[joho] JOHO March 15, 2002
- From: "David Weinberger" <self@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <joho@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 00:53:25 -0500
JOHO
Journal of the
Hyperlinked Organization
========================================
March 15, 2002
Editor: David Weinberger (self@xxxxxxxxxxx)
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========================================
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========================================
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+--------------------------------------------------+
| CONTENTS |
| |
| THE END IS NEARING (OR MARCH FOR YOUR RIGHTS!): |
| So much bad legislation, so little time. |
| |
| WEB AS UTOPIA: The Web is a place where we can |
| perfect our imperfect nature |
| |
| WHY I DON'T WRITE... : ... as considerately as |
| Dan Bricklin or as sympathetically as AKMA |
| |
| WORDS OF THE YEAR: The results are in! |
| |
| SAME GRIM GAMES MIRE GAS MIMER: The results of |
| the Grammies are in! |
| |
| KAYPRO NOSTALGIA CORNER: Strolling down memory |
| lane at 5mH |
| |
| THE ANALS OF MARKETING: They so crazy. |
| |
| SEARCHING: A feature we'd like to see |
| |
| WALKING THE WALK: IPS Funds' experiment in |
| mutual democracy |
| |
| COOL TOOL: An easy, low-end backup program |
| |
| INTERNETCETERA: Dept. of Big Numbers |
| |
| PUZZLES AND GAMES: Quirks and oddities |
| |
| LINKS: From you, as delightful as ever |
| |
| EMAIL: Will you people never let go of the past? |
| |
| BOGUS CONTEST: Jakob Nielsen Ratings |
+--------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------+
| IT'S A SMALL PIECES WORLD AFTER ALL |
| |
| My book (www.smallpieces.com) is due out on |
| March 26, making it quite pre-orderable. |
| www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738205435/dweinbergers
| I can tell the time is approaching because my |
| pre-pub depression is deepening as I mentally |
| write the scathing reviews that are about to be |
| unleashed. I mean, it's one thing to attack my |
| style, my optimism so blind that it's |
| coextensive with stupidity, and my dumbing down |
| of thoughts already familiar, but those |
| comments on my mother are really over the line. |
| |
| FastCompany ran an interview with me by Keith |
| Hammonds in which I manage to say a whole bunch |
| of pretentious things: |
| www.fastcompany.com/online/56/internet101.html |
| By the way, the online version spares you the |
| extreme, moles-and-pores full-page closeup that |
| FastCompany committed to paper. You're welcome. |
| |
| FWIW, a couple of days ago, the book broke the |
| 300 mark at Amazon. That's a good thing. Now |
| it's dropping back to its natural and deserved |
| pre-pub depths. |
+--------------------------------------------------+
SMALL NEWS FLASH PIECES: Tom Matrullo has weblogged
a fabulous review of my book. He does a better job
of explaining what it's about than I've ever been
able to do. Thank you, Tom
http://tom.weblogs.com/stories/storyReader$891
+--------------------------------------------------+
| OSCAHS! |
| |
| In my never ending quest to waste my time, I've |
| written a utility for your Oscars party. People |
| enter guesses about who'll win in the various |
| categories and then, as you click on the actual |
| winners, it totals the score. (This would have |
| been easy for someone else to do with a |
| spreadsheet, but my irrational fear of numbers |
| causes my hands to tremble past the point of |
| typing whenever one of the beasts crawls across |
| my desktop.) |
| |
| This is beta software! If you'd like to try it, |
| you can download a zipped file here. It's about |
| 800K, almost all of which is the Visual Basic |
| DLL. (To uninstall it, you just erase the files |
| you installed.) |
| |
| Price of Admission: Your soul. (I.e., it's |
| freeware for Windows users.) |
+--------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------+
| IT'S A JOHO WORLD AFTER ALL |
| |
| You can listen commentary on National Public |
| Radio's "All Things Considered" on weblogs' |
| effect on journalism. (You'll need the Real |
| player to listen.) |
| www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc/20020213.atc.15.ram |
+--------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------+
| CONFERENCE COVERAGE |
| |
| I wrote a whole lot of coverage of the TED |
| conference here: |
| www.hyperorg.com/blogger/misc/tedreports.html |
| |
| And I also wrote up the Instant Messaging |
| Conference in Boston: |
| www.hyperorg.com/blogger/archive/2002_03_01_archive.html#75000070
|
+--------------------------------------------------+
---------------------------------------------
THE END IS NEARING (OR MARCH FOR YOUR RIGHTS!)
The venal, frightened a-holes we call U.S.
congresspeople are getting close to enacting
legislation that will maim if not kill the sharing
of creative works, and will hamstring the US
computer industry for that matter. The Security
Systems Standards and Certification Act is Fritz
Hollings' extremist response to the entertainment
industry's demand to have their stranglehold on
creativity backed by law and hardware. As Hiawatha
Bray of the Boston Globe writes:
Read it and gasp: "It is unlawful to
manufacture, import, offer to the public,
provide or otherwise traffic in any
interactive digital device that does not
include and utilize certified security
technologies."
