“A large universe of documents”

April 30, 2013 by 1 Comment

w3c and buzzfeed2

“The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”

That’s how the Web first defined itself to the world.

Today is apparently the 20th anniversary of the moment when Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, the advanced physics lab in Geneva, made the Web’s underlying code free and public. CERN has a big project up to document and celebrate. As part of that project, it has posted a reproduction of the home page of the first public website.

The definition above is the first sentence on that page. Let’s unpack it!

The WorldWideWeb

I’m guessing this odd treatment — one word with CamelCase capitalization — was an inheritance from the Unix programming world in which Tim Berners-Lee worked and the Web hatched. It’s been years since anyone wrote it this way (even the W3C adds spaces). Spaces don’t work in old-school file names and the Web was conceived as a direct way to interconnect the file systems on networked servers, so leaving out the spaces made sense. Today it’s a style-book fight just to keep people from lower-casing “the Web.”

wide-area

The Web was all about moving our conception of a network from the thing that let one computer talk to another (or a printer) in an office to the thing that connected people and data around the world. In those days networks were considered “LANs” — local-area networks — or “WANs” — wide-area networks. LANs were in physically proximate spaces like large offices or, later, homes. WANs were bigger — computers connected first by phone lines and later by an alphabet-soup of higher-speed connections like ISDN, DSL, T1, and so forth. But it wasn’t clear what one would do with a WAN until the Web came along and showed us.

hypermedia

The term that emerged from Ted Nelson’s work on hypertext, popularized by Apple’s HyperCard, meaning texts and documents that are connected by crosslinks. The Web made links second nature for many of us, but we still haven’t fully digested all their possibilities — or stopped arguing about their pros and cons.

information retrieval

It’s fascinating to recall just how simple the Web’s bones are. Its underlying protocols provide a simple collection of action verbs — “get,” “post” and “put” — that describe sending and receiving information. That’s it. All the other stuff we do online today is built on that foundation.

initiative

The Web was not a startup. It was a collaborative “initiative.” This caused many in the tech industry to dismiss it; how could it ever compete against the mighty, money-driven behemoths like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL, or, later, MSN?

universal access

The Web would be “free” and “open,” as the CERN page now says. No tollgates or licensing fees or dues or rent. Of course there was money in the system; the rapid commercialization of the Internet on which the Web still rests still lay in the future in 1993, but it was already in sight. But the piece of the system that made the Web the Web was going to be free of charge and free to tinker with.

With the right networking technology, it’s easy to make something universally available; it’s much harder to create something that the universe actually wants. That was the genius of the Web.

large universe of documents

This is the phrase that still excites and haunts me. The Web was originally about “documents,” not functional code. It was a publishing platform for the sharing of what we now refer to as “static files.” The phrase reminds us of the irresistible invitation the Web made to non-programmers: you too can contribute! You don’t need to code! HTML is a “markup language” and can be learned in minutes! (That was true, then.)

Today’s Web is infinitely more capable, and more complex. Over the past decade, modern browsers and javascript have turned it into an adaptable programming environment that first rendered the old MSOffice-driven desktop world obsolete and now faces its own challenges in the mobile world.

That’s great! It’s where I live and work now. But there will always be a corner of my mind and heart set aside for the Web as that simpler enterprise — that thing that just lets anyone explore and expand a “large universe of documents.”

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‘How to Be Yourself’: My Ignite talk about authenticity

February 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Ignite talks are an exquisite form of self-torture for which you voluntarily stand in front of a crowd and give a five-minute talk timed to twenty slides that advance, inexorably, every 15 seconds.

At the end of last year I gave one of these talks at NewsFoo, and the kind folks who organized that event provided some great video.

My theme was a topic I’ve grown increasingly fascinated by — “reality hunger,” the “authenticity bind,” and the nature of personal identity in the digital age.

Here’s my five minutes:

What’s with the references to RuPaul? At the conference I had the good/bad fortune of immediately following Mark Luckie onstage. Luckie’s talk on “Why RuPaul is Better At Social Media Than You” was way more fabulous than mine could ever be, as you can see:

There’s some great stuff in nearly all of the other Ignite talks from NewsFoo. They’re all here.

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Demonetization

November 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Buried near the end of John Markoff’s front-page feature in the Times today about “deep learning”, neural-net-inspired software, this tidbit, which I think requires no further elaboration, but is worth noting, and noting again:

One of the most striking aspects of the research led by Dr. [Geoffrey] Hinton is that it has taken place largely without the patent restrictions and bitter infighting over intellectual property that characterize high-technology fields.

“We decided early on not to make money out of this, but just to sort of spread it to infect everybody,” he said. “These companies are terribly pleased with this.”

Said companies will (a) build a new industry on these openly shared ideas; (b) make fortunes; and then (c) dedicate themselves to locking those ideas up and extracting maximum profit from them.

That’s inevitable and nothing new. Let’s be glad, though, for the occasional Geoffrey Hintons and Tim Berners-Lees, who periodically rebalance the equation between open and closed systems and keep our cycle of technology evolution moving forward.

