- Alan Watts Theater
Offbeat and totally worthwhile little videos with audio from Alan Watts recordings and animations. Apparently produced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the South Park guys).
Links for August 20th
- Machinist: How a million Windows users killed Skype
Windows Update = milions of reboots = trigger of deep bug in Skype’s peer-to-peer system. Fascinating real-world example of the limits of software reliability.
BarcampBlock abuzz
BarCamp Block was extraordinary — I spent Saturday morning and afternoon there. (Family commitments kept me from the Saturday evening and Sunday events or I’d have stayed all the way through.) This “unconference” was a free event, with “programming” supplied ad hoc by the attendees themselves, and a schedule devised on the fly at the start of the weekend.
Sounds like chaos? “Cult of the Amateur” mediocrity? No way. Think instead of the energy, ideas and conviviality that can flow from a crowd of smart people when they’re given a chance to make things up as they go along.
The event was huge — hundreds of people gathered primarily around one block in downtown Palo Alto centered on the SocialText offices. No one could possibly have attended more than a fraction of the sessions. Three highlights for me were:
- A discussion among about a dozen people at the Institute for the Future office about coping with RSS overload. This was started by someone who works at a company that’s producing a sort of personal (or collaborative) filter for your RSS feeds (so you can train your feed reader to only show you posts on a set of topics that you’re interested in). I have no use for such a product; when I subscribe to a feed I’m happy if the blogger surprises me with interesting stuff that I didn’t know I was interested in (and that I’d never see with a feed filtered by preset criteria). But the idea led to a good exchange in the room, and helped crystallize my thinking on a feed-reader feature that would make a big difference (for me, anyway!). I’ll post separately on that.
- Tantek Celik led an open discussion about the state of microformats, a subject I’m increasingly interested in. This is one of those Web-technology phenomena that at the moment is intelligible almost exclusively to geeks, but I think that — like blogs or RSS — it will become much more widely useful and adopted in the next few years. I’ll also be writing more on the subject later.
- Finally, Brad Fitzpatrick, David Recordon and Joseph Smarr led a session on “Opening the Social Graph.” They were talking about a pragmatic, we-could-build-it-now solution to the much-discussed problem on the “social web” of proliferating networks. Who wants to join another social networking site when, each time you do that, you have to painstakingly rebuild your list of “friends” or relationships? Isn’t there a way to make this information portable? LiveJournal founder Fitzpatrick’s recent paper on this subject proposed one approach. At BarCamp Fitzpatrick and his collaborators talked about setting up a nonprofit organization that would serve as the hub for the backend data services his solution would require. Another fascinating subject worth more future in-depth posting. (No one seems to have posted notes on the session, so I’ll try to add mine to the conference wiki soon.)
So there you have it: I spent less than a full day and came away with my head buzzing and three major areas of material to pursue more deeply. I don’t think any of the old-fashioned, CEOs-on-stage conferences I’ve been to match that record.
[tags]barcampblock, rss overload, microformats, social networking[/tags]
Berkeley talk, Chandler, Barcamp, Citizen Josh
I have been hunkered down getting my life (and a mountain of notes and research) in order. Here’s a grab-bag of items:
- On Wednesday I spent the afternoon at UC/Berkeley at the kind invitation of Bill Allison, and talked with a thoughtful, interested group of faculty, administrators and IT people about Dreaming in Code and the wider topic of software’s innate difficulties. Berkeley, along with a number of other institutions, is about to kick off an ambitious project to build a new platform for much of its underlying digital infrastructure. Chandler, whose slow progress Dreaming in Code chronicled, has a university tie-in as well, and these folks are smart and foresightful enough to want to try to understand what pitfalls they might be facing.
Too often, groups embark on big new software ventures as if they are the first pioneers ever to walk down their particular path, when in fact most of the field is full of well-worn roads (and the roads usually lead into one or another ditch). So hats off to my Berkeley neighbors for wanting to study an at least partial map of the terrain.
- Speaking of Chandler, the folks at OSAF are closing in on a major release, called Preview, later this month. I’ll be writing more about it here as it unfolds.
- Barcamp Block: This marks the second anniversary of Barcamp, a self-organizing conference for geeks, startup companies and related phenomena. It’s down in Palo Alto this coming weekend, it looks like great fun and interesting people, and I’m planning to be there, at least for the first day.
- Also here in Berkeley, my friend Josh Kornbluth‘s great show “Citizen Josh” (I wrote about it when it opened) is settling in for a three-week run over at Berkeley Rep. Worth seeing if you missed it across the Bay when it played the Magic Theater earlier this year.
[tags]uc berkeley, chandler, barcamp, josh kornbluth[/tags]
Derek Miller at Gnomedex
Before Gnomedex recedes too far, I wanted to post about what was by far the standout experience of the conference for me and, I imagine, many others present.
