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JOHO
Issues from before
2000
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Cluetrain@10: Recently, the tenth anniversary edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto came out, a book I co-authored. Here's some of what we got wrong in the original version. Our kids' Internet: Part 1: Will our kids appreciate the Internet?: Will the Net become just another medium that we take for granted? Part 2: The shared lessons of the Net: The Net teaches all its users (within a particular culture) some common lessons. And if that makes me a technodeterminist, then so be it. Part 3: How to tell you're in a culture gap: You'll love or hate this link, which illustrates our non-uniform response to the Net. The news' old value: Part 1: Transparency is the new objectivity: Objectivity and credibility through authority were useful ways to come to reliable belief back when paper constrained ideas. In a linked world, though, transparency carries a lot of that burden. Part 2: Driving Tom Friedman to the F Bomb: Traditional news media are being challenged at the most basic level by the fact that news has been a rectangular object, not a network Bogus Contest: Net PC-ness: What should we be politically correct about in the Age of the Web? |
Exiting info: As we exit the Information Age, we can begin to see how our idea of information has shaped our view of who we are. The future from 1978: What a 1978 anthology predicts about the future of the computer tells us a lot the remarkable turn matters have taken. A software idea: Text from audio: Anyone care to write software that would make it much easier to edit spoken audio? Bogus Contest: Name that software! |
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How much do we have to care about? Even if the mainstream media's coverage of most of the world didn't suck, would we care? Are we capable of caring sufficiently? (Annotated by Ethan Zuckerman!) Vint Cerf's curiosity: If we are indeed getting more of a stomach for the complex, what role has our technology played? ROFLcon and Woodstock: Am I so enthusiastic about the ROFLcon conference because it was important or just because I'm out of touch? Is the Web different? The definitive and final answer. The Turing Tests: Throwback humor, in both senses. Bogus Contest: Surely anagrams can't be random! |
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Is the Web different? Is the Web just the next medium in our history of media, or is it a spiritual transformation, the great hope, blah-di-blah-di-blah? Fairness and scarcity: In a world of abundance, fairness is so 1990s. The next future of HTML: The draft of the next version of HTML manages a surprisingly fine balance between the needs of humans and the needs of our computer overlords. |
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The future of book nostalgia: Anthony Grafton's New Yorker article on why libraries will always be with us shows the power of book nostalgia. What we owe: As parents we need to fight to let the Internet we love be a settled part of our children's lives. |
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The
Privacy
Non-Principle:
Privacy is too squirrely for principles. We need to keep it difficult. |
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Can
tags be wrong?:
You tag it potato. I tag it tomato. Shall we just call the whole thing
off? |
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The
abundance of meaning: If too much information
is noise, what's too much meaning? |
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Anonymity
as the default: As digital identity management
systems come one line, the norm is switching from being anonymous to
being identified, with unintended consequences we may not at all like. |
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Why
believe Wikipedia?:
Simply by appearing in the Britannica, an article
has credibility. But that's not true for Wikipedia because you might
hit an article a moment after a loon has altered it. Yet, Wikipedia has
(and deserves) credibility, in part because of its willingness to
acknowledge its fallibility. |
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Why
the media can't get Wikipedia right:
Stuck in its old model, the media get the story backwards. |
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The
year of unique IDs: We're about to get very
interested in assigning meaningless numbers to lots of things. Very
interested. |
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Relativism
and the Net: Moral and cultural relativism used to
be a lot easier. |
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All
I have to do now is write the mofo. Times
Books is publishing Everything is Miscellaneous.
Here's what a book auction is like... |
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Why
I'm a pessoptimist —The Right to Connect:
Let's not be too quick to compromise. |
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Trees
and tags - An introduction: What are taxonomies,
tags, faceted classification, folksonomies...? And do they matter? |
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Trees
vs. Leaves: Tagging may be shaking the leaves
off of taxonomic trees, affecting not only how we organize ideas and
information but how we think about organization itself. |
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The
future of facts (and the rise of fact servers):
Are facts going to become as cheap and uninteresting as styrofoam
peanuts? |
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Why
Dewey's Decimal System is prejudiced:
The DDC's aging value system shows the pernicious influence of reality. |
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The
Three Orders of Order: The third order is new,
and it's ripping up the rules for how we manage, navigate and
understand our world. |
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Why
I'm not a pacifist any more: It has nothing to do
with Bin Laden. It all began in the third grade... |
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Chains
and links: The tree-like structures we've
grown up with are being challenged by messy webs. |
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There's no I in Identity: Ordinary Language analysis of our real-world use of the term "identity" can help us avoid some misunderstandings when trying to figure out what "digital identity" means. |
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Keep Voting Ponderous: Near-transcript of a commentary on NPR's "All Things Considered" about why electronic voting machines -- even if they were trustworthy -- will degrade the voting experience. |
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The
fate of JOHO: Should we carry on? |
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Metadata
and Desire: Metadata, that most abstract of
abstractions, is rooted in human desire. |
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The
Unspoken of Groups: The implicit and ambiguous
holds us together. |
May 17 , 2003: Special Matrix Issue
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Are
we simulations?: A philosopher argues that if
our species manages to survive long enough, then we're highly likely to
be sims. Sounds like stunt philosophy to me. |
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The
Web Matters: Familiarity breeds ennui. A little
wonder wouldn't hurt. |
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Is
the Universe a computer?: I don't understand it,
but I'm pretty sure people are drawing some false analogies from it. |
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The
Internet is not a thing: It's an agreement. And
there's a big difference. |
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Open
