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Can you send a file to the Internet?

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I’ve always thought of the Internet not as a place but as a means of connecting other entities — sites, servers, people, etc. (Hey, in that sense maybe it is “a series of tubes”!) From its beginning in the antediluvian mists as what was known as a “network of networks,” connecting pre-existing but now-forgotten networks with a common set of protocols, the Internet was not a destination but a means of transport between other destinations.

So for me, the phrase “on the Internet” isn’t ideal, but it makes some sense as shorthand meaning “on one of those other things that is on the Internet.” But recently I’ve noticed a couple of usages that caused me to stop short. Both were in the New York Times, and from writers who are as or more steeped in Net lore than I am.

In an otherwise highly useful recent roundup of backup services, David Pogue refers to “online backups, where files are shuttled off to the Internet for safekeeping.”

Files “shuttled off to the Internet”? I can picture files that are shuttled across the Internet, to some server or disk array or whatever. But what happens to a file that’s sent to the Internet? I get this picture from the old Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk took a trip through the transporter and didn’t come out the other side; his molecules got scrambled in interstellar space. If I send my file “to the Internet,” I’d really worry about those bits just sort of dissolving into the void.

Similarly, John Markoff’s fascinating piece on botnets from Sunday’s Times, Attack of the Zombie Computers is a Growing Threat, begins with this sentence: “In their persistent quest to breach the Internet’s defenses, the bad guys are honing their weapons and increasing their firepower.”

Does the Internet have any “defenses” at all? Individual Web sites and corporate networks and ISPs do, of course, and they are all scrambling to deal with the torrent of spam being produced by these bot-infected zombie computers.

In a sense, I suppose the Internet has structural defenses, in the form of the relative security of the protocols and conventions users rely on (like encryption), and social defenses, in the form of the people who work hard to stymie the stuff that bad actors do. But these are not really “the Internet’s defenses”; they’re things that people do to defend their Internet-connected computers.

This probably sounds like nitpicking, but I think there’s something at stake in how English usage shapes how we think about the Net.

The great thing about the Internet is that — unlike its “walled-garden” predecessors — it is not a single place with one set of “defenses.” In the memorable words of the “World of Ends” manifesto by Doc Searls and David Weinberger, “No one owns it; everyone can use it; anyone can improve it.” (And, as the botnets show, anyone can try to wreck it, too.) When it comes to descriptions of the Internet, I am instinctively biased towards language that embodies these principles, and my brain registers a little squawk of concern when it encounters phrases that don’t.
[tags]world of ends, language, usage, internet, john markoff, david pogue[/tags]

Office 2007: An iconoclastic view

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The infuriating aspects of Microsoft Word are legion, and whenever possible I prefer to write in a plain-text processor. But sometimes you have no choice but to work in Word, scratching your head over its stubborn peculiarities and gradually, over the years, acclimating yourself to its interface.

Now, as Walt Mossberg details in his column today, Microsoft is about to throw out years of tradition in Word and the rest of Office. In the new Office 2007, it seems, there are no menus. That’s right — the basic tool for controlling the screen since the early days of the Macintosh is gone, replaced by a newfangled, multifaceted toolbar called the Ribbon.

Mossberg gives it a mixed review (though he admits to “cursing it for weeks”). No doubt Microsoft has invested millions in testing it. I haven’t used it at all yet, so I could be off-base. But thinking about this change, or even just looking at the screenshots, makes my head hurt.

Maybe I’m unusual, but I have always found the dizzying array of toolbar icons in Office programs profoundly unhelpful. Icons are fine when they are small in number and used constantly (think of the stop, reload, back and forward buttons on your browser). But when you have a multitude of complex tools and features, as in Word, you never really get the hang of what all those little hierogylphs really mean. Either you wait for the “tooltip” to pop up (but why should the text have ever been relegated to this second layer?) or you go to the menu, where at least the function will be represented by an English description that has some relationship to what it does.

From now on, sorry — no more menus. Maybe there’s an option to flip the Ribbon to text descriptions, but from Mossberg’s description, it sounds like this Office is less customizable, not more, than the old one. The keyboard commands that heavy users rely on for common operations apparently are unchanged, so that’s nice. But when you need to find that odd command you only use once a year, good luck rummaging through trays of icons.

