Chris Messina's updated his OpenID Hitlist/Shitlist. [Link]
...via Blogger, Google has become both an OpenID provider (with delegation) and consumer. Separately, Brad Fitzpatrick released the Social Graph API and declared that URLs are People Too.
DIY Home at Maker Faire
Photo above is a shot of the DIY Home of the Future installation at Maker Faire, concocted by Derek Woodgate, David Demaris, and I, with a lot of help from other folks. It wasn't practical to build our complete vision of the DIY Home, but we did manage to show some sense of the immersive media environment and suggest embedded "ambient intelligence" by including the very interesting biofeedback system "Healing Rhythms" from Wild Divine. This was a pretty good first instance of the kind of "Futurama" exhibition we want to do more of ... a kind of floating museum of the future. We ran into all sorts of interesting problems of production, but Dave Demaris is a real genius at solving those problems. Biggest hit: Brian Park's Flogiston Chair with a nice bendy screen for fully immersive game play. Kids were all over it. (BTW, we were using the same chair that was used in the film "Lawnmower Man.") We're at Maker Faire again today, if you're in or around Austin...
Public appearancesAn excessively busy couple of weeks here. Last week I coordinated a couple of sessions at Innotech Austin, where we talked about Sustainability and Social Media in one session, and Ambient Intelligence and Digital Convergence in another. (Some photos here. For Maker Faire this weekend, I've been working with Derek Woodgate, David Demaris, Joey Lopez, Maggie Duval et al to create a "futurama" installation on the DIY home of the future. We hope to give a good sense of three aspects of the home of the future: 1) it's reconfigurable by the "user," 2) it's responsive (via sensors picking up health and energy information, etc., and 3) it's an environment for immersive media and ambient intelligence. These are potential, anyway - I can imagine barriers. I talked to someone yesterday who's working on a project to create smart energy meters for homes that will send readings over the network (an idea that's been around for many years, but it's finally going somewhere). He said that the energy companies don't want residents to be able to see their energy usage. Not sure why; if I was a conspiracy theorist, I would imagine they want to jack with the numbers before they send a bill. But surely not...
Photo: The Sustainability and Social Media panel at Innotech... l to r: me, Bill Anderson, David Armistead, Josh Parker
Google and privacy (or Google vs. privacy) has come up in my conversations quite a bit lately... the more Google sinks its teeth into the global social information sandwich, the more I hear concerns that the company will somehow sometime misuse its massive databases and algorithmic expertise. The Wall Street Journal discussed the Google vs. Privacy domain with Cory Doctorow, who ficitionalized the growing paranoia in his recent story "Scroogled." Cory talks about the "real tension about, on the one hand, being good to people, but on the other hand, acquiring as much information about them as they can, under the rubric that it allows them to be better to people."
And it does, a lot of the time. There are lots of ways in which Google knowing more about you makes Google better for you. But without much regard to what's happening in the world around us, in an era in which the national security apparatus has turned into a kind of lumbering, savage, giant toddler, it behooves us to not leave things within arm's reach that it might stick in its mouth. And that includes things like my search history. And I'd prefer that Google not be storing a lot of that stuff, especially today, especially after Patriot [Act] and so on. They're inviting abuse, I think, by doing that. The steps you don't save can't be subpoenaed. And by saving them, Google is inviting a subpoena.
So Google's always had this kind of "We will collect all your information, and it will belong to us, and you won't be able to take it away, but it's OK because we'll only do good things for you" attitude, and that's a bit of a problem.
Photo: Cory Doctorow, 2004, by Jon L.
Being a Public CharacterIt's like we all bit a circus lion, like the dog in the Don Marquis story... we're all public characters now, dealing with whatever slices of attention come our way through our presence online. Our data stacks up in the nooks and crannies of the 'net, and it never goes away. It was inevitable that systems like Rapleaf would appear, aggregating our data and looking for ways to monetize it. I once wrote a piece called, "Who are you, who owns you?" - in which I said, bravely, that "there should be no legal framework within which my data can be considered someone else's asset." The genie, actually a large drooling cooter, is out of the bottle... Link to ZDNet TechNews on Rapleaf
PhotosynthThis photosynth demo is very cool... "We can do things with the social environment, taking data from everybody, from the entire collective memory visually of what the Earth looks like, and link all those photos together, and they become something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts... this is something that grows in complexity as people use it... their own photos... become enriched with all that [everybody else's] metadata..." Thanks to David Weinberger for the "miscellaneous" pointer!
If WiFi is outlawed, only outlaws will use WiFiOkay, the title's a little off, but it felt clevered. Sam Peterson, an evidently upstanding citizen of Sparta, Michigan, was charged with a felony for using a coffee shop's open WiFi connection without going into the shop. It wasn't a problem for the owner of the shop, but police and local prosecutors figured there had to be something wrong with it, and sure enough, they found a law that seemed to make it illegal. [Link]
Gunner brings a lot of insight to his critique of the design of the Netsquared conference agenda, how it conflicts with the principles th at Netsquared espouses. [Link]
The N2Y2 approach is based on scarcity model (i.e., a fixed $100,000 pie where we fight for the bigger slices) rather than an abundance model (a broad pool of potential collaborators and funders with no set bounds on collective benefit). While the latter is arguably embedded in the former with the N2Y2 agenda, it's a matter of focus and primary paradigm. Michelle Martin recently did an excellent blog post on how “scarcity thinking” potentially affects content sharing in the nonprofit sector, and Michelle Murrain elaborated with her inimitable clarity on parallels in open source software and technology for nonprofits; I take their points and echo them in an open question: is the N2Y2 agenda model moving innovators in the nonprofit tech sector towards abundance thinking or scarcity thinking?Wating for Google
And it's not just the competition component of the N2Y2 agenda I lament. Those who know me and my work know I have no shortage of opinions on agenda design for nonprofit events. The notion that a great majority of 350 brilliant people will be in sit-and-listen-mode for the better part of 2 days represents a real opportunity cost to me; an event that aims to remix the web for social change should arguably remix the agenda for social interaction :^) I also question to what degree the agenda's competition component favors those demographics who are most comfortable speaking in English to large crowds; will the innovation and potential of those presenters who are shy or non-native English speakers really be borne out in this format? Does ability to pitch a room really equate to ability to best impact the sector and change the world?
(Agenda side note: I'm really grateful for Net2's willingness to let me facilitate a pre-event collaborative session among the featured projects in response to my concerns, but I continue to worry whether any collaborative ethos we establish on Monday afternoon will crash like a wave on the beach come Tuesday morning.)
And I wonder aloud how the N2Y2 contest processes (both pre-event and at-event) reflect the values of “content from the edge” that is so often said to characterize this era of internet innovation? It's pretty web 1.0 to let a community vote in a prescribed process; it's much more au courant to let the community design the process. Wikipedia was a total failure before it was a total success, Del.icio.us took years to become usable; they succeeded when they enabled the users to drive the whole process. Looking to the future, I heartily encourage the Net2 team to consider how it would work to engage the community at the outset of the Net2 process design, not just once the rules have been cast.
So Big Brother is watching, but doesn't really care who you are, and just wants you to pick the right pair of shoes to wear tomorrow. [Link]
Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.More on Facebook and privacy
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
Thomas Leavitt writes (via Dave Farber's Interesting People email list) a sane response on the Facebook privacy question. (However, if you're a full-blown conspiracy theorist, you might want to note that Thomas Leavitt is a Mason.)
The macro issue here is the potential for our government (or any other) to abuse their access to this information for repressive purposes, or, in the worst case, to simply round up people of a particular political persuasion and summarily execute them.... and in reference to that, it seems that the information available in a social networking site about someone's political affiliations would be insignificant, in relation to the trail left online via other mechanisms... such as, say, postings to Dave Farber's IP list. :) The reality is that the Internet is the new town square, and if you've got even the slightest inclination to express a political opinion, in all likelihood, you're going to do it online, and leave a record that a repressive government would have no problem finding. In point of fact, it would be interesting to do a study of a hundred random individuals picked out of the phone book, and find out how many of them have enough of a corpus of identifiable online postings to enable a reasonable guess as to their political affiliation - and then cross check that guess against voter registration records and direct inquiries. I'd bet the success rate for those folks where a reasonable guess could be made would be very high.What happens in the Facebook...
Somewhere in the 21st Century... [Link]
Joel Greenberg in Tech MondayWeblogsky friend Joel Greenberg has an interview in today's Tech Monday (registration required). Joel, formerly of GSD&M, talks about his new gig with a Second Life-focused company called Electric Sheep. While at GSD&M, Joel became a Second Life expert, so he knows the turf pretty well.
Why are advertisers interested in "Second Life," and what sort of possibilities do they see?
People are interested in "Second Life" because intuitively they see it as a communications medium that is really kind of cool. I think "cool" is the wrong word for advertisers — ultimately they want to make money. It's too early for "Second Life" at this point for advertisers to really make money. So they are doing it for a number of reasons. One is PR. I think the window of opportunity for PR is closing for companies entering "Second Life." For the past six months or so, or the past year, you could get a buzz for saying "Yes, we are doing something in 'Second Life.' "
Why are very traditional marketers OK with experimenting in "Second Life" and not other worlds?
