Question Technology

Really (not so) Simple Syndication

Back in August, Nicholas Carr started an interesting discussion on his blog by posting this image and writing:

Is it still "really simple" when it involves choosing among 35 options?
If the object is to baffle, annoy and repel the masses, then what we have here is a remarkable success.

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The problem with RSS.

It's an excellent point, and it (and the subsequent discussion) typifies one of the big problems I have with open source software: too many choices, and all of them are mediocre.  I base that on experience not just with RSS readers, but with linux and many types of applications.

The concept of RSS is great and I find it essential for the sporadic blog reading that I do.  I'd also be highly frustrated without the Bloglines feature that lets you publish a blogroll that updates automatically based on what blogs you subscribe to.  I search occasionally for a better RSS reader, but none of the newer and slicker ones seem to have that feature, which kind of baffles me.

On an administrative note:  This blog's feeds now all go through FeedBurner, which shouldn't make any difference to readers but is supposed to work better.  I also added a "subscribe by email" button for anyone who prefers that.  And thank you for subscribing -- I appreciate the support!

Citizendi-what?

There is much nattering on the internets about Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger's new initiative to create a better Wikipedia, one that recognizes expertise and is named, rather horribly, Citizendium.  Internet expert (and hard-core relativist, apparently) Clay Shirky (Many2Many) thinks it won't work because expertise is just a social construct.  Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing) agrees and thinks it'll just "devolve into interminable pissing matches over who was and was not qualified to be called an expert," which I thought sounded ridiculous (how do real encyclopedias ever get made?), but then I remembered: this is the internet, where everyone behaves like twelve year-olds.

Nicholas Carr has a good post about this.  He concludes that the flaw in Citizendium is not too much expertise, it's too little (still).  An excerpt:

I tend to agree with Shirky's belief that Sanger's concept of Citizendium is fatally flawed (though I wholeheartedly support Sanger's desire to counter the destructive force of anonymity). But Shirky's diagnosis of the flaw is all wrong. What "will kill Citizendium," he writes, is that, unlike Wikipedia, "it won't go far enough" in "its disrespect of experts." No, Citizendium's flaw does not lie in having too much faith in what Shirky dismissively calls "the rugged condition of expertise." Its flaw lies in not having enough faith in it. By creating a vague bureaucratic system in which experts gain their Citizendium credentials through community certification, Sanger is, in fact, reducing expertise to a social construct and thus rendering it meaningless, or at least turning it into a bone of endless and silly contention. He wants to have it both ways, and as a result will likely do no better than create another Wikipedia: a vast, labyrinthine garden of mediocrity.

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: What will kill Citizendium.

Boing Boing Revolutionizes Hipster Commerce!

You've got to hand it to those attractive hipster techies at Boing Boing.  Who else could package up a bunch of quirky old articles about things like "the subculture of people who are hooked on incredibly hot peppers," sell them as PDFs on the net -- where it's terribly hard to find such writings for free -- and be received as heroes?

Their secret?  The things Boing Boing is selling don't have DRM (Digital Rights Management) copy-protection technology, the number one enemy of BoingBoing and presumably their readers.  I'm not a fan of media corporations and the more draconian protection schemes they've tried recently, but neither am I a convert to the anti-copyright movement.

I guess you have to start somewhere if your mission is to reinvent commerce and intellectual property practices, but BoingBoing's initial offerings strike me as just a wee bit too precious -- and value-less.  You're paying for the pride of knowing you've done your part against the corporate nasties (no, not the ones that BoingBoing pimps for on their blog -- the other corporate nasties).

I don't know if BoingBoing takes any cut off of these sales.  I doubt it, but then why would they use the following awkward wording:

[they are] giving the creators the majority of the proceeds (minus the transaction charges imposed by Paypal and Payloadz.)

Would not the words I've italicized be unnecessary otherwise?

Link: Boing Boing: Introducing the Boing Boing Digital Emporium.

Give Me Back My Mouse

I don't usually critique web sites or software on this blog, but I'm going to doff my grumpy Luddite hat for a moment and replace it with my grumpy armchair web critic hat.