POSTSCRIPT: Harvey Motulsky writes to tell me that most of the Ribbon toolbars (though not the very first one, apparently) do have text labels on them. He points me to Jensen Harris’s blog at Microsoft which records the process of the redesign — I’ll look forward to reading that later. And, in comments, Walt Mossberg suggests I’m just showing my stripes as an “old-fashioned reporter” — no doubt guilty as charged.
[tags]microsoft, office 2007, walt mossberg, interface design[/tags]

The “invention” of RSS and the snowball effect

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The arguments over the history of RSS are interminable and overheated, and I wouldn’t fault anyone for tuning them out. RSS is the technology (really, that’s a glorified label for what is a relatively simple file-format specification) that lets you subscribe to feeds from blogs and other Web publishers. Early adopters on the Net have embraced RSS whole hog; today it’s how I take in most of the information I read online. Yet much of the general public is still awaiting a basic introduction to this incredibly useful tool. Back in 2003 I wrote that, with RSS, it felt like we were about where we were in 1994 with the Web itself; today we’re maybe in 1996 or 1997.

RSS is important, and so technology industry leaders and pundits have already devoted a remarkable amount of energy toward arguing about its origins — including, most recently, debating a controversial patent filing by Microsoft. (The idea of patenting anything to do with RSS strikes me as ridiculous and counter-productive, but my grasp of patents is limited, and it’s always been hard for me to understand the idea of any kind of software patent.)

Even if you’ve tuned out the RSS debate, though, I’d recommend checking out Dave Winer’s post from today, “RSS Wasn’t Invented.” Dave argues that what matters in the RSS story isn’t the (non-existent) moment that the idea for the technology was conceived, but rather the complex and slowly-unfolding process by which RSS tools came into wide use. Discovery of the value and purpose of RSS, you might say, took place long after the specifics of its technical functionality were first imagined.

The “invention” of RSS, muddied as it was by prior art, wasn’t responsible for its uptake. Rather there were several significant moments along the way: support by individual publications, individual bloggers, then blogging tools, then a small number of aggregators and readers, then a few very large publishers, then a flood of publishing and reading tools, followed by a flood of content.

I can vouch for Winer’s argument because I recall the early adoption of RSS at Salon, in, I believe, late 1999 or early 2000. We needed a simple tool to circulate our daily list of headlines and links to partner sites, and one of our engineers chose an XML file format he was familiar with through its use by Netscape. We didn’t know it by the name “RSS,” and we weren’t adopting it for any purpose relating to blogging. We just grabbed a handy format that looked easy for our partners to receive and put it to use. Later on, the rise of blogs — based on publishing tools that Winer, and the folks at Blogger, and later the folks at Movable Type and others, had produced — created a demand from the general public for subscribable RSS feeds. When I went to our engineering team and said, “We need to provide an RSS feed for Salon,” we realized that we had one already, we just weren’t calling it that.

RSS was simple for developers to produce and gradually got easier for non-technical users to consume. The complex and murky (and contentious) story of how its technical specifics gradually coalesced is far less important than the social process by which a “virtuous circle” or snowball effect spread its adoption. I know I’m striding into choppy waters here, but I can vouch for it, because I witnessed so much of the story: Winer deserves credit for a central role in getting that snowball started.

In any case, what’s more important is his argument today — that the tech industry needs to study and learn from the story of how successes like RSS unfold:

If it had been left at the “invention” stage, it would be where many other XML-related technologies are today, invented, but not much-used. Something new was done with the cloud of content, tools, aggregators, and that allowed a lot more people to use it, or hear about it, or decide it was finally time to support it.

[tags]rss, blogging, dave winer[/tags]

Why this year’s Time “Person of the Year” should be the last

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So Time magazine went and decided that — 2006 being the Year of User-Generated Content ™, aka the Year of YouTube Being Acquired By Google, and also the year that big corporate media companies began to see the rot in their financial foundations — its person of the year is “you.”

Dan Gillmor points out that the very nature of this choice presupposes a rapidly obsolescing notion that the magazine’s own editors are still on the other side of the barricades from the teeming content-generating masses. Jeff Jarvis asks what the fuss is all about, “this is nothing new.” Dave Winer says that Time is still too focused on the value created in the “wisdom of the crowd” aggregation of a multitude of voices, when the really important value lies with each individual voice.

I would add that, if Time’s editors put real stock in their choice and believed in the notion they are now promoting, then, having chosen “You” as the “Person of the Year,” they would announce that this is the very last time they will meet in solemn conclave to anoint a Person of the Year. Gatekeeper, retire thyself! No more bogus end-of-year popularity contests!

Except they do seem very effective at sparking conversations online.
[tags]time magazine, person of the year, youtube, dave winer, jeff jarvis, dan gillmor[/tags]

Good reads: Journal interview with Thomas Lee

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Lee Gomes interviewed Stanford engineering professor Thomas Lee in the Wall Street Journal yesterday; the subject was the history of microchips — but Lee uses that material to offer some trenchant observations on the nature of creativity.

