November
20, 2000
Media Penetration
Sharp-eyed reader Maura "Chip"
Yost noticed that ABC-TV's
morning show, "The View" (with
Baba Walters, et al.), showed
the bogus headline I created for the
previous issue of JOHO...the one
that says "It's Gore-Bush: Bush Bows,
Accepts VP Role" with
the subhead "'It's the challenge I'm
up to,' says VP Bush.'"
They gave no attribution much less an
URL. Nevertheless, this makes
me an official Media Darling, doesn't it?
Please?
|
"The Net is not like a
brain!" I heard myself arguing
with more vigor than I'd intended. Unfortunately,
the person I chose to gainsay
on this topic had been introduced as a hedge fund
manager but turned out also
to be a neuroscientist at the University of
California's Brain Imaging Center.
He knows the brain the way I know...well, I don't
know anything as well
as he knows the brain. You'd be surprised at how
much I learned about the ways
the Net is indeed like a brain.
The scientist was joined by a hugely
smart computer industry analyst
who also thinks the comparison is fruitful. It was
around the moment that the
two of them showed me that I was completely wrong
that I realized that I actually
don't believe that dumb old wrong thing. No, what
I really believe is
that the problem isn't with the comparison to the
brain, it's with comparisons
at all.
"So the Net's like a
brain," I said, "but it's
also like the environment and it's also like an
economy and it's also like a
party. Each of these may bring us insights about
the Net..."
The analyst agreed although he
especially likes the brain comparison
because he can look at some structure of the brain
and gain insights into the
Net that he might otherwise have missed. It spurs
his imagination and his analytic
insight as well.
But, if you push too hard on any one
metaphor, you can easily
be led to think that because A is like B in one
respect, it must be like B in
other respects. This is formally known as the
Fallacy of False Analogy, and
informally as the Fallacy of Making Stupid
Mistakes. In the case of the brain,
it can lead one -- not necessarily the people I
was talking with -- to think
that the Net might itself be conscious. While that
might be suggested
by a parallel to the brain, it can only be
known by explaining what consciousness
is and showing that the Web has those
characteristics. The Argument by Analogy
only takes us so far.
So, yes, the Net is like the brain,
and it's like the nervous
system, and it's like the body, and it's like
forty jugglers playing checkers
with three blind monkeys. Some of these analogies
have more points of similarity
than others, but in every case, we move beyond the
perceived similarities to
inductions about other properties at peril of
blinding ourselves — sort of
like shining the flashlight of knowledge into our
own eyes.
Had the guys I'd been talking with
been making that particular
mistake, I might have won the argument. Instead, I
had to settle for learning
a whole lot. Damn! I hate when that happens!
Having written my share of
PowerPoint presentations in the past
10 years, and having seen more than my share of
them, I'd like to pass along
some of the insights I've gained. Follow these
simple guidelines and you're
sure to have a "deck" that meets —
or even surpasses — the
minimum daily requirements for PowerPoint business
intake.
There are some simple formatting
tricks that will make every presentation
look great. Put your company logo in a corner of
every page. By "corner"
I mean, of course, a full quarter of the page.
It's been proven that when people
read bullet points written over a company's logo,
the harder it is for them
to read the text, the further the logo is driven
into their brain. If you make
the logo big and bright enough, physics itself may
cause it to be imprinted
in your audience's brain so that it doesn't matter
what you actually say. In
one documented case, a presenter put a logo two
thirds the size of the page
smack dab in the center of every slide, and then
put the bullet points in a
light gray font so that they were literally
unreadable, and at the end of the
presentation, the financial analysts left the room
and doubled the stock price.
The kicker is that every single bullet point said
simply "If you can read
this, then you're sitting too close." It's
true. It happened to a friend
of my cousin's. Really.
Remember to capitalize the first
letter of every word in every
slide's title, even the "little" words
like "a" and "of."
(In the bullet points, capitalize any word you
like or are proud of spelling
correctly.) No point in taking chances that you'll
get the real capitalization
rules wrong. After all, that's the strategy you
use when you always refer to
yourself as "myself" rather than having
to know the difference between
"me" and "I." (By the way, the
grammatical rule is simple:
it's "I" when you're taking credit and
it's "me" when you're
blaming someone else.)
The title slide is tremendously
important. Remember, you only
get one chance to really screw up your first
impression. Give it a title that
makes clear just how significant this presentation
is going to be, and how smart
you are. Tip: It's good to begin with the word
"A", as in "A
PsychoDemoGraphic Exploration of..." or
"A MetaModal Model of Valuation
in..." That little word "A" lets
you get away with claiming a
territory clearly beyond your competence while
still sounding almost humble.
We all know the old rule about how
many bullets to put on a
slide: As many as fit. And keep in mind that
"fit" is such a relative
term; that's why PowerPoint lets us make fonts
smaller. But we're in a new
"with-it" age when the old rules don't
Apply any More. (Notice,
by the way, my use of the Random Capitalization
Rule.) The new rule says:
It doesn't matter how many bullets you have on a
page, what counts is that
you read every word in every bullet out loud.
And if you haven't been able
to fill up the slide with words, digress to use
up the time. Remember, your
audience isn't there to hear you not speak!
Don't forget: every third slide
— at least — has to
have a 2x2 matrix that puts your company in the
upper right. Feel free to manipulate
the axes until you get this right. For example, if
you have to have an X axis
that's labeled "Value" and a Y axis
labeled "Companies with Red-Headed
CEOs," then go right ahead.
Now, things are getting pretty
serious, and maybe even profound
(i.e., no one understands what you're talking
about) in your presentation,
so it's time to show you're a regular Joe or
Jane by tacking in a bad scan
of a randomly chosen comic strip. For example,
here's one you might want to
use. It's from the very popular Mark Trail strip
of October 27:
Two cougars are nuzzling on a wilderness peak.
From a helicopter comes "I
don't think your pet cougar is going to have any
problems adjusting to his
new home!" Then Jim says "I believe
that friend he found is a female."
Suzie says, "Thank you very much Jim, for
helping us with our problem."
Jim replies, "I'm glad it worked out."
Wow. This is just so apropos to
everything that you're sure
to get a chuckle. The ice is broken. Everyone's
really having fun now.
