We run SpamAssassin on our mailserver here at Salon, and it’s generally done a good job of tagging the mountain of spam I receive, but lately, the wily spammers have gotten better at evading it, and on weekends I was seeing hundreds of spams again. So this week I downloaded and installed the newest Eudora (6.0) which includes a Bayesian filter that “learns” what I consider spam. The crap that eludes SpamAssassin and breaches the outer perimeter is now being mercilessly spotlit and executed before it can penetrate the confines of my inbox. (Do I sound like a crazed paramilitary freak? I guess that’s what too many years of >1000 spams per day does to you.) It’s too bad we now need a two-stage defense against spam, but at least it actually works.
Late to the party. What are we celebrating again?
I’ve read a bit of the vast outpouring of posts in the blogosphere about Orkut, Google’s new (and “still in beta”) social-networking software system. I’d never taken the dive into Friendster, Tribe or any of the other vaguely or not-so-vaguely similar systems out there. So when I received an invitation from a long-time online correspondent to join Orkut and take a look, I thought, hey, why not? See what all the fuss is about.
So I signed up and I’m still trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.
Orkut signs you up, lets you post as little or as much info about yourself as you feel comfortable providing, and then opens the door for you to cross-link yourself with anyone else on its network who you might consider a friend, assuming the feeling is reciprocated. The end result is a sort of six-degrees-of-separation chart, a digital map that should let you explore “who’s friends with my friends.”
As many observers have already pointed out (see Dave Weinberger’s critique here), this approach has its weaknesses and limitations. There’s a forced, binary choice in the “friend/not friend” classification, when in real life we all have a lot of “sort of” friends. The connections the service elucidates are really more typically acquaintances and not close friends, anyway.
The larger question for me is, why take the time? I’ve already got a pile of contacts in my address book for people who are genuine friends. This blog has a loose network of people it links to and people who link to it. Assuming one is not in the market specifically for dating and mating — which creates its own powerful motivations — then Orkut seems to exist pretty much as a self-referential proof-of-concept.
I think I’m supposed to be interested in it because social software is hot right now and people are generally aware that software which connects people is a Good Thing. But where Meetup has the specific purpose of coordinating real-time and real-space events, where blogs have the specific purpose of allowing individuals to publish news and ideas to the whole Net, where venerable online environments like The Well have long had the specific purpose of engendering group conversation, Orkut seems strictly omphaloskeptic: I just don’t see how it reaches outside the framework of the relationships it traces to accomplish anything once it makes those relationships explicit.
Maybe I just haven’t delved deep enough into the phenomenon. This reaction is based on one evening’s exploration of the service, so if I’m missing something — obvious or subtle — tell me, please!
Department of good news
Slashdot already has this link, but some information bears as wide distribution as possible! CNN reports on a study that says avid Net users watch less TV but aren’t geeky hermits at all:
| The typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers, the study added.
“Use of the Internet is reducing television viewing around the world while having little impact on positive aspects of social life,” said Jeffrey Cole, director of the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the California university that organized the project. |
The poetry of spam
As part of a recent cycle in the arms race between spam senders and spam filters, the spammers have begun raiding the English dictionary for random obscure words to seed their subject lines, helping evade intelligent filters like SpamAssassin. Thus I am seeing some of their messages. And I have to say, though I am no happier at receiving their e-mail than anyone else, and have less than zero interest in the herbal viagra and penis patches they are peddling, the random verbiage in their subject lines sometimes catches my fancy.
Perhaps spam is, as my colleague Sumana Harihareswara has proposed and chronicled, a kind of folk art. Consider some of the recent examples I’ve culled. These are juxtapositions of words that might inspire a new generation of band names, or spark a screenwriter’s imagination. Herewith, the subject lines, and my attempt at interpretation:
interlace possibility
— A TV engineer daydreams of romance
origami inflation
— Paper money is always at risk
yarmulke bedaub
— No baptism please, we’re Jewish
antimacassar asymmetry
— Headrests in need of some thoughtful rearrangement
And my favorite:
aerogene flagstaff phantasy haze
— special effects smoke generator deployed for Jimi Hendrix Arizona gig!
Art is so much a matter of projection, anyway. The Rain Parade had an album title, “Emergency Third Rail Power Trip,” which struck me — when, as a resident of Boston in the mid-1980s, I purchased the LP — as a psychedelic word-poem about electrocuted megalomaniacs. When I moved to San Francisco I discovered its more prosaic origin, as a utility sign posted near the BART tracks.
BONUS LINKS: Spam poetry.
Other Google links for spam poetry
Random links
Real Live Preacher is wrestling with the question of his anonymity.
