I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here

The other day I was joking about some abstruse aspect of XML and I said "I happen to have Tim Bray right here", in reference, of course, to Woody Allen's devastating cinema queue put-down in Annie Hall. Now I was only half joking - Tim Bray was on IRC with me working through the Atom Publishing Protocol interop at the time - but the deeper point is that through the web we do have access to people and their works in a way that was pure comedic fantasy in 1977. I can find copious examples of Tim Bray's or Marshall McLuhan's work, searching them for the citation I need, I can talk to Tim, or see how the authors of books I like feel about their movie adaptations.

It seemed as if the joke was on me, as the chap I was talking to had never seen Annie Hall. But I happen to have Mr Allen right here:

Heck, I even have the strange Dada website pitching direct debits I remember from the UK in 1996 here.

Andrew's Film Bee Aware - public screening

Andrew and Christopher have been making videos since they were 5, but this summer Andrew got the chance to go to Camp Cinequest, a summer camp for young filmmakers at San Jose University, organised by the Cinequest Film Festival. He told the local paper all about it (PDF version). Now there's a public showing under the Cinema St James festival - come along!

Bee Aware and Edward Scissorhands at Cinema St James

Friday, August 10, 2007 7:30 PM - 11:00 PM

St. James Park

First Street and St. James Street
San Jose, California

37.3404, -121.892

Unwind by taking off your shoes, kicking back in your favorite lawn chair with a cool glass of beer, and watching a great flick under the stars. Cinequest provides Maverick short films, tonight featuring "Bee Aware" and "The Seed" before the main fature, "Edward Scissorhands". Bring the rest of the family for a night out in the park! Seating available starting at 7:30 p.m. , pre-show begins at 8:00 p.m. and the films begin at dusk. All screenings are FREE.

Microformats in Blogger - hAtom support

Those of you who read my blog directly, rather than via a feed-reader, will notice that it is looking styled again, for the first time since CSS Naked Day in April.

I made an initial conversion to hAtom by hand in the meantime, but a few weeks back Michał Cierniak and I checked in a change to the underlying Blogger templates to make hAtom the default, which the Blogger team graciously accepted. This should enable much simpler client-side parsing of the blog pages. One thing we had to do to enable this was to add a new datatype to output a date in the W3C's ISO-8601 profile, as expected by hAtom. If you look in the templates now, you'll see markup like this:

<abbr class='published' expr:title='data:post.timestampISO8601'> <data:post.timestamp/></abbr>

If you want to make your own hAtom friendly templates, you can use the data:post.timestampISO8601 appropriately in the date-time design pattern; the data:post.timestamp will reflect your personal formatting preferences as before.

Caliban's Mirror, YouTube edition

The UK Professional Association of Teachers has called for YouTube to be banned because it has been used to show people being bullied. Meanwhile, Oxford police are pursuing a man who pinched a news reporters' bum on air:

I trust the PAT will call for Channel 4 to be banned too.

Perhaps the net can fulfill Bentham's dream of the panopticon, where prisoners are always watched. In the Philippines they are showing the way. With Bentham, Busby Berkeley and Michael Jackson as guiding spirits, 1500 prisoners perform "Radio Gaga", "Thriller", the Algorithm march, and, yes, "YMCA" for the camera. If they're taking requests, I nominate Pink Floyd's "In the Flesh".

YouTube, like the rest of the web is a mirror to life. If you don't like what you see, look for something else, like this elegy for Concorde:

Or remember Antonioni

Or Syd Barrett

Or make a video to tell your own story.

End Homographophobia now

There is a dangerous prejudice afoot in the technical world - Homographophobia. Those who suffer from it call for segregation, to avoid the miscegenation of meaning - they want to ensure that their Humpty-Dumpty definitions are not polluted by sharing with others. But they are wrong. We are all imperfectly multilingual, we all have our own internal associations for any given word, but we can only communicate through overlapping meanings with some degree of sharing of concepts.

So we should eschew namespaces and hierarchies as they are just solipsistic security blankets, and embrace the overlapping ambiguity of using words as tags, as Roschian prototypes and as puns. Homophonophobia is a similar affliction, yet homophones give rise to so much entertainment and jollity, as the "four candles" sketch shows:

Social networks - what's the Object-ive?