Well, first of all, it does freak them out. But when you say, look, as of a year ago, the GDP of the ("Second Life") world was $65 million. That number came from ("Second Life" owner) Linden Lab. And I've heard it's up to $225 million. That is the value in U.S. dollars of all goods and services sold in-world. It gets their attention.
I'm not sure I agree with Joel's implication that Austin doesn't have Web 2.0 activity. He says "... there are no video sites coming out of Austin," however I know of at least one (because Polycot is involved), and I think there are at least a couple others. And while it's clear there's very little VC activity in Austin, there are some folks trying to revive interest, and there are several projects that could be called "Web 2.0" that are bootstrapping.
Photo: Joel presenting Second Life to Bootstrap Web.
Flickr's growing painsI first used Flickr after Stewart Butterfield showed the beta (or was it alpha?) version in the halls at the Emerging Technology Conference a few years ago. It was klunky in its first form, but it just got better and better; over the last couple of years it's been a system I point to when I talk about best examples of "Web 2.0" applications. A couple of weeks ago, Flickr Uploadr stopped working the way it should. Uploadr is a downloadable utility that makes it much easier to upload many photos at once. When I say it stopped working, I mean that it would break connection consistently after uploading one or two photos, which made it particularly useless. I searched for evidence that others were having this problem, and finally found a mention in the help forums, starting with a post on February 11. How did Flickr respond? Not particularly well - they blamed the users' network connections and pointed to a help file with advice for users experiencing slow uploads. It doesn't appear that the Flickroids investigated whether their own system might be screwy, and when other users chimed in with the same problem, they just stopped repsonding. (Note that uploads work normally via their web interface, which only handles six at a time, and nobody seems to be having problems with other network connections, just Flickr).
I'm feeling irritated, because Flickr is broken and they don't seem to be doing anything to fix it. However I see that they have other problems on their mind, such as a server scramble that served images (including porn) to the wrong accounts on the sysem. Note to Stewart, Yahoo, et al - I'm surprised you're not reponding on the Uploadr issue and I'm surprised the technology's unraveling. I'm hopeful that you'll sort things out, and Flickr will be usable again.
Fibber McGee's inboxI have the same relationship with email that Fibber McGee had with the contents of his closet; I've posted several rants about my email woes, and here's another: after several months using Gmail as my primary mail client, I've gone back to Outlook again. At least Outlook is performing better than before, probably because I spent the many hours scrubbing and defragmenting while trying to correct a Firefox performance problem.
I'm still getting most of my mail at gmail, either directly or by forwarding other accounts, but I'm using Outlook to retrieve it via Gmail's pop3 system. I'm doing this because Gmail's system was just too chaotic; I was missing messages right and left. If you get a couple hundred emails a day, Gmail is probably fine, but when you get thousands, it's very hard to keep track. This is because gmail uses labels rather than filters, so you can't drop messages categorically into various mailboxes so that it's out of the way until you need it... so you can miss messages in the deluge. Worse, gmail combines all messages on a single subject, with no option to view the messages separately. This made it much harder for me to see responses to messages I'd sent or conversations I'd joined.
I should say I'm using BOTH Outlook and Gmail. Gmail is too valuable for search to abandon completely, even though its architecture defeats a power user's attempts to organize. It's also handy if you move around a lot, and sometimes prefer a web-based client.
I suspect many other folks are set up this way, and that's fine for Google - they only want the data.
Photo: Fibber McGee, buried under the contents of his closet.
Ballooning in Second LifeLast night I joined members of the Online Facilitation email list for a tour of Second Life, including a balloon ride over various places created by Linden Lab employees. I'm finding the Second Life experiences pretty interesting, though someone on the list questioned, after the fact, just what it's good for. Here's part of my response:
...if you looked at events in search, you'd see that there's loads of stuff going on. After we finished last night, I dropped by a location where there was going to be a 'Socrates Cafe' - philosophical discussion - and talked to the person who was setting up for it. They get a good turnout, and I could see how the visuals were kind of an ambient enhancement... discussion is harder when you're moving around and trying to do stuff, which is one use of the system, but it's easier when you're sitting in a supportive context, focusing on verbal communication while influenced or "vibed" by the visual environment. I also found a Buddhist center with meditation cushions, where there are regular discussions of Buddhist practice and philosophy.
Joel Greenberg of GSD&M was showing a bunch of us around SL the other night. GSD&M is a high-end ad agency based here in Austin. They've bought an island, which they call Idea City, which is a concept from one of the company's founders (their building here also has that name). I think they use it for sessions where they can prototype ad campaigns. They also give back to the SL community - they have a place where you can get a parachute and be shot from a cannon straight up, skydiving down.
Photo: Nancy's avatar on the balloon, floating and looking around.
Joel Greenberg on Second LifeJoel Greenberg took a few memebers of Bootstrap Austin's Web Subgroup on a tour of Second Life last night. In his role
GSD&M's Senior Planner focused on emerging technologies, Joel's set up an "Idea City" island in SL. Several cool features, including a cannon that'll shoot your avatar into the air with a parachute. Joel showed us around several sites - one of the most interesting uses of the system was an installation that simulates the schizophrenic's experience of the world, with visual and aural virtual hallucinations based on actual descriptions of schizophrenic perception. Joel said that families of schizophrenics could go there to get a better sense of a phenomenon they deal with every day but can't see. I learned a lot more about Second Life navigation, which isn't always easy; now if I only had more hours to spend....
European scientists are developoing an electronic security system that identifies people "by the unique pattern of electrical activity within their brain." [Link]
The authentication system requires a user to have EEG measurements taken beforehand with further measurements for each authentication test. This is done via a removable cap, which communicates wirelessly with a computer that analyses the data gathered. The cap has fewer electrodes than are normally used for EEG measurements, but can still provide enough information for authentication....Getting real about Myspace
Gavin Clarke at The Register reports that the popularity of Myspace and Facebook is overestimated, based on a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life project. From Pew:
"There is a widespread notion that every American teenager is using social networks, and that they’re plastering personal information over their profiles for anyone and everyone to read," says Amanda Lenhart. "These findings add nuance to that story – not every teenager is using a social networking website, and of those that do, more than half of them have in some way restricted access to their profile."
The article in The Register is a little muddy in its attempt to emphasize the negative – that social network sites have been overhyped and their value overestimated – but to me the problem is less that statistics are misrepresented about those specific sites, and more that we lack good statistics and good background research to tell us what the numbers really mean.
Sandy Stone told me that I should hear Barlow at 23c3... I didn't get a reference url from her, but ran across it on boing boing. I'm just noting it here so I can come back and listen when I have time. Isn't that what blogs are for? [Link]
Paradise.comA couple of British guys leased the Fijian island of Vorovoro and are building its tribe over the web. How real is it? Check it out – their blog has lots of photos. [Link]
Since April 2006, when recruitment started, more than 1,000 of a projected 5,000 people have joined. Last fall, the first band of 100 members – including Ben Keene and Mark James, the earnest twentysomething Brits behind the effort – arrived on Vorovoro to establish basic infrastructure, like a garden and the Great Bure (the community’s main sleeping quarters). Meanwhile, members from more than 25 countries elected their first leader and, in their first referendum, voted by a landslide to install a block of composting-style toilets.
What is "Freedom to Connect"?
David Isenberg's held two conferences called "Freedom to Connect"; the idea first emerged from a private meeting in 2004 which I attended. Several of us were gathering thoughts on a private wiki, where Martin Geddes posted this:
Freedom to Connect is a thinking tool to enable you to think about the role of networks in the future.
It will give you the questions and the words you will need to participate in the discussions and decision-making about how and where networks are built, who has access to them and under what conditions and how we should be able to use them.
Freecon will lay out the reasoning behind enabling universal public access to these broadband communication networks and the benefits that can flow from that kind of access. It will also provide the case against restricting access, limiting publication or broadcast rights and controlling or prioritising the kinds of traffic that flow through those networks.
Armed with these tools you will be able to argue for the best possible communications future, against the constraints that vested interests will want to place on your ability to communicate. ...
We never got real clarify about the "freedom to connect" concept, often addressed since then by the more limited term "net neutrality."
Net neutrality isn't a great label because it doesn't mean anything to most who hear it and to many who say it. It's supposed to suggest a lack of bias in prioritizing data transmission... a small-d democratic Internet, where every packet has the same opportunity to reach its targeted location, so you can expect content you send to get where it's going expeditiously, and you can expect your requests for content to be honored in the same way.
The Internet is build around the end to end principle, which says that the network is relatively "dumb" with "intelligence" - e.g. communications protocols or rules - running at the end points. This "dumb network with smart terminals" that doesn't act on data in transmission any more than is necessary to manage the flow of data and acceptable performance along the routes from end to end. The dumb network is "neutral," it doesn't care what's in the data it's transmitting. It doesn't give priority to, say, streaming video (which is one reason your streaming videos occasionally stop for a few seconds while streaming).
From the perspective of those who operate broadcast or voice networks, the dumb network is a dumb idea. Because they focus on delivery of content that needs sustained flow, they advocate a network that gives priority to some packets over others... for better "quality of service." If you followed their lead to make the Internet more multimedia-friendly, you would change the character of the Internet - and it might be harder to ensure access to, say, Weblogsky with all that video streaming everywhwere. Bad for me, but okay for companies that deliver digital media and voice over IP - especially the former telcos that already dominate the network.
