Do you like it?).

There is lots of work to do, and I guess you and I and many other people will be busy for the next few years figuring this all out.

Oh, and any ideas about what a library is truly for? Some help would be much appreciated in deciding that - I’ve got some suggestions, but it hasn’t quite crystalized in the old brain yet.

UPDATE: Interesting proposition about wordpress and learning, that suggests a way education might start changing. [via blogsavvy; via bentrem twitter]

UPDATE II: Stemming from a debate about the value of political groups on Facebook, Mat’s started thinking about political platforms on the web.

I’m pretty sure openid (a centralized, secure sign-on) is a good idea. evan has a post explaining it, addressing some security worries (but his server seems to be down now, so i’ll have to link later) and here it is.

anyway, i’ve just installed the wordpress openid plugin, so you can leave comments here using openid.

let me know if you find it useful.

UPDATE: I’m still uneasy about openid. a little birdie pointed me to this article, that says i should be.

Jimmy Wales got hammered by Arrington for the launch of Wikia Search.

Jimmy Wales comments on the techcrunch thread, with a salient point:

When I launched Wikipedia, I wrote at the top of the first page “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”. On that day, anyone reviewing it would have laughed. What’s this? There’s nothing here! This is not an encyclopedia, it is an empty website with some funny editing syntax!

Aka: To build a community-driven tool, you have to have a platform to build. They’ve released the platform, and don’t really have the tool yet. Here’s what the about page says:

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.

Whether it’ll work or not, I don’t know, but google needs a good competitor. Though I think wikia’s really competing against del.icio.us and stumbleupon… so we’ll see how it goes.

Also, pls: openid. Just gives me less of a headache. I don’t want to register for another site.

fake steve jobs writes a blog i’ve read very occasionally, funny satire on all things tech, apple and jobsy. the real steve jobs, apparently, has had enough. the fake one got a letter from apple lawyers, and how’s this for scary:

And then, I swear to friggin God, there’s a list of my assets with an estimated value for each and I suppose the implied threat that I stand to lose them. Which kinda scares the living shit out of me, to be honest, since they’ve got a pretty thorough list, which means they’ve been doing some research on this and the offer didn’t just come out of thin air. Their lists includes my home address, most recent assessed value of my house and all the information about my mortgage; a rental property that we own; my bank accounts and investment accounts, including the college funds for our kids, whose names are used; and our boat and two cars.

Of course this is a satire blog, so not totally sure if the story’s true, but if so …

UPDATE: appears this, like the rest of the blog, is a hoax (see Chris’ comments below and …check on the Internet).

more semantic web from ground up rather than top down: twitter #hashtags, see hashtags.org … hashtag any twitter post (eg. #montreal) and it ’s trackable and findable on hashtags.org (I think they need to be following you on twitter). smart fellows.

(oh and here is an explanation of twitter)

Google is playing around with a new Wikipedia competitor, knol:

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

Up to now, Google has won because it is the best way to navigate *other* people’s information on the net. Search, reader, gmail, even maps are all tools to find the best information that others provide on the web. Google Books starts going in a new direction, where Google becomes the repository of information, which already makes me nervous. You can expect that Google Books is likely to be ranked ahead of Gutenberg in searches, for instance. That’s not good, because the others might be *better* sources.

Knol is a whole other level: Google becomes the producer of information.

And one can expect that Google’s search will privilege it’s own content… from that same blog post:

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read.

That’s bad bad news for how the google manages knowledge finding & distribution, I think. It puts them in a conflict of interest; exactly the conflict of interest (search engines sending you to information based on where they want to send you, not where you want to go) that Google shunned to become to kings of search.

I don’t know if they have addressed this conflict of interest yet, does anyone have any info? Here’s what they say in the article:

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledg

That’s some wishy-washy language. What does “appropriately” mean? “So that we will get the most amount of traffic?“

With the success of Wordpress - free & GPL - that other blogging platform, MovableType was on its way out. But SixApart has just released MovableType in GPL.

Good for everyone I think - throw some competition into the mix.

Heri’s got a map of Montreal tech start-uppy things going on, if you’ve got a project to put in there:

I’m just fiddling with Amazon ads for another web project soon to be launched (stay tuned). If you scroll down on the left-hand sidebar (on my homepage, here), you’ll see some amazon.com ads on this blog (they won’t last long). Here’s one too:

As I’ve been playing around, it occurs to me that a revolution in how we approach advertising is about to happen … maybe it’s already happened, I don’t know.

Traditionally, publishers (eg TV stations and Newspapers) courted advertisers to get their business. This meant that content producers worked for the advertisers - with all sorts of implications for what kind of content was allowed.