One way of thinking about social networks is through "social objects" - the cultural touchstones and shared ideas that we use to bridge our Dunbar-constrained networks to broader communities. We all do this - use some shared object as a point of conversational reference. Here in the US it tends to be sports teams activities; in the UK there's always the weather to fall back on. (This fails in California because it's too predictable - when I came here in 1998 it took me a while to realise that saying "beautiful day again" was like saying "I see gravity's still working" to Californians).

Talking about social objects is nothing new - Jyri discussed them at length back in 2005, and danah dissected Friendster's suicide in 2006 when they killed off the Fakesters (user profiles that represented social objects like "Jack Daniels" and "Burning Man").

Where I find the 'Dunbar number' idea falls down is that social network connections, like so many other human-made things, are power-law distributed. The small number of highly-connected entities that fulfil the role of social objects are sometimes people. If you think about celebrities, they clearly fit- being able to discuss Brad and Jen and Angelina's latest shenanigans binds you in, and shows like American Idol are designed to draw on this need, giving the Faustian bargain of fame in exchange for objectification.

Different social network services can be distinguished through the different kinds of object that lead to their success. Friendster's expulsion of Fakesters, and later attempts to use TV characters is one example; MySpace's embrace of independent bands and FaceBook's initial use of Universities as touchstones help explain their divergence. LinkedIn has Companies as their touchstone, Orkut has it's communities, which are often used as badges for the users to express their identity. Suicide Girls is a blog network focused around models-as-objects, last.fm uses songs and bands, Flickr uses photos, Dopplr uses places.

Looked at in this way, James Hong's attempt to change the core objects of HotOrNot from pictures of strangers to pictoral self-tags he calls "Stylepix" seems an interesting experiment.

Making sense of the different object graphs and how they interact with the social graphs in these overlapping sites will keep lots more researchers busy, I'm sure.

B-roll is the new a-hole

Editing shows respect. Steve Gillmor has put up his new video podcast Bad Sinatra which is him unedited wandering around and chatting to people. Now, I like Steve, and enjoy having rambling conversations with him about things, but I don't think it works as video. With video, as with audio, editing shows respect for your audience. To do a truly live or as-live show, like the splendid In Our Time, you need to plan it out in advance and choreograph it. Otherwise, you need to edit. Carefully.

If you want to hear a perfectly edited podcast, listen to Radiolab. I spend 90 minutes a day cycling and listening to my iPod, which is exactly the use case for podcasting I explained to the BBC a few years back. Now that shows of this quality are there to be downloaded regularly, my tolerance for self-indulgent rambling podcasts like bad voicemail messages is way down.

I made this point way back at the dawn of podcasting , when Chris Lydon's well-edited interviews inspired us to download them to our iPods. In the online world we are each others' media, as we mediate what is worth reading for each other through our blogs and link streams. This too, is a form of editing, and doing it shows respect for each other. Steve, tighten it up into something worth watching. My children know how to do it.

Open versus Closed - code and networks

I read two things this morning in praise of closed systems and fêting their future dominance, both by people who should know better. Bob Cringely praises Adobe's Flash, and predicts that AIR will take over the world because Flash can be made to run on cellphones. Clearly, this is wishful thinking on Adobe's part. There is a standard for creating user interfaces that has many orders of magnitude more developers than Flash, is installed on every computer and nearly every cellphone already, and is powerful enough that even Steve Jobs didn't dare to leave it off the iPhone, and that's HTML.

Cringely says:

Once you own the interface to every mobile device you can make those devices talk more easily to your networked applications than possibly to those from Apple, Microsoft, or Sun. As we move toward a fully mobile Internet, compliance with mobile APIs will be more important than what operating system is running on the server, which is why I believe Adobe is putting so much effort behind AIR and Flex.

"Owning" interfaces is not something that you can do when there is an existing interface that is simple, powerful and deployed on every device imaginable already. That would be HTTP - Cringely's piece starts by saying how HTML has made it beyond ubiquity to invisibility, but HTTP is so invisible he doesn't even notice that it's there (let alone TCP or UDP).