One of the design principles behind the modern, spiffy web sites ("AJAX" or whatever the kids are calling it now) is apparently "make stuff happen without mouse clicks."  Rollover buttons are nothing new, but now we get instant popup menus and graphics.  Go to Amazon.com if you don't know what I'm talking about.  When you mouse over some (but not all) of the headings across the top of the page, big rectangular mini-pages pop out in front, obscuring the rest of the page.

What's bad about this?  It typically happens unpredictably, it obscures content unnecessarily, and I'd bet it doesn't save the user any time.  Most of all, it irritates me because I am a restless mouser, and I suspect others are similarly afflicted.  When I'm reading a page, my mouse moves all over, double-clicking on words or tracing patterns.  Whether the result of ADD or some other neurosis, I don't know.  I like to think it's akin to doodling.  On today's web it's getting harder to find unadorned free space for restless mouse doodling.

Amazon is not a particularly bad example, and I'm sure they do plenty of user testing to keep it from getting too objectionable.  Earlier iterations of their site were worse.  Slate.com's home page is another example.  If your mouse strays too far to the left then boom -- out pops a bit array of text links, obscuring the entire center panel of main headlines.  You then have to mouse down to the bottom to close, which is at least better than an earlier design that didn't have a close button at all, so you had to mouse far away and just wait for this monstrosity it do disappear.

I doubt the designers do this to minimize mouse clicks.  Fewer clicks are often good, especially for repetitive tasks, but that's not usually a concern with web pages.  My guess is that it's just a fashion thing -- it looks slicker and the newer code makes it easy to do, so why not?

So, while I generally like the newer, frame-free, active web pages, I object to designers hijacking my mouse for other functions.  Let me control my mouse!  I'll click when I'm ready to click.

Creative Commons Warms the Heart

Cory "Copyfight" Doctorow writes about a "Heartwarming Creative Commons" success story:

Last week, I received the most remarkable letter from Jamie, a US Navy seaman stationed on a ship in the Mediterranean Sea. Because my novels are Creative Commons-licensed, he is able to download them and print them out onboard ship, and pass them around to his comrades. The absence of quality reading material on the ship has turned Creative Commons texts into hot items on the ship...

Link: Boing Boing: Heartwarming Creative Commons success story from the US Navy.

Okay, so it's true that these guys downloaded Cory's novels and passed them around.  But give me a break -- there are tons of sites on the web, from Project Gutenberg to Google, where you you can download public domain novels.  There are also some successful donate-books-to-the-military programs that these guys should know about.  Heck, I'd be surprised if publishers wouldn't even donate books to the military if asked, even in electronic form.

So, sure, this guy's a Cory Doctorow fan and it's great that he was able to get the books easily, but there is plenty of good reading material on the net.  Does Doctorow really have to spin this as part of the copyright wars he's obsessed with?  Get real.

Google's Free Image-Tagging Work Force

The other day Google launched the "Google Image Labeler," a site that invites you to come look at pictures and type in descriptive words.  Users are paired up and their responses compared.  The more matches, the better your "score" and the better the image tags for Google's image search.

Why would you want to do this for free?  Apparently it's a game that derives from something called the "ESP Game," according to TechDirt, so for starters there's the amusement factor.  I can't imagine that will last long, though.  There's also the joy of seeing your name on the high score page at Google.  Most of all, I imagine this appeals to the utopian "cult of information" that also drives Wikipedia and other online projects, including Google, whose followers believe that simply dumping and categorizing all the world's information onto networks will empower and enrich people.  Google is still a hero for most of these enthusiasts, so it's not a concern that they're effectively being used as free labor.  Imagine if Microsoft tried this.

Interestingly, it looks like people are gaming the system, judging by "today's top pairs" (see image).  I'm not sure if that user is suggesting an effective cheat or is saying that most images on the web are in fact "tits" -- both seem plausible.

Via Boing Boing: Google uses game to get good image metadata with Image Labeler.

Previously in cheap online labor news: Human-Powered Artificial Intelligence (Amazon Turk).