Then it's back to the serious work
at hand. Be sure to have a
slide showing the outside of your building because
that's a surefire way to
impress people. "Jeez," your audience
will think, "this must
be one heck of a company to actually work in an
office building!"
Important tip: Leave in some
slides from some other presentation
that has nothing to do with this. That way
you'll have the opportunity to
announce you're skipping over a slide,
subliminally positioning yourself as
a person so important that you've actually done
a PowerPoint presentation
before.
When you're done tweaking the deck
and getting it just the way
you want, be sure to show it in edit mode so
that none of the animations work.
Even better, put it into slide sorter mode so
people have to screw their eyeballs
in extra tight to be able to read any of it;
this encourages people to pay
attention.
Oh, and be sure to leave the paper
clip guy on in the corner.
You'll look like a real professional!
Searching for Trust
Note: The following
contains a recollection that is hotly
disputed by friends whose memories of these
events are as vivid as mine. The
main issue seems to be whether we ever seriously
discussed the first version
of the plan discussed below. Also, whether I was
a pig- headed, sanctimonious
a-hole about it. Actually, there's widespread
agreement about the latter point.
About four years ago, I should have quit my job.
I was working at a company
that created one of the first search sites on the
Web. Although I was VP of
Strategic Marketing (the "strategic"
indicating that I didn't actually
know anything), I lost the argument over letting
sites pay us to have their
URL guaranteed a particular position in the search
results. For example, if
"BigBoy's Texas Getaways, Inc." paid us
some thousands of dollars,
we'd guarantee that if anyone did a search on the
words "cowboy" or
"dude ranch," their site would be listed
at #6. Pay us more, and you
could make it all the way to #1.
Our company ran the numbers on how many search
terms we'd have to sell in order
to become early Web gazillionaires. Fortunately,
sanity prevailed and when we
launched we put a gif next to the paid-for ads
that said "Preferred,"
which to my mind was better than nothing...barely.
For a couple of years afterwards,
we were still taking lumps in the press.
The less questionable variation on this plan has
long been standard for search
sites: BigBoy's can pay the site to stick a banner
ad onto the search results
page whenever someone searches for
"cowboy." Because it's a banner
ad, there's no intrinsic deception. And about a
year ago, goto.com introduced
a site whose "business model" is based
precisely on the idea we'd
first discussed [or did we? — see the note at
the beginning of this article].
While their home page doesn't tell you that this
is a commercial yellow pages,
the search results tells you how much the
advertiser paid to be listed. For
example, a search for "cowboy" brings
fogdog.com to the top of the
list, which cost the advertiser $0.16. The #2 slot
went for $0.15, and #3 for
$0.12.
A new report by Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch ( http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/00/11-inclusion.html)
makes it clear just how far this trend has gone.
At AskJeeves, for example, a company can ensure
that it will show up in Jeeves'
highly-constrained, visible search results list.
According to Jeeves' fact sheet,
it seems that a company can buy a question.
Sullivan, however, says that the
connection is less direct than this, ensuring that
BigBoy's listing might show
up if someone asks "Where can I go for a
rootin' tootin' good time?"
even if the BigBoy site didn't buy that precise
question. Either way, BigBoy
is paying for placement.
Sullivan's example is "What should my blood
pressure be?" which puts
a link to onhealth.com as #1 and then has a
special section underneath listing
other onhealth.com pages. There is no indication
that any of this is paid advertising.
Sullivan says that Jeeves says that that's ok
because the "editorial staff"
at Jeeves maintains quality standards. Yeah, and
how many heart specialists
are on staff to judge which health site is best?
AskJeeves isn't alone in the monetizing of
relevancy. At Yahoo, for $199 you can be certain
that one
of their paid "editors" will at least
look at your site, although
there's no guarantee they'll include it in Yahoo.
(Note to Yahoo: If you at
last index my site, www.hyperorg.com, I will
personally provide certain "favors"
worth way more than $1999, if you know what I
mean.) And Inktomi, one of the
leading providers of the technology infrastructure
for search sites, will guarantee
that your site will is re-crawled every 48 hours.
On the other hand, my favorite search site (these
days), www.google.com, handles
these issues well. If a company buys a word, it
gets a text-only ad at the top
of the list, clearly identified as an ad. (Try
searching for "Ford"
as an example.) Further, ads shown in the right
margin display a green bar indicating
what percentage of people have clicked on them,
enabling us users to "vote
with our clicks," so to speak. (Search for
"flowers" to see an
example.) But, Google draws the line at monkeying
with the rankings. It uses
complex algorithms that assess factors such as how
many other sites link to
it. This is in the user's interest. Sites that try
to trick a user into going
to sites because someone paid them are working
against the user's interest.
While there may be (grudgingly admitted) some
benefits to letting companies
pay for placements, there is no reason, except
avarice and the abrasion of the
ethical sense, to hide the fact that our attention
and trust have been sold
to the highest bidder.
Danny Sullivan's Search Engine
Watch:
http://searchenginewatch.com/
AskJeeves brochure to advertisers: http://corporate.ask.com/pdf/Jeeves_Answer_Link.pdf
Inktomi FAQ: http://www.inktomi.com/products/portal/search/submit
FAQ.html
I'm Just Mild about Saffron
Inter@ctive Week has run a breathless puff piece
("Saffron Spices Up Searches:
New Personalization Technology Holds Great
Promise" Mike Cleary, Oct. 16) about
an "associative database" from Saffron
Technologies. The new engine supposedly
is "a type of decision-making software that mimics
learning. It understands
context." The Saffron product "works like a
salesman...It may not have seen
a particular customer ever before, but it
understands what the customer wants
based on the customer's request" In the immortal
but bewildering words of Aparicio:
"It's not about getting a blood test,but finding
the right thing you need to
fix your toilet." How's that?
We get a hint about what it's up to in some
blather about neural networks.
But such networks, says the article, haven't
worked well with large databases.
(Hmm, I thought that was the point of a neural
network — deriving sense from large
quantities of data.) Saffron Tech says they have a
compression technology that solves that
problem. Then, two thirds of the way through this
touting, we get the flat out
statement: "The technology removes unproven,
however." Even their
beta customer has to use other personalization
software to do the "cross-selling,"
i.e., generating the hits relevant to the
purchase.