If we had much fatter pipes, more bandwidth, that would also mitigate their delivery problem. Why don't we have more bandwidth? Why is last mile service (to your door) constrained and asymmetrical? In part it's because they don't want a world where anyone and everyone can deliver content and services. A fully two-way symmetrical system threatens distribution systems that are already difficult to control.
I don't pretend to be an expert on networks, but I've learned a lot since I started paying attention. You can learn a lot, too, by joining the discussions at the Freedom to Connect BarCamp tomorrow evening. We've invited experts and hope to hear many sides of the 'neutrality' question. The future of the Internet is clearly a significant public issue, poorly understood by legislators and policy wonks, as well as the general public. There are many calls to action from interest groups coming from different perspectives, and ne telecom legislation that shouldn't be considered or passed until all of us, and especially lawmakers, have a clear understanding of the issues. (At the moment, legislators have a one-sided perspective, because what they hear on the subject comes from telco and cable industry lobbyists).
Tom Brown likes OpenIDTom, Austin Bootstrapper and founder of Stuffopolis, digs OpenID, which is a manifestation of the Identity 2.0 conversation. [Link] (If you're interested in Identity 2.0, a particularly useful link: Kaliya Hamlin's Identity Woman blog).
MySpace spamI just got a Myspace friend request that was clearly spam - the "friend" is a matchmaker service for "real mature singles" (bad targeting: I'm not all that mature, and I'm taken). What's interesting is the set of comments from "Amber's friends." [Link]
Hello uh thanks for the add but I don't know you and I'm not looking for any mate. Please don't send any unclean adds to my page are I will delete youFloating above Mark Warner
Dude yer retarded this is the second Friend request u sent me! f*** off
Nice marketing ploy but if ya check my page, I'm not yer homey little type. Can't wait til this account get's deleted. Cha!
Damn! do I look 50 or over or did you send this becuz my age on myspace is 79 who is this and are you the lady on the picture
WHO DO U THINK U R HOE I DONT KNOW U
etc.
Mark Warner appeared for half an hour or so on Second Life this afternoon – actually a test run for his planned virtual Town Hall. I sat quietly on the front row until it was over... then I started floating, couldn't resist.
"Nancy Drew addicts don't get sent to rehab"Good quote of the day from CNet, about the contention that young people become video game "addicts." [Link]
"If a little girl spent hours reading Nancy Drew books, no one would send her to a book addiction clinic, because people perceive books as nutritional," said Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association.
Full story here.
Technorati's upgradeI've been using Technorati since early on; now it's three years old and has just completed a major upgrade that makes it, for bloggers and blog readers, one of the most useful sites on the web. Originally a search engine focused on blog content and traffic analysis, Technorati has added and improved features... here's Dave Sifry's summary from his post about the upgrade:
- Technorati is 3 years old! What an amazing trip so far.
- The World Live Web is all about people - We're here to help make sense of all the interesting stuff we do in real-time.
- Technorati's rolled out a major update to our site and to our back-end systems.
- We've made some major speed and accuracy improvements in core search.
- Link counting is a lot more accurate and timely.
- We've personalized the homepage so you can get a look at all the stuff you care about on one page.
- While we love expert bloggers, we've also spent a lot of time making Technorati understandable to normal people.
- We've added in lots of features to help you make sense of the blogosphere, including Discover, which is topic-based, Favorites, which gives YOU the power to pick your favorite blogs, and Popular, which algorithmically derives the most linked-to items in the last few days.
- We've made some big changes to blog profiles - allowing you to get stats about any blog that Technorati tracks, including the tags used, posting frequency, traffic, and Technorati ranking.
- We've made things easier for advertisers and partners, and we've been overwhelmed with demand. We're building out our capabilities, and if you're interested in advertising, drop us a line.
- This is just a start - there's more to come in the coming weeks and months, including better charts, more real-time spam detection and elimination, more real-time media indexing, microformats integration, and additional localization and language support.
Technorati hasn't always worked perfectly, but that's the 21st century for you – we're living a perpetual beta existence. The good news is that it keeps getting better.
Rainbows EndStewart Brand reviews Vernor Vinge's latest, Rainbows End, in which
everybody's real world is draped with arrays of private and shared virtual realities, and "Search and Analysis" is the core skill taught to the young and the rejuvenated old as "the heart of the economy." It turns out that the crux of a Search and Analysis world (and of Vinge's narrative) is this: who knows what, and how, and how is their knowing displayed or cloaked?
Brand notes that Vinge has influenced the thinking behind Internet development in the past, and in this book proposes concepts that might catch on, as well, like "'Secure Hardware Environment' as the deeply reliable and unhackable foundation of everything online and virtual" and "'certificate authorities' that offer people
the option of accountability amid the blizzard of faux personalities lashing through cyberspace." That last reference brings to mind the Internet Identity workshops. [Link to Brand's review]
Via Joi's blog: Linda Stone has created a wiki on continuous partial attention, which is what I've been calling multitasking. The definition on the wiki clarifies that continuous partial attention is different... [Link]
When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We're often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task -- we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch -- we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.Bilocation via avatarbotTo pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention -- CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.
We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.
Like many of us who have 'way too much going on, Hiroshi Ishiguro wished he could be in two places at once. Unlike most of us, he's pulled it off by building a Hiroshi-bot, a robot that mimics his appearance and movement. [Link]
Ishiguro said he wants the robot to have sonzai-kan, or presence. His group will try to quantify the elusive quality that makes people sit up and take notice, and figure out how it can be captured and transmitted."The YouTube War"
"I want to check whether students, as well as my family, can feel my presence through Geminoid," says Ishiguro, who seems perfectly at ease with his new twin.
Ana Marie Cox notes that, while the architects of the Iraq War and their boosters argue that media portrays the war as a downer whereas soldiers on the ground could tell you all the good things that are happening, you can see that's not the case by surfing through the videos they're sharing on sites like YouTube. [Link]
By that logic, putting cameras in the hands of those soldiers on the ground should provide enough celebration for an "Up with Iraq" musical.The anti-scam
There's music in a lot of the soldiers' videos, but precious little uplift. In "The War Tapes," one soldier/auteur complains frequently about the risks he and his comrades take to protect the property of the Halliburton subsidiary subcontracted to feed the troops: "Why the f--- am I sitting out here guarding a truck full of cheesecake?" he laments. After another guardsman supplies a Bush Administration-approved justification for their presence (freedom and democracy for the Iraqi people, stability in the Middle East), the cameraman asks, "tell me how you really feel." Deadpan, he continues: "After that happens, maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy."
"Shiver Metimbers" of the scambaiting web site 419 Eater successfully scammed a Nigerian 419 scammer (this is hilarious!). [Link]
Are you tired?When you ask the musical question, you get the musical answer. [Link]
Digital Maoism? (Or Mau-Mauism?)Jaron Lanier writes a spectacularly flawed essay on the supposed "hazards of the new collectivism," looking at collaborative projects like Wikipedia from the outside and equaiting them with the dictatorship of the proletariat. He so misses the point that he triiggers a set of responses far more interesting than his piece, though they have their own flaws. I think Howard Rheingold has the best response:
Collective action involves freely chosen self-election (which is almost always coincident with self-interest) and distributed coordination; collectivism involves coercion and centralized control; treating the Internet as a commons doesn't mean it is communist (tell that to Bezos, Yang, Filo, Brin or Page, to name just a few billionaires who managed to scrape together private property from the Internet commons).It's interesting to see the usual suspects attempt to grab the river's current and keep it still. Outlook vs Thunderbird
A month or so ago, I abandoned Mozilla Thunderbird and started using Microsoft Outlook 2003 again. I've been meaning to blog about my reasons for jumping ship and why I feel let down. I don't follow Thunderbird development at all and have no idea why it hasn't grown more robust over the last couple of years, but my expectation when I made the move to Thunderbird was that it would just get better, but it didn't. It's probably great for many folks, but it's not so great for someone like me, with many thousands of emails a day, and many projects depending on email for communication.
I thought I would list my issues here, hoping Thunderbird developers would take note. Then again, maybe Thunderbird's not meant to be an application for professional use, so my case may be irrelevant. Whatever the case, here's what was bugging me:
- Thunderbird's spam filter isn't any better than Outlook's junk mail filter; in fact, Outlook seems to catch more spam. (I didn't do a study, but in Outlook I'm not feeling the same pain from spam.)
- Outlook provides more ways to sort and organize email. In my default view emails are grouped by date, which is very helpful.
- I use a lot of filters, so it's very helpful that Outlook gives me a way to look at all unread mail in one place.
- Outlook, of course, has an integrated calendar.
- I can create a follow-up reminder that will prompt be on a specific date and time to get back to a particular message.
Those are the more obvious issues. (I do miss one thing about Thunderbird - it was faster than Outlook, and search was easier/faster.)
Waiting for a more powerful Thunderbird here, but not especially hopeful. I'd also note that plugin development, for which I had high hopes, seems flat, and more focused on toys than productive tools. And plugins tend to break whenever there's an upgrade.
YouTubeYouTube's success as an online aggregator of video snippets suggests that digital convergence is the wave of the present. However the system still faces challenges, [Link]
Others see potentially troublesome similarities between YouTube and the original Napster file-sharing service, which made it easy to download free music, often illegally. It was sued and eventually shut down for rampant copyright violations.TrendWatching: INFOLUST
Like Napster, YouTube is totally free. It is also filled with video cribbed from TV shows and movies - clips that violate copyrights.