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Missed stories: About that Horace Mann School article in the Times

June 9, 2012 by 21 Comments

I attended the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, N.Y., from 1971 to 1977. I’ve generally thought well of the school as a great environment for a brainy, socially awkward kid like me to learn and grow. I became a writer largely based on my experience there, I learned to love journalism there, and I learned almost as much from my peers as I did from my teachers.

Horace Mann was, plainly, a place of great privilege. (My parents paid a fortune to send me there, and I remain deeply grateful for that.) I took a crazy-long trip each day from my central Queens home to the northwest corner of the Bronx to attend. I did that because the school embraced unorthodox teachers who inspired students. Also because it made ample room for the weird kids. It helped them find other weird kids to share their weird alienation and feel a little less alienated.

Now there’s this. The article is, I believe, thoughtful, fair, and sensitive. The author is a few years younger than I am, but his account accurately reflects the school I remember.

Except, of course, for the part about a decades-spanning pattern of sexual abuse of students by teachers, a pattern that it seems the school largely ignored and that I knew essentially nothing of during my student years.

I’m not a victim myself. I experienced no molestation, or anything even borderline or ambiguous, during my six years at H.M. Still, in the wake of this article, I find myself spending a lot of time and thought re-examining my own past — as I’m guessing are the great majority of my classmates and everyone else who had anything to do with the school in those years. (There have already been extraordinary conversations both in private e-mail and in the public comments on the Times story, and they’ve challenged my assumptions and stretched my thinking on the matter.)

So here’s what i’d say if I could punch a hole in time and send a message to myself on the day, almost exactly 35 years ago, that I graduated from Horace Mann:

You’re not going to believe this, but 35 years from now, H.M. is going to be on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. The humongous article will tell the world, in voluminous detail and with pained concern, about a “secret history of sexual abuse” at the school. Some of the events have already happened, while you were here; most are still to come.

It’s a story about troubled people abusing power, about changing mores and standards, and also about institutional failure and betrayal. A big story, I’d say. And — sorry to break the news — but you missed it.

You were the editor of the Record! You and your friends prided yourselves on attempting to tell the full story of life at the school in print every week! You published exposes of pot-dealing and polled the student body of drug use and thought, in those post-Watergate years, that you were ripping the lid off the truth. But you missed something bigger and more consequential.

I guess you couldn’t have done otherwise. You’re all of 18 years old. You think you know everything — but you’re smart enough to realize how wrong you are, too.

So now that you know this, I want you to think about two lessons.

One lesson for your work: The story you think you’re living is almost never the story of your time that the future will write. For journalists this is, and should be, humbling. It should make you ask questions every time you think you’ve told the truth about a situation. What’s the next layer down? There’s always another one. Never believe you’ve gotten to the bottom of anything. Even if you’ve done a good job, the world keeps rethinking everything. And those decades-spanning changes in how we think and live are the ones will make your head explode. Expect it.

Also, one lesson for your life: Eccentricity can be inspiring. What many of your Horace Mann teachers did, with their arrogance and their mystique and the cults that some of them spun around their subjects and themselves, can be amazingly effective at persuading monkey-minded adolescents to buckle down and care about science, literature, math, Latin, or music. The cult of learning can be beautiful — but it can also be a stalking-horse for something destructive and dangerous, ugly and evil. When seductive eccentricity crosses a line into control and victimization, it becomes a curse, and it can wreck lives.

Like a lot of your teenage friends, you’ve done a pretty good job of distinguishing between these kinds of eccentricity and avoiding the kind that could hurt you. Good for you. But not everyone is as confident or as fortunate. Kids can’t reasonably be expected to draw all the lines that adults, by rights, ought to be drawing for them. It’s up to institutions like schools (and churches, businesses, and governments!) to organize themselves in a way that leaves room for creativity while protecting the participants from abuse. Power always requires accountability. There are no exceptions.

That’s hard. But it’s something adults owe the children they’re raising. Try to remember that!

And then, if I can run this conceit out one more step, I think my newly minted Horace Mann graduate self would probably say something like this in response:

Thanks for the feel-good message on graduation day! There’s not much I can do with what you’ve told me, is there? Shouldn’t you have used your time-lord powers to dump sermons on the Horace Mann trustees?

Teach me this trick and maybe I can deliver you some wisdom in your retirement home. In the meantime, I’ve got a suggestion to throw back at you.

Yeah, I do think I know everything. But I also know I’m actually still a kid. I don’t yet know who I am, but you do, right?

Forget about Horace Mann. You live 3000 miles away from the place now, anyway. You should take all this introspection and turn it on that future world you’re living in.

I know that one of the things that happens to people as they get older is that they become more willing to just go along with the patterns in their lives, to accept a “that’s the way the world is” complacency. Fight that, will you?

You can’t do anything about what happened decades ago. But look around now, in your “now.” Find the stories that are the ones that one day, you’re going to wish somebody had told sooner. Tell them.