All I know is what I read, but doesn't this smell
of BS?
Searching Runs Amok at Wal-Mart
Crusty columnist for the Boston Globe, Alex Beam,
devoted his column (Nov.
14) to excoriating www.walmart.com's search
engine. His search for "garment
bag" turned up zero hits. "Luggage"
didn't turn up luggage. And
"dustbuster" was a bust because the
engine is case sensitive. Worse,
every time you run the search engine, you empty
your shopping cart. Alas, Beam
reports that Wal-Mart has fixed at least some of
these problems in the past
few days, greatly decreasing the site's
entertainment value.
The award-winning JOHO I-Witness Investigative
Team looked into it. As of the
morning of November 14, searching for "
gameboy" returned a completely
blank page. When I tried to go back to the home
page, the site crashed Explorer,
but not before the site drove local businesses out
of town by using economies
of scale to as an unfair competitive weapon.
PC Magazine (Dec . 5, Nancy Sirapyan) has a
useful round-up of search sites.
Google and NorthernLights receive five stars. AOL,
AskJeeves, IWon, and LookSmart
receive two. Sounds about right to me. One I'd
never heard of, www.oingo.com,
got four stars and seems worth looking into.
Chris "RageBoy" Locke (www.rageboy.com)
suggests we go to the www.drugstore.com
search page and search for "that which cannot
be found," thinking
we'll be amused by the result:
"We have no matches for
that which cannot be found."
RageBoy adds:
yeah, I'm in really bad
shape over here.
No kidding. How about searching for
"farts" so you'll get the reply:
"We have no matches for
farts."
Hoo hoo, my nine-year-old finds that wicked
funny.
Or better still, how about searching for "
so-called industry gurus with too much time on their hands"?
Misc. -
Dept. of Pointless Messages
From: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, November 03, 2000 3:57
Subject: Email ref : JOHO -: Nov. 3, 2000
To ensure the integrity
of our IT Business Systems, we have installed
automatic checking software
for all electronic communications to check for
possible virus invasion, misuse
or malicious damage.
This software is holding
your recent communication for examination prior
to release to the recipient.
IIT Department Securicor
Information Systems Ltd. 01249 665555
Here's the reply I didn't send:
Thank you for
your message of November 2,
2000. To ensure the integrity of our IT Business
Systems, we have installed
The Value Check Verification (VCV) system to
examine all incoming electronic
messages. An initial scan indicates that your
message falls into Category
S12.b: Pointless and/or useless conveyances of
information.
Here is the
process by which we ensure that
only the highest quality messages penetrate our
IT Business Systems, thus
ensuring maximum efficiency, proficiency and
throughput of electronic communications:
Upon receipt:
VCV system swings in action,
alerting all defensive forces of an incoming
missive. The Strategic Air Command
goes to Defcon 3.
1 hour from
receipt: Sender receives this
confirmation message with results of Initial
Value Scan (IVS)
4 hours from
receipt: Sender receives detailed
results of IVS
6 hours from
receipt: Send receives automatic
re-count of IVs
6.01 hours from
receipt: Message sent out
for review to Standing Committee on Electronic
Communications (SCEC)
28 hours from
receipt: Members of SCEC submit
Form 27ii5m, evaluating the review.
240 hours from
receipt: Initial tally of
Forms 27ii5m submitted simultaneously to SCEC,
to message sender and to Interpol
720 hours from
receipt: Final decision of
SCEC on Deliverability is rendered. Sender of
message is informed.
Note: Please be
advised that if SCEC members
submit Form 27ii5m electronically, these forms
themselves are subject to the
VCV procedures outlined herein.
Over the next
30 days, we look forward to
keeping you updated on the progress of your
electronic communication. If you
have any questions or need technical support,
please submit your communication
electronically and we will get back to you after
720 hours. Thank you.
Middle World Resources
A Compendium of
Resources |
| Walking
the Walk
An article in InformationWeek
(Sept. 25, Rick Whiting) reports on signs of life in the budget preparation
process: "...more companies now view budgets as living documents
that are revised on an ongoing basis through the year," with a
wider range of contributors. For example, at Amway, which the article
refers to as "the $5 billion home- and personal-product supplier"
rather than as "your neighborhood ponzi scheme," they are
planning to use the Net to spread the budgeting process to 300-500 managers.
|
Cool
Tool For the
Hyperlinked
Organization
When it comes to changes in the UI, I'm
as a hesitant as an old Jew
in West Palm Beach. So, here's a freaky
utility that is small (136K),
weird, and headed straight for the
uninstall list after I've played
with it for a while. But it is definitely
cool.
Madotate adds another button at the top
of every Window, right next
to the minimize, maximize and exit
buttons. Click on it and your window
swings open like a door (graphically) and
retreats to the nearest border
of your screen, stacking up against any
other Madotated windows. A label
along the edge displays the window's
title. A click and it's restored.
Bizarre. http://www.crosswinds.net/~gcaulfield/
WARNING: If your monitor is set
for greater than 800x600, it'll
screw you up, requiring you to reset your
resolution and reboot.
(I heard about Madotate
in the oddly compelling 'zine,
Lockergnome:
www.lockergnome.com
)
|
Internetcetera
Reader Bill Koslosky writes:
Random fact: if
you claim you could count every
vote comprising the purported
98,221,798 votes (52%+ of the eligible
voters) cast in this election, that
level of accuracy is equivalent
to measuring width of the continental
US (assuming 3,000 miles)
to the nearest 2 inches. And then some
kid comes along and digs
hole on the Jersey shore and your
number is now 100% wrong. Assuming
a 3% error, this would require this
number to be reported as 98,000,000
+/- 2,900,000 and if you really want
to get technical, a confidence
interval of for example, 95%. After
all, how confident are you that
the error is 3%? Boy, this sure makes
your single vote look tres
insignificant!!! ... BTW, Gore's lead
in the popular vote is 0.23%
and Bush's lead in Flori-duh is 0.017%
(based on CNN's numbers).
The reported error for these vote
machine card readers is 2-5%!
He notes that the gap in the popular
vote has actually narrowed since
he wrote this.
.
|
Peter Merholz writes:
Something tells me you'd
be interested in this:
Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional
Communication
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.1/4b.html
It's got "post-modern" in its title.