For instance, he says, the transistor was invented in the 1940s by a group led by William Shockley — but not in cliched “eureka!” fashion. Instead, it was “something they stumbled on while they were trying to diagnose their earlier failures to invent a transistor.”

Gomes asks Lee how we got from transistors to integrated circuits:

Because of a somewhat bored and nervous new hire at Texas Instruments, a young kid named Jack Kilby, who eventually won the Nobel Prize. He had been hired in the summer of 1958 and given a project that left him unenthusiastic. He was hired just before the entire company went on a two-week vacation. Rather than just goofing off for the two weeks, he decided to come up with an alternative to his assigned project, so he wouldn’t be seen as just a complainer. So during those two weeks, he invented the integrated-circuit concept.

Failures, accidents, things stumbled upon, stuff people do on the side: that’s how the world moves forward.

Lee’s moral? “You shouldn’t feel bad about being in a state of ignorance; if you are an enlightened person, you should be in a perpetual state of ignorance. And be very suspicious of linear histories, because it means either that the author had an ax to grind, or he hasn’t done his homework, and there are lots of side stories left to be uncovered.”

Read the whole interview.
[tags]wall street journal, transistors, microchips, integrated circuits, history, creativity, thomas lee, lee gomes[/tags]

Yahoo reorg: “audience” over here, “publishers” over there

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Interesting. Yahoo announces a corporate reorganization with the following explanation:

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced a reorganization of its structure and management to align its operations with its key customer segments — audiences, advertisers and publishers.

Nothing unusual there. Sounds like your good old-fashioned off-line media company. Except, hold on a minute: Hasn’t Yahoo spent the last few years repositioning itself as the big Internet media company which understands that its “audience” and “publishers” are the same people?

This is the message I have heard in conference talks by Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz; it’s the message Yahoo gave by acquiring Flickr and Del.icio.us; it’s the message of the great success of Yahoo’s “Hack Day” events, which deliberately blurred the line between the corporate “us” and “them” in the developer community. Google may have more PhDs and keener algorithms, this vision of Yahoo had it, but Yahoo understood the social dynamics of the new, user-driven Web far better than the competition. Or so it seemed.

So either (a) the message never really made it to the top of the company; (b) it did, but now it’s being jettisoned, which would be too bad; or (c) the reorg will need another reorg real soon.
[tags]yahoo, yahoo reorg[/tags]

Put Windows key out of its misery

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One of the best ways to avoid wrist trouble, RSI and similar tendon-aching problems — aside from NEVER EVER cradling the phone between your shoulder and your ear! — is to minimize reaching for the mouse. (Office workers spent years at typewriters without getting RSI.) So smart people use keyboard shortcuts when they can.

But several years ago, Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, messed up the world of keyboard shortcutting by inserting a new key between the “Ctrl” and the “Alt” — the dreaded “Windows” key. This key does nothing except pop up the largely useless “Start” menu. On most desktop keyboards, it’s fairly easy to avoid. But on crowded laptop layouts, it can be hard to ignore, and I find my fingers landing on it by accident while I’m typing. Then Windows shifts its “focus” out of the active window, and even if you dismiss the Start menu, you have to click back in the window you were working in to resume whatever you were in the middle of — you can’t just keep typing.

Ugh. So I was thrilled to find this page with a handydandy registry editing script that will disable the Windows key. Highly recommended if you feel as I do. (But remember; you are editing the Windows registry. This script does the work for you, it’s pretty much click and you’re done, but if this sort of thing worries you, be warned.)
[tags]windows key, windows annoyances, lifehacks[/tags]

Web 2.0: Fear of IPOs

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This Web 2.0 conference is almost exclusively focused on the business end of the phenomenon. And the defining characteristic of this iteration of the tech-industry business cycle is that virtually no one other than Google has gone public. It’s as if the excesses of the dot-com bubble left the very term “IPO” tainted. It’s also the case that this time around, the market, very sanely, isn’t that keen on supporting IPOs for companies that haven’t demonstrated profitability. So the “exit strategy” of choice today for startup companies isn’t to go public; it’s to be acquired by Google or Yahoo (or maybe AOL or Microsoft).

Yesterday evening, Barry Diller advised a questioner who asked how you could “build value” today: “Don’t sell it. Just ride it. Equity is built by holding on. Sometime you gotta sell a little of it. But hold onto it if you have something of value.” (Here’s more on Diller’s talk.)

This advice has its limits, however. A successful Web service start up reaches a point, if it manages to attract millions of users, where it has to start getting really good at things like datacenters and customer support. Maybe that’s not what the founders are interested in. Or maybe it’s dauntingly expensive. At that point, selling out to a Google or Yahoo makes perfect sense. These companies are explicitly and unashamedly in the business of doing outsourced R&D for the big guys. That’s “building value,” too.

