Hand-forged posts since 2002
What could be a better diversion for two robot-besotted five-year-old boys than San Francisco’s annual Robolympics? We went Saturday, spent about an hour watching the “two bots enter, one bot leaves” arena combat in the gym at SF State, then wandered over to the more peaceful confines across the way where swarms of Aibos wandered the stage.
This was Matthew and Jack’s favorite. No wonder: The sword lights up, the bot does Mifune moves — this snapshot doesn’t really do justice.
Apologies — I’ve been digging into the work of actually writing some chapters of my book, and something had to give. Since the kids still expect to be tended and entertained, the blog had to be left neglected and bored. I could hear its whimpers from the corner, but I had to harden my heart. (The kids scream louder, anyway.)
Conveniently, I no longer need to explain the deep psychological reasons behind my choice not to blog a whole lot of the work of my book, because Steven Johnson has said it all. Johnson has a new book coming out next month, Everything Bad is Good For You, a defense of pop culture that I am looking forward to reading as a reward to myself once I finally finish the half-dozen books on software disasters I am working my way through.
It’s difficult to express just how outrageous and surreal are the antics of Congress and the president this weekend around the Schiavo case. It’s like something out of DeLillo, a sickening mixture of TV-fueled tabloid theater and heartland hokum dressed up in a high moral dudgeon that can’t fully conceal the crude political agenda at work. (See the GOP talking points on the issue if you really want to retch.) We wind up with a bizarre, unsettling misfiring of our constitutional system, in which two branches of government punch a ragged hole through the barrier between federal and state affairs and rudely throw their weight onto the scales of justice in one family’s grieving dispute.
Our nation does, of course, possess a perfectly functional legal system that handles the sad and difficult details of cases like Terri Schiavo’s. For anyone who wants more information about those details, I recommend a careful reading of this page (thanks to Rafe Colburn for the link) — a thorough, dispassionate accounting of the facts of the case from a Florida attorney/blogger. To the extent this source is accurate, and it seems to be — it’s far better documented than TV news, tabloid articles and even what you will get from a serious newspaper — the Schiavo case has run its course and more through the Florida courts. The legal record does not suggest even the thinnest reed of hope for a recovery. (“At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid.”) In a case like this, we’re all entitled to our opinions, of course. But only if you’re a congressman or a president do you get to ignore the courts, overrule judges and have your opinion trump the law.
So to hell with the courts, to hell with the evidence, and to hell with the careful determination of Terri Schiavo’s wishes that the courts have made. Bush and his supporters aren’t happy with the outcome, so they’re going to federalize the case! The president himself — who has, through international crises thick and thin, been unable to rouse himself from those long, long vacations at his Texas ranch, even when hundreds of thousands were killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami — will fly back to Washington to sign the bill! Sanctity of life? The hypocrisy would be ludicrous if the case weren’t so heart-rending. We will turn our backs on the myriad deaths in Sudan, we will pay any price in casualties to root out phantom weapons of mass destruction, we will execute the mentally retarded without lifting a pardoning executive finger — but heaven forbid the courts from concluding that one poor woman whose brain shut down many years ago would have preferred her relatives let her die in peace. No, that cannot stand; we must bend or break our system of government to stop it.
This is a decadent circus the right has cooked up for us, worthy of that Late-Roman-Empire feeling that ever more deeply enshrouds the Bush era with each new turn of the news cycle. It is also a neon display of the contempt President Bush and his party hold for our legal system (I guess that when it comes to meddling with Florida courts, their track record is successful), and of their willingness to trample on due process and individual rights for the sake of a cause celebre cherished by the Base That Must Be Obeyed.
I keep thinking, in this dark time, that sooner or later Bush, DeLay & co. will cross the line of political propriety so blatantly and incontrovertibly that they will, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, find their ertswhile allies turning away from them in disgust. Maybe transforming the private conflict of a family dispute into grotesque public spectacle will be that sort of Rubicon for them. But I’m afraid that such an outcome would require a stiffer spine and a braver soul than most Democrats seem able to muster.
In the meantime, clearly, everyone who doesn’t want George Bush and Congress to overrule relatives, doctors and courts to make those bedside end-of-life decisions for them needs to draw up that living will, pronto.
Since there’s yet another round of speculation about Google’s plans to transform the universe by developing its own sorta-kinda operating system, I think it’s time for a little game of connect-the-dots.
OK, we know all about Google’s expanding universe of Web applications that now go way beyond Web search, what with Gmail, the Google Desktop Search, and the latest product to turn the geek smile, the new Google Maps.