I'm trying not to take this
as an insult.
Jacqueline Kinney writes:
Reading of your fondness
for the term "action item", thought you may
enjoy this...
http://www.sentient.com/~pcm2/action_item.html
It's a nicely drawn superhero comic strip.
Michael Siracuse points us to a more serious
site:
I was wondering if you
had seen MITRE's Concept Model for KM. good
reading.
http://www.mitre.org/pubs/edge/april_00/
Miriam Lawrence, points us to www.BrowseUp.com,
a plug-in that lets you attach any file to any
spot on any Web page. This seems
to be basically like www.thirdvoice.com
,
although rather than attaching a sticky note to,
say, the Apple site that says
"Macs suck," you can attach a Powerpoint
file, a Quicktime video,
and an obscene Flash to make your point. The file
is stored on the BrowseUp
server and is only visible to other people who are
using the BrowseUp plug-in.
You can also create your own links between two
pages.
Does anyone use ThirdVoice any more? How long
before BrowseUp goes the same
way? Great idea, based on Web idealism, without
enough of a benefit to justify
the trouble.
Steve Guich, pursuing the offline conversation
that brought about the article
in this issue about the role of metaphors, sends
us this link:
http://128.143.168.25/book/chap2/chapter2sec4.html
It's about the role of metaphors and analogies in
science. This is a topic
I have long found difficult. For example, I was
halfway through The Elegant
Universe by Brian Greene this summer when it
was stolen (along with my backpack,
passport, credit cards, cash, laptop, Palm, new
cell phone, Moby Dick,
and more) from our car while we were driving in
the south of France. Aarrgghh.
I was following the book surprisingly well —
i.e., every thirty pages I
thought I understood something — and was
waiting for Greene to address
the question of whether the strings of string
theory are actually supposed to
be little loops of stuff that vibrate, or whether
it's just that the analogy
works really well and maybe even predictively.
Since I've never been able to
be clear about the ontological status of
indeterminacy (is it the way things
are or "merely" our inability to know
the way things are?) —
very likely because I'm framing the question wrong
— I wasn't really expecting
to get an answer to my question about the
literalism of string theory. I suspect
that in this realm, the difference between a
literal and metaphorical explanation
simply doesn't hold ... but I can't figure out
why.
Ysbrand van Veen writes:
Don't know if you have
ever seen Gossip, created by a small Amsterdam
based company Tryllian. I really
love their Java and agent technology based tool,
no matter that it's slowwwwww...
Being a 'Homo Ludens' this in my opinion is
certainly THE way to exchange
information among Internet users. www.tryllian.com
Gossip gives you agents that do stuff for you on
the Web. They check "Meeting
Points" which serve as a "community
interchange" spot for information
and URLs. Right now, there's only one Meeting
Point — Tryllian's — but the
company hopes others will emerge. In playing
around with it, the agents that
I sent out (with a deadline of 5 minutes in one
case and an hour in another)
never came back. I assume that strayed off to an
Amsterdam "coffee house"
and got sidetracked by the way the reflectors in
the bicycle wheels make helixes
if you squint your eyes hard enough.
Arnold Kling, who was at Pop!Tech, a conference
on which I reported 1.5 issues
ago, has written an interesting essay that
gainsays Bill Joy's doomsaying:
http://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst3/aimst324.html
Anita Brown, dean of BlackGeeksOnline (www.blackgeeks.net),
reprints in her newsletter an article from Wired
by Manny Frishberg about a
conference on the "digital divide."
Here's how the article begins:
SEATTLE — Bill
Gates
appeared at the Digital Dividends conference
here like a Tory at the signing
of the Declaration of Independence, telling the
350 attendees that they were
wrong to expect to find markets among the
world's poorest people.
Eighty percent of the
global population lives on less than one dollar
a day, and most — according
to the World
Resources Institute, which organized
the conference — have never made a
telephone call, let alone used the Internet.
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,39461,00.html
David Forrester writes:
You'd probably enjoy reading (if you haven't already) Jaron Lanier's recent
essay against Kurzweil, Joy, and their ilk's' vision of machines taking over...
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge74.html
Because I am basically a small-minded person, I
have trouble getting over Lanier's
intense self-absorption in his own hipness to
actually hear what he's saying.
Will someone let me know if the article is
actually interesting?
Christopher "RageBoy" Locke sends us
this bizarre product page —
for the Philosophy brand hair care products —
that signals the official End
of Western Civilization:
http://www.drugstore.com/products/prod.asp?pid= 57767&catid=16483&aid=281067
I myself have ordered a six-pack of Leibniz Sheen
Rinse with Hi-Protein Monads.
Bret Pettichord flags an article by Steve
Feuerstein about his book , Oracle
PL/SQL Programming Guide to Oracle8i Features, in
which his code examples are
highly political, including (as he summarizes
them):
- Excessive
CEO compensation—and
excessive, destructive layoffs
- Union-
busting activities
- Positive
role of unions
in society
- Police
brutality
- NATO
bombing of civilian
targets in Serbia
- Managed
Care National
Rifle Association and gun control
- The prison
industry
- Slashing
social programs
to finance tax cuts
For example, to illustrate how to create a data
structure, he builds a database
of war criminals with Henry Kissinger as his first
entry.
While I have no problem with his particular
politics, if we take a book such
as this as a type of teaching tool, then I'd
recommend on a couple of grounds
that next time he choose examples that help people
learn about his topic, rather
than ones that show what a smarty pants he is.
Does this make me a hypocrite
about the importance of voice? You know what? I
think I just don't care.
http://www.oreilly.com/news/feuerstein_1000.html
Peter Merholz suggests we look at a monthly 'zine
about e-learning. If you
care about this topic, you may find it useful:
http://www.elearningpost.com/elthemes/ee.asp
Mike O'Dell, Uberlord of UUNet — while Mike
technically doesn't own every
packet transmitted over the Net, I believe has
right of first refusal on them
— suggests we take a look at the aptly named
http://www.nakednews.com/.
It's the news and the news announcers are naked.
Should I worry that this reminds
me less of my one-handed adolescent dreams than of
of Monty Python's News for
Parrots?
Australian Ron writes:
If you are in need
of a good hard belly laugh, here's a great
place to start:
http://satirewire.com/
"Belly laugh" is maybe a little strong.
