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Archives for November 2003

The Web is an amazing thing, part 3486

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Andrew Leonard cooked up an incredibly feast for a small party over the weekend, as is his wont. One of the things he cooked was Szechuan duck, from a recipe in the still-amazing (and sadly out of print) “Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook.” One of the things that made the duck extraordinary was a marinade and stuffing of Sichuan peppercorns.

I wanted to know more about this ingredient, which I’d only used a couple of times in the distant past. The Web had all the answers, and more. No imaginable encyclopedia could ever provide such depth of detail. And instantly!

People sometimes get this spice confused with your basic red-hot chile pepper, since that pepper is so widely used in Sichuan cooking; but this is something different, a dried-up brown thing about the size of a matchhead that has a unique, almost numbing impact on the palate. For reasons I was dimly aware of — Andrew’s explanation was to blurt out something like “citrus infestation vector!” — these peppercorns are now illegal to import into the U.S. Which is really too bad. But at least I can read about every chemical compound they contain…

Brevity is the soul…

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These hilarious “weekend update” op-ed summaries from Matthew Yglesias are making Tapped a must-read:

  WEEKEND UPDATE. Sunny Sunday keep you away from the news? Here’s what you missed:

The Columnists

  • Nicholas Kristof. Forget that stuff I said last week about Democrats being too vitriolic — Bush sucks.
  • David Brooks. Only unilateral surrender can save the Democratic Party.
  • Thomas Friedman. If everyone was moderate, then we could all get along.
  • Maureen Dowd. Even a column about organ donation wouldn’t be complete without a few pop culture references.
  • George Will. Democrats who are for multilateralism in Iraq and against it in the WTO are hypocritical, whereas conservative columnists who are against it in Iraq and for it in the WTO are not.
  • David Broder. The states sure are looking bankrupt.
  • Jim Hoagland. This argument would be a lot more plausible if Arab-on-Arab violence was really a new phenomenon.

Eno time: The long and the short of it

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I found myself waiting on a long line at Fort Mason Friday night, one that stretched from the doors of the Herbst Pavilion all the way out the Fort Mason parking lot gate. You don’t often see a crowd that size at the warren of funky non-profits and arts groups. A man wandered up to the line at one point and asked, a little incredulously, “Are all you people waiting for the Annie Leibovitz exhibit?”

No way. We were waiting to hear Brian Eno, who was giving a free talk to kick off a lecture series by the Long Now Foundation. But the makesift lecture hall proved all too small for the huge crowd, so a lot of people had to listen to the talk piped in over a PA to the bigger room next door. You could mill around and look at Leibovitz’s homages to ephemeral celebrity while listening to Eno talk about the value of taking a 10,000 year view.

In the mid-1970s, when Eno’s still-amazing solo albums “Here Come the Warm Jets,” “Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy” and “Another Green World” shaped my teenage musical imagination, an Eno lecture might not have filled a small broom closet. So as I waited Friday night — while distinguished ushers Danny Hillis and Kevin Kelly handed out programs and warned us we might not get in — a part of me was thinking, who cares if I get in? I’m just glad to live in a time where Brian Eno has found a following, and a place where he is a bigger draw than Annie Leibovitz.

But I’ve grown a little old for that sort of in-group pride, and besides, the topic of Eno’s talk was one that deserves mass distribution beyond the narrow circles of the Bay Area art-and-science-crossover world. If you haven’t already encountered the Long Now perspective, this essay by Eno does a pretty good job of recapitulating his Friday talk.

Lit from below just a little demonically, Eno explained the Long Now Foundation’s aim of expanding our frame of reference in thinking about the future: What if we were thinking not just about tomorrow or next year or even “the rest of my life,” but about the next 10,000 years? (One thing the foundation does in all of its literature is add a zero in front of the year — for instance, it’s 02003 right now — to “avoid the Y10K bug” and keep that longer time span in the front of our minds.)

As a longtime devourer of science fiction, I’m probably a bit of a pushover for this vision. I remember reading Olaf Stapledon’s “Last and First Men” as a 14-year-old and savoring the sense of temporal vertigo its ever-expanding timelines induced.