Marc Andreesson also has a good underlying point about the Valley's short attention span with regard to technologies, but he too ends up praising a closed application model, in this case Facebook's. They provide access to their users under sufferance, and clearly can't provide access to users of otehr social networking sites. For Marc to back a closed system like this when he has built his career on open ones is odd to me. Kottke puts this well:

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It's called the internet and it's more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications run on the internet, out in the open, and people can tie their social network into it if they want, with privacy controls, access levels, and alter-egos galore.

Dave Winer agrees it is time to do this:

Eventually, soon I think, we'll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself.

The thing is , pace Andreesson, we have been working on building a consensus to express these connections in an open way for a few years now. We already have a way to express social networks and personal information online. We have hCard for expressing contact information and authorship, and we have XFN to express social connection. Twitter, Dave's experimental platform, already supports this. Lets continue to spread it further.

Jobs WWDC keynote in chapters

I finished watching the WWDC Macworld Keynote from last week - here's my chapter-list version of the stream so you can skip through it to the bits you find interesting:

My overall reaction similar to what I said based on textual reports. Jobs saying that web-based applications are as good as native ones on the iPhone is a big change for him, and a sign that development really has changed. What was clearly flawed in the iPhone directory app demo was the need to write all the integration links into the site - how about Safari/iPhone natively understanding hCard and integrating it with apps, like Operator does in Firefox?

Stacks seems not to really solve the too many documents problem well - see Tim Oren's discussion of literalism and magic (Tim worked on 'Piles', the less euphoniously named version of this idea at Apple, long ago).

The dynamic DNS support integrated in 'Back to my Mac' is great idea for those not yet committed to keeping their documents in the cloud. The tension between Jobs advocating a new OS with 300 features, versus a thin client on the iPhone to the same developers was pretty clear.

Jobs saying that Safari for Windows has built-in support for both Google and Yahoo Search was not something I saw anyone pick up on.

Oh, and one more thing... the new iChat features look great, but why is there still no demo or even mention of iChat on iPhone? The main thing I use my sidekick for is AIM chatting, and if iPhone can't do that and forces chat through the procrustean constraints of SMS it's a huge missed opportunity.

Microformats and media

A few weeks ago at Web2Open, Mary Hodder and I gave an audience-led talk on Microformats and Media Info. Fumi Yamazuki videoed it and posted it on YouTube. The web connection was a little unreliable, so I started out typing up examples by hand...

Every high school graduate?

An unctuous lexicon for the loquacious, wrought through nomenclature hubris for pecuniary chicanery. Is using "should" like this obsequious or supercilious? The taxonomy oligarchy could have been more abstemious with the latinate and greek terms, though no doubt they'd call me a vacuous jejune xenophobe for daring to abrogate their homogenous hegemony.

Even Steve Jobs can't ignore the web

When Jobs introduced the iPhone, it was clear that the platform they could not afford to ignore was web developers - however closed the platform was, having a crippled web browser was not an option. Jobs confirmed that today by saying that the SDK for iPhone applications was Web 2.0 Internet standardsWeb 2.0 + Ajax. Jobs also announced Safari 3 for Windows, so Webkit is now a platform that runs on all computers and a lot of phones.

This is another step in the Innovators Dilemma disruption of the PC computing platform by web-based applications, where learning lessons from the web, and reusing others work are important principles.

Compare and Contrast

Here's Andrew Keen's talk at Google - you can hear me asking questions and reading out that Douglas Adams quote from the front row:

In contrast, here's David Weinberger's tour de force about "Everything is Miscellaneous", which I am proud to have helped arrange.

If you only have time for one, watch Weinberger.

Keening for Culture

Andrew Keen turned up at Google today to plug his book The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. I was too late to get a copy of the book, so reviewing that will have to wait until Amazon delivers me one later this week. Instead, I listened closely and read some of his soi-disant polemics on his blog.

Like Nick Carr, and before him Andrew Orlowski and John Dvorak, Keen is a professional troll. He has realised that combining overblown rhetorical attacks on the internet with a smattering of erudite sounding quotation gets him both newspaper commissions and a lot of links from bloggers, and he is making the most of it. Listening to his arguments, I had the feeling that he was clutching at so many straws so he had enough to build his straw man.