I'd reserve that phrase for
www.theonion.com
. Maybe it's just that
it's really hard to be satiric given the news
these days.
Tired of Quake? Nah, me neither. But if your kids
come home early from school
and you need switch to something a little more up
their alley, Wild Tangent
provides online games that are impressive in their
graphics and playability.
Unlike Quake, you don't download a massive client;
these are games that are
launched from your browser.
http://www.wildtangent.com/games/index.php3
Jeffrey Tarter, editor and publisher of the
esteemed SoftLetter, writes:
You MUST go read this story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/articles/A7115-2000Oct14.html
If ordinary hacks like
us were allowed to vote in the Pulizter awards,
this guy would be a shoo-in.
How could you not love this article? The author,
Gene Weingarten, made the
following offer to a PR flack: "I will write
glowingly about her client's
pillows if she will tell me something really
humiliating about herself that
I will also print." He then expanded his
offer to about a dozen other pliers
of the PR trade. Some went for it, some didn't.
This is a very funny article.
|
Who's
Tired of Being a Millionaire?
Stu Rubinow responds to our request for
recommendations of charities:
Do you know
about Heifer Project International (
www.heifer.org
)? They're the "teach a man to
fish..." proverb given life and
substance. They provide breeder
livestock (and training in what
to do with them) to poor people around the
world. The expectation
is that you will then give some of the
offspring from your animals to
others in your village, and they do the
same. So an initial gift
of 6 ducks becomes, in some number of
years, a village poultry collaborative
that's producing for food and sale more
ducks a year than you can count
and has raised the standard of living
for everyone.
This from their
most recent mailing: "Since 1944, Heifer
Project has helped over four
million families in need, providing over
20 types of food- and income-producing
animals and intensive training in animal
management, environmentally-sound
farming and community development in more
than 125 countries."
All started by one Indiana farmer
with a vision.
So for 20 bucks
you can give someone a flocklet of geese
for Chanukah (HPI will send
them a card telling them that you've
donated in their name). If
not geese, at various donation levels
chickens, bees, goats, sheep,
llamas, heifers, pigs, rabbits, water
buffalo. What could be better?
We've been giving them money for
years.....
Let's hear from
more of you about your favorite, lower-
profile charities.
|
In the previous issue, I cited a particular
petition ("We, the undersigned
... hereby declare the Governor [Bush] to be a big
smirky doofus") as an
example of the range of pleas on www.e-thepeople.com
.
I also seemed to have mentioned that these
petitions generally would get no
further than the the author's circle of drunken
frat brothers. Little did I
know the role played by a JOHO reader, the
punctuation-enhanced b!X, who writes:
As author of the doofus
petition and a dark-hearted child of the
Internet, I simply MUST emphatically
state that I am not now, nor have I ever been,
an illiterate, drunken frat
brother (or sister).
Meanwhile, petition sites
will only work for real when either (1) the
powers-that-be take email seriously
and/or (2) a site gets grant money to use the
net simply to COLLECT signatures,
but then prints out a nice massive paper copy
for delivery to the target.
Nothing like a sold thump of a huge box full of
petition sigs on some poor
aide's desk.
Mini-bogus contest: Name one petition in the past
twenty years that has had
any effect on national policy. (Note: Dropping off
a huge box full of ten dollar
bills does not count as a petition.)
Joe McDonough responds to the following at the
end of a recent issue:
It makes
you wonder if anyone told SAP that their name in
English is at best unfortunate.
Not like "JOHO" which we extensively researched
for cultural cross-cognizance
and linguistic interpalliation. But the job's
not done. Be assured that we
here at JOHO will not rest until we're certain
JOHO is gibberish in every
language on the planet.
Joe writes:
Actually, "joho" means
"information" in Japanese, which I had assumed
til now was intentional.
The truth is that when I first named JOHO, I
didn't check it in any other languages.
In response to the very first issue, however,
Larry Bohn, an old friend, wrote
to me and said while he liked the 'zine, did I
know that "JOHO" means
"penis" in Indonesian? Well, he was just
pulling my leg, if you know
what I mean. It was only a few issues later that a
Japanese reader told me how
fortunate I'd been. (On the other hand, it means
www.joho.com will forever be
out of my reach.)
Eric Norlin, demi-lord of www.personalization.com writes to pick a nit about
my referring to the NSA as the National Security Administration, while beginning
with the non- credible claim that he's not doing anything as petty as picking
a nit:
not to be nitpicky,
but....Agency, not Administration....i used to
work there as well....and
while the urine and boar thing is
true....."passing" the polygraphs is not....i
failed several of mine (no joke)....it only
meant a couple annoying months
of fbi muddling...
Ah, it's comforting to know that a proven liar
can still work for the most
secret, secure administration, um, agency in our
government.
Matt Rose writes:
found this snippet in an article on the web by Philip Greenspun. http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/managing-software-engineers/
At the MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, which has nurtured
groups of great programmers for
nearly 40 years, the gathering spaces are
referred to as "playrooms". These
contain sofas and coffee tables, movable in the
best tradition of Dewey, where
programmers eat, talk, and occasionally listen
to presentations. Usually a
playroom will have some sort of shared writing
surface such as a whiteboard.
Note that these playrooms also are an important
part of an organization's
knowledge management system...
How radical! A place to sit and talk! Next
knowledge components to be added
to the KM system: felt-tipped pens, 3 ring-binders
and occasional jokes "to
foster the spirit of creativity."
Oh, we should have known we'd stir up a hornet's
nest when we carefully constructed
an example to clarify the distinction between
relevant and irrelevant distinctions.
Laurie Kalmanson was the first hornet to arrive:
dude ... you left the
barn door open a mile wide on this one ... it's
so obvious that i am a weak
person for taking such easy bait ... but i hope
you understand ... i just
can't resist asking the question below your
quote ...
"it's reasonable
to rule out hiring women to work in environments
harmful to the female reproductive
system."
... which also makes it
reasonable to rule out hiring *men* to work in
environments harmful to the
*male* reproductive system ... yes?
Yes, of course. This was exactly my point. I
didn't think the example would
work well if it were predicated on an instance of
sexism working against men
since that'd really stretch the ol' credulity. So,
I went for rhetorical symmetry.