This proposed law got derailed by public opinion in
December. The addresses and phone numbers of the
members of the Senate Commerce Committee are here:
http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/members.htm
You can send an email to Hollings via a Web form
here:
http://www.senate.gov/~hollings/webform.html
I like Doc Searls' idea of marching on Washington.
(www.searls.com) And I think there's something
mythopoeically correct in Greg Cavanagh's suggestion
that marching is so old world: Let's instead shut
down the Internet for a day. Now, there are problems
with that idea, including the fact that it's not
just the US's Internet. But surely the intelligent
and creative readers of this 'zine (and you know who
you are) can come up with something. Anything.
Please.
----
Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News has an
excellent call to arms now that the Supremes have
agreed to hear the Eldred v. Ashcroft case that will
determine if copyright is intended to establish a
marketplace of ideas or lock ideas away until
DisneyCo decides it's time to thaw Walt. This is
serious, despite the fact that the law that needs to
be overturned is the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension
Act.
www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/2705666.htm
----
You know what? The Tauzin-Dingell Bell sucks also.
You can read about it at Dean Landsman's site:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0102551/2002/03/11.html.
Here's what Bruce Kushnick, telecom Guru, says:
This bill gives the Bells more money, more
power, less scrutiny, and even provides
protection from investigations. The proposed
bill would block competitors from using the
networks, will raise customer Internet rates,
and it doesn't address or fix any of the
current DSL or competitor issues. Congress
should not even consider this bill until the
current problems, caused by the Bell companies,
have been fixed.
If you want to see how your CongressWretch voted,
and how much money s/he took from the telecom
industry, go to
http://newnetworks.com/houseforsale.html
----
You want some good news? Sorry, how about another
bowl of CrapFlakes instead?
Check out the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel's
report here:
http://www.loc.gov/copyright/carp/webcasting_rates.html.
CARP requires Internet radio broadcasters to pay
fees that commercial airwave broadcasters don't have to.
----
Continuing the Bad News From Everywhere, David
Isenberg (www.isen.com) forwards this from
Benton.org, a non-profit devoted to gaining social
benefit from communications technology:
Bush abandons national strategy to bridge the
digital divide.
After a year of public speculation over whether
the White House was committed to expanding
Internet access and skills to all of America's
citizens, the administration has finally broken
its silence. In its FY 2003 budget, the White
House stripped over $100 million in public
investments previously available for community
technology grants and IT training
programs--programs that offer real payoffs to
rural communities, the
working poor, minorities and children.
So predictable.
(For more infopinion(tm), see the article in the
previous issue of JOHO and a piece called "The
Paradox of the Best Network" that Isenberg and I
wrote: www.netparadox.com)
---------------------------------------------
WEB AS UTOPIA
This is what I remember saying to a session on March
9, '02 at the Eastern Sociological Society meeting.
And, yes, I'm aware of the irony of putting this
article immediately after the one before it.
(Unedited in the Web version of JOHO.)
----
I'm not defining a utopia as a perfect place.
Rather, it's a place with a particular nature.
Humans also have a nature. A utopia is a place
whose properties enable us to perfect our human nature.
Now, I don't mean that we become perfect in a
utopia. That's not possible. We're humans. We're
imperfect. That's why we're not gods. Besides,
imperfection is the only thing that makes life
interesting. It's a bit like the fact that the price
of free will is the existence of evil in the world:
the price of the world being interesting is that we
are imperfect creatures.
So, what I want to argue is that the characteristics
of a utopia that enable us to imperfectly perfect
our imperfect human nature are properties the Web
has.
First, utopias are always new starts, a fresh page.
The Web is definitely new and a fresh page.
Second, a utopia is a place and so is the Web. In
fact it's a world. It is not a medium. A medium is
something we send messages through, and while we can
do that with the Web, I believe that the excitement
about the Web hasn't happened because it's a
messaging medium. Rather, our language says that we
move through the Web. We, not our messages. This is
very weird. While the Web consists of pages, we go
to them, enter them and leave them. We don't do that
with real world pages or documents. We experience
the Web as a navigable space.
This Web place has certain characteristics.
1. It's persistent. That's one reason we experience
it as a place.
2. It's conversational. The excitement of the Web
has something to do with the fact that we're
connecting with one another by the most basic social
act: talking.
3. It's hyperlinked. The Web wouldn't be a web if
the pages weren't linked. But every hyperlink is an
expression of interest. I link to your page because
I think my visitors might find your page
enlightening or amusingly wrong. The real world is
shaped by a geography of rocks and water. The Web
geography is shaped by links of human interest and
conversation.
Compare this to the real world we're born into. None
of us asked to be born. Even if G-d gave us the
world as a gift, it's still the given, the datum.
And fundamentally this world is indifferent to us.
We get buried in it, our atoms dissolve, and the
worms are happy and the atoms don't care. We make of
this world what we will, but it's damn hard. You
can't move the mountains and it takes a lot to make
the desert bloom. It fundamentally isn't our world.
But the Web is a world that we're making for
ourselves. And we're doing so by connecting to one
another in conversation and by linking to one
another out of human passion and caring.
I can't defend the following so I'll just state it:
We are at our best when we are social and connected.