But there are perfectly pragmatic and down-to-earth rationales for the Long Now idea — not just in the obvious ways, like fostering a (literally) more conservative treatment of natural resources and the environment, but in personal, psychological terms. While the kind of long-term thinking Long Now promotes certainly encourages activism today, Eno argued that it also “takes the pressure off” individuals — “it makes you slightly less precious and tight about your own time on earth.” Long Now projects, like the clock for which it is most famous, are inevitably collaborations across time between people today and future generations.

Eno outlined four misapprehensions of the Long Now ideal: “The Realist” sneers, “Do you really think you can predict the future?” (They’re not trying to predict anything.) “The Pessimist” snaps, “”What bloody future?” (“If he’s wrong,” Eno argued, “it would have been a good idea id we had done something about it.”) “The Optimist” takes a Panglossian, passive approach: “Everything is working out fine,” so why do anything? Finally, “The Designer” believes that “we’re smart enough to design the future for you — we can create a perfect world.”

Each of these responses misses the basic point here, Eno said — one of “encouraging a habit of thought”: “We are building the future, whether we like it or not. We can do it with our back to it, or we can turn around and look.”

For many people, religion provides a moral framework for this long view — but if, like me, you are simply not a believer in any organized religion’s tenets, the Long Now argument makes a great deal of sense. I’ll look forward to the rest of this series.

Multi-dimensional blogging

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[This post was written on Friday but some glitch stopped it from actually posting when I thought it was posted, so here it is, only slightly yellowed with age:}

It’s taken me a little while to figure out what Dave Winer has been up to this past week with his redesign of Scripting News, the site that taught so many of us how versatile the blog form could be. I think I get it now.

A lot of the comments he’s elicited have focused on the outre Amsterdam red-light-district photo that has replaced his time-honored cactus. But that’s just, as it were, the window-dressing. (As of now, Monday, that picture is already gone — I guess that image will change periodically, which is a nice touch.)

At first it seemed like Winer was just adding a bunch of categories to his blog. And hey, that didn’t seem so revolutionary — Radio Userland, Movable Type and lots of blogging tools already allow that.

But the changes now feel more ambitious than that. Dave is placing each of his blog posts into a hierarchical outline or directory. (This shouldn’t be a big surprise — Winer’s signature software product was an outliner.)

So, basically, with this new approach, each new post to his blog is now being fed into two alternative navigation systems: the chronological mode blogs all share (“Find post by date”) and a new outline/directory mode that seems new to the blog world (though obviously it’s omnipresent on the Web). In other words, every blog post is now contributing not only to a diary-like timeline but also to a Yahoo-like knowledge base.

I imagine there are other things going on here beneath the surface, but this alone seems pretty neat to me.

Regulation — it works!

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It’s now been several weeks since the no-call list limiting telemarketers’ calls was put into effect, and guess what? Our household — which previously received on average of 2-3 telemarketing calls per weekday evening, inevitably ringing just when I’d sat down in front of a hot dinner or the kids were raising a ruckus in the bathtub or when we’d finally gotten them down to bed — has seen an approximately 99.9 percent reduction in the volume of telemarketing. I think we’ve received one call total, from our own phone company, which can claim it has an “existing business relationship” or whatever with us.

I consider this a major lifestyle improvement.

Two cheers for Bloglines

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In my continued exploration of the pressing question, “Can RSS help me keep up with the vast numbers of blogs I want to read?”, I’m also trying out Bloglines. Instead of pulling RSS feeds together in a client on your machine, Bloglines uses a web-based, server-side approach: You upload your subscription list and then you can log in from anywhere to check your subscriptions. It’s smartly designed; my one complaint — and one reason I’ll probably stick with Radio for now — is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t let you aggregate postings from all your subscribed blogs onto one page that you can scan. Instead, you get two panes — a window on the left with folders for each subscribed blog, and a window on the right with the postings for the selected folder.

