Do not fold, bend, mutilate or Kindle

I had some hopes for Amazon's e-book device - after all I buy paper books from Bezos via Amazon Prime weekly, I buy Subterranean Press's splendid editions, and I even end up susbcribing to the Folio Society's offers each year. I spend 8-12 hours a day reading screens and 1-4 reading paper books; I should be right in their target market. So I'm really sorry that KIndle is doomed.

I'll keep this short. Kindle requires DRM. DRM destroys value - it makes things do less and cost more, and means they will break suddenly without warning when the service inevitably goes bust.

If you have $400 to spend on a small gadget to read outdoors on, buy yourself an OLPC and give one away to a child elsewhere too. If you are still tempted by the Kindle swindle, read Mark Pilgrim's literary dismissal of it.

Open Rights Group - Happy ORG day

I'm proud to have been involved with the Open Rights Group since it was an idea at a conference, and to be on the Advisory Board.

Today, the two year report was published.

By using web tech to gather reasoned responses to digital rights issues, ORG has got a lot done in the UK, from helping persuade the Gowers review of intellectual property that copyright should not be extended, to sensibly evaluating and opposing the blind use of e-voting and e-counting equipment in May 2007's ballots, to clearly explaining to the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group that Digital Rights Management is a huge mistake.

You should sign up to support more good work from ORG.

OpenSocial and Social Software history

In the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison have written a very thorough history of Social Network Sites.

Over at the OpenSocial API site we've written what we hope could be their future. Let me know what you think.

All bloggers are above average

Chuq and Joseph are pondering 'active' blogs. Chuq says:

As of today, my feed readership is between 550 and 600. My Technorati authority is 117, my rank is 54,800ish. All things considered, my blogs are small, very much personal.

Yet, do the math. 100 MILLION blogs, and mine is the 50,000th largest in the world?

Or do your own test. create an empty blog, register it with technorati, post a couple of test messages, and do nothing else. Don't advertise it, don't point to it, don't create content. you'll likely find that Technorati will throw it somewhere around 1mm in authority.

He goes on to challenge Technorati's count of 100 million blogs because of this. What is really going on? Well, links to blogs follow a Long Tail distribution. You can debate whether it's a power law or an exponential, but it isn't a gaussian. Here's a 2005 links vs rank log chart, and here's a 2006 one (if Technorati want to run my old script that generates these we could have a 2007 one). Technorati's 'Authority' is the number of inbound links in the last 180 days. So, as Chuq notes, if you have a new blog with no links to it, it is ranked about 4 millionth, tied with every other blog with no inbound links. So yes, everyone is above average - they're all on the 96th percentile.

But what happens when you start getting links? I have a couple of old blogs that have a few. With 2 links, my rank goes up to 2.6 Millionth; with 3 to 1.9 millionth, with 5 to 1.2 millionth, up to this blog with 141 inbound links ranked at 44,734. This is a very easy hill to climb in percentage terms, though clearly getting into the top 100 is still relatively hard.

So what of Chuq's contention that the other 96 million blogs with no links are "abandoned, stillborn, or some kind of spam blog" ? A lot of blogs are made for specific events, and don't need further posts adding (and so may not have been linked to in the last 180 days), and a lot have a low posting rate, sure. But, as Dave Winer once said, by that measure every book and magazine article is abandoned. Not all blogs are interested in links - many are personal journals or for a small group of friends to read, and achieving those goals well.

So Chuq's accusations of "playing fast and loose wiht the numbers" are really his misunderstandings of Long Tail distributions. In the Blogosphere, like Lake Woebegon, everyone really is above average.

AtomPub is an RFC

The Atom Publishing Protocol is now an IETF RFC standard. RFC stands for Request For Comments, but if you have any comments, it may be a ittle late. You could add them to a comment feed using AtomPub though

Bladerunner and Middlesbrough

Steelworks
Originally uploaded by andy martin [interzone]

Ridley Scott on Bladerunner:

I don't think all directors do, but I certainly draw from personal experience — sometimes I remember things, sometimes it will come out from the back of my head and I'm thinking, I never knew where that came from. And then I can analyze afterwards and realize that's what it was. Funny enough, the beauty in industry, which is probably killing us, but actually nevertheless is beautifully like Hades, is one reason why you start to feel the beauty in the godawful condition of the red horizon and the geysers of filth going into the air. I used to go to art school in West Hartlepool College up in the north of England, which is almost right alongside the Durham steel mills and Imperial Chemical Industries, and the air would smell like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it's steel, and it's probably particles, it's not very good. But I'm still here. So, you draw back on that. And to walk across that footbridge at night, you'd be walking fundamentally above, on an elevated walk on the steel mill. So you'd be crossing through, sometimes, the smoke and dirt and crap, and you're looking down into the fire. So, things like that are remembered.