The Web is a world that is profoundly social. Its
geography itself is social, a map of connections and
passions. It is thus a world that we've made for
ourselves that is a reflection of our best nature
and a place where can imperfectly perfect our
imperfect natures.
---------------------------------------------
WHY I DON'T WRITE...
...LIKE DAN BRICKLIN
Dan Bricklin not too long ago sent me a friendly
note that ended by suggesting that I help readers
skim my articles by using typography to flag the
most important ideas. Dan is one of the computing
industry's Good Guys: brilliant, thoughtful,
innovative, ethical, human. And I can feel the pain
behind his message. He's staring at the endless,
gray cliffs of my verbiage and is begging for a
handhold. Who could blame him?
Dan follows his own advice. (For an example -- and
for some good reading -- check
http://danbricklin.com/log/ .) He puts key ideas in
bold, uses subtitles effectively, etc. But I don't
*want* people to skim what I write. I want to force
them -- you -- to read every syllable. Arrogant?
Absolutely. No matter how humble a writer pretends
to be, he is still presuming that what he has to say
is worth someone else's time.
Making your writing more skimmable makes total sense
if you're trying to convey information; the bolded
words are the ripe fruit waiting to be picked.
Believe me, If I had salient points to make, I'd
make them in boldface. But my aim is not to make it
easier for readers to find the ideas they want and
get going, but to pull them through ... best of all,
kicking and screaming, against their will.
Writing: Arrogant *and* sadistic.
What Dan says -- see www.gooddocuments.com -- makes
total sense. But ultimately I'm not trying to make
life easier for my readers. I'm just not that nice.
(See Dan on skimming:
www.gooddocuments.com/philosophy/skimming.htm)
...NICER
I've struck up quite a bloggery friendship with AKM
Adam. I love his blog.
(http://www.seabury.edu/faculty/akma/blog.html)
He's a teacher and minister with philosophical and
theological training and interests. Widely read and
insightful, he's a sympathetic reader. In fact, his
sympathetic nature got him exercised about a
offhand, snarky comment in a recent weblog entry in
which I said that that a particular book by Foucault
was not "his usual proof of his own cleverness."
Adam replied in an email to me:
One of the hazards of my vocation entails
teaching conservative evangelical students
whose version of Christian faith troubles me
deeply. But both here at Seabury (where they're
rarer) and in previous teaching positions, I
worked productively among conservative students
because I showed them at least minimal respect:
I didn't ignore their arguments, I didn't
refuse to let them cite their favorite books, I
went to chapel the days they were preaching, I
asked them to improve the arguments for
positions they weren't going to change, not to
abandon positions that were fundamental (so to
speak) to their identity. And then I could ask
them to extend the same courtesy to me, which
they sometimes,
pretty often, did.
I've taken this out of context; you should
understand that AKMA is quite humble. My offhand
remark actually brought him to testify.
My kneejerk response is to say: Hey, buddy, it's the
Web. If I can't recklessly slap a dead French
philosopher upside the head on the Web, then where
can I?
But I know in my heart that AKMA is right. It's easy
to think hard. It's usually easy to think clearly.
It's damn near impossible to think kindly. My
passing swipe at Foucault was intended to get me out
of having actually to read him with the care and
sympathy he deserves. Plus, it's a cheap way to puff
myself up.
Now, the irony is that shortly after this
interchange, John Dvorak, columnist galore, went
after weblogging with a bludgeon, in large part
because (he says) bloggers are never critical of one
another:
http://discuss.pcmag.com/n/main.asp?webtag=pcmag&nav=messages&msg=4681.1
Hah! I could show him some
exchanges that would put creases in his khakis. But
the fact is that among the bloggers I've been
hanging out, we have been critical in what I think
is the best way: finding what's worth talking about
in one another's writings, and disagreeing with an
eye towards uncovering the truth rather than being
the Smartest Blogger on the Block.
Oh, of course it's not that ideal, but it is ironic
to see your community knocked for not being nasty
enough.
---------------------------------------------
WORDS OF THE YEAR
Michael Quinlon's weekly emailer, World Wide Words,
(www.worldwidewords.org) at the beginning of 2002
summarized the words-of- the-year awards from the
American Dialect Society:
Most Outrageous: "assoline", methane used as a fuel.
Most Euphemistic: "daisy cutter", a bomb used by US
Air Forces in Afghanistan (not new, but definitely
a distinguishing word of 2001).
Most Useful: there was a tie between "facial
profiling", videotaping a crowd to identify
criminals and terrorists, and "second-hand speech",
overheard cell-phone conversation.
Most Creative: "shuicide bomber", a terrorist with
a bomb in his shoe.
Most Unnecessary: "impeachment nostalgia", longing
for the superficial news of the Clinton era
Least Likely to Succeed: "Osamaniac", a woman
sexually attracted to Osama bin Laden
Most Inspirational: "Let's roll!", the words of the
late Todd Beamer, who mobilised passengers on
Flight 93 on 11 September to overcome the
terrorists who had hijacked the plane.
Most Likely to Succeed: "9-11"
[Previous winners and more in the online version of
JOHO...]