Wired to Geeks: Come Talk About Yourselves

First there was the Wikitorial, and now Wired is giving it a try by posting a news story for readers to edit.  The subject: Wikis!  The original, unedited story begins:

Wikipedia has hit the big time.

The massive user-generated and edited site is not only the biggest encyclopedia in the world, it's also gotten the attention of the media elite, been lampooned by the Onion and Comedy Central and will come packaged with MIT's $100 laptop project.

But what are the lessons of Wikipedia and what bodes for the future of wikis beyond Wikipedia? Will open collaboration be the exception or the rule?

Wow, pretty shocking stuff, Wired.  Apparently I'm not the only one who's less than enthused about the topic.  After one day, only two people have edited the page besides the original author.*  I suspect the wiki-folk are abuzz somewhere about this experiment, but just not on the page itself.

Link to the wiki page: Wired Wiki.
Link to Wired story about the story: Wired News: Edit This Wired News Story.

Correction!  There have been 103 edits to date.  I was looking at the history for the "original unedited" version, which had been edited nine times by three users.  Confused?  Me too.  I blame SocialText's horrible navigation interface.  (Hey, wasn't Social Text the name of the journal that hosted the Sokal hoax?  I wonder if this coincidence means anything to anyone.)

Anyway, here's the opening to the current, edited story:

Wikipedia has edited its way into the big time.

The massive user-driven site is now by far the biggest encyclopedia in the world. It has recently attracted the attention of the media elite, having been lampooned by The Onion and Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert -- who in turn gave birth to the term "wikiality". Wikipedia may also become familar to children without access to the internet as its extensive database will come pre-packaged with MIT's $100 laptop in the One Laptop per Child project.

But is there a future for wikis beyond the encyclopedia model? Will open collaboration be the exception or the rule?

I usually try to restrain myself from criticizing other people's writing, because I'm no example, but this is truly crappy writing.  Of course I could go edit it myself if I really cared -- Wired even trotted out the obligatory "If you don't participate you can't complain about the results" in their teaser to the article, presumably being a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Daily Show's Future Shock

In case you haven't seen it already, I recommend checking out The Daily Show's funny new feature called "Future Shock" with Samantha Bee.  The first installment featured Ray Kurzweil and RFID-chip-implant do-it-yourselfer Mikey Sklar.  You can watch the videos on the Daily Show site (or you can find copied snippets on YouTube as well, if that makes you feel better).

Privacy is Important, Unless it's Funny

I haven't blogged about the AOL search record disclosure fiasco, nor do I often blog about privacy issues in general, because the topic is so well covered elsewhere. (See Michael Zimmer, Lauren Weinstein, EFF, etc.)  But one aspect of the AOL episode that I find strange is how the internet chatter (I refuse to use the word 'meme') shifted so quickly from concern for privacy to delight over the content of the records.  Lists started popping up all over of the crazy things people search for (see BoingBoing for examples).  And of course these were AOL users, one of the lowest Internet classes and a favorite target for ridicule.

I know it's all just harmless fun, more or less, but beyond the joking, I think this is an instance of two core geek values colliding: privacy and "free culture."  Free culture appears to trump privacy, at least in the sense that privacy is seen as something for corporations to honor.  Free copying is something that citizens will do, regardless of the privacy consequences.  Once something is out there, there's no getting it back.  Or at least it seems to me that that's the underlying model here.  It's evident also in this casual statement in a recent Wired story:

AOL has apologized and taken down the data, but it is now widely available on the internet and some have set up search engines that query the records.

Link: Wired News: FAQ: AOL's Search Gaffe and You.

The phrasing -- "it is now widely available" -- suggests that individuals aren't responsible for continuing to make the data available.  It's just the way things work.

Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence

The Onion does a good job on Wikipedia today.  Excerpt:

"It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. "At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world's oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition," Wales said. "According to our database, that's 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven."

Link: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence | The Onion - America's Finest News Source,
via Bookninja.

No doubt someone will now add a typically humorless wikipedia article that describes the article.

