Tom Leonard :
After aeons drifting hopelessly lost in the space/time continuum, Doctor Who is finally coming back to Earth.
In a move that heralds the most eagerly anticipated comeback in television history, BBC1 said yesterday that it is developing a new series of the sci-fi classic.
I'd like to repeat my vote for Stephen Fry as Dr Who.
Update: Tom Baker tips Eddie Izzard for the role
Friday, 26 September 2003
Thursday, 25 September 2003
Taxing the unemployed
I've just had a conversation with Linda Meridon of the City of San Jose Finance Department.
According to her, looking for contract work counts as running a business, and I need to apply for a San Jose business license.
Also, as I didn't apply when I started looking in August, I will be charged interest on the fees. And she wants a copy of my 2002 tax return.
Apparently, looking for full-time (W2) employment is fine, but if you say you'll accept contact work too, you need to register as a business.
This seems a classic example of the failure to apply leeway that Weinberger explains so well.
According to her, looking for contract work counts as running a business, and I need to apply for a San Jose business license.
Also, as I didn't apply when I started looking in August, I will be charged interest on the fees. And she wants a copy of my 2002 tax return.
Apparently, looking for full-time (W2) employment is fine, but if you say you'll accept contact work too, you need to register as a business.
This seems a classic example of the failure to apply leeway that Weinberger explains so well.
Monday, 22 September 2003
More Greedy Capitalists needed
Liz leads me toTim Burke:
Why is so much children's software so bad? Is it the need to appeal to parents with the proposition that it's "educational", which usually results in insincere, uninvolving, hack-design work in children's culture as a whole? Anybody got any ideas?
The problem is twofold. Childrens 'culture' in games or TV is triply disintermediated - by parents, publishers and producers. Most staff actually working in this business are too young to have children, and are ready prey for poorly justified ideology about learning from the second-rate academics they hire as consultants.
I've been there. I helped make forgettable software for small children that did not engage or teach them.
Software in these fields goes through storyboards, linearizing it to the point of dullness; the children often end up with the equivalent of watching a PowerPoint marketing presentation.
The key is, as Liz and Tim imply, is build model worlds for the children to explore and create in, not linearized presentations. The best children's software - Zoombinis, Zap!, SockWorks and Cocoa do this.
Why is so much children's software so bad? Is it the need to appeal to parents with the proposition that it's "educational", which usually results in insincere, uninvolving, hack-design work in children's culture as a whole? Anybody got any ideas?
The problem is twofold. Childrens 'culture' in games or TV is triply disintermediated - by parents, publishers and producers. Most staff actually working in this business are too young to have children, and are ready prey for poorly justified ideology about learning from the second-rate academics they hire as consultants.
I've been there. I helped make forgettable software for small children that did not engage or teach them.
Software in these fields goes through storyboards, linearizing it to the point of dullness; the children often end up with the equivalent of watching a PowerPoint marketing presentation.
The key is, as Liz and Tim imply, is build model worlds for the children to explore and create in, not linearized presentations. The best children's software - Zoombinis, Zap!, SockWorks and Cocoa do this.
Tim Oren goes after the RIAA again
Tim Oren: Most hostile analysis of the music industry has focused on its inability to cope with the transition from material scarcity to digital abundance in the distribution portion of its business. However, the labels have been equally hapless when it comes to exploiting the Internet as a medium for promotion. Specifically, their promotional model still hinges on the scarcity of play slots on radio stations, and the label's ability to control them through payola promotional spending.
Joe misses the point
Joe Wilcox:
Microsoft claims consumers and businesses can do lots of cool and productive things with Windows. But for all Windows' features, I find what I miss the most is the Internet. Or so I learned a few hours into my three days without Internet access.
[...]
Until this afternoon, when Comcast kicked local service back on, my computer was uncharacteristically idle, in spite of all the things I should be able to do with a Windows PC. It's the Internet, a creation apart from anything invented by Microsoft, that I missed. E-mail, instant messaging, (legal) downloadable music, online newspapers and wire feeds: These are the things for which I most use my PC and for which I sorely suffered without.
[...]
The Web has always been about content. Some of the most interesting stuff that could be delivered over the Web, such as movies and music, is not necessarily dependant on Windows for delivery.
He almost saw it, but then dropped the ball in the last paragraph. The Net is about people. The computer is the conduit to the other people through email, music, IM and the web.