---------------------------------------------
SAME GRIM GAMES MIRE GAS MIMER
NOTE: A recent New Yorker ("The Riddler" by
Burkhard Bilger) about puzzle fanatics mentions
that one of the puzzlemasters points out that
Pepsi-Cola spokesdroid Britney Spears anagrams
to "Presbyterians" while Pepsi-Cola anagrams to
"Episcopal."
At last night's RIM GAMES, hosted by TART JEW SON,
it was no surprise that SILKY ACE AI won a total of
5 GERM AIMS or that FOLLY NATURED took Best Female
Vocal Performance. And YELL DAME DRAMA from the
movie RUIN MULE GOO deserved the award it got. Old-
Timers ZANY RV TINKLE won for Male Rock Vocal
Performance and ROYAL JAM SET got Male Pop Vocal
Performance. But no one was expecting EARTH WHORE
BOTHER TOUR to walk away with album of the year!
After all, HOW HE TORTURE EAR BROTH is ASS LEG RUB
music!
Ok ok, here's the key:
SAME GRIM, GAMES MIRE, GAS MIMER=Grammies,
Grammies, Grammies
RIM GAMES=Grammies
TART JEW SON= Jon Stewart
SILKY ACE AI=Alicia Keys
GERM AIMS=Grammies
FOLLY NATURED=Nelly Furtado
YELL DAME DRAMA=Lady Marmalade
RUIN MULE GOO=Moulin Rouge
ZANY RV TINKLE=Lenny Kravitz
ROYAL JAM SET=James Taylor
EARTH WHORE BOTHER TOUR=O Brother Where Art Thou?
HOW HE TORTURE EAR BROTH=O Brother Where Art Thou?
ASS LEG RUB=Blue Grass
---------------------------------------------
KAYPRO NOSTALGIA CORNER
While checking the date I bought my first computer
in 1983, a KayPro II, I came across a site that
gives a history of the machine: www.yoy.org/kaypro/
There you'll find not only a scan of the original
brochure touting the "9-inch monster screen" (green
character-based) but also a KayPro simulator written
in Java as a class project. Ah, the familiar DOS
prompt at last! And MBasic! Do a DIR and you'll see
that they've ported a few of the original KayPro
games, including a character-based version of Space
Invaders. What a flashback! (There are also links to
CP/M information.)
I gave mine up when I got my first IBM PC (actually
a Zenith ... such an early model that there were
hand-soldered wires on the motherboard to correct
some late-discovered bugs)...
It makes me giddy to think that even our best
machines today are banging rocks together compared to
what's to come. Give me more!
---------------------------------------------
THE ANALS OF MARKETING
RageBoy points us to an article at Wired about
profitless companies successfully suing disgruntled
customers who go on line to say mean things.
And they say there's no viable ecommerce business
model!
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,50548,00.html
----
The lovely www.tinyapps.org site that features --
surprise! -- tiny applications is running a contest
with the following prize:
The first subscriber to provide an answer
that solves this problem ... will receive
a gently used copy of (this is not a
joke) "Writing Solid Code & --
Microsoft's Techniques for Developing
Bug- Free Programs". I spotted it at my
local "Friends of the Library" for a mere
10 cents. ...
---------------------------------------------
TRANSLATIONS
Through an email conversation with Jeff Chapman, we
have come up with a Request for Product for Google.
Suppose you could say that you'd like your search
terms translated into other languages and then get
returns in those languages. For example, suppose you
were looking for information on what vegans eat.
Enter "vegans eat" into the search box and click on
the "Find German pages" box. Behind the scenes
Google translates your search terms into German and
returns the pages that contain the phrase "Vegans
essen". It optionally translates those pages into
English for you. Or, search for "environmental
politics" and click on the "All languages" box, and
it will translate your search terms into however
many languages Google has dictionaries for.
As the engineers used to say at Interleaf, how hard
could it be? You just have to get the bits in the
right order :)
----
My college alumni magazine (Tagline: "Hey! You Got
Fatter than Your Classmates!") ran a notice about
one of my haven't-seen-him-since pals who is behind
www.yourdictionary.com, a very nice site for all
your word-finding needs. It includes some
translation services that so far seem quite
reasonable.
+----------------------------------------+
MIDDLE WORLD RESOURCES
+----------------------------------------+
WALKING THE WALK
I accepted the PR person's invitation to set up
a call with Greg D'Amico, president of IPS Funds
and IPS Advisory because I use the IPS "plain
English" risk disclosure statement as an example
of how humor can work in business. It turns out
that IPS is doing something quite interesting.
On January 1, 2001, they added their third fund: the
IPS iFund, an aggressive fund that invests in
disruptive business models. Here's the exciting
part: iFund Investors have complete control. They
nominate stocks, which are then discussed on the
message board. They vote on the stocks they want to
buy. They even vote on how many people have to vote
in favor of a stock to add it to the fund. (Your
vote counts more if you've invested more.)
So far, the fund is small, with only about 30
investors. But IPS didn't start marketing it until
the fall of 2001.
Yes, the fund was down 40% in 2001 during which time
Nasdaq was down 24%. The other IPS funds were
comparable. Greg says that on up days, the iFund
beats the indexes...but it also beats them (in the
wrong sense) when the indexes are down. Greg thinks
the fund will do better when more people invest and
thus "group intelligence" can kick in better.
