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iPod’s end suggests “end-to-end” model’s limits

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Walt Mossberg recently sang the praises of Apple’s “end-to-end” model that “tightly links hardware, software and Web services.” Apple has certainly found a Midas touch with the iPod; the devices are everywhere.

To me, though, Apple’s weak link has always been hardware. Of course it designs things beautifully; but the quality control has long been…problematic. I’m not merely talking of the spectacular incidents of battery combustion and such; the problem is that lots of basic components — things like keyboards and sockets — often fail. And people who love Apple’s software and hardware designs don’t have the option of buying, say, the Extra-Rugged Edition of the MacBook or the iPod. There’s only one supplier; your choices are limited.

These thoughts are occasioned by the final death of my old first-generation iPod, purchased in 2002. I’ve only given it light usage over the years. But I’d already had to replace the battery twice (Apple’s design assumed such an occasion would never arise). Now, though, the Firewire socket has come slightly loose and the iPod won’t make a connection with the computer at all (it won’t recharge, either, unless you jiggle the cable just so).

Four years is all we can expect from a portable music player, I suppose. I hied me to Apple and invested in a slim new player. But shouldn’t these toys have a label on them that reads “Warning: planned obsolescence”?

Back up a minute

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I live in earthquake country. In 1989 I’d just moved into the first apartment I ever owned instead of rented when Loma Prieta struck, knocking down great chunks of plaster from our walls and instilling in me a healthy respect for the power of faults.

This has also made me religious about data backup, and I have recently been hunting for the best deal in offsite backup. GMail is okay for the occasional file but not spacious enough to be a full solution. There are all sorts of commercial services around, but the pricing tends to get awfully steep once you factor in the size of many years’ archives and lots of music files.

Jungle Disk, an open source front end to Amazon’s S3 service, looks like a pretty good deal, though. (Thanks, Metafilter!) Is anyone using it? I’m going to test-drive it soon and will report on my experience.

How OPML got shared

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Dave Winer has launched Share Your OPML, a service that lets you upload a blog subscription list into a pool of shared information, where you can use it in various ways — see what other subscriptions are “like” yours, see who has subscribed to a specific blog, and so on. Bloglines lets you do a little of this from within its sub-universe of blog consumers, but Share Your OPML is more open-ended and agnostic; it also takes a wee bit more savvy to get your subscription file into its system. (OPML is the Web-based outlining format Winer has championed; it’s widely used for structuring the information in blog reading lists or “blogrolls.”)

The perplexing allure of the double “i”

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First there was Intel’s Viiv. Now, it’s Nintendo’s turn. That game box that used to be called the Revolution? It’s now Wii. (Pronounced “we.”)

Maybe people will end up calling it The Game Box Formerly Known as Revolution. Because I don’t think too many people are going to embrace this name.

Or maybe we should read it as Roman numerals. But that would make it the W2, which, you know, is already taken by the IRS.

We hold this truth self-evident: all packets created equal

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Congress is considering allowing the big phone and cable companies that now control most of the broadband access in the US to do something they want to do, but that has never been done before: turn the level playing field of today’s Internet into a sort of class-system environment, in which packets sent by companies that pay more get preferential treatment. This is a lousy idea that, at worst, could entirely disrupt our basic assumptions about the open Internet.

The companies involved keep saying, “Trust us,we will only use these new powers for good,” but I’m sorry, I don’t.

The Save The Internet coalition is a good starting point to find out more and see what you can do. Farhad Manjoo’s Salon piece about AT&T and the Net is an in-depth look at the issue; it’s fair to both sides of the argument, but I think you’ll come away from it as I did, wanting to make sure that AT&T doesn’t get its way.

Also, a couple of weeks ago Kevin Marks presented the technological case for why these companies do not need the privilege they seek. Supposedly it’s to make it more feasible to deliver high-quality audio and video over the Net. But, er, they can do that now, in many different ways, as Marks says.