YouTube "has a strong position right now, but we'll have to see how much staying power it really has," said Mary Hodder, chief executive of Dabble.com, a startup offering a way to track all the video cropping up on the web. "You can't help but wonder whether YouTube will eventually lose its audience the way Napster did."
TrendWatching.com's April briefing is on the trend formerly known as READY-TO-KNOW, now renamed INFOLUST. Just when you thought you knew everything... [Link]
Show us one experienced, switched-on consumer in a mature consumer society who does NOT google once a day. Or even once an hour. One consumer who has NOT researched the cheapest available fare, price, charge before buying a big ticket item. Who has NOT invested some time reading reviews, recommendations and suggestions from experts and fellow consumers on anything from hotels in Paris and designer vacuum cleaners to which specific seat to request on flight SQ220 from Sydney to Singapore. One who hasn't relished the feeling of being better informed about everything from 18th century gardening to alternative medicine to the real reasons for high oil prices, than his/her peers or, even better, his/her superiors.Tired
All thanks to the insanely expansive and detailed web of information that continues to be spun, offering transparency of prices, of reviews, of opinions, and of detail. Yes, youve heard this before. But just for a moment, marvel at how incredibly addicted consumers have become to getting instant access to any kind of useful and relevant information. In fact, consumers are experiencing nothing short of an all-encompassing INFOLUST....
I just finished attending the two-day Freedom to Connect conference, which was a very good and very important conference, but I'm feeling tired and thinking about all the stuff I need to be doing back home, coincidentally running across a post by Caterina Fake that reflects some of what I've been thinking the last couple of days...
There's too much going on. Every night there's a Mashup get together, or a TechCrunch party, or it's Tag Tuesday, or SuperHappyDevHouse or SXSW or this conference or that conference. And this stuff is fun. It's a real community. But all of these things are great by themselves, but terrible in combination. I see some entrepreneurs in photos from *every single event*. Who's talking to the users, writing the code, tweaking and retweaking the UI? It ain't the Chief Party Officer.
Meanwhile though I'm pretty exhausted after a hyperactive SXSW experience and this conference following close afterward, I'm talking about putting together some workshops and conferences over the next year, but that's probably crazy since there are only so many hours in the week. And we're pretty busy at Polycot (Austin isn't exactly blazing with Web 2.0 hype-driven activity at the moment, though that seems to be happening in other places based on Caterina's notes...
It's crazy. Every single person who leaves a tech company isn't going to Microsoft or Google or Apple or whatever, they're going to a startup. Trying to operate in this environment is crazy. I'm getting late-onset ADD from trying to keep track of them all, and it's impossible to get attention for your product amidst all the buzz (er, noise).
In Austin there's only a few companies that are attentive to the "web 2.0" stuff, and they're developers, not people starting new companies. New web companies aren't that common there, though that might happen. I might even be an instigator because I keep wanting to push economic development, which could be development of authentic businesses but could also produce a lot of bubbly stuff. We just have to avoid fallilng into some kind of manic phase, and build solid business and compelling technology.
I'm actually optimistic, just tired at the moment...
Seven Makes ItPolycot pal Seven makes things, so it make sense for O'Reilly's Make Blog to feature video of Seven doing his thing – in this case, showing his latest warezL a musical instrument hybrid and a Jacob's Ladder. The latter's pretty shocking...!
SXSW Interactive 2006
Jon Lebkowsky, Jon Barlow, and Richard MacKinnon at EFF/Creative Commons party during SXSW 2006
I took time yesterday to put up SXSW Interactive 2006 photos. Interactive was big this year – I'd estimate twice the number of registrants as last year, far more diverse than the "usual suspects" we see every year. When we set up some business sessions for the Digital Convergence Initiative's track, we weren't sure there'd be interest given the blogging/design focus of SXSW Interactive's usual crowds, however those sessions – in fact all of the DCI's sessions – were packed. (I'm pleased to say they were all very good, too - and that's not just my assessment. People were stopping Alex Cavalli and I in the halls to tell us how much they were digging the track!)
I think many attendees were in business, and of those, many were entrepreneurs or operators of small to medium enterprises with an interest in convergence and/or "Web 2.0." My general sense of the crowd was that they were smart, creative early adopters, and that their sense of something happening was not about exploiting trends to build individual wealth. Even those who were interested in making money were thinking about more sustainable practices than the usual MBA-driven build-and-sell approach.
That might be a reflection, in the biz realm, of Bruce Sterling's vision in his closing comments, summarized by Alex at Worldchanging.com:
The challenge, Bruce says, is that the worst people in the world -- genocidal ethnic mafiosos, fundamentalist fanatics, Washington lobbyists -- are running the show, American government has become the new Soviet Union (ossified, corrupt and widely perceived as illigitimate by the rest of the planet) and things are not good in much of the world. That said, if you look honestly at the world, you see a new story emerging, with millions of smart, dedicated people locked in a struggle to steer us towards a better future using every tool in their power, and that "that's a big story!"The party just kept getting bigger!
Next Tuesday, March 14, the Digital Convergence Initiative of the Texas Technology Corridor (DCI) will host an event that's been in development now for almost six months. Originally the plan was to create a Digital Convergence track of programming for the SXSW Interactive Festival as well as a convergence showcase on the floor of the trade show, but we had ambitions for the showcase that would have been hard to realize without more time and funds, so we decided instead to hold a terrific party instead.
As we talked about it, the party turned out to be almost as ambitious as the showcase. We hired an events coordinator (the great Red Velvet Events) and pulled together a group of motivated, excited, and very creative volunteers. We also realized that we could leverage the first DCI workshop and testbed, on Adaptive Web Services, to create a prototype high definition feed between Austin and San Antonio. A terrific idea, but this also meant that we would have to host not one, but two parties, one in each city.
The great thing about the DCI crew, mostly volunteers, is that they didn't flinch when we suggested two parties and a network link of the highest quality (which is definitely a convergence item, and something that hasn't been done quite this way before). The project was conceived by Andrew Donoho of IBM, and we're getting help from AVW Telav, among others. We'll have performers in Austin and San Antonio, and they'll all be performing for both cities. We'll also have other multimedia jazz, the results of the Mobile Content Festival, and Brian Park's Flogiston chair experience.
If you want to join us and you won't have a SXSW Interactive badge, go to http://dcitexas.org/rsvp to sign up. You can also note your intention to attend at upcoming.org.
InteractivingAlready intense SXSW Interactive prep is gathering more steam as we hit the last week before a four day explosion of activity that culminates in a couple of parties we've been working on, the EFF + Creative Commons Party on March 13 and the DCI C3 Party on March 14. Both great parties, and the DCI party will be a little more, an event that actually demonstrates convergent technologies - it's actually two parties in Austin and San Antonio with a high definition link so they can share content. That party also has a digital triptych, the world-famous Flogiston chair, and live music by Aaron Hamre and Darin Murphy. A bit of an AV challenge.
I've been so focused on party prep and coordination of a convergence track that I hadn't paid attention to the rest of the Interactive program, but the Austin Chronicle has several backgrounders in this week's issue.
Hope to make time to track non-DCI panels and presentations that relate to my more usual areas of focus - online community and social networking, strategic web, emerging technologies, etc. Suggestions welcome!
Net NeutralityThe incumbent telcos, corporate giants spawned from a trust-busted monopoly, have never quite got away from monopolistic thinking. They go for dominance, and to get there they ignore the paths of innovation and competition in favor of brute-force legislation. Not long ago they were looking for ways to prevent municipalities from building communication networks for their citizens, nonprofits, and small businesses. Now they want to create new fees for Internet services, tiered pricing that would result in different billing levels for different kinds of services. Mitch Ratcliffe takes a thorough look at the implications of this approach, which would do away with net neutrality, an important aspect of the Internet's success as a platform for innovation. Says Mitch:
Tiered services would make data services pricing a complex Chinese menu and would isolate many homes and businesses in narrowband backwaters. This is the carriers' new holy grail, the ability to milk more from their already crappy services.
Instead of embracing the need to upgrade carriage generally in order to justify higher fees, the telcos are seeking to turn IP-based services such as VoIP and video downloads that compete with their voice and video services into subsidies that offset the weakness of their current business models, which tie connectivity to voice and other services. In David Isenberg's words, we don't need a telecommunications law that helps these companies survive despite their inefficiency, the U.S. must let them fail faster.
David Isenberg, organizer of the second annual Freedom To Connect conference in DC, wrote a poem (in Dr. Seuss mode) that suggests this is a free speech issue, since those who pay will will benefit from a higher quality of service, which suggests that they guy with the money is more likely to be heard. This could marginalize potentially innovative new content sources.
Imagine a world where all the highways are owned by a few companies, and they charge significantly more for the roads that are well-maintained, and you get the idea...but this isn't just about transport. Doc has something to say about all this:
...clearly the Net is not a form of carriage, even though it might appear that way to the carriers and the copyright extremists. The Net has an existence that encompasses carriage and content but is not reducible to either just as human beings have an existence that encompasses the circulatory system and its constituents but is not reducible to either.Zillow
There are higher principles involved. Life is larger than the systems that sustain it. The principle we call net neutrality is as essential to Internet life as consciousness is to human life. When we subordinate Net neutrality to the systems that sustain it, we reduce it to those systems. The Net becomes a cable system, a phone system, a content delivery system. And nothing more. In human terms, this is called brain death.