Now, it seems to me - on parts of the web at least - that advertisers will increasingly have to do the courting, and it’s the content-makers and publishers who will decide what sorts of things they want their content (writing, music, movies) to help sell.

Looking at the ads I just put up here, I have a list of 12 items - 2 gadgets (the sexy itouch I’m dreaming of, and a the mic set that helped me get LibriVox rolling), and 10 books, 3 of which were written by friends of mine (Umm, Regret the Error, and Abandon). The other 7 books are books I’ve read and enjoyed this year, and I would recommend them to anyone.

It costs me nothing to put these ads up. And I am happy to help sell these things which I believe in (though as mentioned, I will soon take the ads down - I don’t want to have a commercial relationship with you here; though I have a couple of explicitly commercial projects where I am/will be putting ads).

In effect, here I am really just recommending to you some books that I really loved this year, and that I think you ought to read, and giving you a mechanism to buy them - and support the authors. While Amazon gets their cut, I don’t care about Amazon, but I do think that these writers should be supported and rewarded so that they will write more wonderful books. Few people read this blog, but if I had a big readership and wanted to put ads up here, I would have to work to put ads here for products that will really sell to my audience. That is, ads for things I think my audience will want.

Now it turns out the only things I can think of to tell you to buy at the moment are books, and a couple of gadgets. If I put my mind to it I could come up with any number of things I think you should spend your money on (maybe some good Scotch, for instance). But I would refuse to sell you things I don’t believe in - things I don’t think you want or need.

In the old model: a publisher (say, NBC TV) tries to convince the advertiser (say, Kraft Dinner) that his audience will buy the product, so that the advertiser will give him money to show Kraft ads on NBC TV.

In the new model: the publisher (me) has to try to figure out what kind of products the audience (you) actually wants, and then advertise them.

Further: the old model was pretty inexact, I convince you to give me money to advertise your product, and no on knows really what the effect is.

New model: I decide what I sell, and I see if it’s selling well or not - which I can tell by clickthrus etc. If it is, I keep advertising it; if it’s not, I’ll start advertising something else.

That’s a pretty significant difference.

Now it so happens that Amazon is the de facto commercial mall these days - but they are just the middle man, and I think their stranglehold on this space might be … well … getting commodified. The value of Amazon as online seller will decrease in coming years, I think, even if their volume increases. In part, maybe for the reasons above: if I am going to sell things, I’d like to sell things I like, and Amazon *has* to carry them if they want my business… because otherwise there is a good business figuring out how to help me sell those things. A business that is overdue I think.

We are in the netherland right now, between states. We haven’t got to the kind of advertising market I’m thinking of. Now, more or less, the Google model says: we’ll read your stuff, and serve ads I think are relevant. Which they almost never are. (For instance, I have Amazon on one of my test sites, and it keeps trying to sell an mp3 download of “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina & the Waves … wtf?)

Adbrite and similar services say: tell me what your site is, and we’ll try to find advertisers who want to advertise there.

But as publisher, what I want is a good advertising clearinghouse so that *I* can find the ads *I* want to have near the stuff *I* am publishing, ads I think *my* audience will respond to. And all I ask in return is a cut of the sales you make from people I send your way.

Again, I think there is a big business opportunity here to make such a clearinghouse. Or maybe someone is doing this already.

Just posted a comment on Dan Misener’s blog (Dan now runs CBC radio, from what I can tell), that I thought was worth repeating here. Dan’s post was about connective tissue, says he:

On Spark, we’re trying really hard to make the show’s connective tissue live up to its content. That comes in the form of story treatments, editing techniques, music choices, sound design, scripts, segues, and all the other tiny little bits that go into making a radio program.

My comment was about the need to find the “core” of information-provision institutions:

i’ve been thinking about this lately: the changes on the web mean that many prized institutions are afraid of becoming obsolete. but i think the real problem is that the function they serve is not the one they thought they served … and they haven’t figured that out yet.

for instance, “providing information” is just one thing that say britannica, and mainstream media, and universities do. but it is not the *core* of their existence - and the core is where their importance and relevance lies. these institutions were fooled in the past century into thinking provision of information was the core of their existence, because information used to be scarce, and it’s distribution limited. now info is cheap and plentiful, and distribution ubiquitous … it turns out they aren’t all that valuable as providers of information.

and yet I feel deeply that professional media, britannica, and universities etc still have crucial roles to play in the world, they just haven’t adjusted yet to what that is.

they have to stop thinking of themselves as “providers of information” … they are something more (not sure what) and when the can confidently figure that out, they will find solutions to their angst about the future.

maybe your ideas here touch on something about where that core might be for radio.