Kurt Andersen and the new bubble, redux

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Last night Kurt Andersen posted a comment in response to my post below about his New York magazine article on the new Net bubble. It deserves highlighting. Andersen wrote:

  Actually, my point in admitting my ignorance in early 1994 (of the Web) and early 2000 (of blogs) and early 2002 (of RSS) was not so much the ignorance, which I don’t think was at all unusual (let alone extreme) at those respective moments — but rather how quickly in the internet realm the arcane becomes commonplace. (The phrase “worldwide Web,” for instance, had appeared exactly twice in the New York Times when I first heard it in early 1994; “blog” apparently wasn’t coined until the spring of 1999, and didn’t appear in the Times until the spring of 2001; and RSS first appeared in the Times in the spring of 2003.)

Fair enough. So Andersen’s point wasn’t to emphasize that he was unusually far behind the curve, but rather to underscore how speedily the phenomena he was catching up to would go mainstream. But I think these divergent readings of the same passage only end up underscoring my argument — that such things look very different from the West Coast end of the telescope.

I don’t know how useful it is to venture deeper into the thickets of chronology. “Early 1994” is a lot different from later 1994 in matters of early Web awareness; Peter Merholz may have coined the term “blog” in spring 1999, but the concept of “weblog” was long-established by then (I wrote in May, 1999: “A phenomenon known as the weblog is one of the fastest-growing and most fertile creative areas on the Web today”); RSS was in wide use at Salon and other places by 2000 and commonplace by 2001-2.

More interesting, to me, is the usage of New York Times reference-counting as a yardstick of prevalence. My argument was about how slow and sometimes blind the New York media culture can be to picking up on trends and practices that have already become commonplace elsewhere, particularly in Silicon Valley and the Web industry. It wouldn’t surprise me that New York Times keyword counts similarly lag. I mean, RSS first rearing its head in spring 2003? I — and a lot of other people — were living inside our feed readers by then.

Certainly, this industry moves fast. But the New York perspective tends to see new tech and Web trends as popping up instantaneously, out of nowhere, and that exaggerates their true speed and robs us of the opportunity to understand their provenance.

The Web wouldn’t have seemed like quite the bolt-out-of-the-blue if you’d been paying attention to the steady acceleration in Internet growth and awareness that had preceded it in the early ’90s (a lot of people had Internet e-mail before they’d ever heard the prefix ‘http’). Blogs were less of a surprise if you’d had an ear cocked to the remarkable flourishing of personal Web-based journals from 1995-8. If you checked in on any kind of frequency to Dave Winer’s Scripting News in the late ’90s, which a lot of us did, you couldn’t help getting an education in RSS.

All of which is simply to underscore my argument: that media people ought to pay a little more advance attention to technology people. The techies’ early-adoption enthusiasms serve as a distant-early-warning system — not infallible, but valuable — for the new wrinkle that will be a media-world craze in two or three years. I can understand how New York was blindsided in the 1990s. But there’s no excuse for it today.

Google in China: Shades of good and evil

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Clive Thompson’s excellent New York Times magazine piece on Google and China plays out variations on Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” principle inspired by the company’s new accommodation with Chinese censorship. Censorship is surely a form of evil; but is it all right to compromise a little bit with said evil if one is doing so on behalf of a greater good? Google’s famous mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”; is it okay to fulfill a lot of that mission by betraying a little of it?

These themes, Thompson rightly points out, echo the arguments in the 1980s between the anti-apartheid movement, which argued for boycott, and the “constructive engagement” position of companies that said they were able to do good by doing business in South Africa. But today’s U.S. economy is far more deeply entangled with China than 1980s America was with South Africa. Few today would argue for an economic boycott of China; where would we get our goods? It’s a historical irony that the record national debt run up by today’s conservative Republican hegemony — heirs to the red-baiters of yore — can only be underwritten by the heirs of Mao in the People’s Republic of China.

So boycott is off the table; maybe engagement is better than nothing. I’m not wholly convinced, and I don’t think Thompson is, either. But his piece lays out the nuances in a useful and thought-provoking way.