Cool idea. Let's hope it works
COOL TOOL
I think I can recommend SecondCopy, a low-
cost backup program that I use to copy key files
onto another disk drive every night. The UI is
straightforward and seems to do what I want done.
It creates zip files that Winzip can read. It lets
me exclude all those MP3s and anything with the
word "draft" in the title.
It also seems to be well-behaved. No low-level
services interrupting every disk write, no
intricate rewiring of my registry. It sits in the
system tray and for the past month seems to have
been doing what it's supposed to.
It's free for 30 days and $29 after that. You can
get it from www.centered.com.
Since we seem to have some free space, I will
recommend a Web site that automatically builds an
online Oscar entry form for you and your pals.
Thanks, Matthew Baldwin! www.acesup.com/oscars
+-------------------+-------------------------+
| INTERNETCETERA |
| |
| Some large numbers: |
| |
| According to InformationWeek (Feb. 11), |
| here are the size of some databases, in |
| terabytes: |
| |
| Telstra: 10.36 |
| British Telecom: 8.45 |
| UPS: 7.88 |
| SBC: 10.50 |
| First Union National Bank: 4.5 |
| Dialog: 4.25 |
| My Outlook PST file: 40.6 |
| |
| The article goes on to say that CERN's |
| Large Hadron Collider will generate 5-20 |
| petabytes per year when it starts up in |
| 2006. It will manage and process this data |
| using 1,000 dual process Intel servers |
| running Linux. JOHO's prediction: The |
| project comes crashing to a permanent halt |
| when senior executives on the project who |
| say they're "uncomfortable reading on a |
| computer screen" insist on printing out |
| the data. |
+-------------------+-------------------------+
---------------------------------------------
PUZZLES AND GAMES
A friend (you know who you are, Steve) points us to
the Wonderlic 12-minute IQ test given to athletes to
see if they're smart enough to fall down instead of
up. The site gives a 5-minute version and sample
scores for various professions.
http://espn.go.com/page2/s/closer/020228.html
As with all such tests, I turn out to be a freaking
genius ... but only if given enough time. As Steven
Wright says, every place is within walking distance,
if you have enough time.
So, who's smarter, a brainiac who scores high on an
IQ test sitting in a sealed room or a normal person
who scores higher on the test in the same amount of
time but with access to the Internet ... and a
way-smart buddy list?
----
An engineer I know likes to "stress test"
prospective employees by asking them to come up, on
the spot, with the algorithm for determining the
angle between the hour and minute hand of a clock at
any given time.
My attempt to distract him by reciting the theme
song to "The Flintstones" in the voice of Barbara
Walters did not work.
----
Dana Parker sends us to Julian Baggini's Staying
Alive: The Personal Identity Game
www.philosophers.co.uk/games/identity.htm
It presents three scenarios having to do with what
constitutes self-identity. For example, in the first
one, you have to decide whether you'd rather get to
Mars by taking a risky space ship or via a
teleporter that maps your atoms and rebuilds you on
Mars. The entire game takes about five minutes to
play. Then you can read a brief and clear analysis
of your results. (The site is presented by The
Philosopher's Magazine, which looks like an
interesting compendium of ideas.)
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/index.htm
----
The text-based version of Pong
(www.karber.net/textbased/pong/) is a funny idea,
but I've always wanted to play an email-based
version of it:
From: PongServer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: self@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: MailPong Move #23
The ball has been served to you
Velocity: 10px/second
Angle: 32.85
Please indicate the parameters of your
move (All measurements in pixels):
Top edge of your paddle:
Point of impact:
Velocity of paddle at point of impact:
Now that would be fun!
----
From Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome games discussion
board comes a free game, called Crash!, that is
surprisingly hypnotic in a Bejeweled sort of way.
Thanks, Ernest! (The help files for this beta
version aren't very helpful. The object is to clear
the board. Clicking on a square will clear it if it
shares a border with two others of the same color;
its border mates are also cleared. The bottom line
of the screen shows you the next line of squares
that will be added.)
http://www.public.asu.edu/~ernestf/programs/programs.html
---------------------------------------------
LINKS
Gary Stock (www.unblinking.com), Creator of the
Googlewhack, points us to The Secret Life of
Numbers, a fascinating (in the literal sense) site
that does an amazing job of presenting its research
into the frequency with which particular numbers
show up on the Web. I assume that the fact that I
can't make heads nor tails of the shimmering
graphics is my fault; I have trouble interpreting
timelines.
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/index.html
----
Gilbert Cattoire has a pair of finds. First at the
home of the Post-It Note, he writes, we learn that
"refillable holders have a unique, very specific
objective: Improve employee relations." Wait, I
thought they were the backbone of a Knowledge
Management system!
http://www.3m.com/market/office/promote/
Second, he points us to www.Annotis.com where you
can get tools to scribble on top of your email,
highlighting passages, drawing little smiley faces,
and putting horns on top of every instance of the
phrase "my manager."