Recent Reading - Suzuki, Midgley, Roszak, Coupland

This strange line-up is some of what I've been reading recently:

The David Suzuki Reader: A Lifetime of Ideas from a Leading Activist and Thinker.  Like most Canadians, I know David Suzuki best for The Nature of Things, the CBC TV show he has hosted for the past 30 years or so.  This book shows more of his environmental activist side.  Lots of folks are talking about global warming, but unlike others (I'm talking to you Al Gore), Suzuki goes deeper to the root causes -- our flawed economic system, and notions of technological progress and human superiority over nature.

The Essential Mary Midgley.  Mary Midgley is an ethics/moral philosopher who is well known in the UK as a social critic.  The main themes of her work are on human nature and ethology, on applying moral philosophy to current events, and on philosophy of science.  She writes incisively about science and its mythologies -- how science isn't just this abstract mechanical method that produces inevitable knowledge, as we're supposed to believe.  It's shaped by human concerns and beliefs that often fit the criteria of religion.

World, Beware! American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror by Theodore Roszak (buy it from the publisher, Between the Lines).  There has been a booming industry in liberal books since Bush Jr. took over, and most of them are not terribly deep or surprising.  Roszak gets beyond the trivial Bush bashing to tell what's really been happening in the past 20 years -- the neo-conservative agenda to realign the world to follow American corporate rule.  The book did not find a publisher in the US, and this first English edition was published in Canada (you can make of that fact what you will, which the blurbage encourages a little too much, I think).  So the book is couched as a warning to the rest of the world to beware of this emerging new colonialism.  This might sound like shrill, conspiracy material, but Roszak isn't a crank; he's a well-established and respected social critic.  His case here is intelligent, thoughtful, and convincing.

JPod: A Novel by Douglas Coupland.  And on a lighter note... I read this over the holiday weekend.  Despite the bad reviews, and never being attracted to a Douglas Coupland book before, I was drawn in by the subject matter -- video games and the lives of a group of cubicle computer nerds (described realistically as "mildly autistic").  This demographic is one I'm painfully familiar with.  It's a funny, quick read, and held my attention better than I expected -- no doubt because the characters are (thankfully) far more interesting than your average nerds.

Laptops for Dolphin Hackers

Today in $100 Laptop News:

An anti-virus expert warns that sending cheap PCs to developing nations will encourage criminal activity and fuel "malware for hire" schemes.  Link: The Register: PCs to developing world 'fuel malware'

Techsmug, er, Techdirt says, predictably: that's just silly.  Link: Techdirt: $100 Laptops To Create Next Generation of Malware Authors?

Annalee Newitz considers whether we should give laptops to dolphins too, 'cause they're so darn smart.  Link: AlterNet: Laptops for Dolphins.

Dolphin hackers!  Think of the phishing problems we'd have then!  Ha. 

(Image stolen from Windrows Elementary School thanks to Google image search.)

Transhumanists Gone Wild

William Saletan wrote an article for Slate over the weekend about the recent Human Enhancement conference.  Some excerpts:

Heeeeeeere's Cat Man!

On a projection screen at Stanford Law School, an auditorium full of nerds stared at a picture of a guy who'd done himself up like a cat—not with makeup, but with tattoos and surgery. The guy's whiskers were implanted. His nose had been converted to a cat nose. His teeth had been filed into the shape of cat teeth. His head has been flattened, and he was looking for a doctor to implant a tail. And that's just the tip of the freakberg. [...]

Remember those kids who played Dungeons & Dragons and ran the science-fiction club in your high school? They've become transhumanists. Their resident immortalist, Aubrey de Grey, walks around in sneakers, a ponytail, and a 14-inch beard that he strokes like a cat. One of the CCLE officials at the conference calls herself Wrye Sententia; the other dresses like an LSD trip. This was the kind of conference where people talked about the Matrix the way Christians talk about the Bible, and where speakers apologized for their discomfort with piercings or tattoos. [...]

De Grey, the guy with the beard, called for higher taxes and research funding to "end the slaughter" of human aging. He argued, incoherently, that our failure to do everything possible to stop aging this instant was tantamount to mass murder. He also floated the creepy idea that overpopulation might not become a problem because once we're immortal, we might realize children are no fun. Even so, he asked the kind of penetrating question only a big-thinking oddball would come up with. Are we stuck in a "trance" of fatalism about aging? If we realize it can be slowed or stopped, "will aging become repugnant," like any other disease?