By framing the Net as a neutral place, we assure that it will continue to serve as what it has already been for more than ten years : a public marketplace where private enterprise of all forms can not only grow and thrive, but can do both better than it ever has anywhere, ever, before.
People with no real estate experience will often make incorrect assumptions about their properties' values.
Example: Someone might think "The guy down the street has had his property on the market for $100,000; my house is bigger, so it's worth more than 100K." However, the listed price of a property may have nothing to do with its actual market value. Anybody can list a house for any price; the relevant data point is not the listed price, but the sold price, which tells you what someone was actually willing to pay. If the home hasn't sold for the $100,000 asking price, that could just as easily mean that it was priced too high for the market.
Which brings me to Zillow. Zillow is supposed designed to help ordinary mortals see what a property's worth, the idea being that, if you have access to the same data realtors have at their disposal, and you a apply a smart algorithm to the numbers, that's all you need to make an informed estimate of a property's real value. However it could be that Zillow actually just legitimizes incorrect assumptions about value by associating them with real data.
I'm talking from (admittedly limited) experience. Marsha and I are selling a condo, and our own research suggested a value between 55K and 60K. (Marsha's a realtor, and she knows her way around a market analysis). Zillow shows a value around 72K.
Somebody's off by 20%.
Zillow allows you to look at the comparable properties it used, and we did. Zillow includes three sold properties from 2004. That's an issue off the bat - good comps would be more recent. But what really threw us was the sold data on the three comps: 294K, 5K, and 42K, with a price per square foot of 259, 4, and 71, respectively. The average sold price is 111 per square foot, and the recommended price is based on 79 per square foot, which suggests that Zillow appropriately considered other factors - but that price is still too high.
The sold price data alone suggested that the three comps were hardly comparable. Looking closer, we found that the house that sold for 294K was shown to have a value of 74K, so the 294K may be bad data. A realtor would have have had the good judgement to toss that property out of the mix... in fact, would probably have thrown all three properties out, because one was unusually low, and another was much older.
The local Multiple Listing Service has its own market analysis program that may be more effective, but no algorithm so far has successfully encoded human processing of visual data and judgement calls based on an analysis of property condition, relative size, modifications, condition of the neighborhood and surrounding houses, etc. Some of that is ambient data that isn't stored where a system like Zillow and find it. A good realtor will get beyond the data and spend a lot of time touring and evaluating comparable properties, applying an experienced business perspective to data and physical observation to get an accurate sense of market value.
Which is not to say that Zillow isn't a cool tool for gathering data. I just wouldn't use its results as the basis for real-world business decisions. And I think we have to acknowledge that there are very human aspects of business processes and decisons that you can't address with code alone.
Robin Good's New Media PicksEnergetic Robin Good offers yet another, er, Goody: Sharewood Picnic, his new media picks of the week. A Good way to find cool tools. [Link]
SXSW 2006SXSW is just over a month away, and I've had my nose in projects for the Interactive conference for several months now, both related to pro bono work I've been doing – for the Digital Convergence Initiative of the Texas Technology Corridor (DCI), where I'm a board member, and for EFF-Austin, where I'm president. My Polycot partners and I figure this is important work relevant to our business. DCI is an economic development project without which the Central Texas region may fall even farther behind the rest of the (flat) world, and EFF-Austin is focused on technology policy that favors open systems and net neutrality, which are relevant to broad innovation in a world of creatively disruptive technologies and practices, and accelerating change.
But I digress (and potentially rant)... back to the original subject, SXSW Interactive. Working with a volunteers, I've been coordinating a digital convergence track that addresses the impact of the remixification of the world on creatives and developers as well as entrepreneurs and businesspeeps. The changes brewing are immense, and those of us who're early adopters are watching other parts of the world catch on faster while the U.S. slides, potentially into oblivion if we don't take steps, the first of which is to acknowledge that something's happening, and it's something that requires us to think hard, establish new neural paths, and not incidentally do a better job of teaching. It's not really accurat that no child's left behind when every child's left behind, though relative perception might make it seem that way. We need engineers, innovators, and smart policy in the USA, and DCI is one incubator for that sort of change, focused on the region along IH35 from San Antonio to Waco (but talking to many folks from many regions during SXSW Interactive).
Along with the track of sessions DCI's coordinated, there's a major event in the works, a party where we'll demonstrate convergent technologies while we're hanging out and having phun. The party's March 14 at Austin Ballet Theatre downtown (maybe we'll dance, too.) A very interesting team of forward-looking volunteers, including artists, technologists, and creative thought leaders have been brewing this party (or should I be lowering your expectations?)
The night before, March 13, EFF-Austin will throw its annual soireé with national EFF and Creative Commons. Not sure of the venue yet, but (as in the past) entertainment will include sets by Mr. Fang, Gift Culture, Kilowatts, and David Demaris. More about this party when we have the venue nailed.
Jeff Jarvis: Interaction vs. ReactionJeff Jarvis has a good post about the real value of interactivity. "Interactivity is about more than reaction. It is about creation. It is not about controlled authority. It is about sharing authority." Indeed. (This resonates with a conversation I had recently with a reporter from the Austin Chronicle.)
Washington Post: No CommentsThe Washington Post turned comments off at the post.blog. According to Exec Editor Jim Brady, the comments included too many personal attacks. More than the Post could handle... though I wonder if they were trying to use existing staff to moderate? High-volume comment areas, like forums, generally need skilled moderators, or at least experienced monitors (monitors, unlike moderators, do little to drive conversation but remove posts that include trolls or personal attacks). It's economically difficult, though, for a newspaper to staff up with 24/7 moderators, who generally get $30/hour or more for their work. Hopefully the Post will find a solution; the interactivity is vital. [Link]
Google Earth spots a bomber
Interesting things pop up in Google's Earth's satellite views, such as a Lancaster bomber spotted flying over Stukeley Meadows in the UK. [Link to Cambridge Evening News]
Clear images available on Google Earth have sparked contests among users for spotting unusual objects such as the Lancaster. Other sightings include a ghostly apparition of Jesus in a Peruvian sand dune and military ships at sea.The broadband dance
Failing incumbent telcos have a new model in mind to boost their profits: charge certain kinds of broadband services providers more for moving their content across the telco's network. [Link article at MarketWatch] Mark Cuban agrees, saying that multiple tiers of service are necessary to ensure quality of service, sorta like toll roads and HOV lanes. Randall Stross had a different opinion, in the New York Times. That's the piece you should read and think about. Stross notes that both Bell South and Verizon are pushing the concept of a broadband fast lane, and he explains why it's a bogus request.
Woe to us all if the Internet's content is limited by the companies who also handle the plumbing. "The Future of Ideas," by Lawrence Lessig (Random House, 2001), shows how innovation and creativity associated with the Internet are the byproducts of its openness, its role as a commons that is accessible, by design, to all. Professor Lessig, who teaches law at Stanford, said last week that even now, broadband carriers have failed to demonstrate their commitment to the principle of network neutrality. "They've fought it at each stage," he said, "and they have never embraced the principle."
An illustration of his point popped up the same day. In an interview, William L. Smith, the chief technology officer at BellSouth, described to me his company's trial offering in West Palm Beach, Fla., last year of a speedy download service for Movielink content. When asked whether BellSouth would offer its special service on an exclusive basis to a particular content site and agree to exclude the sponsor's rivals, he did not hesitate in treating the question as a matter of simply settling on the right price. The N.F.L. and Nascar strike exclusive distribution deals, he said. Why not network carriers?
The largest Internet companies are the ones that could easily afford whatever terms the carriers demand for exclusive deals that would lock out smaller rivals and new entrants. But they have not done special deals with the carriers and instead have joined together to try to persuade Congress to protect the principle of network neutrality and prevent the Bells from striking exclusive deals with anyone. Last November, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft and Google, among others, formally registered their concern with a House committee that is revising the basic telecommunications law; they noted that a draft version of the bill failed to make network neutrality a matter of policy without exception. Whether the committee has responded positively to the suggestions from the Internet players should be known soon.
So we don't have network neutrality by accident, but by design, and attempts to balkanize levels of service threatens to stifle innovation while linking the telcos' pockets and rewarding their inefficiency (Stross notes that other countries, like Japan and Sweden, have much faster broadband service as a matter of course).
I should note that the incumbent telcos are not necessarily bad guys in all this; they're doing what they think they have to do to survive and serve their interests, as any business would do. The problem is that they've evolved from the monopoly culture of the old phone company, which included a believe that "what's best for Ma Bell is best for the country." The telcos have never got comfortable with competition in open markets - they prefer to use legislative power to create and protect profitability. They're not bad people, but their culture, if I've read it correctly, is both archaic and counterproductive.