----
Peter "Nicest Person on the Planet" Kaminski
recommends Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons where
creators will be able to download IP licenses that
make sense.
http://www.creativecommons.org/
----
Dave Rogers recommends a lecture by Brenda Laurel
called "Creating Core Content in a Post-Convergence
World." She proposes that we think "transmedia" to
begin with, rather than rooting the content in any
one medium, and then talks about ways to think about
this cross-device content, including a quote --
worth the price of admission -- from Rob Tow that
"narratives are the constitutions of new worlds."
www.tauzero.com/Brenda_Laurel/Recent_Talks/ContentPostConvergence.html
----
Here's a John Perry Barlow interview in which he
uses the phrase "private totalitarianism" to label
the corporate attempt to own the economy of ideas
as well as the economies of work and money.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082-843349.html
----
Kevin Marks blogs about Richard Dawkins in response to my annoyed
comments. Says Kevin:
Dawkins has written very well and clearly, and
had some very original ideas. However, these
days he seems to be writing the same book over
and over again...
Or, as I'd put it, Dawkins is one meme away from
being a crank. (Please ignore the comments earlier
in this issue about reading with sympathy.)
Kevin: http://epeus.blogspot.com/2001_11_11_epeus_archive.html#7053068
Me:
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/archive/2002_02_01_archive.html#10066052
Martin Jensen recommends this site about Dawkins:
http://www.santafe.edu/~shalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html
----
At Dan Dubno's site, Gizmorama, you'll find a link
to the amazing EarthViewer, demo'ed at the TED
conference. Type an address into the client and it
delivers a cinematically thrilling aerial view of
the location. There's a 14-day free trial on the
site. The Gizmorama site also has links to other
digital images of the earth and a link to CBS News'
comprehensive links about disasters of every
stripe.
http://www.cbsnews.com/digitaldan/
----
There are some lovely maps of the Internet at
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi 's site.
http://www.nd.edu/~networks/gallery.htm
He's the Notre Dame physicist who found that there
are 19 degrees of separation between any two
randomly chosen sites on the Web. (This is back when
there were only a billion pages on the Web. ) More
significantly, he and his team have discovered a
pattern of nodal clustering that seems to pertain
not just to the Internet but to any self-organizing
network. I had a chance to talk with him a couple of
weeks ago -- a very enthusiastic and engaging
fellow. He has a new book, Linked, coming out soon.
----
Ryan Mulcahy, from Darwin Magazine for whom I write
a weekly online column, recommends a site for people
trying to quit cigarettes. My mother died of lung
cancer, Ryan, so you know I mean it when I wish you
luck and strength.
http://www.quitnet.com/qn_main.jtml
----
Mike O'Dell sends us to
http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html. It
took me a minute to realize what it's up to. See
how many categories you fit into!
----
Chip recommends a long article by Ron Callari of The
Albion Monitor (http://www.monitor.net/monitor) that
provocatively lays out the circumstantial evidence
that It's the Oil, Stupid. Many fascinating tidbits
loosely joined. For example, Zalmay Khalilzad,
former consultant to Unocol, the oil company that
was negotiating with the Taliban for a pipeline, "is
the Special Assistant to the President and National
Security Council member responsible for setting up
the post-Taliban 'Pro-Unocal' regime in Afghanistan."
The Monitor is a stronghold of lefty conspiracy
theories and outrage ("Olympic Torch Bearer Uniforms
Made In Burma Sweatshops," "Could Irradiated Mail
Cause Super-Anthrax?"). Just because they're lefty
and conspiracy theories doesn't mean they're not
true.
----
Paul Graham, who is an acquaintance from a previous
life at a software company, has written a really
interesting explanation of why his startup used Lisp
to write their application, including an argument
about what constitutes a higher level language.
(Thanks to Bret Pettichord for pointing
this out.)
http://www.paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/sec.txt
This recalls the old joke that circulated via email
about ten years ago. "I've managed to hack into the
Defense Department's Star Wars code," it explained
breathlessly. "Unfortunately, I was only able to get
the last page." What followed were 2,000 close-
parentheses. Oh, the tears of laughter were
like CDRs to the Lisp geeks' eyes over that one!
My own book, The Adventurer's Guide to Interleaf
Lisp , continues to sell high into the single digits
every year. I only wish I were kidding.
BLOGWORTHY
Dave Rogers blogs on Dvorak on Cluetrain and
blogging.
http://dave_blog.blogspot.com/?/2002_02_01_dave_blog_archive.html
Tom Shugart has started a blog. His very first entry
is a reflection on authenticity.
http://insiteview.blogspot.com
Hermani Dimantas has started a blog. I assume it's
good because, although it's in Portuguese and thus
impenetrable to me, I know from correspondence with
Hermani that he's an enthusiastic, smart guy.
www.mercadohype.blogspot.com
Dan Pink (author of Free Agent Nation) has a blog
that is blessedly short and pithy. And entertaining:
http://justonething.blogspot.com/
Halley Suitt is blogging away at
http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com
Jeneane Sessum and Others have started the "
BlogSisters" communiblog. I love the tagline: "Where
men can link, but they can't touch."
http://blogsisters.blogspot.com/
A multi-personaed person possibly named Matt Moore
or Daniel Byron has started "evil twin blogs." One
charts his travels and stays in India. The other is
more contemplative, although I'm not confident that
I've characterized either well.
http://nowayjose.blogspot.com
http://truefacts.blogspot.com
One of the first certified cases of multiple blog
disorder.