Next came Dana Parker:
Oooh,
problem. This was the unreasonable reason given
by my new supervisor, back
in the 80's, to fire me from my very satisfying
(to me) field engineer job
installing satellite earth stations. He was sure
that the work, which involved
climbing around on roofs and running shielded
coaxial cable through phone
closets in 24 story buildings, would damage my
"female parts". He got away
with it too; the EEOC (headed at the time, you
guessed it, by Clarence Thomas)
found no discrimination, despite the fact that I
was also the only female
field engineer, first in size of territory,
second in seniority, and DEAD
LAST in pay.
I never have wanted
kids. If I'd changed my mind later, I wouldn't
have sued the company for
allowing me to do something potentially
harmful to my ability to reproduce.
And the jury's still out on what, exactly, is
and is not harmful to reproductive
systems and feti, for both men and women.
There's a theory, in fact, that
many birth defects are not caused by the
mother's drinking alcohol during
pregnancy, but by the father's being drunk
during sex. Are we going to put
notices on beer and booze bottles warning men
about having sex when they've
been drinking? (Hah!) Or how about the
likelihood that extended bicycle
riding and restrictive underwear can reduce
sperm count? You gonna ban men
from being bike messengers or competing in the
Tour de France? Or wearing
tighty whities?
How about, let the
individual woman decide what job she wants to
take, being informed of the
risks as they are known at the time. Men are
free to take any kind of
work they want (barring wet nurse), regardless
of whether it would potentially
damage their reproductive organs or any other
organs or appendages. Women
deserve the same rights. If there's a major
discovery next week that sitting
in front of a CRT for ten hours a day is gonna
fry my ovaries, I defy you
or anyone else to tell me I can't take a job
that requires using a computer.
First, please recognize that this is *my*
hypothetical case. I get to specify
its details. And in my hypothetical, the work
environment was genuinely
harmful to women. No fair coming back with
examples where the environment
isn't or might not be harmful. That's just not
how the hypothetical case
game is played.
Now, granting that this is a case of genuine,
unambiguous harm to women,
then I think Dana's point is reasonable although
still arguable. Maybe it
should be up to individual to decide on the
basis of the facts. Personally,
I think I'd vote in favor of a social policy
that protects individuals from
making decisions that have an irreversible long
term effect, closing down
important possibilities (you're not going to
convince me that reproducing
isn't important). It's the type of thing people
in a democracy argue about.
I imagine a factory in a poor district that lets
well-informed 18 year old
women go to work in my hypothetical environment,
and they do it because they
need the money, thoroughly convinced they'll
never want to have kids. Twenty
years later, they change their mind. We've seen
exactly this type of thing
in unsafe workplaces for millennia — people
have "freely" worked in mines
after watching their fathers die of black lung.
But, keep in mind that none of this has to do
with the point in the column
which is that there's a difference between
discriminating based on relevant
differences and irrelevant differences. My
example may have been bad, but
my larger point remains.
Steve Yost writes in response to my comment that real-world moral analogies
don't work real well on the Web:
Yes, the web is different
from the rest of our worlds (thank God). It's
mostly broadcast, mostly text
and images. Mostly as exciting as ad posters
on the subway. Email and collaborative
apps have the essential richness to keep us
returning, but have the same
sensory limitations: nearly devoid of nuance.
It takes great skill with
written language to overcome this —
something most of us don't have.
This aspect of subtlety
might be the most important to your point (or
maybe it misses it entirely).
Our conveyance of morals and conventions in-
person is sometimes very subtle
— a simple look has the potential to
question a statement or action. Subtleties
of manner and sometimes appearance help define
who we like to be with, forming
continually shifting and mixing "morally"
agreeing groups of various scales.
Larger scales require less subtlety, but are
maybe even more demanding of
social bandwidth — contrarily, imagine a
political campaign conducted entirely
on the internet.
(Moral conveyance isn't
always subtle, as witnessed by my parking-lot
chat with a queue-shirker
today who happened to be an acquaintance. But
on a mailing list, it would've
been a long flame war. But there on the
asphalt, enough got communicated
in 30 seconds.)
So, given all this,
I think the call doesn't seem to be for
analogy as much as for nuance.
That seems to be a fundamental
problem — our scope of possible
communication — one to one, one to many,
many to many — is suddenly vast, while
the medium doesn't provide the easy
nuance of in-person communication.
It's all evidenced by
the fact that behind great electronic (what a
quaint word) communications
like this JOHO edition are lots of great in-
person meetings like the one
you attended. It's probably the freshness of
that vivid experience, combined
with your talent for conveying in words, that
made this a great issue.
Well, damn, that turned
into an exposition instead of a question. But
I'd like to know what you think.
And I must be way off your point, which must be
more like: we extend our moral
systems by analogy. We say "doing that is like
stealing a blind man's shopping
bag". But if that's it, why aren't there
analogous situations on the web?
Can you give an example of a web situation where
analogies, don't apply? I
think I'm missing something despite my long-
winded attempt to talk it out
myself.
Geez, this has taken
me over an hour. Would've taken 15 minutes to
discuss over a beer.
I thought this was a topic on which I continually
harp in JOHO, but a little
research shows that I actually have only talked
about it explicitly once that
I can find, in the June 5, 1999 issue, where I
maintained that we can't figure
out what to do about ThirdVoice because the
analogies to real world behavior
don't fit. Napster is the current example du jour.
So, while in the real world
we have a "common sense" that guides our
behavior — you don't
cut in line, you do eventually pay musicians for
their music — common sense
on the Web is still emerging. When we try to
figure out tough cases where common
sense fails us, we use analogies. But the real
world analogies often fail on
the Web. Do we say that using Napster is like
recording off the radio (except
where's the broadcast?), like making tapes for a
friend (except the tapes are
perfect copies and the whole world is my friend),
like a public library (except
there can be an infinity of copies on the shelf),
like shoplifting from a CD
store (except where's the store?), etc.? The
biggest obstacle the recording
industry faces is that with 38 million users,
Napster may already have catalyzed
a new common sense.
As for the importance of nuance: yes, but it may
be less important than it
seems. Human communication is liquid and shapes
itself to its container. I bet
even prisoners communicating by tapping on the
walls develop recognizable styles
and nuance. And a rhetoric. This isn't to say that
all media provide equally
nuanced communications. But we adjust our
expectations to meet the medium's
possibilities.