But staying independent is more fun. Look at GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons — a colorful ex-Marine whose “I’m just a dumb guy who flunked fifth grade” serves as cover for a shrewd business mind.

Parsons told the conference about his near-IPO experience earlier this year; he said he spent $3 million preparing his SEC filings and courting bankers, only to discover that the bankers and the financial press were focused exclusively on “short term accounting paper profits.” Parsons is a believer in operating cash flow instead. He’s proud of his company, with its 920 support reps actually answering the phone when customers call in about the domain names they’ve bought. But all he heard from the public market’s representatives was, “When are you going to get your customers to use self-help so you can cut your support staff?” So he pulled the plug on the IPO.

I cringed at Parsons’ unabashed enthusiasm for ads that plant his logo on the chests of well-endowed women (“”Because that’s where every guy would be looking”). But most Web 2.0-style execs could learn something from his understanding of the basics of retail psychology: “People love the convenience and speed that comes with the Net. But when it comes to resolving problems or learning features, people much prefer to deal with other people.”
[tags]Web 2.0, web2con, barry diller, bob parsons, ipos[/tags]

Web 2.0: Server husbandry

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From Eric Schmidt’s argument that network-based computing would prove irresistibly more reliable than alternatives, to Jeff Bezos’s pitch for Amazon’s on-demand storage and computing services as a means to “let people spend more time and dollars on the differentiated part of what they’re doing, less on the undifferentiated,” to Microsoft exec Debra Charpaty’s presentation about the nuts and bolts of building and running datacenters, one focus of this Web 2.0 conference has been on the server side of the old client/server dichotomy.

Web services are great, the argument goes, but don’t forget about what it takes to deploy and maintain them. “The Cloud” is a nice metaphor for everything that’s “out there” on network-based services, Charpaty argued; then she showed slides of endless racks of machines and squat, windowless buildings sprouting on desolate flats, and declared, “This is the real cloud.”

In one sense, these vast, electricity-hogging, heat-dissipating, cycles-generating structures are the new mainframes. Yet they are also the nerve-centers for an approach to computing that’s more distributed than ever before.

How do the businesses at the heart of the Web industry manage to juggle their determination to dominate the increasingly centralized business of providing the new basics, like storage and raw network-based processing, with their professed dedication to the values that shaped the personal computing industry that gave birth to theirs — values like freedom of speech, individual empowerment, and the unlocking of personal creativity?

That’s the big question underlying all the other controversies more visible on the surface here, like Net Neutrality or intellectual property or open APIs or data mobility.
[tags]web2con, web 2.0, web services[/tags]

Web 2.0 launch pad

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While we clink glasses over House victories and bite fingernails over squeaker Senate races, here are some notes from today’s sessions at Web 2.0.

Thirteen new companies offered five-minute pitches for new products and services at the “Launchpad” event here.

The one that jumped out at me, unsurprisingly, given my history of interest in personal-information managers and the focus of my book on one such project, was Stikkit. It’s a personal-information manager (and sharing tool) built around a sticky-note metaphor. It looks like it has a heritage stretching all the way back to the old-fashioned “terminate and stay resident” note-taking programs like Sidekick and free-form PIMs like Lotus Agenda. Stikkit is led by Rael Dornfest, who I know from his work organizing many editions of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I made a note to myself to explore it further tonight, but it appears to be down at the moment. More later!

I was also intrigued by Klostu, an attempt to create a “super-social network” linking together the separate islands of the “Boardscape” — the thousands of disconnected message boards across the Net. This strikes me as smart: there were tons of communities sharing stuff online long before anyone had coined the term Web 2.0, and it makes a lot of sense to serve them.

The presenter for Instructables, a site featuring user-contributed “how-to” projects, repeatedly emphasized that his service’s most important feature is the passion of his users. He’s right: more than spiffy software or innovative business models, that’s what makes any Web venture — “2.0” or not — matter.

Here are the rest of the projects:

Omnidrive and Sharpcast: Two different approaches to syncing stores of content across multiple machines and devices.

Turn: Automated ad targeting.

Sphere: “Less geeky” blog search.

Adify: Instant advertising networks.

3B: Three-dimensional, walk-through Web browser.

ODesk: Hiring market and distributed management system for software developers.

Venyo: Reputation management service for bloggers.

Timebridge: Outlook add-on for meeting scheduling.
[tags]web 2.0, web2con, launch pad, stikkit, klostu, instructables[/tags]