WFMU's Greed WatchTelcos are trying to figure out how to charge companies like Google and Vonage for competing successfuly and taking away their business. They're talking about a "two tier" Internet and an end to net neutrality - the point being that the Internet and its technologies are becoming so pervasive and effective that they're killing the telcos. In the USA, of course, we should have no right to compete so effectively that we kill business models that have been flowing huge profits into various money bins, hence the various moves by telcos and others to preserve their turf via protectionist legislation. [Link]
Darknet excerptsJD Lasica has created a torrent file that combines all the excerpts from his fine book Darknet: Hollywood's War on the Digital Generation that he's published online. [Link]
Feeding adsInevitable: marketers are beginning to plant ads in syndication feeds. [Link]
One attraction of RSS ads may be that feed syndication is still in the "early adopter" phase -- meaning that feeds' audience members are not typical Web surfers. For the most part, they have actively set up feed readers and subscriptions -- they've "raised their hand and said I'm interested'," as Ben Fox, senior product manager in Yahoos search marketing division, puts it. "You know from a marketing standpoint that they've invested in their content."Weinberg on Wikipedia
I've posted several items about Wikipedia as a work in progress that draws unfair criticism (and incidentally responds well to constructive criticism). David Weinberger has a longer piece, Why the Media Can't Get Wikipedia Right, (via Cory Doctorow.)
With Wikipedia, the balance of knowing shifts from the individual to the social process. The solution to a failure of knowledge (as the Seigenthaler entry clearly was) is to fix the social process, while acknowledging that it will never work perfectly. There are still individuals involved, of course, but Wikipedia reputations are made and advanced by being consistent and persistent contributors to the social process. Yes, persistent violators of the social trust can be banished from Wikipedia, but the threat of banishment is not what keeps good contributors contributing well.Koko
Getting spam after spam about Koko Petroleum? The Koko folks say they have nothing to do with it.
The appropriate regulatory bodies as well as our legal counsel have been requested to take steps to prevent the Spam emails.Spamato
There are no undisclosed material facts in regard to the company.
Certain statements in this news release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Rule 175 under the Securities Act of 1933 and Rule 3b-6 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and are subject to the safe harbor created by those rules. All statements, other than statements of fact, included in this release, including, without limitation, statements regarding potential future plans and objectives of the company, are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Technical complications which may arise could prevent the prompt implementation of any strategically significant plan(s) outlined above.
UPDATE: Sad news: I had to uninstall Spamato; it was interfering with Thunderbird's ability to send mail. It was promising, but not quite ready for heavy-user prime time.
In response to my rant about spam, online friend and sysadmin wiz Bryan Venable sent me a few potential solutions, the first of which was a new GPL spam filter sysetem called Spamato, which plugs into several different email clients, including Thunderbird. It's beta, but works pretty well, certainly better than Thunderbird's own system. Spamato lets you choose any or all of several methods to filter spam, and sends all the bad stuff into a spamato mailbox where you can check for false positives. There's some overhead - you have to have Java installed, and you have to specify the location of your Java_Home (which sounds geeky, but clear instructions are immindently googlable). You have to enable for each install, and that takes a little time, and while it's happening you can't do much else. It also comes with annoying sounds turned on by default; you'll want to turn that off quickly. When I first turned it off, I missed the 'save' button for the sound configuration and thought it wasn't working - look carefully, it's at the bottom of the display.
Anyway, fingers crossed - I hope this is a winner.
Year-end #1: Web 2.0The year-end toptens and summary blusters are popping up, should I add to the noise? It's tempting to make a top ten list ('cause they're fun and they force you to pay attention to all the media that's piled up over the year... though I suppose it's odd for a web consultant to create a list of his top ten albums or films or books. The Austin Chronicle used to ask me to contribute top ten lists of technology stories for the year – since this year's been pretty rich where emerging technologies are concerned, I could do that again here.
One important tech story in 2005 lives somewhere behind the buzzword "Web 2.0," a label that suggests we've taken web development to the next level, though for some it means that we're looking for a way to bring the investors back to the table, and that aspect of the story is so perilous that a backlash has developed among those who'd just as soon keep the secret ("Investors - move on, nothing to see here...") After all, money changes everything, and the code phrase for web+money in the 90s was irrational exuberance. The origins of Web 2.0, though, are in the months following the implosion of the Internet bubble. Web innovators and content developers wanted to keep doing what they'd been doing, and since there was no money in it, they reverted to the gift-economy thinking of earlier years in cyberspace, and developed technologies – and approaches to technology – that fed into Web 2.0. Part of the impetus for Web 2.0 was Tim Berners-Lee's concept of a semantic web, which is "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."
Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly created the authoritative overview of Web 2.0, including several more or less related developments that have reached critical mass over the last year or so – but aren't new; e.g. "software as a service" has been around for a while as the "application service provider" (ASP) model, and what's new about the "long tail" is that it's acknowledged (via Chris Anderson's
article in Wired, and having been acknowledged and explained, it's better understood by more people.
The problem with "Web 2.0" is that the term doesn't mean anything specific, and if you haven't read the O'Reilly piece, the reference would be meaningless in the same way that other too-vague, too-general buzzwords are meaningless. "Social software" is another example. I thought it was a good label when I first heard it, better than "virtual community" or "online social networks." However in the minds of many the term was not inclusive of earlier "social" technologies, like forums, chats, and email lists. "Social software" was generally taken as a label for blogs, wikis, social network platforms (like Friendster/Orkut) and syndication (RSS and Atom).
Terms like "Web 2.0" and "social software" may be useful on some (very high) level, but when you're getting down to the nitty gritty of consulting and development, they're useless. You have to be very specific about goals and objectives, and the kinds of functionality that will be most effective in meeting them.
If I was setting out to write a top ten list, I didn't get past the first item, but that's okay. I have three days to come up with more stuff. *8^)
Thunderbird and SpamEudora was my email client for years, then Netscape Communicator, before I fell into a couple of corporate jobs that forced me to use Outlook. I was looking for a way out until Outlook 2003 came along; it was very good, so I lived with various issues (like storage in the proprietary pst format) until Thunderbird came along as a well-regarded Open Source alternative. I stalled on making the transition, but Outlook became slow and crashy, and eventually cratered, evidently due to a corrupt pst file. I took the opportunity to make the move, and I've been pretty satisfied with Thunderbird since then, though it's not as robust as Outlook. Give it time.
One thing that irritates me, though, is Thunderbird's handling of spam. The junk mail controls are limited (basically an on/off switch), and though the junk mail filters are clearly catching a large percentage of the umpty hundreds of spams that fall into my mail bucket every day, there's a bunch more that the filters miss. I spend way too much time "training" by marking mails as junk, yet I seem to get the same kinds of spam over and over. I almost never see false positives, which is good, but I'm not clear why the filtering is not more successful, and I can't find much by way of documentation, just as there's no real tweaking of the junk mail controls. I've looked for additional spam-blocking products, but what I find are products created specifically to work with Outlook.
I shouldn't complain, since so much of my spam is filtered successfully, but since junk mail handling is supposed to be a key feature of Thunderbird, I'd love for it to be more useful.
LightnetsVia J.D.: Jason Boog at Ziff-Davis' Publish writes about Darknets vs. Lightnets, following on J.D.'s book Darknet : Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation book:
A Darknet is a hidden Web nook where a small group shares digital files. Lightnet refers to a theoretical push towards an Internet where sharing and remixing files is encouraged.
Boog quotes web developer Lucas Gonze, who says "in a Lightnet world, New York Times audio and video will be about as accessible as text. Anybody will be able to e-mail the link to a friend, incorporate the item in a playlist, comment on the item on their own home page, and perhaps make a derived work in the form of a remix, Podcast, or videoblog....Publishers will give away some content in order to be able to sell other content, and they will find new revenue sources when they become remixers themselves." I.e. smart media companies will be thinking outside the pre-digital "intellectual property" box of concepts. The Digital Convergence track we're putting together for SXSW Interactive this year will address this in a couple of panels.
He's real!Nancy posts about Lisa Williams' discovery that Craig Newmark is a real person! However, sez Craig, "Id like to assure everyone that I dont exist, but who does, these days."
Business Week on Generation @I can't think how many conversations I've been in with other consultants and online entrepreneurs who've predicted the imminent death of social network platforms (like Friendster, Google, Orkut, Myspace, etc.) – and I note here that I'm going to call them social networks hereafter for convenience, though I think it's important to distinguish between the technical infrastructure, what I call the platform, and the social network, which is not technology but intangible connections between people. (I make that distinction so that danah boyd won't slap me upside the head; excuse the digression).
There's just no business model, the smart people say. I myself have suggested that social networks lack real juice unless they focus on some object (or obsession), like Flickr with photos.
While we're having these academic conversations, though, the social networks just keep coming, and growing. Now Business Week has a cover story about social networks, focusing especially on Buzz-Oven, which is based in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex. When you sign up, you have to choose a region in the DFW area – and there's no option to select a birth year before 1950. Buzz-Oven, like the incredibly popular MySpace, tends to attract a younger audience. In fact the article title is "The MySpace Generation," though later in the article, the author refers to "Generation @," which was clever.
In a way it's exciting to see new, rich online technology applications mainstreaming to the extent that many high school and college adopters take them for granted the way we took the telephone for granted in the last half of the 20th Century. In fact there may be no business model in the sense that some of my colleagues think of business, where the enterprise is distant from its customers, seeing them as "consumers" and "market segments" and knowing them by their statistical behaviors in aggregate. You can't operate communities that way.