I’m usually dismissive about complaints about “bloggers,” because the usual complaints (boring, stupid, half-assed) don’t apply to the ones I read. But this interview (text and audio) with BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis talks not so much about bloggers in general, but about the actual impact popular bloggers have on media (particularly in the USA), which puts things in a different perspective. Mind you it says as much about Media as it does about bloggers.

On simplification:

It’s a wider thing than the internet, but the internet sums it up. It’s that on the surface it says that “the internet is a new form of democracy”. So what you’re seeing is a new pluralism, a new collage, a new mosaic of all sorts of different ideas that’s genuinely representative.

But if you analyse what happens, it simplifies things.

First of all, the people who do blogging, for example, are self-selecting. Quite frankly it’s quite clear that what bloggers are is bullies. The internet has removed a lot of constraints on them. You know what they’re like: they’re deeply emotional, they’re bullies, and they often don’t get out enough. And they are parasitic upon already existing sources of information - they do little research of their own.

So far not so interesting, but:

What then happens is this idea of the ‘hive mind’, instead of leading to a new plurality or a new richness, leads to a growing simplicity.

The bloggers from one side act to try to force mainstream media one way, the others try to force it the other way. So what the mainstream media ends up doing is it nervously tries to steer a course between these polarised extremes.

and on weak-willed media and the bloggers that frighten them:

I’ve talked to news editors in America. What they are most frightened of is an assault by the bloggers. They come from the left and the right. They’re terrified if they stray one way they’ll get monstered by bloggers on the right, if they stray the other way they’ll get monstered by bloggers from the left. So they nervously try and creep along, like a big animal in Toy Story - hoping not to disturb the demons that are out there.

It leads to a sort of nervousness. The moment a media system becomes infected by nervousness it starts to decline.

and on atomisation:

So over here is the part of the internet - and therefore of the world - where there are people who think the invasion of Iraq was all about oil. Over are people who think it’s all about stopping Muslim hordes taking over our culture. And over here, it’s the neo-conservative lot who think it’s all about ideas.

Do you remember that book about intelligent buildings, how buildings work out how to stand up? That’s what’s happening now. They’re working out how to hold each other up. So you get a Balkanisation where there is no movement forward - everyone just publishes their position, stands up, and that’s it. Everything is so static.

I’m just reading a great book about the mind, called The Brain that Changes Itself about the plasticity of the brain. One interesting thing that I had never quite thought of, is that “old-style” education (a focus on memorization, on memorizing poetry, on hand-writing etc) actually has a huge impact on all sorts of things, including the brain’s ability to reason, to remember, to think in complex ways, in addition to facilities with languages and symbols. Mike wrote about inchoate blog posts recently, and while I don’t agree with the whole idea, I do think the loss of discipline, the loss of the applied, dogged intensity to make a truly important work, is a real problem. For myself, I can write a long, “interesting” blog post and feel I have contributed something intellectually worthwhile to the universe, but it’s a different matter altogether to write a reasoned complete and coherent article, as I have done a couple of times with reviews for Books in Canada. It’s painful to write something like that, and rewarding. A 40-minute blog post takes a day to transform into a really worthwhile “lasting” piece of writing.

True of all forms of art. Compare, for instance, Nora Young’s podcast Sniffer (a sort of audio sketch book of some ideas), and her CBC radio show, Spark (a 2027 minute show packed with interviews and compelling ideas). How much time do you think goes into Sniffer? How much into Spark? (Nora or Dan, if you are reading I’d be curious about the person-hours required to make a 20-minute spark episode).

It’s not that Sniffer is bad and Spark is good, but that we need to keep clear what we want out of the net and our information vectors in general: a vibrant place for exchange of ideas, AND the careful, reasoned deliberation necessary to come to nuanced conclusions about complex problems.

I have been trying to re-inject more discipline into my working life. I feel happier when I am disciplined, but man is it hard in this hyper/disconnected world I live in. Easier to whip off a few blog posts and hope that someone else finds a good use for the ideas, than sit down and write this proposal for a book about LibriVox that I have been avoiding for six months.

Back to work.

Mike announces that free community wifi group ilesansfil is proposing a project to the City of Montreal for a million dollars over five years to increase hotspot coverage. Kudos and good luck. Article in La Presse.

In a related idea, Jon Udell talks about the cities and the creative class:

…the creative class values place above employer. To a 25-year-old European marketing or software professional, the choice of Barcelona over some less desirable city is now more decisive than the choice between working for IBM or Microsoft.

You still need to make your city attractive to IBM and Microsoft, because these companies help create and sustain the quality-of-life conditions that attract the creative class. But companies don’t have a direct interest in those conditions, people do.

