Posts about 'Internets' Category
August 27th, 2008
In some ways, the internet is an incredibly frustrating experience. You’re constantly flooded with incredibly useless information — vapid ideas, pointless everyday minutiae, etc. Wonderful fodder for conversation over a beer; in aggregate, they form the sum total of human stupidity. That’s annoying, but it’s actually also kind of annoying when someone comes up with an incredibly good idea. And because we’re aggregating here, and because the internet is the ultimate expression of the productivist ethos in many ways, there are quite a lot of those two. And they’re frequently quite simple and elegant — and like the best ideas, they make you think, “Well, jesus, that’s obvious. Why didn’t someone already think of that? Hell, I could have thought of that if I weren’t engaged in a futile effort to keep my blog active for the eleventh time.” Okay, I’m a bit of a crank.
The first paragraph is always flavour text. The point here is that Ubiquity is a fabulous idea — the kind of idea that makes you think, “This is going to happen, and it’s going to completely change the way we do things.” And also, “Great, this is my chance to stay relevant!” And that’s when you know you’d better post a quote and a link.
The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
- Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
- Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
It’s better if you watch the video
Cool mac users who have Quicksilver will recognize the similarities; Ubiquity is sort of basically Quicksilver for the internets. Both are the products of people realizing that GUIs are not the be-all and end-all of interface design, and in fact that command lines might have a role in modern interaction beyond the domain of leet haxors. Of course, we’re not talking about command lines per se, here. We’re talking about the idea that not everything you do needs to be something that you click on. The thing is that GUIs have so pervaded what everyone knows as the “computer experience” that most people have trouble thinking outside the point-and-click design pattern.
No Comments »
May 5th, 2008
Did you know that LiveJournal was cool way before blogging was cool? As an academic in the social media space, it was really interesting to me how the interllectuals vehemently denied the legitimacy of LJ in the post-coital blogging glow of 2003-2006. “LJ is irrelevant,” they told us, “All anyone does there is write Harry/Ron slash fic.” Well, half a decade later, LJ is still around and still cool… but does anyone blog anymore? Hardly.
In any case, the point of this post is to alert my 4 readers that Kate is running for a spot on the LJ Advisory Board. You can support her nomination by commenting on this thread. Of course, you have to be an LJ user. And if you aren’t, what the hell is wrong with you? Seriously.
No Comments »
May 2nd, 2008
It sounds like the plot of a B-grade American movie: dad goes away on holiday and his teenage child throws a party for 500 people in the backyard. But it’s a crushing reality for Tim Berners-Lee, who’s proginy, the World Wide Web, drew a rowdy and drunken crowd over the weekend for its 15th birthday.
Berners-Lee returned from a business trip on Monday to find his house in ruins, and the neighbours in an uproar. When reached for comment, a distraught Berners-Lee declared that “this time [the Web] has gone too far… this is going to stop.” The Web’s estranged mother, the Internet, could not be reached for comment.
This is far from the first time that the Web has caused turmoil and outrage. In recent years, its juvenile antics have made the news several times, and been a hot topic around water coolers and on daytime talk shows. The controversy reached an apparent boiling point several months ago, when a Youtube mashup featuring a puppy-riding kitten and Japanese tentacle hentai provoked a worldwide outcry. This weekend’s events indicate that the Web has no plans for reform any time in the near future.
“This sort of behaviour is common amongst teenagers with the kind of history that the Web has,” said Dr. Anne Andrews, a child psychologist. “The Web is one of the most well-known individuals in the world. That’s a tremendous responsibility for a 15-year old to bear. It’s the subject of legislation, the cause of both ruined lives and multimillion dollar fortunes. Not to mention the fact that 90% of it is shemale fetish pornography. When you consider how other child celebrities who have dealt with far worse have sunk far lower, it’s remarkable that the Web hasn’t simply overdosed on heroin yet.”
The Web’s storied history begins in 1980, but was officially born in 1993. For a few years it had a relatively uneventful life, content mainly to service a small cadre of computer geeks and their Gillian Anderson fansites. However, the Web exploded onto the world stage in the late 90s, spurred on largely by major commercial successes such as eBay, and niche cultural innovators such as SomethingAwful. Since then, breakaway triumphs such as Flickr, blogging, and the Tron Guy have ensured that the Web is not a name likely to be forgotten for decades to come.
A tearful Berners-Lee told press that for as long as the Web has been famous, it has been causing him trouble. “It just doesn’t even realize… it’s so meta and self referential that it doesn’t realize the hurt its causing for the people who love it. It won’t listen to me, it never goes to school… it just obsesses over the latest fads. Yesterday it was del.icio.us, today it’s Twitter, tomorrow it’ll be Squookee or fiz.zypo.op. It never settles down. Why can’t it be more like it’s cousins, Usenet or IRC? They have nice, stable lives.”
The Web, meanwhile, is unapologetic. “God, my dad is such a hater,” it stated in a recent press conference. “I mean, I’m totally great and everyone knows it. Where else can you get shit like this? Check this out — a Flash animation of Super Mario cruising for hookers to the tune of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” How about 645,000 images featuring dolphins, vaginas and lines from Back to the Future in various combinations? Whoops, hold on, someone just posted another picture of my nipples on Digg.”