See this one too

Storytelling and performance

Alice Mathias in the NYT points out that public profiles are a kind of performance:

Facebook did not become popular because it was a functional tool — after all, most college students live in close quarters with the majority of their Facebook friends and have no need for social networking. Instead, we log into the Web site because it’s entertaining to watch a constantly evolving narrative starring the other people in the library.

I’ve always thought of Facebook as online community theater. In costumes we customize in a backstage makeup room — the Edit Profile page, where we can add a few Favorite Books or touch up our About Me section — we deliver our lines on the very public stage of friends’ walls or photo albums. And because every time we join a network, post a link or make another friend it’s immediately made visible to others via the News Feed, every Facebook act is a soliloquy to our anonymous audience.

It’s all comedy: making one another laugh matters more than providing useful updates about ourselves, which is why entirely phony profiles were all the rage before the grown-ups signed in. One friend announced her status as In a Relationship with Chinese Food, whose profile picture was a carry-out box and whose personal information personified the cuisine of China.

This is of course what danah has been saying for years:

While some early adopters viewed Friendster as a serious tool for networking, others were more interested in creating non-biographical characters for playful purposes. Referred to as Fakesters, these Profiles represented everything from famous people (e.g., Angelina Jolie) and fictional characters (Homer Simpson) to food (Lucky Charms), concepts (Pure Evil), and affiliations (Brown University). Some Fakesters were created to connect people with common affiliations, geography, or interests. The most active and visible Fakesters, however, were primarily crafted for play. [...]

Fakesters had a significant impact on the cultural context of Friendster. In their resistance, their primary goal was to remind users that, “none of this is real.” They saw purportedly serious Profiles as fantastical representations of self, while the Testimonials and popularity aspect of the Friend network signified the eternal struggle to make up for being alienated in high school. Through play, Fakesters escaped the awkward issues around approving Friends and dealing with collapsed contexts, mocking the popularity contest. Their play motivated other participants to engage in creative performance, but at the same time, their gaming created a schism in the network resulting in a separation between playful participants and serious networkers.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Sanderson is explaining the art of video storytelling, and how to stop short of lèse majesté:

I want to write about fakery in television, because there's something odd going on. None of these 'scandals', from naming Socks the cat to having someone stand in for competition winners when the phone line goes dead in the full glare of live transmission, is particularly shocking to anyone who's made videos. Not worked in broadcast, note -- made videos. When I get a bunch of 14 year-olds to make their first short film, they'll frequently assume they can fake stuff, cheat, and generally bend the resulting video to their will.

Now, all it takes is for me to stare at them for a few moments. The light will go off in their heads and they'll say 'Oh, right. OK, yes. Fine. We'll do it for real.' But the natural human affiliation with cheating is sufficiently powerful, it's often the first assumption.

Later in the day, when the same group is putting together their sequence, they'll find me and say 'If we change the order like this, the film makes more sense. But... that's faking, isn't it?'

...which is, of course, the crux of the matter, because all video is faked to some extent or other. Everything you do up to the point where you start editing is just collecting raw material -- your film is made, crafted, shaped, in the edit suite, not in front of the camera.

It has to be this way, because real life plays out excruciatingly slowly. The responsibility and skill in making films, then, lies in telling stories more quickly, and more engagingly, than real time. Which requires that you leave bits out, which in turn requires judgement about which parts are important.

Telling stories honestly is an aspiration, but not a requirement -- the temptation to cheat and edit the material in order to tell an even better story even more quickly is always there. If the story's better, and more people watch, that's a success, right? If teenagers hacking away in iMovie in a school lab face these sorts of dilemmas and compromises, you can imagine the discussions that happen in chic Avid suites in Soho.