It was fascinating to see how these cities are now thinking explicitly about competing — in terms of their housing, transportation, safety, culture, and IT enablement — to attract the creative class. Success produces a compound benefit, because the creative class is an engine of prosperity. Not only does it spend money, it also germinates new businesses. And those tend to be just the kinds of businesses that appeal to the creative class, so it can become a virtuous cycle.

Is it elitist to focus on the needs of the creative class? I don’t think so. Every citizen cares about housing, transportation, safety, culture, and IT enablement. If cities do better in those areas in order to attract the creative class, everybody wins.

From my personal experience, ISF has been a prime driver of much of the creative interaction among the people I know (which is a small group, granted) … hanging out and working at Laika — with free wifi — helped germinate many of my ideas about the web … at least one of which (LibriVox) has been successful.

Patrick’s co-working project is nearing launch, so that’ll add some good spice to the creative mix.

Another related thing that I’ve been thinking about (without doing any analysis) is that the web and small start-ups are egalitarian employers, and hence could be important for integration of new communities in Montreal.

In the (mostly ill-making) Bouchard-Taylor Commission, one of the things that came up recently was the inability of trained professionals (doctors, teachers, engineers) from other countries to get work in their domains in Quebec - despite a shortage of doctors, teachers and engineers. That’s the nice thing about the web - I can say, talking from experience as a small (unfunded) web start-up, that I couldn’t care less about official qualifications, where you’re from (indeed, where you live) … all I want to know is: can you do the things that I’m hoping can be done (which you’ve learned just by hacking, and can demonstrate by showing me things you’ve done on the web), and do I think we’ll get along?

That’s important since one of the big problems for immigrant communities is finding good work. So finding ways to support small start-ups (whatever that means) *could* be one way to give more interesting avenues for employment for young, keen immigrants. Helping people in general become hackers is another way to give avenues to prosperity, without having the mainstream constraints that our traditional education systems impose.

Montreal is ideally attractive to the creative class — funky, cheapish, fun, mixed, vibrant etc — but there are all sorts of problems here. For pros and cons, see the discussion from a while back over at Heri’s MontrealTechWatch.

I wonder how City of Montreal’s planning & policies compare with other hubs of innovation?

After a whole lot of work, the Collectik Team is very happy to announce the official (soft) launch, of the Canadian Cultural Podcast Directory, a project of the National Arts Centre, and Culture.ca (a site run by the Department of Canadian Heritage) … coding, design and implementation by Collectik.

Here is the about:

Welcome to Culture.ca’s cultural podcast listing. This unique collection, curated with the expertise of the National Arts Centre, brings together Canadian audio and video podcasts that reflect Canada’s vibrant arts and culture scene. We collect podcasts produced by Canadians in French, English, and other languages on a variety of cultural topics.

We strive to be a complete collection, and if you feel your podcast qualifies for inclusion, please let us know through our submit form.

Big thanks to Chris (the programming maestro), Marie-Eve (the graphic wrangler with the eyes of gold), and Madeline (the html artiste/pound-IE-into-submissioner).

More projects to come soon! Stay tuned…

I’ve been using the Defensio anti-spam plugin on here for a couple of weeks now. I’m a happy man … and I believe it’s superior to the defacto wordpress spam blocker, Akismet. Why?

1. Defensio seems better at learning what’s spam and what’s not - and it admits its mistakes. there’s an nice little performance tracker in the admin panel that looks like this:

* Recent accuracy: 99.35%
* 2191 spam
* 42 legitimate comments
* 10 false negatives (undetected spam)
* 4 false positives (legitimate comments identified as spam)

2. Because of the above, it feels like you have more control over it - Akismet rules your blog’s comment section with an invisible fist of iron… Defensio seems much more laid back - like you can hang out with it and say, hey man, that wasn’t spam, and defensio will be like, dude, sorry about that, i’ll try to remember that next time!

3. It ranks by spaminess … and obvious spam gets hidden, so you don’t have to go thru the hundreds of spam comments that Akismet makes you sift thru (if you want to bother), only the “possible” spam that might be legit.

4. The interface somehow feels friendly and inviting (maybe because I know some of the guys involved in the project?)

So good job Mat & Carl.

ShiftSpace looks to be a cool project, it changes the Read-only web into Read/Write web, by letting you add notes, highlight, rate, and even modify source code of sites, in a “second layer” … that is the site stays the same, but by pressing shift+space, you see the notes etc of other shiftspace users, and you can add your own. Check the video.