Many believe that the Web’s problematic attitude started with the famous dot com bust at the start of the decade. “Before that, the Web was cocky, sure, but still relatively restrained,” said Andrews. “When the bubble burst, though, it was a tremendous blow to the Web’s psyche. Suddenly it was all ’social media’ this and ‘user generated content’ that. Since then, the Web has simply lost sight of any and all boundaries.”
Is there any hope left for the Web? Berners-Lee isn’t optimistic. “I used to think things might turn around as it grew up,” he said, “but things just keep going faster and faster. I just know that one of these days I’m going to find the Web coked out in a ditch somewhere, checking its Facebook wall on its iPhone with one hand, and pirating the complete set of Beavis and Butthead DVDs on its Vaio in the other. And on that day, I’ll simply walk away. It pains me, but I have a limit.”
The Web, on the other hand, has a brighter vision for the future. “Man, you can’t stop progress,” it stated. “Today, I’m all 2.0, right? But you know like, that Moore… uh, Metcalfe… Shir… uh, Shirky Boyd’s law? Yeah, like, everything is doubling, like… every second. So in like two years, man, it’s gonna be like — Web 2.0? Try Web Two Point Million. It’s gonna be all convergence, with dynamically generated sentient memes commenting on themselves, while the Hypersphere injects data fluid into all the media nodes hooked up to your noggin. Dude it’s gonna be great.”
1 Comment »
October 30th, 2007
This weekend was Perth’s first PodCamp, which also happened to be my first PodCamp. I’ve been to other camps: BarCamp, DemoCamp, SummerCamp, etc. There’s plenty of other coverage, of course, on blogs like this one, this one, as well as this one and maybe this one. But having a blog comes with the responsibility of filling it with redundant crap, and I’m not one to break the interrules. My overall impression? Plenty of pod, but there could have been more camp.
I always enjoy unconferences, because I generally do not enjoy getting dressed up and behaving like a pretentious ass. I like the fact that anyone is free to do just about anything they want. As mentioned in one of the posts I probably linked to above, communication in the sessions was a little unidirectional. Certainly, most of the PowerPoint slides were much better than I’m used at these things. However, the spirit was there.
Looking around the room at the start of the day, I could tell that pods are indeed becoming fairly ubiquitous, even here on the backside of the planet. I saw roughly an even split between Apples and PCs — that’s a lot more Apples than I’m used to seeing. Clearly, support for R153 in Apple’s newest pods is making a significant splash in the marketplace. This is to be expected, I suppose, as enthusiasts have been demanding greater pod-pod integration for a while now. I hear talk of pod-pod-pod integration on the horizon — we’ll see.
The first session I attended was, roughly speaking, on the future of the pod industry. The presenter started facetiously, declaring that pods are dead. This is a familiar refrain by now, ever since Steve Evans announced that Podder would be shifting its business model from pods to vods. With all the attention going to wiki-vods these days, and especially with the recent success of VodVod, it certainly seems that pods might go the way of cowboynet and blogfisting. However, the presenter went on to aptly note that with the continuous advances in awesomedrive space, we can expect our very understanding of media to change in short order. The recent 300 terabyte trans-temporal Wikipedia recursion will fit onto our future pods a million times over, with room enough left to store a complete collection of ultaporn.
After that, I popped up for a bit to grab a snack, as I had to prepare for my own presentation. I was skeptical about the pecan tart at first, but it turned out to be reasonably tasty.
I presented on the latest advances in pod-hacking techniques. A lot has changed since Jeff Barnes brought the entire North American pod-network to its knees using nothing more than a zombie scriptlet, a phase inducer, and a spunky can-do attitude. These days, you have to pay attention to the psychic IP stack, as well as the podcops. To be an effective hacker these days, you need your rollerblades to be highly polished, and your hair can’t just be dyed one colour — you need a whole rainbow of colours, and the RGB values need to follow the RFC1U1Z algorithm.
More to come? Pod-ssibly!
1 Comment »
August 11th, 2007
So I’ve been thinking, what’s the protocol for trying to build up my bloggery? Clearly I need to start making posts, but should I pretend that I actually have an audience? Am I writing to my future readers who will hypothetically probably not read my old posts? Is this a taboo subject? Does it matter?
In any case, I just came across the first academic paper (to my knowledge) to present some formal analysis of Twitter. Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities comes to us from the CS Dept at the University of Maryland.
In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.
Kudos to the authors for looking into a major new internet phenomenon and providing us with some hard stats (hooray for low-hanging fruit.) However, I feel that this analysis misses the point in the way that almost every paper in this genre to come out of a CS department misses the point. The authors drill down fairly deeply into certain kinds of behaviours, such as information-sharing and information-seeking. However, by their own admission, these activities make up the minority of Twitter usage. The real meat is in the casual “what are you doing”-type messages, which are glibly described as “daily chatter.” What’s actually going on in this traffic — why do users generate it? What purpose does it serve? Do people actually pay attention to it? Of course, answering these questions will require somewhat more than a statistical analysis of network topography. But until someone does so, we’re not going to know what’s really happening on Twitter.
(Of course I would be remiss not to plug Kate, who is writing her dissertation on these very topics.)
[via Smart Mobs]
No Comments »