We all live in the minds of others through telling them stories about ourselves, but we also live in our own minds that way too - the research on memory shows how we readily confabulate extra detail to flesh out a story, and that every time we remember somethign we reify it further, combining it with new experiences both real and confabulated, so that the tale grows in the telling.

As danah notes, the persistence, searchability and replicablity of these digital environments belie our self-constructed memories with awkwardly concrete virtual histories. Massively Multiplayer Online Truth is an interesting game, and one where we are still working out the rules.

iPod progress

I got an new iPod nano for my birthday yesterday. I considered the iPhone and iPod Touch, but their poor keyboard won't replace my Sidekick, and they omitted the most important features.
Specifically, iPhone lacks instant messaging, and both iPhone and iPod touch have Wifi, yet unaccountably don't support iTunes song sharing.

A bit of context here — back when we were pitching Wifi and Zeroconf to Steve Jobs at Apple, the killer demo was the iTunes + QuickTime sharing of music and videos — Macs in the same room finding each other and making their music libraries and videos mutually available, whether you have a router or not. The underlying protocol here is called DAAP, which is just some conventions for using HTTP 1.1 to play remotely and update the song list.

However, the edition of iTunes this went out in was unfortunately the same one that added the iTunes Store. From our developer point of view, the fact that there were 4 separate open source interoperating implementations of DAAP within a week was a big burst of validation for our efforts, but this caused huge confusion among the Record Labels that Jobs had invested so much time in schmoozing to set the store up. Eventually, after too many arguments with Label execs where he tried to explain "but the songs bought from iTunes Store won't be playable remotely, just the CD-ripped ones", he insisted the protocol be changed, which it was, several times.

The social sharing of music via iTunes is still a new and lovely feature of offices, campuses and coffee shops everywhere. But the iPhone users are left out in the cold. They can't see iTunes libraries, they can't share their own songs. Watching the launch of the "buy the song playing in Starbucks" feature, my immediate thought was "Steve, do you want to change the world, or do you just want to sell sugared coffee to kids?"

That said, I am a big fan of the 206 dpi screen on the new iPod nano. I did the maths, and that implies a full HD screen (1920x1200 with room for a controller bar) that is about 9.5 inches by 6 inches - sounds like a nice new Apple subnotebook for MacWorld January. Three and a half years ago, I pointed out the very rapid growth of storage per buck. I now have an iPod that is half the price, a tenth the weight and volume, and that plays video as predicted.

Bubbles and Facebook

A few days back, danah asked:

I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There's no doubt that Facebook's F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer's wet dream. (Never mind that I don't know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don't understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why is the tech crowd so entranced with Facebook?

This made me think of my sure-fire bubble indicator:

When expensively educated, fashionable young graduates start showing up in your field, you're in a bubble.

[...}The trouble with this indicator is that if you aren't looking for it it seem like the natural order of things - of course having personable young things hanging on your every word is to be expected - finally you're getting the recognition you deserve!

In practice, however, the finely-tuned herd instincts that get selected for in the Ivy League or the posher UK universities make them flock to the latest bubble

By this measure, we are well into a bubble in the Valley, (Google being the top company of choice for MBA's is one example), but Facebook has a perfect conjunction here - growing out of Harvard and the Ivy League, it started out with the very crowd of high-achieving conformists that danah called hegemonic teens, who make up my leading indicator, so when they connected with the tech crowd the mentos hit the coke.

Journalists slumming online

I've realised why I got quote so cross with Andrew Keen and the way he portrays the net as 'corrupting'. Pagan Kennedy's essay on MySpace reminded me, and Tom's passionate defence of his blog against PR slummers who want to use him as a mouthpiece confirmed this thought. There is a temptation online, and that is to go slumming - to pretend that you can abuse people's trust and emotions without fear of personal consequences, that people online are somehow not real and so you can toy with them and remain above it. A while back at Making Light, Lucy Kemnitzer explained this well:

Slumming isn't going to a seedy place. Slumming is taking your superior attitude and your certainty that the world is your Disneyland in with you. It's looking at the people who work there as performing monkeys putting on a show for you. It's being cushioned by your privilege. It's thinking that if the place is raided, surely you will be passed over because you're not one of those people. It's running a narration in your head where you are the normal observer, and those guys are the freaks.