'Content' is a word for the byproducts of these connections.
Microsoft claims consumers and businesses can do lots of cool and productive things with Windows. But for all Windows' features, I find what I miss the most is the Internet. Or so I learned a few hours into my three days without Internet access.
[...]
Until this afternoon, when Comcast kicked local service back on, my computer was uncharacteristically idle, in spite of all the things I should be able to do with a Windows PC. It's the Internet, a creation apart from anything invented by Microsoft, that I missed. E-mail, instant messaging, (legal) downloadable music, online newspapers and wire feeds: These are the things for which I most use my PC and for which I sorely suffered without.
[...]
The Web has always been about content. Some of the most interesting stuff that could be delivered over the Web, such as movies and music, is not necessarily dependant on Windows for delivery.
He almost saw it, but then dropped the ball in the last paragraph. The Net is about people. The computer is the conduit to the other people through email, music, IM and the web.
'Content' is a word for the byproducts of these connections.
Sunday, 21 September 2003
How to Atomize (or de-atomize) Syndication
Joi, Dave, Shelley and others have been talking about how Microsoft might approach the Syndication feud.
They're all missing how 'embrace and extend' works. Imagine I'm a developer who wants to write a tool that can read and write to weblogs. I look into it and discover that there are multiple conflicting versions of syndication formats, and multiple inconsistent blog posting APIs.
I have to pick which ones to start with, and implement multiple parsers and an outer API to talk to the various blog types available.
If Atom or Microsoft or RSS 2.0 or whomever wants to win converts in the future they need to solve this problem for would-be adopters. Here's how to do it (for clarity, I'm using Atom as the putative protagonist, largely because I can then use the pun 'Atomizer').
Take Postel's law seriously.
Implement a web service at atomizer.org that, presented with a feed URI in arbitrary format, returns a usable feed in Atom format. (For extra credit, provide an API in mainstream languages that does this transparently when parsing fails).
Implement another web service there that presents the atom API fro arbitrary blog URI's. It bridges the Blogger, Userland, MT, LiveJournal, etc. APis transparently.
Given such services, the choice should become obvious for all future developers.
Will any of these players pull this off? I don't know.
They're all missing how 'embrace and extend' works. Imagine I'm a developer who wants to write a tool that can read and write to weblogs. I look into it and discover that there are multiple conflicting versions of syndication formats, and multiple inconsistent blog posting APIs.
I have to pick which ones to start with, and implement multiple parsers and an outer API to talk to the various blog types available.
If Atom or Microsoft or RSS 2.0 or whomever wants to win converts in the future they need to solve this problem for would-be adopters. Here's how to do it (for clarity, I'm using Atom as the putative protagonist, largely because I can then use the pun 'Atomizer').
Take Postel's law seriously.
Implement a web service at atomizer.org that, presented with a feed URI in arbitrary format, returns a usable feed in Atom format. (For extra credit, provide an API in mainstream languages that does this transparently when parsing fails).
Implement another web service there that presents the atom API fro arbitrary blog URI's. It bridges the Blogger, Userland, MT, LiveJournal, etc. APis transparently.
Given such services, the choice should become obvious for all future developers.
Will any of these players pull this off? I don't know.
Saturday, 20 September 2003
Video Blogging
Joi comments on activist web video: At the joint Social Entrepreneurs and Global Leaders for Tomorrow meeting in Geneva, I met Gillian Caldwell. She is a film maker and an attorney and the Executive Director of WITNESS.
This is incredibly important work. They are causing a great deal of impact already, but I think blogs could help increase their ability to reach a broader audience. This is such a great reason to figure out video blogging.
He mentions later that he wants to 'deep-link' video.
By this I think he means he wants to excerpt a shorter clip from a longer video and use this as a link. Most web video models don't do this very well; because of inter-frame dependencies in both video and audio, you usually get either a visual glitch or a big bandwidth spike at the beginning of each excerpted clip. A standalone clip may work, a sequence of them will often fail to play right.
In addition, clip selection is fiddly to do well, and all-but impossible for streaming.
I have some ideas on how to get round this issue; it also needs some work on the presentation side for improved effect.
This is incredibly important work. They are causing a great deal of impact already, but I think blogs could help increase their ability to reach a broader audience. This is such a great reason to figure out video blogging.
He mentions later that he wants to 'deep-link' video.