---------------------------------------------
EMAIL, ARBITRARY INSULTS, AND SUSPICIOUS HACKING
COUGHS
[Many of these have been edited for space. But not
in the online version.]
From Jim "Jack Vinson" Fenwood:
Since I knew you wouldn't be able to pass up an
opportunity to use my mail to shamelessly
promote your latest opus, I was confident that
my fifteen minutes of JOHO fame was a sure
thing. Imagine my shock and dismay to see Jack
Vinson identified (albeit tentatively) as the
author of MY message. It was in fact me, Jim
Fenwood. My big chance, gone in a puff of
scrambled hard drive electrons!
Sorry, Jim. The exquisite chocolates are in the
mail.
----
Kevin Marks responds to my weblogging of the little
Oscars-scoring program (above) that I wrote in
<shame> Visual Basic </shame>:
You don't wanna use that, you wanna use this:
http://runrev.com
... Or if you really love Basic, use this:
http://www. realbasic.com/
Love Basic? Not hardly. Back when I was running DOS
I far preferred C. (I could never master C++ or
Java.) But VB has one compelling strength if you're
strictly an amateur programmer: Microsoft has made
it really easy to bash together a UI.
So here's the plan: Make your OS too hard to develop
in and then sell the dumbed-down kit so people can
develop in it. And I fell for it!
Ah, let the flames begin.
----
Gaspar Torriero (www.gaspartorriero.it/blogger.html)
responds to my asking: "Are we in a time that could
rival the golden age of Athens in its capacity for
reinventing ourselves?"
You ask yourself a very rhetorical question.
IMHO:
...Sometimes a small mouse will rise the head over
the maze and briefly guess the whole picture...:
"Access to communication and information
will be soon free and ubiquitous. New the
technologies will allow us to switch from
representative to direct democracy, and
the State will auction its services
through ebay. ..."
Or:
"We will swim in the same shit as ever,
and will be all killed by our greed and
stupidity, or by the swift indifferent
strike of a meteorite."
Who cares? We will not be there. All the same,
I like to pretend that yes, this is our golden
age, this is our occasion to reinvent
ourselves, every day. It's much more fun this
way.
Ok, then can I ask if we're maybe in a time that
could rival the golden age of Newark?
----
A couple of you have pointed out that the Foucault
text I talked about in the previous issue is
available online for free:
http://foucault.info/parrhesia/
----
Jacob Shwirtz of www.gazm.org writes about the
topic of Foucault's lectures:
...when studying the Talmud, in the original
Aramaic, there is a word used often,
"Pharhessia" (phonetically spelled), which
means "in public." Not sure it has any
connection to the Greek word but it got me
thinking...
If it's a coincidence, it's an interesting one.
Words are funny things, aren't they? They could
practically be cute little woodland creatures if
they were anything like them.
----
Prof. Tom Wilson writes about my article about
broadband:
...Interesting how far behind the industry
'leaders' are (even when they are right!). It
was in 1986, I think, that a man called
McKenzie, wrote a book called "Sunrise Europe"
(very interesting, if you haven't read it) in
which he suggested that Europe as a whole
needed an inter-governmental policy to take
broadband (cable at that time) to every home,
school, office and factory in order to build an
information economy that could stand up to the
USA and Japan.
Needless to say, nothing was done about it
anywhere...
And where is Britain in all this? In spite of
the Prime Minister's voiced desire to make the
UK the leading broadband country in Europe, it
is currently behind Portugal and just about
ahead of Greece. The UK isn't five years behind
the trend, but twenty years!
----
Vergil Iliescu comments on authenticity and the Web:
I've just started reading "The Psychology of
the Internet" by Patricia Wallace...Chapter 3
is called "Online Masks & Masquerades", and
includes the following comment: "When we alter
the characteristics of ourselves on the
Internet ? even fundamental ones like age, race
or gender ? we might not think of ourselves as
liars or con artists. "... We might feel more
like researchers, or experimenters. We are
playing with our own identities and trying out
different hats..."
The Internet creates the opportunity to create
a persona (mask), and this is generally
acceptable. ... I think the Internet somehow
creates a distance, a separation which allows
you to be/play a different personality. I
wonder why. Maybe it because you just don't get
the same visual and verbal clues, and it is
easier to be consistent, since you are writing,
for the most part. In Billy Connolly's
biography, written by his wife Pamela
Stevenson, she notes that Billy doesn't use the
internet because the people who do are "the
kind of people you wouldn't talk to in a pub
anyway" (or something like that, I'm quoting
from memory). I don't agree literally with
that comment of course, but I think it
illustrates that his perception is that the
relationship, for him, would not be
sufficiently authentic ? can't see the guy,
can't smell the guy, and worse, can't share a
drink.
Any email to JOHO that has the good sense to cite
Billy Connolly is assumed to be not only right and
true but wise.