You can do it almost everywhere. I've seen people do it on an ordinary residential street in a city, going into a corner restaurant or working man's bar as if it were the Exotic And Dangerous Gangsta Exhibit at a Los Vegas theme hotel. I've seen people do it at a flea market in an ordinary rural town. Or at the weekly get-together of a community, where they danced and sang and gave each other presents (a pow-wow). I saw people doing it at my college, thanks to a former Governor and President calling it a cross between a hippie pad and a bordello.

Here's a clue about how not to go slumming when you enter a place: shed your privilege and your pretensions to superiority. If they play music that isn't to your taste, maybe it's because they hear something in it that you don't, so listen. If they're presenting an image you find disturbing, maybe you're not looking at it right. If you can't get out of your own skull while you're there, maybe you belong somewhere else.

When Keen (p76) cites Michael Hiltzik and Lee Siegel (both journalists who got caught in sock-puppetry online - posting hagiographic comments about themselves through pseudonyms), it is not their perfidy he condemns, but the Internet as enabler. In fact, it is their slumming and condescension that is the problem - their longing for freedom from consequences of their actions that led them astray. Keen himself is a knowing troll, trying to be the Simon Cowell of Web 2.0, and behaving like a pantomime villain to get web conferences to boo him. The ultimate example of this kind of slumming was Michael Skube's polemic against blogs, profoundly rebutted by Jay Rosen. Pagan Kennedy's tone is dancing around the edges of slumming - she starts out with "OMG drunk teenagers", but the article comes to realise that people online are human too, and makes fun of her own original attitudes.

abi sums it up:

The girls in question would not have been slumming if they had been going to drink the drinks, chat to the patrons, or see the dancers. They weren't. They were going to watch themselves drink the drinks, chat to the patrons, and see the dancers. It's like Kundera's definition of kitsch - the last layer of self-observation determines the definition.

Will botnets compete with Amazon S3?

Reading about the Storm Worm's botnet being bigger than supercomputers I was reminded of a prediction I've been making for a while. Spamming and phishing and other bad behaviour relies on overwhelming miniscule conversion rates through huge volume, so it has to free-ride on others' resources to actually make money. However, large distributed computing is being commoditised, by Amazon's S3 and E3C and others. At some point the botnets will realise that they can make more money by competing with Amazon or Akamai to store data in their stochastic cloud of compromised computers. A variant of memcached with a redundant hashing algorithm, or maybe an adaptation of Freenet would be obvious places to start; for all I know this already exists.

Best advice on scandals ever from TNH

In the Making Light thread on the SFWA's debacle where Andrew Burt used a bot searching for 'Asimov' to issue DMCA takedown notices willy-nilly, sideswiping Cory, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden gave the clearest, most compact advice on handling net PR disasters ever:

1. Get out there and say something, fast.
2. Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.
3. Explain what you're doing to help fix the problem. Be telling the truth when you do it.
4. Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You've screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every one of those pairs of eyes is a person who knows how to Google.
5. Corporate-speak will do you more harm than good. Instead, speak frankly about what's going on. React like a human being. Talk like one, too.

Also, James D. MacDonald said:

While one should not attribute to malice anything that is adequately explained by stupidity, any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

Update: Teresa made it a post, so now it has it's own intelligent comments.

Lunar eclipse tonight

As I was up anyway, working on some code, I stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse and took some photos.

Update: A lovely composite photo taken by Matt Onheiber.

Actually, in-video linked ads date back to the 80s

Mike Arrington has been stirring it about YouTube's new in-frame ads but this idea is something that dates back years, way back to the late 80s. In 1989 my colleagues Max Whitby, Nikki Barton and Chris Prior made a documentary with Douglas Adams called "Hyperland" looking at hypertext and the interlinked video future. Here's a snip where they explain 'micons':

What they went through back then to make all those overlaid animated video loops doesn't bear thinking about. I remember it involving Macromind Director and early 8-bit video capture cards and writing out to framestores one frame at a time...

Bacn and mushrooms

The term bacn for

email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

is a handy word for a new phenomenon, but it looks like it should be an acronym. Boring Automated Computer Notifications, perhaps?

Also, we need another word for the kind of bacn that doens't tell you the notificiation, but is just a way to get you to click on a link and generate a pageview for someone like Evite or Facebook. I suggest we call these 'mushrooms', as they keep you in the dark and feed you dirt. Also, because that gives me an excuse to link to Andrew's Bacon movie again.