By this I think he means he wants to excerpt a shorter clip from a longer video and use this as a link. Most web video models don't do this very well; because of inter-frame dependencies in both video and audio, you usually get either a visual glitch or a big bandwidth spike at the beginning of each excerpted clip. A standalone clip may work, a sequence of them will often fail to play right.
In addition, clip selection is fiddly to do well, and all-but impossible for streaming.
I have some ideas on how to get round this issue; it also needs some work on the presentation side for improved effect.
Isenberg takes up Power Laws
David Isenberg says:
Yahoo and Google are permanently popular; they have low Zipf volatility. But my hypothesis is that there's a middle tier of blogs with high Zipf volatility, where a well expressed idea or a funny story or a new factoid can rapidly catapult a blog from #100,000 to #1000, or in rare cases even to #10, in a matter of hours.
I am not sure how you'd test this idea experimentally (comments appreciated), and I am afraid that if you take 100 blogs, say between #100 and #200, and look at their delta-rank over a one week period, they might not look any different than the blogs between #20,000 and #20,100. Despite this caution, I strongly suspect that blog rank (and web site rank, to a lesser extent) has a burstiness that is not characteristic of other media, that permits new ideas (and new sites and blogs) to bubble up and subside, to move more readily than other media along the x-axis of Zipf's Law.
His intuition is right, but it doesn't just apply to blogs. Consider other power-law distributed things, such as music and movies - their rankings suffer sudden volatility too.
In one sense, the argument is obviously true - with a true power law distribution, once you get down to the smaller numbers there are many with the same value, so a change of one in your value can move you a long way up (or down) the rankings.
However, the underlying catastrophe theory that predicts power laws also predicts cascades of arbritrary size too, so Isenberg's theory is likely to be right.
Yahoo and Google are permanently popular; they have low Zipf volatility. But my hypothesis is that there's a middle tier of blogs with high Zipf volatility, where a well expressed idea or a funny story or a new factoid can rapidly catapult a blog from #100,000 to #1000, or in rare cases even to #10, in a matter of hours.
I am not sure how you'd test this idea experimentally (comments appreciated), and I am afraid that if you take 100 blogs, say between #100 and #200, and look at their delta-rank over a one week period, they might not look any different than the blogs between #20,000 and #20,100. Despite this caution, I strongly suspect that blog rank (and web site rank, to a lesser extent) has a burstiness that is not characteristic of other media, that permits new ideas (and new sites and blogs) to bubble up and subside, to move more readily than other media along the x-axis of Zipf's Law.
His intuition is right, but it doesn't just apply to blogs. Consider other power-law distributed things, such as music and movies - their rankings suffer sudden volatility too.
In one sense, the argument is obviously true - with a true power law distribution, once you get down to the smaller numbers there are many with the same value, so a change of one in your value can move you a long way up (or down) the rankings.
However, the underlying catastrophe theory that predicts power laws also predicts cascades of arbritrary size too, so Isenberg's theory is likely to be right.
Friday, 19 September 2003
In Memoriam Gilda Wickelgren
Our neighbour Gilda died early this morning after a long fight against hepatitis and its complications.
She was a wonderful, kindly, loving lady. With her husband Bruce, she grew us vegetables in her garden, showed us interesting parts of California, and was always the neighbour you dream to have. We will miss her a lot.
She was a wonderful, kindly, loving lady. With her husband Bruce, she grew us vegetables in her garden, showed us interesting parts of California, and was always the neighbour you dream to have. We will miss her a lot.
Thursday, 18 September 2003
Mark Petrovic of Earthlink
I had a long and fascinating discussion with Mark Petrovic today. David Beckemeyer - the Hecklebot creator - introduced us.
it's very encouraging to meet somone paid to think deeply.
it's very encouraging to meet somone paid to think deeply.
Wednesday, 17 September 2003
Monday, 15 September 2003
Updated with Photos
The St Luke's Chapel site now has photos.
Rosie's Science Class, which is held at the church, has Photos up too
Rosie's Science Class, which is held at the church, has Photos up too
Saturday, 13 September 2003
BloggerCon IRC details
I just posted BloggerCon IRC details over at the BloggerCon 2003 Weblog.
This includes a link to my experimental simple OS X IRC client written in Python & PyObjC. (Currently it's so simple it only lets you into #bloggercon...)
This includes a link to my experimental simple OS X IRC client written in Python & PyObjC. (Currently it's so simple it only lets you into #bloggercon...)