Why don’t I like this? Well, for me, the labor-saving aspect of an RSS aggregator is that I don’t have to click on one bookmark after another in my browser to check the blogs I want to check. I want to scroll down one long page (which is what Radio gives me). Why would I want my aggregator to make me click on one folder after another to catch up with my subscriptions? Isn’t that awfully close to the way my browser works? Put everything on one page for me — or at least give me that choice. Since Bloglines is a relatively new service and it shows every sign of having been carefully designed with the user in mind (Mark Fletcher’s blog tracks its progress), I can only hope that it will offer this feature at some point.
Addendum Oscar Bartos points out in the comments that Bloglines does offer the one-page view, though it’s not intuitively obvious or called out in any way. I’m going to live with it for a few days but I think I’ve found my RSS home, at least for now…

Critical information overload

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Provocative piece in today’s Wall Street Journal by Dennis K. Berman talks about the growing demands on our informational intake, noting the phenomena of “surfer’s voice” (the distracted conversational tone of someone who’s paying more attention to a computer screen than to the voice at the other end of the phone), “absent presence” (cellphone users paying more attention to the voice at the other end than to their physical surroundings), and other anthropological artifacts of our multitasked world.

People have been lamenting the impact of informational overload and “Data Smog” (in David Shenk’s phrase) for a long time, of course. Today what we’re suffering from is the layering of too many simultaneous incompatible channels of incoming information: E-mail is only the tip of the iceberg. Instant messaging ups the on-screen ante. Cell phones are now considered a necessity of life.

One response the Journal piece chronicles is the desire to set certain times aside for meditation — an update of the Sabbath concept. But one interviewee, a daily meditator, sheepishly admits, “I check my e-mail before I meditate.”

I think the article was on the right track in pointing out that some of the problem, at least, is not the result of ineluctable and anti-humane attention-deficit-disorder-inducing Evil inherent in our technology but rather simply a side-effect of the technology’s immaturity: “All the data we receive are still ghettoized… We could use, instead, programs that will break down those walls, helping people keep their train of thought while they switch back and forth between different projects and devices.”

The creation of a Grand Unified Personal Information Flow isn’t going to happen overnight, but people are working on it: Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project is one key effort. No doubt the folks at Microsoft working on Longhorn feel that this is part of what they’re aiming for, too.

The ideology of the PC revolution always talked about empowering the individual, and that remains a good yardstick for success or failure in the arena of personal-information management tools. Are you in control of your e-mail or is it controlling you? Does your cell phone help you get things done or does it keep getting in the way?

This all works on a subtler level, too, since the accelerated communication channels computer networks provide also shape the kinds of things that are easier to get done. The technophobic critique has always been that our digital tools promote instant gratification over long-term effort. That’s true, up to a point. But — given human willpower and ingenuity — the same tools can be marshalled toward long-term projects, too. Just look at Howard Dean’s campaign for an example: All those blogs and e-mail messages and Meetups are aligned toward a goal that is a year away.

RSS to go

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As part of my own ongoing (and often losing) battle to work more efficiently I’m experimenting with trying to read as many of the 100-plus blogs I try to follow using an RSS aggregator. For those readers who are still in the dark about this whole concept — and, despite the excitement in the blogosphere about RSS, an awful lot of people still know nothing about what it is — the idea is that, instead of calling up blog after blog in your Web browser to see what’s new, you have a program on your computer that periodically checks “feeds” from those blogs to find out if they’ve got new posts, and collects headlines from those that do so you can peruse them in one place (and click through to those you want to read).

I posted about my own preferences for RSS use recently, and got some helpful responses. Over the weekend, I took John Robb’s advice (thanks, John!) and installed a version of Radio on my laptop to use solely as an aggregator. I’ll keep reporting here on my experiences. So far I’m finding it helpful, though I’m noticing that certain blogs’ feeds are idiosyncratic in ways that I’m not finding helpful: For example, Josh Marshall’s doesn’t actually link to the story that’s being teased; and the feed from Radio Free Blogistan includes a brief headline but no excerpt from the post, making it harder to figure out what the post is about.

By the numbers

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Dave Pollard has a fascinating survey of Salon Blogs statistics.

For those of you who have been wondering about some of the technical problems we’ve had here in recent months, on and off (most recently, thankfully, off), we’ve sort of been in a holding pattern. Our partners at UserLand, who actually run the Salon Blogs servers and produce and support the software we use, have been in a management transition. Dave Winer, the company’s founder, has posted recently that UserLand should be announcing a new management team soon. When it does, I hope to be able to report to the Salon blog community with more information about what we can do to improve whatever chronic problems may remain.