Link: Among the Transhumanists: Cyborgs, self-mutilators, and the future of our race.

Dale Carrico is not amused.  He wrote a lengthy response at the blog for the conference sponsors:

The subtitle of Saletan’s piece prepares us instantly for the sort of rhetoric to come: “Cyborgs, self-mutilators, and the future of our race.” (Just who he means by “our” here will be clearer in a moment, but already one can be fairly sure that “self-mutilators,” whoever they might be, won’t figure in Saletan’s racial “we.") That is to say, the title sets the scene quite literally—one might even say it makes a scene—offering up a vivid phantasmagoria of prejudicial figures and images that begins to do Saletan’s argumentative work for him before a single claim is actually offered up for our consideration.  Such snapshots, provided without context but with ample smirking, take up more than half of the piece.  And no wonder.  As we shall see soon enough, when Saletan finally gets around to reporting the claims that occured in the Conference itself or proposes his own claims in assessment of it, the results are hardly so edifying to his own positions as the prerational shudders of Kassoid repugnance his freakshow act is likely to yield for him. [...]

By the way, in highlighting all the staid conventional credibility and serious intellectual engagement actually in evidence throughout this event my point is not to endorse Saletan’s ugly implication that there is something inherently ridiculous about transsexuals or members of body-modification communities or the rest of the folks Saletan seems to want to dismiss here as inherently disreputable freaks.  It is just that the event Saletan describes in his little hit-piece was simply not remotely well captured in this description of his.  The sad spectacle of his smug bigotry in these matters is less interesting than the fact that he felt it necessary to take such a tack in the first place.

Link: Thanks for Back-Handed Compliments.

Carrico's main point seems to be that Saletan didn't take the conference seriously enough, but who could blame him for being distracted?  I don't think it's "smug bigotry" Saletan is exhibiting -- he's just having fun.  If the conference planners wanted only serious, scientific criticism then it sounds like they mis-stepped by throwing into the program everything but the kitchen-sink-man.

Douglas Coupland on Video Games

Douglas Coupland's new novel, JPod, is set in the world of video game developers.  There was an interesting article about him in The Observer this week.  Excerpt:

'I don't play games myself. Never. But I will watch people playing, especially if they're good. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is, of all the games to watch people play, the most fun. It's not like a race; you can take time off to just work for a while as a taxi driver, or visit a hooker. There's something interesting, fascinating actually, about watching someone take time off in a video game to go and visit a hooker. Games I do find interesting,' he says, 'for what they say about us, about what we wish for, about the programming. But let it stop there: don't listen to this rubbish about them actually being good for you, helping with hand-eye co-ordination or whatever. They're games. They prepare you for nothing.'

Link: The Observer | Magazine | Generation next,

via Bookslut.

Post-Singularity Fun and Games

Clive Thompson writes on his blog about "Plasma Pong: A game of pong played in a plasma field."  This reminds me of a short story by Greg Egan in a sci-fi collection called Beyond Singularity.  I bought that book recently to try to learn more about this whole singularity thing from the sci-fi enthusiast point of view.  Most of the stories are optimistic, and purport to tell us how humans might live in the distant future when they're immortal and no longer constrained to physical bodies.

In Egan's story, "Border Guards," multi-million-year-olds play a game called "quantum soccer," in which they run around and try to score points by manipulating electrical fields.  I imagine it would look something like plasma pong.  When they're not playing pong, they obsess over relationships like sulky teenagers until a day comes when they've had enough and they simply disappear to another place in the universe to start over.

I've only read about half the stories in this book, but based on this and various other readings from books and from poking around the Singularity Summit's website, I have to wonder: is this the best we can come up with?  We would change our species to be adolescent video gamers forever?  Other utopian visions don't seem much more compelling.

I'm probably being a unfair to Egan's story -- I'm sure it and the others have merits that I'm not appreciating -- but where are the really compelling stories about why we're doing this?

(My wife recommends Charles Stross's novels, and I plan to check them out too.)