Posted by misuba at 08:00 AM
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.
I'm not going to go real deep into what a trust metric is, because for this version, the math wouldn't necessarily have to be that overwrought anyway. It's very simple: there are some friends you'd trust with your seat at Starbucks, but far fewer you'd trust with your car keys, and even fewer with, say, your sister in a tube top. Work out a simple numeric scale for different levels of trust, or, if you're smarter than I am, a more complex matrix of situational variables.
The next level is, I might trust my friend, but do I trust her taste in people? Do I recommend that other people trust the people she trusts? You don't want to just let people on your system make sight-unseen judgments about people they haven't met or interacted with, but a secret, blanket judgment about her general taste might be helpful whilst being too vague to cause any damage. These ratings could percolate throughout the system, giving you a better sense of how much to invest in interactions with those fifth-degree types. (I have yet to run across anyone on Friendster who's more than four away. The system's still small, and certain of my first-circle friends are abnormally well connected, but still, makes you think.)
I know that trust problems are more complex than I paint them here, possibly to the point of being wicked. But this is the way we're heading: not just to the semantic web, but the social web. We're going to have to map more knowledge of finely nuanced social behavior into our game rules. Maybe we're headed into a space that only humans are ever going to be good at. (For that matter, maybe I am.)
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Posted by misuba at 03:10 AM
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 misuba at 04:02 AM
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 misuba at 09:06 AM
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 misuba at 10:33 AM
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?
Posted by misuba at 07:48 AM
I've been thinking about what to post about the promised "kit" - the standard set of Internet software that one should use for maximum safety and comfort - and there isn't much to say, I'm finding, besides "use Mozilla, filter your spam somehow and try not to use Outlook." I'll have more to say about spam filters soon, but peep this:
Second-Order Digital Divide: Differences In People's Online Skills
Sooner or later, this will percolate up to the mainstream press in a much bigger way, and computer makers will be forced to answer for the egregious lag in user interface across the board. Or at least that's the current fantasy.
Posted by misuba at 11:02 AM
Give or take a standard deviation. There's way too much stuff I haven't heard yet for this list to be authoritative, but:
Posted by misuba at 06:18 AM
There's something William Gibson said long ago, and which is nearly as famous in some circles as his flogged-to-death coinage 'cyberspace.' Instead of a neologism, it's a phrase, a powerful summation of the core ethos of hacking: "The street finds its own uses for technology."
I was at Moe's Books today, of all places, and I found a pile of a thin newspaper called Bay Area High-Tech. It looks for all the world like the Berkeley Daily Planet, the startup micro-daily here in town that recently went under. That's why I picked it up. Although the stories on the front page were national ones (even if Intel and Apple are based in the Bay Area, that doesn't make their travails local news), I envisioned some nice local angles in the interior. Nothing too exciting, maybe pieces on local wireless activists or other non-profit groups.
But Bay Area High-Tech has no local news in it. Every story inside has a generic, if generally somewhat hacker-leaning, headline on it: UK Firm Sues Microsoft For Stealing Its Cell Phone Technology. Microsoft Re-rates IE Flaw After Experts Take It To Task. IBM Offers Voice Over IP Network Services. There is one tiny article about California's anti-spam legislation in the Security section; that's it. The rest is slightly old-smelling tech news and pseudo-advertisements (which are, helpfully, set off in boxes with a different headline font).
Bay Area High-Tech has no URL for itself in its masthead, or anywhere else. Its advertising salespeople are the same as its co-publishers. Overall it's pretty clear that this is just another play at selling full-page Fry's ads, and if so, it's a missed opportunity in my opinion.
But am I right? Has the Internet made one big neighborhood out of everyone who might care about your new tech development? Or is the street, like the real one, finding any new uses for technology anymore? Is there such a thing as local technology news?
If there isn't, should we make some?
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Posted by misuba at 06:04 AM
(Let's go ahead and launch, although aesthetics are not perfect yet, and the thought that someone might TrackBack me is so remote that I haven't even looked at the TrackBack template.)
I had some time with my dad last week, he was in town for Macworld. He's a chaplain for a hospice in the midsouth (as in, really the south but almost the midwest) but his favorite part of the job is building stuff in Filemaker. He's been that kind of gearhead since I was twelve. For a while it was the only thing we seemed to have in common.
Anyway, we were talking about his current setup over coffee, and I started going off about Mozilla and its popup-stopping capabilities, and then about POPFile, and all this other stuff. And he said to me, "I really don't know what the kit is anymore, do I? Michael, this is what I wish you could do. I wish you would package this information up for people like me."
A couple of things dawned on me. One: I used to do exactly that when I was in college. There was a culture, if you can call it that, of AppleShare file servers through which people gossiped and traded warez, and my server was the place you went to get all the basic Internet gear and learn how to use it.
Two: I've had Movable Type set up on this server for a long while, intending to start using it to talk up my consulting services. I was also looking at joining the "blog community" proper, with a blog about what I suppose you'd call social software - with a focus on forms of social software that don't look like the forms we already have. LazyWeb kind of obviates the need for the latter project, and it's looking like I'll have full employment soon. So what do I do with this blog?
I think I'll do some writing here about the ground-level Internet - not quite a totally naive-user Internet-for-your-mom take (not that my mom is that naive, really), but some decidedly just-folks issues. I'll also be taking advantage of TrackBack channels such as the aforementioned LazyWeb, and the Social Software channel linked to above. (How many people these days are starting blogs for the sole purpose of linking their posts elsewhere, do you figure?)
I probably won't get famous, but I might get some nice tools. Or a newspaper colum-- (stuffs several bales of hay into mouth to prevent evil thoughts)
And in a couple of days, I'll post the kit.
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