I had a vision for this almost 15 years ago, when Paco Nathan and I built FringeWare, Inc. as "a street market in cyberspace." We realized that sellers and buyers had become abstract entities with no real relationship. Stores became soulless interfaces where the people selling the merchandise were clerks with little investment in the business. We figured we could change that by making a community of sellers and buyers, and take profits from the transactions. That's partly what we did, anyway... our vision of online commerce horrified the bankers we talked to. This was before the web existed and before there were secure methods for processing online payments; in fact we had to open a physical store before we were allowed to process credit cards. But, at least for a while, we were getting products from members of our community and selling them to other members. We also published FringeWare Review, a magazine with mail order catalog in the back pages. Through our email list and articles and eventual web site, our customers came to know us pretty well.
It's great to think that we can integrate communities and markets this way, and the potential's there. It can work even if many are strictly-business bottom-line about it, because all markets, including community markets, have people like that - they tend to glue things together. What could kill the goose, though, is greed. That almost happened in 2000, but we recovered because those of us who're passionate about online publishing, commerce, and community wouldn't stop what we were doing, even when we weren't being paid to do it (hence the blog phenomenon). Now we're getting paid again, and that's nice, but we don't have to become zillionaires, it's just not sustainable. A few million would be okay.
But I digress – or ramble – getting back to the Business Week piece... it wouldn't be much of a Weblogsky post if I didn't blockquote something:
Many youth networks are evanescent, in any case. Like one-hit wonder the Baha Men (Who Let the Dogs Out) and last year's peasant skirts, they can evaporate as quickly as they appear. But young consumers may follow brands offline -- if companies can figure out how to talk to youths in their online vernacular. Major companies should be exploring this new medium, since networks transmit marketing messages "person-to-person, which is more credible," says David Rich Bell, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.Podcast tussle (or hustle?)
So far, though, marketers have had little luck creating these networks from scratch. Instead, the connections have to bubble up from those who use them.
Another edit tussle at Wikipedia, this time over the history of podcasting. Adam Curry furtively removed a reference to Kevin Marks' role in podcasting's development, but as Kevin notes, he left an audit trail. Curry's site is down. Daniel Terdiman blogs about the fracas at news.com, saying Curry's been "podbusted." Curry says he "wasn't doing anything evil or posting that I had 'done it all. Merely participating in the process of Wikipedia to the best of my knowledge. Apparently that's not cool if you were a part of history." Depends on the changes you make... but we all know that none of these technologies can be credited to any one person, and the guy who does it first isn't necessarily the guy who does it best.
I don't think encapsulation of MP3 in RSS and the additional scripts that allow you to move podcasts automatically into your iTunes or iPod, wonderful as these breakthroughs have been, are the real story, anyway. You can find plenty of "podcasts" online that are really just mp3 files posted without encapsulation. The real news is that podcasting inspired broader understanding of the grassroots media potential of the Internet. (Thanks and a tip o' the hat to Ewan.)
"Intimate visual co-presence"Via SmartMobs: Howard Rheingold posts a pointer to Mizuko Ito's position paper on "intimate visual co-presence," where couples leverage the convergence of online photo sharing services and camera phones. [Link]
Just as text messaging created new kinds of modalities for co-presence and communication, we can expect that pervasive photo sharing will lead to a new set of social practices that differ from what we have seen in the PC Internet space and the mobile texting space. I suggest that intimate visual co-presence may be one of these new social modalities.
Just as text messaging created new kinds of modalities for co-presence and communication, we can expect that pervasive photo sharing will lead to a new set of social practices that differ from what we have seen in the PC Internet space and the mobile texting space. I suggest that intimate visual co-presence may be one of these new social modalities.
Rules for Web StartupsEvan Williams of Odeo, Inc. (and cofounder of Blogger, which is now part of Google) posts a good, commonsense set of Ten Rules for Web Startups, many of which are very close to the counsel Polycot gives in consultation with our clients, especially the user-centric approach and agile development. (Via an email to BootStrap Austin from Brett Hurt of BazaarVoice).
Map mashupsCNet has an article, "Mapping a revolution with 'mashups' ", that explores various hacks using the Google Maps API with other data sources. "Mashup" is a key convergence technology "...first used in pop music when artists and DJs began playing two songs simultaneously. In technology, it refers to a Web site or application that combines content from multiple sources but appears seamless upon use." One item that I would have included: Google's request to the creators of the Google Maps Wallpaper Generator that they take their tool offline. According to a comment at Google Maps Mania, "it's not that Google is being mean, it's that their license from DigitalGlobe doesn't allow that sort of activity, which could potentially interfere with DG's capability to sell data in to the commercial marketplace." It would good to know just what kind of hacks are not permitted.
Wi-Fi everywhere, Nintendo everywhereThe connection between Wi-Fi and gaming is in transition from visionary to obvious as Nintendo announces its Wi-Fi connection plans for Europe: more than 7500 hotspots in the UK as of November 25, and 15,000 hotspots throughout Europe as the global Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service is launched. (Via Dave Farber's "Interesting People" list.) [Link]
Blog!I led a discussion with David Kline about his new book, Blog!, on the WELL. David and his co-author, Dan Burstein, interviewed several bloggers in several fields ... primarily politics, business, and media. (David also interviewed me on blogging and activism.) The interview and the book are full of insights about the state and future of blogging, and are a must-read for those who are trying to grasp the depth and breadth of the blogosphere.
Blogs won't change human nature. But to my mind, a world in which millions of people now have voices that can be heard is better than a world in which only the chosen few "experts" or "pundits" or media do.Blogs and Biz
True democracy is messy. And it's true, there's still a lot of narcissistic "talking at" rather than "discussing with" going on. But I liken that to the ego-centric stage that early toddlers go through. Ordinary people -- people who have no special access or reach -- are learning what it means to now have a voice. As we mature and become more confident that what we say is valuable, if only to ourselves and to perhaps a few dozen of our readers, then I really truly believe the "noise" will be pierced by ever-increasing dialogoue and meaning.
Civility comes from confidence and self-assurance that you do, in fact, have the right to speak. Early practitioners of the new social invention of democracy a couple of hundred years ago were not very civil at all. Per capita, there were probably as many nutcases and angry narcissists as there are now. But by the mid-19th century, the average citizen could think of no better form of entertainment and enlightenment than to spend 12 hours listening to a Lincoln-Douglass debate. These were common men and women who attended these events, who eagerly read partisan newspapers, and who lived peacefully with their neighbors who read entirely opposing partisan newspapers.
Does this save the world? Usher in a permanent era of peace? End war?
No. But at least the world increasingly becomes *our* world, a world that reflects the voices and concerns of many millions rather than thousands.
It's not news that consumers don't trust media and advertising, but David Kline blogs how corporate America really doesn't get "consumer-generated media."
...the study suggests that most American companies are woefully unprepared for the managerial, marketing, customer relations, and product development challenges of a new business environment in which customers trust bloggers and each other more than they do traditional corporate marketing. Unfortunately, the modern corporation is built on a solidly-hierarchical "push" model in which customers (and their friends) are at the bottom of the totem pole -- mere passive recipients of whatever the company chooses to deliver to them.David's comments are based on an Intelliseek study found here. Bimbophonics, Bubbles, and 2.0
But that's going to have to change. And the change certainly won't come easily, not to a generation of executives and managers who were never trained to deal directly with customers who can now make or break their businesses.
The Web 2.0 meme seems to create quite a fuss. At the Seattle Mind Camp (the sort thing, incidentally, that we should be doing in Austin), Chris Pirillo evidently dissed Web 2.0 as a sign of a new Bubblocalypse, which John Cook reported here...
"Web 2.0 is a $2,800 ticket to a tech conference. That's all it is." He went on to say that he tries not to use the term.Moore made the mistake of dragging out a (mis-) quote, Tara Hunt of Riya.com saying "For me, it's the free parties and beer." Taken out of context, she felt it suggested she was a beer-soaked bimbo...
"I am praying it is not another bubble. If VCs are funding 'me-too' ideas than it is going to be another mess."
What I believe I actually said was, "Web 2.0 is all about the beer and free parties", which was a tonge-in-cheek reference to the frenzy in the community (where there IS beer and free parties), not that beer is my only experience of it. Yes, like I uprooted my entire family and moved to a new country to be the sole breadwinner for parties and beer. I'm afraid I could have done that quite comfortably in Toronto.The "bimbo" thing is weird and dismissive, but she hits the real issue in her second graf, where she says
All of the grand demos and in-depth conversations and contacts over the weekend were instantly twisted to "I'm a Bimbo" in that moment.Sounds like it was a swell weekend, and she was a little offended that Cook didn't say more about that. Meanwhile Cook posts an update that says
I just spoke with Tara again this morning to clear the air and set the record straight. We both agreed that the quote was in the context of Web 2.0 and was not a reflection on her. Just so we are clear here, my intention in using that quote was to show that energy and enthusiasm is once again surging in the Internet community -- and that has led to free parties and beer. Hunt's quote, which was set up by Chris Pirillo's comments about the possibility of another bubble, was a tongue-in-cheek way of commenting about what is happening in the Internet world. That was the spirit of the quote and that is why I used it -- not to cast some negative impression on Hunt or women in general.(Liz Lawley's in there, too, but 'nuff said.)
Then again, one more thing: Web 2.0 is much maligned as a bubble-blowing buzzword, but I happen to think it's useful to have some way to acknowledge new web paradigms. And if the insane valuation of Google hasn't set off a new bubble-binge, I don't know what would. However there does seem to be some business going on, and that's okay.