Most interesting, to me, is this observation about Chinese blogger Zhao Jing:

  The Internet brought Zhao a certain amount of political influence, yet he seemed less excited about the way his blog might transform the government and more excited about the way it had transformed his sense of himself. Several young Chinese told me the same thing. If the Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is experienced mostly as one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand tiny, everyday ways.

I think that observation applies not only in China, but everywhere, and certainly here, in the U.S., where so many observers in the media continue to misunderstand the importance of blogging. Most journalists with successful careers have completely internalized the sort of “empowerment” Zhao experienced when he started blogging. Not only do they take it for granted, they take it as a professional right, and they have a hard time understanding what it might mean for non-journalists to experience. They simply can’t accept that a blogger’s musings might have significance for him/herself, and reach an audience of 12, or 120, and never engage a vast audience, and that might still feel like a success.

A China full of people — not all billion, maybe only hundreds or tens of millions, but lots, anyway — experiencing that sense of “self-actualization” might be a nation that grew less and less satisfied with a censoring regime and increasingly interested in changing it.

That doesn’t get Google off the hook, exactly, since Google isn’t facilitating self-publishing in China — the Google-owned Blogger doesn’t operate inside China the way MSN Spaces does. But it’s another sign that absolutist, black-and-white rhetoric is too limited for this arena. Google might well be betraying its “Don’t be evil” slogan; but the slogan might also be too simple-minded for the complexities of the global stage.

Feeding the Bittorrent beast

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Dave Winer talks about the growing importance of Bittorrent, mentions how Opera (still my favorite browser!) now supports it, and asks for “more non-infringing content.”

Hollywood hates Bittorrent because some people use it to redistribute illegally copied movie and music files. In the case of music, you can use Bittorrent to move around large libraries very quickly.

But the most common use of Bittorrent I see out there is not trading humongo MP3 libraries but instead much-higher-quality (.flac, .shn, etc.) recordings of live shows by bands that support such trading. These “lossless” music files are much bigger than MP3s; Bittorrent makes it possible to download them in a reasonable amount of time. The file traders are religious about preferring the higher-quality compression scheme — many will include little notices begging you not to convert the files to the “lossy” MP3.

Personally, I consider these recordings “non-infringing,” though I don’t know what the lawyers would say. Largehearted Boy does a daily “Bittorrent Brunch” pointing to new postings, many at Dimeadozen.

Kurt Andersen on the new Web boom: Why the media industry keeps blowing bubbles

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One of my first stops each morning is Jim Romenesko’s venerable blog of news-industry items. Since I work with one foot in the world of politics and journalism and the other in the tech world, sometimes the headlines trip me up.

This morning, for instance, I learned from Romenesko that “WP promotes Perl.” Aha! The Washington Post has decided that the open-source programming/scripting language Perl is the answer to its problems! No, this is a journalist named Peter Perl, and he’s becoming the Post’s associate managing editor. I’m not sure how many of Romenesko’s readers know, or care, what Perl is. But maybe they should.

Case in point: today’s dose of Romenesko pointed me toward New York magazine, where Kurt Andersen ponders whether the Web industry is once more heading into bubble territory — and concludes that it is. I don’t know which is scarier: Andersen’s general portrait of ignorance chasing investment returns, or his specific news that Michael Wolff (of “Burn Rate” fame) is plotting his return to the Net industry.

Andersen takes a bemused stance, suggesting that nobody really knows how far the insanity will go this time around. It’s hard to argue with that. But — as many media-industry-focused, New-York-based writers trying to get their heads around trends incubated in other places often have — he generalizes his own sense of ignorance a bit too broadly, implying that his own failures to pick up the scent of important new tech trends mean that any effort to do so must be doomed.

