You are currently browsing the Gibberish Weblog weblog archives for January, 2003.
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 8:00 am on 1/31/2003
It turns out there’s another new take on Six Degrees, called everyonesconnected.com, that has some interesting spins on the idea of a social-connections site too. But it also turns out that neither it nor Friendster matter at all. The reason is trust.
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 3:10 am on 1/29/2003
If you’re not familiar with the Eldred v. Ashcroft case that was recently decided in the Supreme Court, I want you to read this comic twice. The first time, just read it. Then, go familiarize yourself with the Eldred case by reading this. It’s important that you not do this out of order. Then read the comic again.
Now, if you are familiar with the Eldred case, try to read this comic as if you weren’t. In fact, try to read it as if (to correct for what I believe the common political lean of my readership, such as it is, to be) you are from Red America. In a suburb somewhere. As though you aren’t generally given to a frisson of loathing when you hear the word “corporation.”
Do you see how the author of this comic is utterly failing rhetorically? I mean, middle America doesn’t find his strip funny anyway, but still. It’s impossible to see his point if you aren’t already deeply familiar with the case he’s talking about. For the rest of us, he’s making a point, but he’s not making a difference.
An even better case of this tactical failure on the part of the American left is Thomas Frank, editor of the hip-I-guess political zine The Baffler, and author of The Conquest of Cool and One Market Under God. I love Frank’s analysis of the boom and contemporary capitalist thinking in OMUG, but a lot of people who don’t already agree with him would love it too. Unfortunately, even if they do pick up a copy of this book, they won’t get through the introduction, because Frank’s use of irony is so thick that there are entire paragraphs that you can’t even parse unless you already agree with them.
Not everyone wants to write for the uninitiated, and that’s fine. But where would we be if more of us were trying?
(I promise not to write about politics too often.)
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 4:02 am on 1/27/2003
I’m just basking in the glory for a minute, because the DSL router I just set up actually worked with no fuss (technique). This allows me to hook my laptop into a monitor-keyboard setup that’s much more ergonomic (power).
I don’t remember if I read it somewhere or if it was just my mom who brought it up, but Steve Jobs’ recent keynote comment that he expects new computer sales to shift emphasis to laptops in a big way has a big dark side. According to every guideline I’ve seen for workstation safety, you should have the top of your monitor up at eye level. Laptops simply can’t do that. You’ll wreck your neck if you put in the kind of hours I have - and, in fact, I have.
Steve’s revolution will reap a harvest of necks. That would be a better post title, “A Harvest Of Necks,” but I played DOA3 down at Michael and Amanda’s over the weekend, and fell in love with the fighters’ taglines. Why doesn’t any of them say “My mother was a saint!!”?
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 9:06 am on 1/24/2003
Part of the reason I started this weblog is so I could talk about new forms. Every online community, for a wide definition of “community,” seems to fall into one of two basins of attraction: weblogs and message boards. I’m not counting the forms that are basically formless, chat and Wikis. But, really, no wonder so few smart people seem eager to jump into this online world; the only forms we’ve got for computer-mediated communication are just these old two. That’s a tight bottleneck for all of the possibilities of the written word.
I’m interested in people who are putting together new applications, that don’t boil down to “this guy posts one thing after the other and maybe people comment on them one after the other,” or “we all post stuff and respond to other posts and it all goes into a big pile, only we call it ‘threaded’ so it sounds organized.” Those are sets of game rules, in a sense, and they encourage certain kinds of interactions. I’m interested in the new interactions we might get - new emergent behaviors - from new sets of game rules. Sometimes they might come out of a web app that’s trying to accomplish something specific, but sometimes not.
I’m particularly interested in something an online acquaintance has been working on for a while, and seems finally to be gathering steam on.
He calls it “Robert’s Rules for the net.” But really, it’s a set of game rules, about the larger game of American politics. What’s really exciting is that it stands a chance of breaking the endless cycle of Usenet dogpiles and semi-connected weblog salvos - those discussions don’t ever build or move forward. XR will put them in a structure - which may mean that nobody will like it, I dunno.
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:33 am on 1/22/2003
Nice idea - take the old Six Degrees site, a kind of social video game with no clear idea of what it was for (let alone how to make money), strip down its interface and give it some more focus. Friendster lets you add Friends to (what they don’t call) your first degree, and then you surf around through the connections looking for friends with common interests, or people to date. You can even leave testimonials on your friends’ pages about how cool they are (which are actually about how cool you are, but whatever), and make introductions.
Recasting this concept as a friends-and-lovers personals site may well be pure genius. I imagine they’ll try to charge me for it soon, so I’ll enjoy it while I can. If you want in on the beta or just want to look around, email me - if you’re reading this you’re probably a friend anyway, right?