Friday, 12 September 2003
Lunch with Dave Sifry
Interesting things are afoot with Technorati. Dave's prodigous database just keeps growing.
Thursday, 11 September 2003
YesVideo tapping the American experience
I met with Subutai Ahmad of Yesvideo.
They have taken an interesting approach to the power law distribution of people with video cameras. They taregt the long tail who can't be botherd to edit it themselves. Instead they drop off the videotape at Walgreens with the photos, it gets shipped to Yesvideo, and they digitise it, make a DVD and ship it back. They have smart image processing to pick good chapter points and even make short highlights video.
Watching the multiple screens of people's home movie in the processing plan there I was forcefully reminded of Andrew Odlyzko's point about how much privately made media there is:
Historically, it appears that privately taken pictures have traditionally been the dominant source of data. An interesting accounting of all the information stored in the world in 1997 by Michael Lesk [Lesk] found that home photographs were the dominant component. (For a more complete and up-to-date accounting of information, see [LymanV]].) They contributed about 500,000 TB each year (even when one assumes that each picture is stored as a modest 10 KB JPEG file). By comparison, all the texts in the Library of Congress amounted to around 20 TB, while the graphics and music in that collection came to about 3,000 TB. Thus even this great library contained less than 1% of the world's information. (The publicly accessible Web pages currently contain a few tens of terabytes, just a few percent of what the Library of Congress has, but comparable to the text collections in that library.)
An obvious comment to the estimates above is that the purpose of a library is to select the most valuable material, and that most of those photographs contributing to the 500,000 TB are of no interest to most people. That is true, but that does not stop those pictures from being taken, and it will not stop an explosion in volumes of data collected this way in the future. A few pictures or video clips will turn out to be of great interest, in spite of amateur production. Just think of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, or the Rodney King video. More importantly, many of the pictures being taken are of interest, or might be of potential interest, to at least one person. Most of the world will have no interest in a picture of your newborn baby, but your mother will cherish it. Similarly, in the future you will be taking digital video clips of your children and sending at least some of them to your mother.
Imagine if this company was hooked up to the Internet Archive
They have taken an interesting approach to the power law distribution of people with video cameras. They taregt the long tail who can't be botherd to edit it themselves. Instead they drop off the videotape at Walgreens with the photos, it gets shipped to Yesvideo, and they digitise it, make a DVD and ship it back. They have smart image processing to pick good chapter points and even make short highlights video.
Watching the multiple screens of people's home movie in the processing plan there I was forcefully reminded of Andrew Odlyzko's point about how much privately made media there is:
Historically, it appears that privately taken pictures have traditionally been the dominant source of data. An interesting accounting of all the information stored in the world in 1997 by Michael Lesk [Lesk] found that home photographs were the dominant component. (For a more complete and up-to-date accounting of information, see [LymanV]].) They contributed about 500,000 TB each year (even when one assumes that each picture is stored as a modest 10 KB JPEG file). By comparison, all the texts in the Library of Congress amounted to around 20 TB, while the graphics and music in that collection came to about 3,000 TB. Thus even this great library contained less than 1% of the world's information. (The publicly accessible Web pages currently contain a few tens of terabytes, just a few percent of what the Library of Congress has, but comparable to the text collections in that library.)
An obvious comment to the estimates above is that the purpose of a library is to select the most valuable material, and that most of those photographs contributing to the 500,000 TB are of no interest to most people. That is true, but that does not stop those pictures from being taken, and it will not stop an explosion in volumes of data collected this way in the future. A few pictures or video clips will turn out to be of great interest, in spite of amateur production. Just think of the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination, or the Rodney King video. More importantly, many of the pictures being taken are of interest, or might be of potential interest, to at least one person. Most of the world will have no interest in a picture of your newborn baby, but your mother will cherish it. Similarly, in the future you will be taking digital video clips of your children and sending at least some of them to your mother.
Imagine if this company was hooked up to the Internet Archive
Wednesday, 10 September 2003
Lunch with Tim Oren
I had a fascinating lunch with Tim talking over possible futures of weblogging and how to rescue music from the RIAA mindset.
He later blogged a splendid rant on all the ways the labels destroy value apart from DRM.
He later blogged a splendid rant on all the ways the labels destroy value apart from DRM.