Bob "Prof" Morris is prompted to write
by my comments on a presentation
by ethicist Rush Kidder:
Besides the factor you touch on of how learned about something an individual
actually is, there is also the question of developmental stages e.g. Kohlberg's
model of moral reasoning ( http://courses.ed.asu.edu/brem/protected/edp510/kohlberg.htm
if you are not already familiar with it). ... [A]s I have come to understand
it, stage theory models not a personal level of achievement or enlightenment,
but rather models the ability to internalize certain kinds of arguments and
account for various viewpoints in one's reasoning, especially about other
human beings. Thus, to evaluate the soundness of someone's moral argument,
you need to know what kinds of things they are unable, personally, to consider
in forming those arguments. What the realm of possible influences and models
is, so to speak. Although Kohlberg and others' stages are ordered, it is not
an ordering of "better" or "more mature", but merely—-the theories hold—-that
you can't usually get through stage N+1 without going through stage N. Sometimes
that may take minutes, sometimes years. The tricky part is that it is very
difficult to recognize the presence or absence of stage N reasoning if one
is in stage M < N.
I actually didn't mean to judge Rush, just his
lousy, disappointing, pandering,
superficial presentation. In fact, it was only
disappointing because I assumed
(and still assume) that his thinking goes past his
presentation.
As for people at a prior Kohlberg stage not
understanding the reasoning of
those at subsequent stages, well, frankly, I don't
understand what you're talking
about.
Margret Bailey comments on my noting that Bill
Joy, in a presentation at the
same conference, said that he doesn't read
fiction.
I was especially interested
in the anxiety produced in you because Bill Joy
doesn't read fiction. Baby,
it's not just the narrative that's critical in
fiction...Stephen Jay Gould
tells a hell of a story, and for the most part
he gets filed in the non-fiction
sections at Borders (would that there were an
actual natural history section).
I, of course, having been through the dreaded
post-structuralist edumacation,
feel that the difference between fictions and
histories can be elided with
a single citation of Michel Foucault (Two
Lectures from Power/Knowledge).
Nevertheless, what I'm really pointing to (aside
from the obvious that people
who don't read fiction seem to be stuck on some
notion of factualism which
doesn't line up with my ideas about the
usefulness of truth regardless of
its factual content) is that empathy is
developed through the identification
with a fictional character using the human 6th
sense: the imagination. think
you might enjoy Martha Nussbaum's 'Poetic
Justice' read alongside Wittgenstein's
'Philosophical Investigations', although
Nussbaum ends up being too touchy
feely and Wittgenstein too aphoristic. That's
why -I- don't trust people who
don't read fiction. I mistrust that their
empathy and their imaginations are
developed.
Oooh, nicely put. ("Edumacation"? Gotta love
it.) And I agree with you. There's
more to be learned from literature than how to
string a story together; hence
my reference to sci fi, which does ok in the plot
department but is a tad weak
when it comes to understanding the soul.
Don Darragh, apropos of some damn thing we were
discussing, writes:
Are you familiar with
the technique for catching monkeys? First you
take a VERY heavy jar with an
opening just large enough to insert a banana.
Then leave it in plain view
of your intended capture. Seems monkeys will
reach into the jar & grab the
banana, which then makes their hand too large to
exit the jar. Whereupon you
need merely walk up to the monkey/jar (since the
monkey refuses to let go
of the banana the jar is now too heavy for the
monkey to flee)& cart them
away. My personal experience with encountering
truth has been very similar.
My refusal to let go of the "untruth", now
recognizable because of "seeing"
the truth at first makes me miserable. As long
as I cling to the untruth &
the simultaneous recognition of truth, I'm
miserable. Only after letting go
does freedom occur.
Oddly, this is how I first met RageBoy, except it
wasn't his hand in the jar,
if you catch my meaning.
Joe Rassenfoss writes about a perpetual thorn in
my side, namely the practice
of spelling "email" as
"e-mail."
check out the furor caused
by Wired, which just switched their style from
"email" to "e-mail." Both sides
of the argument blast away in this story. It's
good....
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39651,00.
html?tw=wn20001025
What a bunch of sell-out wussies!
Reminds me an interminable argument among tech
publishing weenies about whether
there should be one or two spaces after a period
in proportionally spaced docs.
(Hint: The answer is one.)
Dana Parker contributes to our new Never-Ending
Topic: our former code words
for marijuana.
Back in the day, I lived
in San Diego. We occasionally had access to some
fine (purportedly) Mexican
herb. One day a friend commented, "This is the
last of the Oaxacan." Someone
else (I wish it were me) asked "Should we call
it Chingachgook?" Needless
to say, the name stuck.
Unfortunately, this is a name that is likely to
get you beaten up by two entirely
separate ethnic groups. (And, by the way, did you
know that "oaxacan"
is Icelandic for "penis"?)
Australian Ron, who has in fact decamped for the
US of A, is spurred to pen
a screed (which I've edited for space) by our
interview with one of the founders
of Quiq, the force behind Answerpoint, a site
where anyone can post a question
or answer one.
didn't we invent that
a while back and call it Usenet?
...it will die horribly
of a terminal case of Portalitis. It's the wrong
place to ask questions. i.e.,
the people with the knowledge to answer them
(well) aren't exactly going to
be frantically lining up to see if someone asks
for just the factoid they
want to talk about today. Rather it's going to
attract a lot of people with
lots of questions and no answers...
[yes, it might work better
in a focused private intranet, but read on, it's
still limiting the form of
discussion rather than enabling the sort of
freeform shaping of ideas that
we messy humans so love — ed.]
Maybe that will sound
overly pessimistic, but I don't think so,
because exactly the dynamic that
this seems to want to create is *already* being
played out in the net's native
mode. Distributed all over the place. On
websites, newsgroups, mailing lists,
irc, and just about any other way people can
manage to shovel bits at each
other down a phone line. The people who live
only to rejoice in the finer
points of fumblewidgets have already found each
other and set up their own
space. The (smart) people who want to know about
fumblewidgets will gravitate
there, not to some generic widget portal unless
it's paid the bucks to appear
on top of the search listings.