Thanks to the patient explication of Jesse James Garrett, we now have a name for the bundle of technologies that make this generation of Web-based applications feel more usable than their predecessors: “Ajax,” an acronym referring to “Asynchronous Javascript + XML.” All you really need to know is that this stuff makes it possible for Google (as well as a few other innovators) to design Web services where stuff happens very fast on your screen without your having to wait for the browser to send a request back all the way across the Internet to a server, and for that server to send some bits back to you. With Ajax, this all happens via services that are already built into your browser, rather than insisting that you wait while Java takes its long march into your browser window — or that you open your computer up to the myriad vulnerabilities created by Microsoft’s approach to building Web applications.
So Ajax is cool, and all eyes are on it. Meanwhile, Microsoft, prodded by the success of Firefox, has woken from its slumber and announced that it will update Internet Explorer as soon as this summer. We can be reasonably certain that the new IE will provide its users with some of the key improvements that Firefox users now enjoy, like tabbed browsing, which Opera users like me have had for, like, ever. (Opera even automatically saves and restores your tabbed window sets — God, it’s good! But with the right set of plugins you can pretty well match it with Firefox, and for free.)
Opera’s CTO, Hakon Lie, along with a group called the Web Standards Project, has issued a challenge to Microsoft. Microsoft, under the slogan “embrace and extend,” has a history of adopting previously extant standards and then twisting them just enough to make everyone’s lives miserable. To this day, Web designers often have to build two versions of sites, one to serve to IE and one to serve to everyone else — or they have to make compromises in how a site is served to make sure its pages don’t break on these incompatible browsers.
Microsoft developers say this time they intend to do better. Lie and the Web Standards Project plan an “acid test” to see just how well the new IE handles some of the subtleties of newer versions of standards like CSS (the “cascading style sheets” that give designers fine-grained control over a Web page’s layout).
It seems to me there’s another acid test anyone can perform: When the new IE is out and gets automatically distributed across the Net (to the millions of Microsoft users who now have automatic updates turned on so they don’t get zonked by some viral crud), all you’ll have to do is fire it up and visit your nearest Ajax-powered site. If Gmail works, great. But if the new Microsoft browser, in order to deliver some new benefit or other, turns out to break the Ajax armatures that hold the new Web applications together, then we’ll know that the company is up to its old tricks again.
I’m a long-term believer in blogs; three years ago, I wrote, “Weblogs expand the media universe. They are a media life-form that is native to the Web, and they add something new to our mix, something valuable, something that couldn’t have existed before the Web.” That column was written three years after my first column on blogs, back when you had to call them “Web logs” and explain what they were to everyone each time you used the term. (Just as those of use who were writing about the Web for mainstream publications in 1994 had always to append some boilerplate phrase every time we mentioned “The World Wide Web,” like “…the popular, graphical network of Internet sites…”)
So blogs are having their moment in the media sun today, and that’s just fine. But Gallup now has a poll out that tells us that “relatively few Americans are generally familiar with the phenomenon of blogging.” Gallup wants us to stop and realize that blogs aren’t so big after all. Its headline is dripping with contempt: “Blogs Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues: Very few Americans read them with any frequency.” But really, this is a glass half-empty or half-full kind of thing. And the glass is filling up awfully quickly.
You can tell Gallup is a little uneasy from the phrase “relatively few”; since it appears that we are talking about nearly half of Americans, I’d like to know, relative to exactly what? Gallup’s numbers say that one out of four Americans are “very or somewhat” familiar with blogs. I think that’s extraordinary, but Gallup seems to thinks it’s some kind of weak showing.
Gallup tells us the following: “Three-quarters of the U.S. public uses the Internet at work, school, or home, but only one in four Americans are either very familiar or somewhat familiar with blogs (the shortened form of the original ‘Web logs’). More than half, 56%, have no knowledge of them. Even among Internet users, only 32% are very or somewhat familiar with blogs.”
I think what we’re supposed to be hearing here is, “Forget all the hype about blogs, this isn’t a big deal, the majority of Americans don’t even know what the hell they are.” But you could take these exact same numbers and present them in the inverse light if you wanted: “Though the Internet has been around for almost forty years, only 3/4 of Americans use it. Yet blogs — which have only been around 6-7 years, and have been popularized under that name for half that time — are already a phenomenon recognized by nearly half of the U.S. population. And fully one-third of Americans who use the Internet, or one quarter of the entire U.S. population, say they are very or somewhat familiar with blogs — an impressively high number, given their novelty.”
The interpretation of polls, in other words, is really a matter of the assumptions you bring to them. The Gallup write-up starts with a chip on its shoulder; it sets out to prove that blogs aren’t as big as the hype, though if the hype were as big as all that, you’d think there’d be a much bigger group of “heard of ’em but don’t read ’em” respondents (i.e., there’d be more people who’d at least have heard of the phenomenon thanks to the hype, without having spent time actually reading blogs).