To use it you need to have greasemonkey installed in Firefox, and then install the Shiftspace add-on. It’s still buggy, so I wasn’t able to add a note when I tried on Sylvain’s blog.

But it looks pretty neat, I think.

Reading the shiftspace web copy tho, I am reminded of how important it is to write clear concise text. The first two paragraphs of the About page are meaningless mumbo-jumbo:

ShiftSpace is an open source layer above any website. It seeks to expand the creative possibilities currently provided through the web. ShiftSpace provides tools for artists, designers, architects, activists, developers, students, researchers, and hobbyists to create online contexts built in and on top of websites.

While the Internet’s design is widely understood to be open and distributed, control over how users interact online has given us largely centralized and closed systems. The web has followed the physical transformation of the city’s social center from the (public) town square to the (private) mall. ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend by providing a new public space on the web.

I don’t know what creative possibilities are, much less online contexts; and when I am evaluating a tool I *never* care why you built it (”ShiftSpace attempts to subvert this trend…”), until I have decided whether or not I want to use it. I can provide my own whys. Just tell me what the damn thing does.

Para 3 gets close to the meat, but is still garbled by jargon (”contextualizations and interventions,” “utilitarian,” “context-based public debates”):

By pressing the [shift] + [space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualizations and interventions – which we call Shifts. Users can choose between several authoring tools we’re working to develop – which we call Spaces. Some are utilitarian (like Notes and Highlights) and some are more interventionist (like ImageSwap and SourceShift). Users will be invited to map these shifts into Trails. These trails can be used for collaborative research, curating netart exhibitions or as platforms for context-based public debates.

And I love this sentence:

Notes is a Space that allows a ShiftSpace user to leave post-it annotations on websites.

How about:

Notes is a Space that allows a ShiftSpace user to leave notes on websites.

Or something equally clear.

Anyway, nice project, and I would have added my comments in the spaceshift layer of the site, but couldn’t quite make it work. But, again, nice work.

I’m noticing my self-selection of how I’m using my different digital publishing/networking tools:

• twitter: i use this as i would the old water cooler - comments about my day, pleasantries, links to little jokes, thoughts about life and everything. My twitter feed is open, but I only follow a few people, based on whether over time i find i enjoy reading their twits or not. this is a mix of friends and a few professional “colleagues,” a number of librivox people. i check twitter in downtimes, probably 5 times a day (for about a minute each time). twitter’s like cubicle banter. a great place to get tech questions etc answered.
• facebook: i don’t really use facebook. I have a profile, I accept every invite to connect from anyone I remotely know. why do i keep my facebook profile? not sure. i check in a couple of times a week, and usually spend about 2 minutes on the site. it’s been useful mainly for notes about events i want to attend.
• linkedin: I use this to keep track of people I know who are related to my professional life. i use it maybe once a month, or after conferences etc. Probably I check in for 5-10 minutes.
• weblog: my weblog is used for a) philosophical writing b) notes about projects I am working on, or friends are working on c) links to things of interest that I wish to comment on, or that I think ought to be public d) political stuff e) stuff of personal interest (eg friday mixed tapes). I probably spend 20 mins a session, at least twice (probably 3 times) a day… sometimes more.

That’s about it I guess.

Because I love good radio, I get very angry with CBC for their bad radio, of which the examples are abundant.

However…I must offer a big public congrats to them for two new shows:

• Spark, a great show about tech and trends hosteb by the so very excellent Nora Young; and
• Search Engine, another fine show about the web and how it’s impacting society, hosted by Jesse Brown

I just listened (on my collectik player, check the sidebar here) to CBCRadio3, Spark, and then Search Engine all in a row… and thought, whoa, is it possible that CBC is actually cool and with it? Well done programming decision-makers (ps when are you going to cancel these shows!?)

I have no idea when they are on the radio, but the podcast urls are:
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/spark.xml
http://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/searchengine.xml
http://www.cbcradio3.com/podcast/radio3/

Globe columnist Christie Blatchford wrote an article about blogs … with the tiresome old complaint, “blogs are like little girls’ diaries” etc etc. and ended: “I do not blog, I have not blogged, I will not blog and, furthermore, I do not care to read blogs.”