Kind of a Penguin Day
Spent today at Urban 15 in San Antonio, at an Open Source workshop based on Aspiration's Penguin Day events. Despite Aspiration co-director Allen Gunn's presence and leadership, we saw this as more of a precursor to a larger regional Penguin Day that we'll put together sometime after the first of the year, probably in February. Today's event wasn't far off the mark, though. We started with general explanations of Open Source for the diverse group that showed up, the discussed actual Open Source implementations such as the use of Webmin to manage the sites hosted by the Metropolitan Austin Information Network, the San Antonio Independent School District's use of Open Source content management systems to support school web sites, the Drupal-based Write On Austin! web site, and the Urban 15 project Nos Unimos, which hosts family photos from San Antonio's historic West Side. In breakout sessions we talked about content management systems, licensing, and Open Source history. We also had a speed-geeking session (where I demo'd WordPress via the "You're It!" blog). Check out a few photos.
Long Tail CampIf you understand "the long tail," you'll get the idea of the Long Tail Camp:
Long-Tail Camp will start on November 11, 2005 at a location of your choosing. Just show up and start talking about the long-tail of whatever. There might not be a lot of people paying attention or even showing up but hey, it’s the long tail, what can you expect? We’re certain that Long-Tail Camp will be a huge success and expect it will be over in about 10-12 years, depending on the exact parameters of the distribution...What is the long tail? Chris Anderson describes it in his Wired article with the example of Rhapsody, RealNetworks' streaming music service.
Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.Open Content Alliance
The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.
This is the Long Tail.
You can find everything out there on the Long Tail. There's the back catalog, older albums still fondly remembered by longtime fans or rediscovered by new ones. There are live tracks, B-sides, remixes, even (gasp) covers. There are niches by the thousands, genre within genre within genre: Imagine an entire Tower Records devoted to '80s hair bands or ambient dub. There are foreign bands, once priced out of reach in the Import aisle, and obscure bands on even more obscure labels, many of which don't have the distribution clout to get into Tower at all.
Yahoo and the Internet Archive are building the Open Content Alliance along with several other contributors "will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content." Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle says
The opportunity before all of us is living up to the dream of the Library of Alexandria and then taking it a step further-- Universal access to all knowledge. Interestingly, it is now technically doable. Then the question became-- is it in the interest of enough people and institutions to get there? Some hang-ups have been around costs, rights, and guidelines for sharing. All of these things were worked out for their domains by Internet folks and open source folks in the last few decades. But how are we going build a system that has everything available to everyone?
Hence the Open Content Alliance, where "our guiding principle is to offer high-resolution, downloadable, reusable files of the public domain." Brewster goes on to discuss copyright issues and potential resolution via Creative Commons licenses.
Technorati Tags: opencontentalliance, media
Consumer is producer!Remember Community Access television? Think Wayne's World. Access television was home to all kinds of low budget, quirky content put together by pretty much anybody with a will to work through whatever training and bureaucracy was required. If you give people access to the airwaves and lower your expectations about quality of presentation, you could find occasional gems on the access channels.
With lower barriers to entry, better production technology, and potential millions of channels for delivery along with searches and filters, you might find thousands of gems, delivered at no cost to your computer, then possibly to your home theatre. "Consumer is producer" - the John Gulagers of this world won't need a greenlight to make and distribute their creations.
That's one vision, anyway - Open Source Media. I happened onto some people from the Berkman Center discussing this in a chat backchannel for a virtual meeting, and one of 'em blogged about it... a lunchtime talk about Digital Bicycle.
Participate.net
Participant Productions was founded to create
quality entertainment that would engage, educate and inspire. Together, we built an environment to foster storytelling that engages the audience, generates awareness of topical and interesting issues and inspires individuals to take action.The company's films include Murderball, Good Night and Good Luck, and North Country. The company has a new site called Participate, which was set up to build community and encourage action relevant to the themes of particular Partcipant Production films. Currently the site has a couple of campaigns... "Report it Now," which is aligned with "Good Night and Good Luck," and "Host a North Country Community Discussion." It'll be interesting to see what the site's like when it gets busy, which should be any minute now.... Web 2.0 visualized
Via Polycot I'm all over Web 2.0 in a very practical sense but not doing the conference circuit or waxing theoretical about it, for the most part. Who has time for theory when you're chopping the wood and carrying the water (or Kool-Aid)? Anyhow Nancy White pointed to a swell mememap overview at blog.forret.com, seen larger here, by Peter Forret. "Get/Remix/Deliver"! This is a better version of Tim O'Reilly's attempt, which emerged from a FOO Camp brainstorm.
Plague playVirtual plague's broken out in the massively multiplayer World of Warcraft. BBC has the full story, and Joi, who's got into WoW recently, blogs about it with, with a funny quote from the infected Jonas Luster:
The idea was, to move all infected players into instances, where we could be by ourselves, so we hooked up into large raid groups, rezzed instead of corpse walked, and re-infected ourselves before hearthstoning back into Org. Bog Troopers, a huge horde guild in Org, raided Stormwind, which was almost empty, and killed the child king (no HK, there, you have to kill the Guardian) before walking into the Stockades, farming gold. The GMs congregated up on Honor's Stand, so we had a handful of players up there, stealthed, and infecting them. It was more fun than any other world event EVAR!.Permission to kill the Internet
Jennifer Granick's started a column at Wired News with a piece about the many challenges to the concept of a free and open Internet, focusing on the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and Katrinalist.net as "tangible evidence of the beauty and power of internet technology in the hands of well-meaning citizens," which she says is "also an endangered species."
...many ISPs and some prosecutors are arguing that it's a crime to use unsecured wireless access points without the explicit permission of the owner. Antispam crusaders advocate blocking any e-mails that haven't been whitelisted first. Airlines like American and auction sites like eBay -- which want customers to visit their websites, view their ads and "join the community" -- have won court injunctions against companies that collect price information on plane fares or auctions to help consumers comparison shop.Glocalization
Under ancient legal theories like "trespass to chattels" and ill-advised modern laws like the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and state computer crime statutes, courts are holding that if you don't have authorization, you can't access computers
And if you can't access computers, you can't collect data about airfares, auctions or evacuees.
Web 2.0 as seen by danah boyd is a negotiation between global and local – not so much geographically but virtually. "Think of it," she says, "as a complex tango with information constantly flowing between the global and the local, altered at each junction."
The complex relationship between personal, local collectives, and global must all be modeled in glocalized networks for Web2.0 to work. We need to break out of the global village model, the universal "truth" approach to information access. We need to situate information access in glocalized culture. Folksonomy is emerging as a dance between the individual and the collective; remix occurs as individual and collective responses to the global. They are forms of organizing and situating global information in a glocalized fashion.Coming soon: a podcast on convergence
Wednesday we recorded the first Balcones Fault Line Report, a talk show that Stephen Dulaney of Austin Podcasting Networkand I conceived. Our regular panel, besides Stephen and I, will include Catherine Crago and David Nuñez (who missed this first recording). Our first guess, Dr. Alex Cavalli, talked about the Digital Convergence Initiative that he's instigated. The two hour conversation will probably be podcast in two or three parts... watch this space, I'll post something when it's online. Meanwhile, if you're in Central Texas and care about Digital Convergence, be sure to attend the DCI Conference on September 22. (Register here.)
Darknet
JD Lasica's Darknet is a very good overview of the tumultous evolution of the perception of content and distribution as all media is digitized and increasingly available online, sometimes through legal channels but more often via the Darknet, i.e. file sharing networks of trust (not to be confused with the euphemistic label trusted computing). I'm leading a discussion with JD at Inkwell.vue on the WELL. If you want to join the conversation, you can send questions and comments to inkwell (at) well.com.
The Darknet, at bottom, is the collection of spaces where unauthorized or illegal file sharing takes place. Most media outlets use the Darknet in the narrow sense to refer to the private, secure, encrypted spaces online set up to exchange files without fear of detection -- sites like Blubster and WASTE and the new initiative Ian Clarke announced 2 weeks ago that will expand darknets from small groups of a few dozen people to potentially millions of people.Pirillo's revenge
My book deals with these kinds of darknets, but also points out that Darknets in a wider sense refer to any kind of illicit file-sharing network -- including the years-old sneakernets on college campuses, where kids trade, buy and sell CDs and DVDs of movies and software downloaded from warez sites and the Internet; Usenet and IRC Chat, where strangers exchange files; and a new wave of legitimate darknet companies like Grouper and imeem and Outhink's Spin Xpress (which I'll bet most of you haven't heard of!).
Darknets are not evil -- at least in my book. They're the public's reaction to overly restrictive copyright laws and bass-ackwards media business models. In some ways, darknets are becoming the last bastion of the digital freedom fighters (alongside the folks who just want to snag free stuff). So it's a decidedly mixed bag.
Chris Pirillo's got a great idea for dealing with telemarketers: record and podcast their calls! He's posted about it here, with a funny example.
Identity 2.0 and GoingOnMore news on the Identity Metasystem front, and a rose by another name, Identity 2.0. Wired News reports a new Tony Perkins/Marc Canter project, GoingOn, to be launched in the fall. Marc Canter is referring to it as "the world's first true DLA," or Digital Lifestyle Aggregator. They have venture backing for the project, which will presumably have some relation to the identity metasystem concept.