At some point over the last couple of years blogs crossed the threshold from niche to mainstream. Gallup’s numbers confirm that. The bias in the company’s article is like what you could find in a music industry trade publication of the 1980s that might have said, “Though CDs are growing in popularity, our survey shows that less than half of Americans actually own a CD player, and most still purchase their music in the form of records.” The trend line had already crossed the point of no return, but the statistical snapshot made it look like the LP was king.
Of course blogs won’t replace the old media with anything like the thoroughness that CDs drove out vinyl (new media channels of communication don’t kill their predecessors the way new physical delivery formats often do). But the news from Gallup is clear: Blogs have now become part of the mass culture. Too bad the company chose the wrong headline.
When you post something on a public weblog, you’re posting it to the open Web, which is to say, you are making it public to anyone who follows a link to it. So I was a little taken aback, as I followed the blogosphere chatter over the Microsoft-Groove deal (here’s the commentary by Groove investor and former board member Mitch Kapor), to come upon this comment by Ed Brill of Lotus / IBM.
Brill labels his post as a “not-for-quote-by-press observation.” He boldfaces the phrase, so clearly he means it seriously, he’s not joking. In a follow-up post he explains that “the posting isn’t my complete perspective on the announcement. … In a press interview, I’d offer a broader view of the deal, and, more importantly, put it in the context of what we at IBM/Lotus have to offer the market.”
But, um, Ed, you’ve posted words on the Web that are readable by hundreds of millions of people. I’m afraid the cat’s out of the bag. If a reporter (or anyone) wants to quote you, you can’t say, “Sorry, that was off the record.” If you don’t want to be quoted, post your comment in a private forum! Put it in a private e-mail labeled “Do Not Quote”! Call your friends and tell them what you think, and don’t let any reporters on the line! If you need time to compose your “complete perspective” on an announcement and don’t want your quick initial scribblings to be quoted, don’t post them.
This is a small point, and there’s nothing particularly incendiary in Brill’s posting that would cause any fuss. I’m just finding it impossible to get my head around the oxymoronic notion of a public Web posting that is “not-for-quote-by-press.”
UPDATE: Read Ed Brill’s reasonable response. Looks like, as an IBM employee, he’s feeling his way through this complex and still-evolving landscape.
I’m trying to be really, really good and hunker down on my book work, so I didn’t make any effort to check in at the Game Developers’ Conference even though it was right here in San Francisco, and now I’m kicking myself, because it appears that two of my favorite thinkers on the subject — my old friend Greg Costikyan, and Brenda Laurel, whose “Computers as Theater” was pivotal in shifting the course of my career — delivered blistering rants today at a panel there. I don’t know if the event will ever be more thoroughly documented, but in the meantime, these notes will do [link via BoingBoing]. Here are choice excerpts:
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Costikyan: How often DO they perform human sacrifices at Nintendo?? My friends, we are FUCKED [laughter]. We are well and truly fucked. The bar in terms of graphics and glitz has been raised and raised until we can’t afford to do anything at all. 80 hour weeks until our jobs are all outsourced to Asia. but it’s ok because the HD era is here, right? I say, enough. The time has come for revolution! It may seem to you that what I describe is inevitable forces of history, but no, we have free will! EA could have chosen to focus on innovation, but they did not. Nintendo could make development kits cheaply available to small firms, but they prefer to rely on the creativity on one aging designer. You have choices too: work in a massive sweatshop publisher-run studio with thousands of others making the next racing game with the same gameplay as Pole Position. Or you can riot in the streets of Redwood City! Choose another business model, development path, and you can choose to remember why you love games and make sure in a generation’s time there are still games to love. Laurel: GTA [Grand Theft Auto] I talked to 22 little boys in LA, all of them wanted to see that game. With only one exception, the thing that they wanted to see was to be able to drive by their house. They weren’t interested in stealing cars. Or the criminals. Or the back-story. They weren’t interested in that, they wanted the simulation of driving by the house. |
UPDATE: Greg has now posted the text of his talk. And it seems that at least some of Brenda Laurel’s talk drew from material in her essay here on “New Boys.”
Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks: And it’s making Ray Ozzie, Groove’s founder, chief technical officer. [Link via Dave Winer.] This strikes me as a pretty big deal — here’s why.
Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, started Groove as an effort, once and for all, to solve the still incredibly thorny set of problems surrounding collaborative software. This is an area that’s been legendarily difficult for technology companies to crack (Netscape, for example, foundered after it took a turn in this direction by acquiring a company called Collabra). Ozzie and Groove haven’t figured everything out, but they’ve come a lot closer than many of their predecessors. Most recently, Groove has found a big client in the U.S. government, which has adopted its technology for extensive military use (causing a certain amount of controversy).