the Spectrum: It's time to decentralize the
ether. |
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Digital
ID: Four lessons from the DigitalID World
conference, including: IDs are nice but not the center of the universe |
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Special Issue: Letter to FCC: Fail Fast!: Forty-four netheads have sent a letter to the FCC urging it to let the current telecommunications industry "fail fast." Its infrastructure and business model are obsolete and getting in the way... |
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Palladium
and the Real World: Microsoft's bid to make our
computers secure will also make them vulnerable to thick-fingered
copyright holders. |
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Dreyfus
on the Internet: Hubert Dreyfus, philosopher, has a
monograph about the Net that is profound and off the mark. |
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The
Semantic Argument Web: Tim Berners-Lee's dream of a
Web of meaning is unlikely to happen, at least the way he thinks. |
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Pope
on the Internet: The Church's message on the
Internet gets it surprisingly right ... and unsurprisingly wrong. |
March 28, 2002 - Special Small Pieces Issue
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What
the book is about: It's harder to say than it
sounds... |
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The
End Is Nearing (or March for Your Rights!): So much
bad legislation, so little time. |
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Cracking
words: As Michel Foucault shows that the Greek word
for "free speech" cracked under social pressure, some of our most
common words are also showing the strain. |
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News
Flash: Luuuuuub .... Duuuuubya |
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Links
and Horizons: There's more to the Web - and to the
real world - than meets the eye |
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NEWZ
you can use: Parodies, ironies, and other natural
extensions of reality. |
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Identity
and self: Liberty and Passport may guard our
identity, but let's not forget our self. |
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The
Rationality of Laughter: Jokes make sense of the
senseless. Especially these days. |
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The
First-Person News Network: The Web provided a new
type of news on September 11, 2001. |
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Mind
the Scaffolding: Our minds are out in the world,
not inside us busy building an internal picture of the external world. |
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Special Summer Vacation Interim Issue The
Database and the Joke: There are two basic forms of
information on the Web... |
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Save
the Threads!: We need a way to move our
conversations up, down and across the Net. |
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Value-Free
Net: The Internet's design was based only on
engineering values, but somehow political values managed to sneak in.
Imagine that! |
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How
Bits Are Built: Bits aren't like atoms. They don't
really exist. And that's why the Web is ours. |
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Joy
of Connects: Is a new web of acquaintances gelling?
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The
Problem with Professionals: What does being a
professional add besides the right to carry a clipboard? |
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Reed's
Law — An Interview: One of the Internet
originals explains that the value of the Net comes not from its raw
connections but from its group-forming ability. |
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The
New Common Sense: Common sense is a rich gift that
we lack on the Web. |
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The
Hyperlinked Metaphysics of the Web: Our culture has
had a container-based metaphysics: space and time are containers within
which events occur, and things are only truly real if they're
self-contained. The Web, on the other hand, presents us with a
hyperlinked metaphysics that is transcendent and fundamentally
spiritual. |
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Webs
and Brains and Comparisons: Is the Web a global
brain? Beware of metaphors. |
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Electoral
Quantum Foam: Constitutional Democracy meets Chaos
Theory. Sweet! |
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Pop!Tech: Report on a thought provoking conference in Camden, Maine - Bill Joy, John Perry Barlow, Ira Glasser of the ACLU, Whitfield Diffie, the Governor of Maine, assorted MIT smarties by the scoopful, and about 500 others once and for all answer the question: What does it mean to be human in a digital age? |
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When
Q&A Goes Global: We go for generations
without inventing new ways of talking. Now, it happens just about every
day. |
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The
Web's Deep Optimism: Everything bad can and will
happen on the Web, but the cause for optimism is deep in the Web's very
architecture. |
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Number
Mysticism:If the number is precise, it must be
right! |
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The
Power of the Unstated: John Updike's poem "Hoeing"
delivers the tacit knowledge goods |
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The
Question Question: Smart people aren't stuffed with
their content. They've mastered the social art of questions. |
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The
New Gravity: It's merged with its opposite:levity. |
June 19, 2000 - Extra special short issue on Beijing
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China Shards: 4 days in Beijing as a tourist.
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June 2 , 2000 - Extra special short issue
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The
Wireless Return to Earth (Bonus: Nano-Groups): The
Wireless Web will know where you are and who's around you, changing the
nature of groups. |
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The
Real Document Architecture: The Web isn't a medium.
It's a place ... filled with weird document-buildings. |
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Faith
in Technology: Is technology indistinguishable from
magic...or is it just beyond our control? |
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The Cathedral,
the Bazaar and the Trade Show: Your company's booth
at a trade show may be your only chance all year to actually have a
real conversation with customers - What a concept! |
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The
Five Stages of Web Grief - The phases of mourning
turn out to describe the typical stages companies go through when
confronted with the Web. Where's your company? |
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Napster:
The Most Important App Since Sex: Real peer-to-peer
computing, a global collaboration that skates along the edge of the old
laws |
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One-Question
Interview: Naomi Klein: The author of No Logos
tells us how the Web is enabling the anti-brand movement |
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The
joy of email: The hours we spend on email everyday
are building the new, connected world. |
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Does
the Web Scale?: Sure, we can have global yet
intimate conversations on the Web now, but what happens when there are
billions of people on line? |