Point and match to the 18-year-old. What could I possibly say in response to that except, “I’ll try”?

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Mr. Daisey and the Fact Factory: my take at Grist

March 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment

We interrupt this long blog-silence (more on which soon) to note that if you wanna know my take on the Mike Daisey/Apple/This American Life thing, I’ve just posted over at Grist on it.

My career started with writing about theater and specifically solo performance, moved into technology coverage, then took a turn into ethics and accuracy in journalism, and is now focused on sustainability and the environment. So Daisey’s story touched pretty much every one of my nerves.

Here’s an excerpt:

The temptation to round corners, to retouch images, to make a story flow better or a quote read better, faces every creator of non-fiction at every single moment of labor. And we all do it, all the time. We do it by varying degrees. We slice out “ums” from quotes. We leave out material we deem extraneous. No matter how much we verify of the facts that we think are salient, we can never verify everything.

But there are some compasses we can follow and some precedents we can observe. We don’t create composite characters (see: Janet Cooke) — or if we do, we explain exactly what we’re up to. We don’t say we’re reporting from one city when we’re sitting in another (see: Jayson Blair). We don’t simply invent stuff because it makes such great copy (see: Stephen Glass). We don’t invent a fake persona because it “makes people care” (see: Amina Araf).

The distinction between cosmetic changes and substantive fabrications is relatively easy to make. Storytellers get into trouble when they start to write themselves blank checks to “improve” on reality because the ends (in Daisey’s case, “making people care”) justify the means (in Daisey’s case, making shit up).

The whole thing is here.

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WSJ Social: When news apps want to steal your face

September 24, 2011 by 19 Comments

I read about WSJ Social, the newspaper’s experiment at providing a socially driven version of itself entirely inside Facebook, and thought, hey, I should check it out. So I Googled “WSJ Social” and clicked on http://social.wsj.com. Since my browser was already logged in to Facebook, I was immediately confronted with a Facebook permissions screen. I captured it above for posterity.

Here is the problem: All I want to do is see what WSJ is up to. I might or might not actually want to use the product. But before I can proceed, here is what I’m asked to approve:

(1) “Access my basic information — Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I’ve made public.” Well, this stuff is public already, right? I think I can live with this.

(2) “Send me email — WSJ.com may email me directly…” Hmm. I’m not eager to add to my load of commercial email and there’s no indication of the volume involved. But I’m not hugely protective of my email address — you know, there it is in the image above — so I guess this isn’t a dealbreaker.

(3) “Post to Facebook as me — WSJ.com may post status messages, notes, photos, and videos on my behalf.”

Excuse me? You want to do what?

Forget it, NewsCorp. Ain’t happening.

Now, I fully understand that the app may be up to nothing terribly nasty — some or most of what it wants to do may be routine back-end stuff. But it doesn’t provide me with any confidence-building information. Tell me, WSJ Social: How often are you going to post under my account? And what kinds of messages are you going to send? How will I know you’re not going to spam my friends? How do I know the WSJ’s rabid editorial-page id won’t start posting paeans to Sarah Palin under my name?

Facebook permissions screens may have become as widely ignored as Terms of Service checkboxes and SSL certificate warnings. But the notion of the Journal (or anyone else) insisting on its right to “Post to Facebook as me” before it will even let me examine its news product is simply ridiculous.

UPDATE: On Twitter, WSJ’s Alan Murray responds: “Not going to happen. Standard permissions in order to allow WSJ Social to share stories you ‘like’ with your friends.”

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My next chapter: Grist

September 12, 2011 by 1 Comment

After a wonderful couple of years writing Say Everything and another great couple of years building and launching MediaBugs, I’m returning to the world of editing: Starting today, I’m the executive editor of Grist.org, the pioneering green news website with the irreverent attitude.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me, after I left Salon four years ago, that I would ever take this kind of job again. It would have to be a very special organization: one that was trying to accomplish something important in the world; one that valued old-fashioned journalism and newfangled digital innovation; and one where the odd set of talents I’ve accumulated across my motley career could actually be put to work in useful ways.

Grist turned out to fit this bill in an almost supernaturally precise way. I first got to know the work Chip Giller and his team were doing there a decade ago at Salon, where we had content-sharing agreement, and I’ve continued to be fan of what they’ve built over the years. Now I have the privilege of taking Grist’s editorial helm at a moment that’s more critical than ever for the future of the planet — and more fluid than ever in the evolution of media.

Can you tell I’m excited?

It’s been a long day, so I think I’d better turn in — but not before pointing you to the sprightly post Chip wrote to welcome me to Grist, and the little note I wrote to introduce myself. There was also a brief press release with some kind words from my former colleague and sometime boss Joan Walsh.

And for those of you wondering about MediaBugs: It’s very much an ongoing project, though obviously I’m going to have less time to devote to it myself. I’ll be posting more here soon on its future, as well as offering a full report on its progress to date and some of the lessons we’ve learned from it.

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