Derek K. Miller is a longtime Canadian blogger who lives in Vancouver. I encountered his writing at Penmachine several years ago the way bloggers often discover one another — he’d linked to a post of mine, I saw the referrer, I checked his site out and liked it. I’ve followed Miller’s blog sporadically over the years but hadn’t read it in a good while, and so I missed his news earlier this year: he’d been diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Since then he has written with honesty and openness about his ordeal. He’s using his blog at once to keep his community of friends and relatives up to date and to give a wider audience a little window onto the nature of this experience, which in our culture frequently gets hidden from view.
Apparently he’d been slated to give a talk at Gnomedex, but he’s still recovering from an operation, so making the trip to Seattle wasn’t in the cards. Instead, he spoke to the conference from his bed via a video link, and talked about what it’s been like to tell the story of his cancer experience in public and in real time. Despite the usual video-conferencing hiccups (a few stuttering images and such), it was an electrifying talk.
This wasn’t about peddling a new product or handicapping startups or any of the usual conference fodder. It was a moment for everyone present to think about mortality, strength in the face of adversity, and the ways that resourceful people find to forge strong human connections with our little technological tools.
(I haven’t been able to find a posted video of the event, but if I do, or if someone posts a link in comments, I’ll add it!)
[tags]gnomedex, gnomedex 2007, derek miller[/tags]
Dreaming in Code on NPR’s Weekend Edition
Rick Kleffel did a really nice piece about Dreaming in Code for NPR’s Weekend Edition, and it aired this morning. I was traveling back from Seattle today so I entirely missed the broadcast. But the piece has its online home here.
There’s some nicely edited bits from the interview Kleffel did with me earlier this year, shaped to fit the context of a series Kleffel has been doing about first-time authors. He presents the book as both a product of my personal obsession and a chronicle of the OSAF team’s obsession with their product. There’s even a Moby Dick reference. Check it out!
[tags]weekend edition, npr, rick kleffel[/tags]
Gnomedex report: Friday
Gnomedex is a friendly, human-scale conference of early-adopter geeks. When Jason Calacanis asked the crowd how many people were on the Web back in 1994 or 1995, four out of five hands went up. The event’s marketing tagline is “The Blogosphere’s Conference,” but of course this is only one slice of one blogosphere (there was, for instance, almost no overlap with this other blogosphere).
The sessions have been a wildly mixed bag. Things got off to a rocky start with the keynote by Robert Steele, a former intelligence officer turned crackpot libertarian who delivered a scattershot rant whose agenda was so vast that it was no agenda at all. For instance, Steele simultaneously advocated the “restoration” of the U.S. constitution (through, among other things, the impeachment of Dick Cheney) and the abolition of the U.S. constitution (via a new constitutional convention).
Steele believes that “central banking is an evil cancer,” but he could not make the effort to explain why. He raced flippantly through his own slides, showing a complete disrespect for the crowd (if he couldn’t take the time to prepare a presentation, why should we take the time to listen?). Among Steele’s positions: Henry Kissinger is a war criminal; the federal government is “going away”; wikipedia is for “morons” but Amazon.com will become the hub for a new global mind; we can attain world peace through “open everything” — including “open carry” of guns. There was something here for anyone to agree with, something else for anyone to disagree with, and in the end nothing of substance.
Far more valuable were Darren Barefoot‘s exploration of the relative value of different forms of digital do-good-ism and Ronni Bennett‘s presentation on aging and the Web (sites need to do a better job of making themselves accessible to the elderly). Vanessa Fox led a thoughtful discussion about the line between public and private information in a blog-based universe.
The day closed with Calacanis. His title slide read, “The Internet’s environmental crisis: How the Internet is being destroyed by selfish polluters — and how we can stop them.” Calacanis pines for the early days of the Web, before the SEO spammers got involved. But the talk was really a pitch for his new “human-powered” search company, Mahalo (which I wrote about here). Dave Winer called him out from the back row, declaring that the talk itself was “conference spam.”
I just thought there was something naive and/or disingenuous about the idea that Mahalo is a blow against spam. There are many classes of spam-related pollution of today’s Net — e-mail spam, comment spam, spam blogs — and of them all, actual spamming of search results is probably the least pressing. Google still does a pretty good job. The day that Google’s results look like the flow of spam into your e-mail inbox is the day that people will start clamoring for something like Mahalo. But unless Google slips up badly, that looks unlikely.
Mahalo is ad-free today, but sooner or later it will begin running search advertising. already runs Google text link ads, and one imagines it will push that more aggressively over time. (If the service succeeds in drawing big numbers, the pressure will be on to “monetize” the traffic; somebody has to pay all those “humans.”) Calacanis has an editorial background and promises clear labeling of all ads. That’s great. But Google’s ads are clearly labeled and separated from the search results, too. Having editors is a fine thing but it is no more a guarantee of incorruptibility than a good algorithm.