So, being the old crank that I am, I sent her an email:

you probably have many emails from angry “bloggers” already, but i always bang my head against the table when i read things by writers who don’t read blogs explaining why blogs are bad. “blog” is a stupid word that defines this: a way to transfer text from one set of typing fingers to a number of eyeballs. some of that text is crap, some of it good, some of it extraordinary; but a text’s goodness or crappiness is not determined by the mode of transportation (ie blog vs newspaper vs book vs magazine).

goodness and crappiness are traits independent of the mode of transportation, and i will lay down a challenge to you: you provide 5 examples of excellent pieces of newspaper writing and I will provide 5 excellent pieces of blog writing, and we do a blind taste test on some famous smart people, and see which they pick as the better text. i suspect there will be no difference.

best,

her response (which I was surprised to receive):

such a contest would be fair only if we confine the parameters…in other words, no fair if i offer five great bits of toronto writing, and you pick five from the web. let’s say five examples of good newspaper writing from Toronto writers and/or bloggers. what say you?

and my reresponse:

ha! well, that was a surprise.

so the problem with your premise is that you’re nixing one of the great distinctions between the web and print: while you are stuck with whatever the Star & Globe editors want to give you in their pages, I have the full universe of the net to choose from. score 1 for blogs. though I think it’s a big mistake to see these two means of transporting text in opposition. they aren’t, they are complementary (as are books, magazines and newspapers).

further, i don’t really read toronto web writers that i can think of. and since the globe is a national newspaper, how bout we limit the geography to canada? and i think we also have to further constrain things for fairness: no “hard news” articles … instead it should be commentary/columns/op-ed etc.

by the way, can i blog about this? including quoting your email?

no answer after a week, so i blogged about it anyway.

There are many web stores out there, many affiliate advertising programs (amazon etc), and an increasing number of web ad services (google adsense, amazon etc) that you can put on your site to make some bucks. google gives you whatever ads that usually are irrelevant, and amazon gives you their products.

Proposal: a “meta” affiliate program that allows me to manage ads from many different affiliate programs. This allows me, on my blog or site, to:
a) manage web ads from many different webstores (amazon, indigo, futureshop, worldrugbyshop.com, lulu.com, etc) through one account/interface
b) choose *exactly* what products get advertised on my site (gilbert rugby balls, specific books i like, gadgets I endorse, organic soy milk that’s tasty etc)
c) add in PSAs for causes/URLs I like (atwater library, project gutenberg, my pal’s blog etc)
d) *and* provides affiliate management for small webstores who can’t implement their own service.

Benefits to me (site owner):
a. ads are for exactly the things I want to advertise
b. ads chosen for my specific target audience - better conversion rates
c. rather than choosing between different afiliate programs, I can use all of them
d. can advertsie for things that right now can’t be advertised in any sensible way

Benefits to existing affiliate programs:
a. probably none… this will take away their cornering of the market
b. but maybe that I target the audience better, so can sell more stuff thru me

Benefits to webstores:
a. provide affiliate service where none prevously exists
b. advertising to just the right audience … site owners who have chosen your goods to advertise (note this is the opposite of the trad model where advertisers choose their audience; here the audience is choosing their advertsiers - much better).

Does this exist? If someone implements this and makes millions, can i please get preferential client treatment? Thanks. Also, if you want to hire me as a consultant, I am willing to consider it.

Michael Geist writes a worrying article about how the web is starting to look more and more like cable.

Until recently, the Internet was precisely the opposite [of cable], offering unlimited user choice, continuous interactivity, and technological capabilities to copy and remix content. That is gradually changing as broadcasters seek to re-assert greater geographic control over their content, ISPs experiment with cable-like models for prioritized content delivery, and some creator groups lobby the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission to adapt Canadian content regulations to the Internet.

one thing that’s starting to happen more and more is geographical blocking:

…NBC and Fox recently unveiled Hulu.com to some critical acclaim, while Comedy Central created a new site for the popular Daily Show that features a complete archive of eight years of programming.

Canadians, alas, are generally locked out of these sites due to licensing restrictions. Canadian broadcasters have been scrambling to buy the Internet rights to U.S. programming, both to protect their local broadcasts and to beef up their online presence. U.S. broadcasters may eventually decide it is more profitable to stream their content on a worldwide basis and to remove longstanding geographic restrictions, however, for the moment they are parceling up the Internet as they would a broadcast destined for multiple cable markets. This geographic bordering extends beyond just blocking streamed content. The new Daily Show site is off-limits for Canadians since the U.S.-based Comedy Central recently took the unprecedented step of redirecting Canadian visitors to the CTV-owned Comedy Network site.

I don’t like the sound of all that. But what’s even *worse* is that cultural groups - in the name of “protecting Canadian culture” are thinking along the same lines. If commercial broadcasters in collusion with ISPs (who sometimes are commercial broadcasters) can shove their content at us, and keep us away from other content, then can’t we make sure that “Canadian culture” (chosen by us) gets precedence too … that is, can’t we start deciding what you watch and read again, all the better to *improve* our bottom line and country?

Uck.