Among the things he said were that he's nostalgic for big media, that the web is not a viable economy for artists, and we need middlemen. Talent is scarce - the value is finding talent. Web 2.0 flattened media lends itself to corruption - media without official gatekeepers is untrustworthy. Youtube is becoming one long commercial break, where the 'best content is sponsored', that most of his evidence is anecdotal, people aren't as smart or as media literate as we'd like them to be and that online anonymity is corrupting (yet he plays along with the wholly fictitious Strumpette).

Andrew Keen's real sleight of hand is that he evokes the best of newspapers and contrasts that with the mass of the web. He says that most musicians won't make money from the web, ignoring that hardly any make money from the label system he defends. Like Carr, his worldview is wholly coloured by survivorship bias.

Now, I recognise a lot of this - being an Englishman in America makes it very tempting to play the Cultural Erudition card - having recently watched the excellent The History Boys, he reminded me of Irwin, the master keen to use gobbets of quotations to support an arbitrarily contrarian premise. This kind of Oxbridge cleverness for its own sake is part of the Guardian/BBC Platonist culture that sees its role to lead the uneducated masses to better themselves, while sneering at their plebian interests. Keen continually calls Google "Orwellian", while ignoring the emotional core of 1984, which is the tension between Winston's day job at the (BBC-derived) Ministry of Information, controlling the party line, and his private diary, written "to the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different for one another and do not live alone". Michael Warner's essay "Styles of Intellectual Publics" expresses this yearning well, and Keen's denial of it to those outside the clerisy of the professional media is a betrayal of the enlightenment principles he professes.

So what did I like? I liked that he said the web was a mirror of ourselves, but I see him as a Caliban cursing his reflection, as I said five years ago:

The web we see is a reflection of ourselves individually as well as collectively.

With 2 billion pages and counting, we can never see it all, and when we venture outside the well trodden paths of the personal web we know, we are more likely to make mistakes in our maps, and come back with 'here be dragons' written across entire continents and tales of men with no heads.

I think this effect, rather than malice or wilful misrepresentation is what is behind such things as journalists' clueless articles on weblogs or congressman fulminating against the net consisting mostly of porn and piracy.

I also liked his call for media literacy, though his assumption that internet users are children who don't have it was more de haut en bas posturing. Douglas Adams put paid to this back in 1999:

Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.

Update: Larry Lessig points out many of the inaccuracies of the book:

And then it hit me: Keen is our generation’s greatest self-parodist. His book is not a criticism of the Internet. Like the article in Nature comparing Wikipedia and Britannica, the real argument of Keen’s book is that traditional media and publishing is just as bad as the worst of the Internet. Here’s a book — Keen’s — that has passed through all the rigor of modern American publishing, yet which is perhaps as reliable as your average blog post: No doubt interesting, sometimes well written, lots of times ridiculously over the top — but also riddled with errors. Keen’s obvious point is to show those with a blind faith in the traditional system that it can be just as bad as the worst of the Internet. Indeed, one might say even worse, since the Internet doesn’t primp itself with the pretense that its words are promised to be true.

Larry has a wiki page for further corrections

Unceremonial writing

I was listening to Cory's podcast while cycling home, and while talking about writing, he said something that resonated strongly with me. He said that the danger with writing is that you make it ceremonial, that you have to have a cigarette, or a cup of tea, or the right music playing before you write, and that it is easy to keep accumulating ceremony, until you don't get to the writing part.
That struck home, because I stripped the styling from my blog 2 months ago, and said to myself that I'd convert it to a new template with hAtom support and revamped CSS before I posted again. I had put a ceremony in the way of writing here, so I'm going to start writing again, and maybe get around to titivating the markup later. I've been reading and listening and talking a lot over the last two months, just not writing it down here, so I'm going to start doing so again.

Cory dropped by at Google a couple of weeks back, and gave a very thoughtful talk on the future of copyrights and politics.

Also, his new novel "Little Brother" is a splendid blend of polemic, practical advice on information security and a rollicking tale with characters you can believe in, where he takes his "science fiction is imagining the present" idea to heart and gives a series of recipes for culture clashing. Cory has made writing habitual and frequent. I'll try to do so too.