UPDATE: Darren Barefoot posted the full text of his talk. It’s an entertaining and enlightening walk through the comparative social value of many of the different kinds of volunteer activities and contributions people make on the Net to try to improve the world.
[tags]gnomedex, gnomedex 2007, robert steele, jason calacanis, mahalo, darren barefoot, ronni bennett, vanessa fox[/tags]
Bad loans still available, no one turned away!
If you want to know what’s wrong with our financial system at the moment, one data point arrived in my (snail-)mailbox yesterday.
I’m used to be being bombarded with loan and credit-card offers. They usually take a one-way trip to the shredder. But the subprime mortgage meltdown has been so much in the news of late that I thought I’d have a look at the latest crap the lenders were sending my (non-subprime) way.
Yesterday’s “Payment Reduction Offer,” from an outfit called Statewide Bancorp, promised “the security of a 30-year Fixed” yet somehow was going to cut the monthly payments on my existing (30-year fixed) loan by half. Wow! Good deal! “With this money you could buy a new car, remodel your home, pay-off high interest debt or use the money for whatever you want.” Cool! And they say “it’s almost impossible not to qualify!”
How can they do that? Ah. If you flip the letter over and read the fine print — better get out your magnifying glass — you discover that this isn’t a traditional fixed-rate loan at all. It’s a fixed-rate with a five-year teaser, where for those first five years you’re doing a “minimum payment” and defer interest.
I have no clue what happens to the payment amount after that five-year period is up, but it can’t be good — it’s certainly more than I’m paying now, and there isn’t a word about that anywhere in the letter. So much for the “security” of your fixed rate: the whole point of a fixed rate is predictability on your payments. Oh, yeah, there’s also a prepayment penalty, so if you get suckered into the loan and want out, they’ve got you there, too.
This is the sort of underhanded marketing of a lousy loan that got the mortgage market into its current mess. Apparently, the BS machine is still happily cranking out these offers, even as the market collapses. And you wondered why the U.S. financial system has the jitters?
[tags]subprime mortgages, mortgages, loans, lending[/tags]
Meerkats inspire Wikipedia fracas
I watch precious little TV, but I had a long flight home late at night last Friday, and was brain-dead after too many hours awake but too wired to go to sleep. So I flipped the channels on Jetblue until I found myself staring at a group of a half-dozen or so of what looked like hybrid squirrel-rats, with raccoon eyes, who stood on their hind legs like begging dogs, only with an attentive, thousand-yard stare.
Meerkats. How little I knew! The show, Meerkat Manor — apparently, a big hit over on Animal Planet — follows a meerkat tribe or clan or whatever the term is. There’s a dominant female — she’s the only one allowed to breed — and a dominant male and a bunch of offspring. They hide from Kalahari predators in elaborate burrows — the title’s “manor” — but also engage in fierce territorial strife with other meerkat gangs.
Maybe it was my sleep deprivation, but I found these meerkats intensely dramatic: family tragedy, clan warfare, survival vs. the elements, all enacted by cute critters with sharp claws. The show anthropomorphizes its subjects to a degree that probably makes serious wildlife students cringe; each animal gets a name (like “Zaphod” and “Mozart” and “Flower”) and the gangs are “Whiskers” and “Lazuli” and such. In each show’s intro the meerkats are even given hushed voice-overs. But then the rest of the show proceeds in a less ridiculous, hyper-documentary mode. And fiber-optic cameras show you the action down in the burrows themselves! In this view, the meerkats all look like shoplifters caught on some dim subterranean security camera.
It was over to Wikipedia for me, to learn more. There I discovered that the show’s Wikipedia entry was under lock-down. There’d been an edit war over the meerkats! But why? Apparently some contributors posted information about some major deaths among the Whiskers in the latest season of the show. But that season hasn’t been aired yet in many places, so other contributors view the information as spoilers. And that has led to a fight. If you visit the discussion page you can follow an impassioned debate over whether it is possible to have a spoiler for a work of non-fiction.
If only the meerkats knew what mischief they were making for this strange species that’s filming them.
[tags]meerkat manor, documentaries, wikipedia[/tags]
Feed and email repairs
One thing about leaving a job after 11 years is that you need to adjust your information infrastructure. I thought I had my email transition down, but there was a weak link in my forwarding plan, exposed this past weekend when a mailbox at my service provider that I assumed was empty (it was all forwarding) instead filled up. I don’t think I missed any important email but if you sent me something over the weekend and got a “mailbox full” bounceback now you know why.
For reasons that I can only assume were coincidental, the day after I posted about leaving Salon my Feedburner setup broke. I only caught up with this yesterday. I believe it’s fixed and my RSS feed should be working fine, but if you notice anything funky, let me know. Of course, the odds are that any such funkiness will result in the absence of updates, meaning you wouldn’t even see this post…