And in other news youtube launches a Canadian version, Youtube.ca (which redirects to ca.Youtube.com)… Oilman has some complaints, for instance about this sentence from their blog: “In developing territory-specific YouTube sites, we wanted to bring YouTube to you, in your language, while making local talent more visible and getting closer to our users around the world.”

The rest of the complaints there seem to miss the point, ie he wants Youtube Canada to be more representative of Canada - bigger flag etc. Why? Why would you want Youtube Canada any more than … oh … say Sympatico Video (shudder). What’s wrong with just leaving the Internet as it is, (mostly) borderless?

[Incidentally, why do Canadians have to be such a bunch of insecure whiners? See the comments on Oilman’s post].

From one end, Youtube.ca doesn’t make much sense, as good content on youtube should win the good old fashioned way, because it gets linked to and people like it. Youtube.ca probably makes it harder to find good stuff, tho maybe all these geo-youtubes will feed into the main youtube.com site? Hope so.

But putting Geist’s article together with Youtube.ca - it’s obvious that they want to do more geographically-targeted advertising. Just like TV!

I already find it annoying that google searches search differently on different computers - depending on, for instance, where you are and what language your browser is set to. I don’t want Google to filter searches “just for me” based on where I am etc… I want to know what’s at the top of the listing.

But now it looks like the rest of the web is shifting in this direction too.

The enigmatic Mat Balez announces the official beta release of Defensio, a new anti-spam plugin for blogs:

There’s a bunch of things to love about Defensio, including the ability to sort by “spaminess” (bubble those false positives up to the top of your spambox!), RSS feeds of your spam and ham, and individualized performance statistics. But I’ll let you read the “official” announcement to get all the juicy details.

Developed by Carl Mercier & Mat. Read the official announcement here.

I use Defensio instead of Akismet on a couple of my blogs (not this one … though I plan to change), and I do like it better - it’s got a bit of a personal feel, and you feel you have a bit of control over it, unlike Akismet that rules your blog like a dictator.

Defensio will have a hard time breaking the Akismet stranglehold on the Wordpress world … Akismet doesn’t go great job but it does do a good job. Usually that’s good enough for most people not to bother installing a new plugin, unless they are setting up a new blog.

UPDATE: this looks interesting:

One of the first applications of Defensio’s spam filtering service has been the blogosphere — but it doesn’t end there. We’ve built an easy-to-use public API that is perfectly suited to handling comment traffic from any social web application that might be subject to spam

The people who comment here tend to be thoughtful and interesting even if I don’t agree with them, so whenever I see discussions about commenters on blogs acting like tools, I think, oh well, don’t seem to have that problem here.

Then every once in a while I post something that seems to attract attention from strangers. This post about Steve’s experience trying to delete a Facebook account, for instance, keeps getting new commenters (four months later), some of them apparently clueless, and some of them just jerky.

I’m glad I don’t have to deal with jerky commenters every day

I’m watching a session at Podcamp Boston on teen podcasting, by kabren levinson of nerdnewsradio.com (started when he was 15, 2 years ago)… the intro was pretty interesting, about Kabren’s experience of NOT getting his session accepted in the original schedule (read his blog post here and the follow-up here… Podcamp, being run by good folks, addressed the issue and gave him a slot).

Did you know there’s a TeenPodcastNetwork.

Quote: “How come teens are never involved in planning teen centres?” … good question. Cool kid.

Two recent examples:
1. it helped me find an accountant
2. it confirmed for me that dreamhost was acting crazy for others, not just me.

for any of my developer friends who have good connections with the firefox gods, here is what i would like to add to the plugin wishingwell (or maybe it exists already - pls send URLs):

copy/paste extra:

an enhancement of the copy/paste functions (ctrl-c/ctrl-v) that allows you to:
copy: to copy the text you want from a page *and* copy the URL of the page it comes from

paste: when you paste the text elsewhere (eg in the window of your blog editor), it pastes the text AND the URL underneath the text. Then linking to the URL will be much easier.

Could be tweaked in various ways, but I just want to avoid having to go back to the same tab twice, once to get the text, and a second time for the URL.

Maybe there’s already a way to do this - pls let me know.

UPDATE:
Kara suggests Jumpcut, a utility for macs that:

provides “clipboard buffering” — that is, access to text that you’ve cut or copied, even if you’ve subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut’s interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard’s history.

And it works like a charm; will solve many little niggles I had beyond the original problem described above.

Michael Wesch of Kansas State University is probably the most famous university prof in the world, or at least he will be soon. Millions have read seen his articles videos in academic journals on Youtube, most famously, Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, and more recently Information R/evolution.

The latest looks at students and their strange relationship with our academic institutions and models, which were designed before the telephone, not to mention the iPhone.