I agree that there's something important going on
about the social construction of our selves. The
notion that the self is a set of persona or even a
set of relations isn't new. But, as you indicate,
the way our selves are being re-valued in the
hyperlinked social world of the Web is new. And the
fact that it is a written self strikes me as
important. I wish I knew what it portends.
----
Mark Justman, Futurist, writes:
Your blurb in the recent issue of JOHO on
omniweb brings to mind another (if smaller)
example of a software company using quirkiness
as a key marketing asset www.zootsoftware.com
Zoot is a ECCO/Agenda-like PIM that is coded
and sold by a one-man operation. What can be
rather interesting is that bug fixes and
suggested new features can (and do) get added
in a matter of days...not months or never.
Also, the Zoot faithful do a fair share of user
support on the Zoot discussion group, which
also contains sample databases and
instructional files created by Zoot users.
Several of these users have even begun to
construct a collaborative guide and help manual
for Zoot: groups.yahoo.com/group/ZootForum/
It's also a very nifty tool for personal
Knowledge Management.
----
Mike O'Dell has figured out a way to get back to the
habit of reading:
i pick up the keyboard off the desk and set it
on top of the monitor. it's not on the desk,
tempting me to type on it - it's just out of
reach. AND i have a place to actually put a
book!!
Isn't this an urban myth like the person who calls
the customer support line and complains that the PC
"cup holder" is broken only to find that he's been
using the CD tray? Reading books? Sure.
----
Gary Lawrence Murphy responds to our short piece
about CNN's depiction of an asteroid smashing into
the earth:
...I thought it only fair to warn you that by
next year at this time you will have the
opportunity to compare the image to its
reality: http://xfacts.com
It seems there's planet in our solar system we
haven't noticed because every time we count, we
forget to count ourselves. Or some such.
----
Steve Telleen writes:
...No one pays attention to spam. So if you are
a terrorist cell, you embed your coded message
in the spam email text, purchase a list of
100,000, sprinkle your cell list of 10 or 20
email addresses through it, and send it out
through the normal spoofed spam channels.
...So what do you think? Should the Homeland
Defense guys be concerned?
See www.spammimic.com and then tell Tom Ridge that
it is now a national priority for the Homeland
Security Office to confiscate all spammers and to
lock them in the Opryland Hotel where they will be
forced to opt-in to listen to a 24/7 loop of
"100 Jingles We Can't Forget." If they want it to stop,
they need to call an 800 number that rings and rings
and rings.
By the way, if you want to see the internal
governmental version of the Homeland Security
Advisory System, go here:
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/archive/2002_03_01_archive.html#75013975
---------------------------------------------
BOGUS CONTEST: JAKOB NIELSEN RATINGS
Jakob Nielsen, the guru di tutti guri of usability,
has a book out -- E-Commerce User Experience -- for
$250 that in 389 pages lists 207 rules for designing
sites real good. (You can read a a review of it
here: http://www.webreference.com/new/020131.html In
fact, I have only seen the review, not the book.)
The rules include:
11. Don't show products that customers can't buy.
51. Show total cost, including taxes, shipping and
handling, as soon as possible.
70. Allow customers to purchase without registering.
108. Design comparison tables to highlight
differences.
111. Put the search box on every page.
114. Support search for nonproduct terms.
199. Write all text in EASL (English As a Second
Language)
206. Don't use metaphors that are intimately
connected with a specific country.
Excellent advice. But few people know that Jakob has
an Evil Twin named Bokaj who has produced the same
book, but with the worst possible advice for e-
commerce sites. It includes rules such as:
Popups, popunders, pop in-betweens ...
just keep on poppin'!
Click away from your shopping basket and
you're asking to have it emptied
Force a purchase commitment before
revealing the shipping charges
Disabling the "Back" button is a sure way
to make your site sticky
Everyone loves naked ladies. Sprinkle
them throughout!
Have you heard any of Bokaj's rules?
RESULTS
Stu Rubinow:
Did you notice that the scum-sucking dead-
dog's-mourners'-guestbook spammer in 'Worst
Marketing...Ever' has a URL
[www.magicrates.com] that could be entered in
your "ambiguous Web addresses" contest?
Either a location for unbelievably low plane
fares, or a site selling packing cases to ship
the Three Wise Men.
Viz, www.MagicRates.com or www.MagiCrates.com. I
don't know, Stu. I appreciate your tenacity, but
unless we get some better Ambiguous URLs, we may
have to draw this contest to a close.
Nah. We at JOHO don't like to bring anything to a
close. We'd rather just go on and on and on and on
until we're the only ones left in the room.
Hello? Anyone still reading? Dan Bricklin, is that
you? I can hear you breathing. Could you turn off
the light when you finally grope your way to the
exit?
--------------------------------------------------
EDITORIAL LINT
JOHO is a free, independent newsletter written and
produced by David Weinberger. If you write him with
corrections or criticisms, it will probably turn out
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more information about subscribing, changing your
address, etc., at
www.hyperorg.com/forms/adminhome.html. In case of
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recriminations. Sometimes things just don't work out
between people.
Any email sent to JOHO may be published in JOHO and
snarkily commented on unless the email explicitly
states that it's not for publication.
The Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization is a
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