He kicks off with a series of anecdotes: In 1994, Time’s Walter Isaacson told him to nab the “New York” domain name for New York mag, which he was editing. Andersen admits he didn’t know what Isaacson was talking about. In 2000, when he was launching Inside.com, his partner Michael Hirschorn suggested that they create blogs on their site. Andersen didn’t know what blogs were. Two years later, as Inside was imploding, a friend in the business told him he should look into RSS. The term drew another blank stare.

These experiences, Andersen concludes, “confirm William Goldman’s truism about show business: Nobody knows anything.”

No, they don’t do that at all. In fact, Andersen’s advisers all seem to have known some very valuable and important things, things that he could have learned — and profited — from. I’ll give him credit for openly admitting his ignorance; that’s more than a lot of writers would do. But the leap from “I keep missing the boat” to “there is no boat” is unwarranted.

In the mid-’90s, as the hard work of building the Web industry began, it was hard to get people in New York to take what was happening on the Internet seriously. Then, in the late ’90s, as the prospect of vast IPO returns loomed, it was hard to get them to view anything that was happening on the Net critically. When the bubble burst, the general feeling in the corridors of media power was, “Thank God that Web stuff is over — now we can stop paying attention to all those Silicon Valley acronyms.” Today, apparently, the bit has flipped once more, and New York is returning to an uncritical embrace of all things Webbish.

What about the middle position? The one where you say, there’s enormous value and considerable crap bubbling out of the technology industry, and you try to do the hard work of sorting one from the other?

Ah, but that would mean trying to learn about things like domain names and blogs and RSS before they become buzzwords. And that, it seems, is simply asking too much.

Random links

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## “Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient” [link courtesy Metafilter]:

Ever since I discovered that my aging trove of files written in WordPerfect 4.x was getting harder and harder to rescue from the digital scrapheap, I have made a point of storing all my writing and notes in plain-text form. When the Web came along and I moved my career from print to online, this made even more sense, since for anything that’s going to end up as HTML, the detour into some proprietary word-processing format is not merely a waste of time but an active hazard, and at the end of the line you’re only going to want plain text anyway.

When the whole life-hacks movement got going I was pleased to learn that my own behavior matched those of many uber-geeks who preferred plain text files for their longevity and adaptability.

This “word processors” rant is an old piece but it makes a cogent argument for the separation of content from display formatting — a sensible principle that drives most content-management software and Web-site production tools today.

## Mark Dominus unearths the origin of the “equals” sign in a 16th-century manuscript page — and in the process, explains a fascinating phase in the development of English in a page from Robert Recorde’s “The Whetstone of Witte.” [Link courtesy Greg Knauss over at kottke.org]

 

I had recently learned that the twiddle in the Spanish ñ character was similarly a letter “n”. A word like “año” was originally “anno” (as it is in Latin) and the second “n” was later abbreviated to a diacritic over the first “n”. (This makes a nice counterpoint to the fact that the mathematical logical negation symbol ∼ was selected because of its resemblance to the letter “N”.) But I had no idea that anything of the sort was ever done in English.

Recorde’s book shows clearly that it was, at least for a time. The short passage illustrated above contains two examples. One is the word “examples” itself, which is written “exãples”, with a tilde over the “a”. The other is “alteration”, which is written “alteratiõ”, with a tilde over the “o”. More examples abound: “cõpendiousnesse”, “nõbers”, “denominatiõ”, and, I think, “reme~ber”.

Dominus follows up with more on diacritical marks here. Unlike other European languages, English gradually dropped this practice, but in some alternate universe, we might be spelling “annual” añual.

I am always delighted with such evidence of the fluidity and dynamism of English — the 16th century was a period when the language was constantly soaking up words and structures from other cultures. Shakespeare and his contemporaries took full advantage of the language melee around them, and even as standards and rules coalesced in later centuries, English never adopted a top-down system of rules dictated by some academy (or Academie). Which is why, while I enjoy the pedanticism of a book like “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” as much as anyone else who has ever edited copy, I am happy that no dictator governs the language I work with every day, and that it is free to evolve based on the needs and practices of the people who use it.