Tim Bray is exploring the factors that make different technologies into successes or failures.
Yearend fugue
Blogging from me will be light over the holidays. Any spare time I get over the next week will be devoted, weather allowing, to building my kids a swing set in the backyard. But before the eggnog haze descends upon us, a few choice links.
First, Mother Jones has an interview with Tony Kushner in which the “Angels in America” playwright states, with crystalline precision, the essential fact of the 2004 election. This should be etched into the consciousness of everyone who hopes that things in the U.S. can be put back on course:
| Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country’s future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs — if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate — don’t give him your vote. Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.
The GOP has developed a genius for falling into lockstep. They didn’t have it with Nixon, but they have it now. They line up behind their candidate, grit their teeth, and help him win, no matter who he is. MJ: You’re saying progressives are undone by their own idealism? TK: The system isn’t about ideals. The country doesn’t elect great leaders. It elects fucked-up people who for reasons of ego want to run the world. Then the citizenry makes them become great. |
One light of hope this year is that the citizenry has important and still-underestimated tools at its disposal to egg its leaders on to greatness. If you’re keeping up with the blogosphere you may be sick to death by now of reading about the power of many-to-many decentralization, “social software” and the Dean campaign’s remarkable online successes. But what if you’re stuck inside the Beltway? Frank Rich’s Sunday column this week serves as a useful reminder that most of the Washington press corps remains utterly and pathetically clueless about what has already happened during this election cycle. Jay Rosen’s annotation of Rich’s column is well worth reading, too.
So we’re fortunate to live at a moment when the technologies many of us have enthusiastically embraced for two decades are showing signs of achieving social and political ends beyond simply bringing delight to geekdom or fueling the stock market. Cory Doctorow has good words here:
| The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It’s about realizing that all the really hard problems — free expression, copyright, due process, social networking — may have technical dimensions, but they aren’t technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can’t solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them. |
(And Kevin Werbach points out that technology and policy are always intertwined.)
Finally, as many of us retreat from the daily grind to take year-end stock, I want to offer you this wonderful passage that Kevin Kelly cited earlier this month on his Cool Tools blog. It’s from a book titled “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking,” by David Bayles and Ted Orland, that I will have to add to my 2004 reading list.
| The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. |
Which, I suppose, is an anecdotal version of the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” But I prefer the Samuel Johnson version: “Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.”
Thanks to Salon’s subscribers for keeping us going through these thin years — and special thanks to all the Salon bloggers for keeping their “quantity” and “quality” fires stoked. Happy holidays to all.
Costikyan vs. the Times
Greg Costikyan takes apart yesterday’s New York Times Magazine cover story on videogames:
| We then have some yada-yada from Bonnel about how games are similar to primitive dance, which is nonsense; the case he could, and should, be making is that play is as fundamental to humans as story, and games thus appeal to a fundamental part of what it is to be human, just as stories do. But this would, of course, sabotage the argument that games are form of storytelling–which I don’t think I need to debunk again… |
Microsoft, Longhorn, blogs
My latest column is up today: It offers an overview of Microsoft’s vast Longhorn juggernaut — and a bit of praise for the company (yes, we’re capable of that when it’s warranted) for letting loose its horde of developers to blog about their work on the new operating system. How many will still be blogging in 2006 or beyond, when Longhorn finally ships? We’ll just have to wait and see.
Doc Searls on presentations
I’m glad I posted that item about PowerPoint because it gave Doc Searls an opportunity to link to his 1998 piece on how to create a good presentation — “It’s the story, stupid” — which I’d never read. Good stuff, about both PowerPoint and public speaking in general.
Face time
Edward Tufte’s diatribe against PowerPoint, which I wrote about six months ago, is back in the news thanks to some recent exposure in Wired.
Tim Bray articulates something important about this subject that I learned several years ago: Slides should complement a talk, not replicate it:
| …You have to get away from the idea that what’s in your slides is the content of your presentation. Slides aren’t big enough or rich enough or smart enough to themselves contain any presentation worth listening to for more than about ten minutes. Instead, your slides are a visual auxiliary to your material; no more, no less. |
You can build slides as a set of illustrations to parallel what you’re saying, or even offer a comic counterpoint to it. Some really adept speakers use slides as a sort of loose score, creating a riffing rhythm between slide and speech (Lawrence Lessig is a master of this technique). The single deadliest thing a speaker can do is read from his own slides.
In an age of information overload and telecommunications abundance, the simple fact of a speaker and audience sharing a physical space and real time is precious. A speaker owes listeners the courtesy of turning to face them and giving them something of herself. If all I wanted to do was read your slides, I can download them, thanks.