A Vision of Students Today:

[Link… to class blog; link to French translation]

How new is it, I wonder, that teachers can’t understand the world their students inhabit? It’s always been true to a certain extent, but the disconnect previously was mostly cultural … here it seems to me more environmental, and so fundamental. The mechanisms for communicating are changing, has changed (communicating the big ideas, facts, thoughts, as well as the minutia of of daily lives), and with pervasive computing and constant connection to the web, the way we think is changing too. For better or worse doesn’t really matter, it just will change.

Questions/comments (these have all been kicking around for a while, but still):
1. fact-learning: what is the value of memory when all the facts we might need to remember are available at our fingertips?

2. collateral damage: given the long success of fact-learning, what happens if that fades away as a prime method of educating? what else do we lose (eg, powers of focused concentration, the brain-training that memorizing things does)

3. plagiarism: copying is so easy now. instead of demanding that people not copy, maybe we should raise/change the standards of what we expect work to look like, assume it will be copied and pasted, and require that it be relevant in more important ways (see #1 above) … I see the parallel with with wikipedia/britannica question. if the info itself is free and available on wikipedia, then if britannica wants to be relevant, maybe it’s just going to have to think harder about what it can do better than wikipedia. ditto with schooling. maybe we need to move *beyond* “plagiarism is bad” to something more meaningful.

4. lecture halls: what are big classrooms for? i rarely went to many of my big lectures when I was in university - all that info was in the textbook, so why attend a dry lecture with a bad prof? it didn’t make sense to me then, and it seems crazier now. in the case of small classes I have a different opinion.

5. discipline: here I mean mental discipline. I notice this myself, with online distractions everywhere, I often find it hard to concentrate and apply the long-term discipline needed to Get Things Done. Part of how I have adapted is by trying to harness that lack of discipline, a prime example being LibriVox … which I once joked should have as a motto, “powered by procrastination.” This is the area that “worries” me most, because it’s the thing in my own life that concerns me. maybe we need to start thinking more about how to use unfocused, ambient mental energy for important things?

6. radical changes: while I think the changes in technology mean we need some radical rethinking of education, radical changes are always dangerous, you never know what other side-effects might overtake the initial effects. we need to be careful. if only someone would invent a way to have instantaneous feedback from multiple sources in an open intellectual system, it would make things easier!

7. The most important things an “education” can provide are:
a) critical thinking: ability to think critically about problems, this means ability to see a problem, to understand it’s context and history, and to be able to analyze various options and decide on the one that seems most likely to “work”. this is as true in science as in humanities and arts.

b) clarity: are we becoming less clear in our thinking and writing? losing the discipline of writing clearly, for instance, is bad news. the open web results a enormous amounts of unclear/undisciplined writing … so, are we really losing that skill, or is it just that there is far more writing and thinking being captured than ever before, and hence we see more of the unclear stuff - where before only the clear stuff got into writing? does clarity really matter? (yes). what’s to be done? or does that ask the wrong question?

Just some notes to ponder.

And also, more out of curiosity, I wonder how humans will adapt to these big changes that are only scratching the surface?

Citation-mania on wikipedia has had a really negative effect on the style and fluidity of many of the articles I’ve been reading of late. There was a time when you could count on wikipedia articles for a roughly-neutral, often slightly idiosyncratic, sometimes really clunky summary of whatever you were reading about. But there was a certain unfinished, wild charm to it.

But it seems more and more articles I’m reading are just lists of citable, and cited facts, and wishy-washy “he-said/she-said” quotations, footnotes, and little annoying “citation needed” superscripts.

Which is fine as far as information goes, but hell to read. To whit (those little bracketed numbers are citations):

John Francis Anthony “Jaco” Pastorius III (December 1, 1951 – September 21, 1987) was an American jazz musician and composer widely acknowledged for his virtuosity of the fretless bass,[1][2] as well as his command of varied musical styles.

His playing style was noteworthy for containing “dazzling solos in the higher register”[3] and “fluid machine-gun-like passages that demanded attention,”[1] often featuring his instrument in lead rather than rhythm section.[3] His unique innovations also included the use of harmonics[3] and the “singing” quality of his melodies. In 2006, Pastorius was voted “The Greatest Bass Player Who Has Ever Lived” by reader submissions in Bass Guitar Magazine.[2]

Yuk. Maybe it’s just the citation notes, that make it feel like bullets? But it makes me think, for some reason, of this.

Boris wants me to stop complaining about the web. So I guess I’ll stop here. Except to say: remember the good old days of revolution and anarchy? (which for me is 2004, but what the hell).