Monday, 8 September 2003
Rosie's Science School
Rosie has begun teaching science to Elementary students. Some details over at Wonder Why Science
Here she is demonstrating kinetic theory with blue ink in cold water and red in warm water:
The hot water molecules are moving faster, and hence mix the ink up more quickly.
Here she is demonstrating kinetic theory with blue ink in cold water and red in warm water:
The hot water molecules are moving faster, and hence mix the ink up more quickly.
Friday, 5 September 2003
Media Heresy - DRM destroys value
People find the familiar comfortable. They want things to be like they were. So when technology did away with scarcity of recordings by making perfect copying easy, they wanted to change things back, to make these digits behave like physical goods.
This is where the dream of DRM comes from - making digital goods scarce, and enforcing payment.
Now using machines to enforce laws is bad. They have no capacity for mercy, latitude or leeway.
And all DRM is readily circumvented as, eventually, it has to turn into patterns of light and sound for people to see and hear, and at this point cameras and microphones can record it. So for the determined adversary, it will be broken.
What this means is that DRM can never thwart the real enemy, it can only annoy the legitimate customers, and they will thus Pay less for the product, or not buy it at all.
There is a very odd reward curve here - the paying customers are getting less value than the non-paying circumventers. DRM is all stick and no carrot.
It is for this reason that DRM destroys value, and business models based on DRM always fail.
The putative counter example at the moment is the iTunes Music store, but as Apple ships a circumvention device with the application, by allowing you to burn the songs to CD, the case is unproven to put it mildly. Remember, the $7M that Apple has grossed from the iTMS is small change to them; they make many times that from selling iPods.
If the labels succeed in making iTMS Windows stricter it will sell fewer songs.
This week I have been reading Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital in which he explains how US property law changed to recognise what was really happening on the ground, rather than what the large landowners wished for. This set off the accumulation of capital that made the US the wealthiest country in the world.
Last week I read The Perfect Store about how Pierre Omidyar created a market for goods online, that was built on mutual trust, and it grew to become eBay, the most profitable of all online businesses.
The time is ripe to do the same for online media, and create a marketplace that reflects people's desires and trust.
This is where the dream of DRM comes from - making digital goods scarce, and enforcing payment.
Now using machines to enforce laws is bad. They have no capacity for mercy, latitude or leeway.
And all DRM is readily circumvented as, eventually, it has to turn into patterns of light and sound for people to see and hear, and at this point cameras and microphones can record it. So for the determined adversary, it will be broken.
What this means is that DRM can never thwart the real enemy, it can only annoy the legitimate customers, and they will thus Pay less for the product, or not buy it at all.
There is a very odd reward curve here - the paying customers are getting less value than the non-paying circumventers. DRM is all stick and no carrot.
It is for this reason that DRM destroys value, and business models based on DRM always fail.
The putative counter example at the moment is the iTunes Music store, but as Apple ships a circumvention device with the application, by allowing you to burn the songs to CD, the case is unproven to put it mildly. Remember, the $7M that Apple has grossed from the iTMS is small change to them; they make many times that from selling iPods.
If the labels succeed in making iTMS Windows stricter it will sell fewer songs.
This week I have been reading Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital in which he explains how US property law changed to recognise what was really happening on the ground, rather than what the large landowners wished for. This set off the accumulation of capital that made the US the wealthiest country in the world.
Last week I read The Perfect Store about how Pierre Omidyar created a market for goods online, that was built on mutual trust, and it grew to become eBay, the most profitable of all online businesses.
The time is ripe to do the same for online media, and create a marketplace that reflects people's desires and trust.
Thursday, 4 September 2003
Watch out CYC
What the #joiito bot knows. I'm dumping it out dynamically with the Twisted webserver, which is all Python too.
For some reason I needed to use a full path to the pickle data, not a local one.
For some reason I needed to use a full path to the pickle data, not a local one.
Wednesday, 3 September 2003
Firehose not straw
Having finally got DSL via Earthlink, I'm swamped by the megabit bandwidth. Lots of nice movies to watch.
Tuesday, 2 September 2003
Greg Dyke's speech in full says less than the press release:
We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes.
We intend to allow parts of our programmes, where we own the rights, to be available to anyone in the UK to download so long as they don't use them for commercial purposes.
Monday, 1 September 2003
Cartoon Network promotes homeschooling
Don't go back to school day is a day of warnings about schools. eg "Here's a helpful tip; while at school, try not to get beat up". It's not John Gatto, but it makes the point...
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