Where is this ramble going..
well it occurred to me over a bowl of pasta
earlier, that one of the major
gripes that people seeking to exploit Free
Software have is actually a direct
function of not understanding this.
Sure the programmers are
all lazy, sure they never bother to write any
documentation explaining it
for you in words of two syllables. But hang
around on our users list for a
week, and not only will all your questions be
answered, but in all likelihood
we'll have answered whole pile of other ones
that you didn't even know you
wanted to ask yet. Not to mention the ruboff of
having the resident fumblewidget
guru understand better your favorite colour and
pet peeves.
But I guess that's just
not congruent with the McKnowledge Way that many
people (outside that experience)
have come to expect. Drive-though takeaway
knowledge might sound good to a
time and motion man, but it's no substitute for
hanging around the bar and
telling stories. Perhaps as we continue to
mature as a culture we'll begin
to regard these time-pinchers[1] in much the
same way as our parents came
to look upon the penny-pinchers of their day.
Thinking about it, many of us
probably already do.
I'm not so sure we're
inventing new ways of talking here, just new
bars to hang around while we
do it..
[1] preemptive trademark
pending..
Yes, I have little hope that Answerpoint will be
around in 18 months, at least
in its present form, and my original article was
quite skeptical. But I stand
by my point: it's damn exciting to live in a time
when we can invent new ways
of conversing.
James Montgomery was at first disturbed that www.zdnet.com
— for whom he edits the small business
newsletter — scored so well
on the wankometer discussed in the previous issue.
But upon further investigation...
...reporting back...seems
the universe is not totally out of whack after
all (presidential election
results still outstanding). ZDNet's Small
Business site — mine — rates a
"considerable" Wank factor of 2.10.
Here's a ranking of ZDNet
sites for which I have partial or total
editorial control:
ZDNet Business & Technology
home 2.27 Considerable
eWEEK.com 1.30 Considerable
Systems/ network management
2.20 Considerable
Application service providers
2.10 Considerable
Enterprise applications
(including app dev, ERP, groupware, and other
generic topics) 1.98 Considerable
The only conclusion to
be drawn from this data sampling is that I'm a
considerable wanker. Or that
the person who manages ZDNet's home page is a
lesser wanker than I. I win!
Jim, I've never met the webmaster of ZDnet's home
page, but I can pretty well
guarantee that you out-wank him. Just consider the
amount of research you did
on this...
Jonathan Page writes:
You mention several times
in you piece on Pop!Tech that the speakers told
jokes etc but you don't say
what they were. A colleague of mine is speaking
at a seminar on Wednesday
about a new electronic grant application
processing system we have just launched
- he asked me if I knew or could find any jokes
etc about e-commerce/ e-life
in general as he reckons that by the time he
gets to talk the audience will
be at the reaching for the warm milky drinks
stage. Any help would be gratefully
received.
Well, I know a humdinger about three sales guys and an embedded fax machine,
but your friend might be better off going to http://www8.techmall.com/techdocs/ah-archive.html
where much of the Web's humorous flotsam can be found.
Mike Elzey writes in my response to mentioning
that GW Bush is a moron:
listen to Jim Rome on
the radio. Here was his take on the election
(paraphrasing):
"The main thing you should
want out of a President is that the President be
smarter than you. Say what
you will about Clinton, he's smarter than me.
While Al Gore may be about as
interesting as drywall, he's smarter than me.
Dubyah ain't."
Unfortunately, the electorate seems to disagree.
Eisenhower beat Stevenson.
Reagan beat Carter and Mondale, and Bush beat
Dukakis. If anything, with the
exception of Carter vs. Ford, it seems you can't
hardly go wrong betting on
the dumb guy.
All hail president-elect Bush. Sigh.
I read yet another motherhood piece — you
know, the boilerplate at the end
of a press release — that so overstated the
product's capabilities that it
was unrecognizable. For example, it said that the
product makes the information
it's generated "available 24/7 via the Net or
corporate intranet."
In other words, it builds a Web page. Whoopdidoo.
Here are some other examples of motherhood
descriptions of products. Your first
job is to guess what product or feature they're
describing. The second is to
send me your own challenges. Better yet, find real
examples of the purposefully
befuddling.
|
About a...
|
Motherhood
|
Real Meaning
|
|
Web page
|
"multiple,
simultaneous presentation of data"
|
Uses frames
|
|
Computer
|
"enables users to
make personal statement, enhancing
the work environment"
|
Comes in colors
|
|
Mouse
|
"ergonomically
designed"
|
Isn't bigger than your
hand
|
|
Web page
|
"multimedia"
|
Animated gifs
|
Contest Results
Kenneth Powers responds to our request for fill-
ins of the phrase "If
_______ had designed the Internet, it would
____________."
If the Fab Four has designed
the Net every packet would make a mysterious
statement if read in reverse
and contain a barely-veiled reference to mind-
altering substances when read
correctly.
From Ross Wirth:
If Al Gore had designed
the Net . . . packets would be taxed so that
every classroom could have Internet
access.
If Congress had designed
the Net . . . each packet would cost 33 cents to
send and take between 2 and
7 days to reach its destination.
Well, we should probably re-do the Gore entry at
this point: If Al Gore had
designed the Net, packets would be hand checked to
make sure they're valid.
Dan Kalikow writes:
Apropos your perennial
(?) mini-bogus contest — I'm fresh back
from Hong Kong where I couldn't
help but notice prominent billboards with
http://dicksoncyber.com on 'em.
Its parent company, Dickson Ltd., makes every
effort to stave off untoward
implications by capitalizing it DicksonCyber &
bolding their surname in their
graphics, but sadly, I feel obligated to
deprickate this effort :-)
Similarly, Mark Hurst of www.goodexperience.com
(whom I had the pleasure of
meeting at Pop!Tech — he's depressingly
young), writes:
this comes from a goodexperience.com
reader — he saw me mentioned in JOHO and
sent me his own favorite "wacky
url" :)
Here's one of my favs:
www.gifart.com
(gif art? I read "gee,
i fart".)
Or, perhaps it merely refers to what happens
after you eat K-Rations. But,
in my experience you can't go wrong by ending on a
fart joke. G'night and G-d
bless!
Editorial Lint
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