By scooping up Ozzie and Groove, Microsoft is doing what it has always done: extending its reach by embracing (or consuming) smaller companies that have made technical breakthroughs Microsoft’s big research labs and development teams haven’t been able to match. It’s a smart move for Bill Gates and company — an indication that they remain absolutely determined not to fall behind the competition, and a sign that Microsoft intends to push the boundaries of collaborative software’s capabilities. It will be interesting to see where they take Groove: Let’s face it, Windows and Office are both pretty creaky for users who want to share and coordinate work nimbly and quickly. Gee, maybe information technology does still matter, sometimes.
Despite its having been on the table for at least six years now, this question of whether bloggers are journalists won’t seem to rest, and now that the courts are getting involved, we don’t have much choice but to revisit it, as Slashdot, among many others, has done today. Dan Fost’s San Francisco Chronicle story provides a good summary of the issue, as Apple Computer pursues its suit to get some bloggers to reveal the sources of anonymous information they published. But the article misses the most basic distinction at work here.
A blogger is someone who uses a certain kind of tool to publish a certain kind of Web site. The label tells us nothing about how the tool is used or what is published. We went through this discussion a decade ago, when people first started asking whether Web sites were journalism. To understand this, just take the question, “Are bloggers journalists?” and reframe it in terms of previous generations of tools. “Are telephone callers journalists?” “Are typewriter users journalists?” “Are mimeograph operators journalists?” Or, most simply, “Are writers journalists?” Well, duh, sometimes! But sometimes not.
That is the only answer to the “Are bloggers journalists?” question that makes any sense. Bloggers sometimes engage in journalism, just as they sometimes engage in diary-writing, art-making, essayizing and many other forms of communication.
This answer is inconvenient, as we face the question of whether bloggers should receive the same legal protection as more conventionally defined journalists; it doesn’t provide a clearcut legal rule. But, let’s face it, legal protections for journalists have always involved a certain fuzziness. Since, thankfully, the U.S. government doesn’t legally charter journalists — that would be difficult to square with the First Amendment — everyone is free to apply the label to themselves. You don’t need a journalism degree, either. (I’ve been a journalist for three decades and I don’t have one.)
You can try to define journalists by applying the filter of professionalism, by seeing whether people are actually earning a living through their journalistic work — but then you rule out the vast population of low-paid or non-paid freelance workers, and those who are not currently making money in their writing but hope to someday. Apparently most of the existing shield laws use some version of the “you are where your paycheck comes from” definition of journalist (see Declan McCullagh over at CNET for more). That’s one good reason for thinking that they might need some revision.
There’s a good definition of “journalist” sitting right at the top of Jim Romenesko’s journalism blog today (is pioneering blogger Romenesko a journalist?), where CNN/U.S. president Jonathan Klein says: “I define a journalist as someone who asks questions, finds out answers and communicates them to an audience.” By that standard, a hefty proportion of today’s bloggers qualify.
Does this vast expansion of the journalism population mean that the courts and legislatures are going to have second thoughts about protecting the confidentiality of journalists’ sources? Perhaps — and maybe those shield laws need tweaking or amendment, given the transformations underway. But any attempt to draw a narrow line around the journalism profession in order to preserve those laws is doomed to fail. There is no way to draw that line — income level? circulation? corporate size? forget it! — that is not ridiculous on its face.
So we’re left with the pathetic spectacle of beloved Apple Computer chasing down some bloggers to find out which of its employees leaked some early peeks at product information. Apple may win, and the laws may contort themselves to exclude the vast new throngs of online journalists from the protected club. But is there any doubt that, in the long run, it’s Apple’s dam-building effort that’s doomed? Whether protected by law or not, the teeming network of the blogosphere is not going to shut down, any more than online music file sharing could be ended by the legal campaign against Napster. In this sense, the whole “journalists or not?” debate is an irrelevant, backward-looking theological dispute.
[I wrote this post this morning but the computer that I run Radio on died for some reason, so it’s going up late, and with some revisions…]
I’m too mired in book work to offer much besides pointers, but here are pointers galore on the important controversy over the Google toolbar Autolink feature — in which Google offers to overlay its own links to certain types of information that it finds on everyone else’s Web pages. In 2001 Microsoft proposed putting something similar right into its Internet Explorer browser, and Walt Mossberg and many others blew the whistle on it. Links should be considered part of the vocabulary of Web content; inserting links is tantamount to tampering with the content.
This time it’s been Dave Winer who’s been blowing the whistle insistently. Here’s Dave’s case against Autolink. The opposite point of view — it’s a tool, I should be able to use any tools I want once content lands on my screen! — is smartly summarized by Cory Doctorow here and here. Paul Boutin in Slate, and Tim Bray, also offer good, careful perspectives.
Me, I think the issue is fundamentally political more than technical; Google is now powerful enough that it needs to learn to tread more lightly in areas like this. My hunch is the Google-ites, encapsulated in their “let’s bring all the world’s information to light!” mission, simply had no idea what an ethical morass they have plopped themselves into. If the past is any indication, they’re nimble enough to step out.
