Places I’m Enjoying

I poked around Living Code this morning and enjoyed it. A reader of my newsletter recommended a Cat Stevens conspiracy theory expounded there. The lead story today is a call for an XML standard for GUIs, which the author calls “AmbiGUI.” Gotta love it. Plus the site quotes Ambrose Bierce: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” I like the mix of tech, humor, social conscience, and word-awareness.

Prof. Tom Wilson at the Dept. of Info Sciences at Sheffield Univ. wrote to me today to point to a little grenade he tossed into a listserv recently in which he mentions that there may not be any such thing as knowledge management. Here’s his original message and here’s the listserv’s archive; look for entries in December and November. The thread is interesting if only because of the effect academic conventions have on the expression of passion.

(If anyone cares, here’s a catalog of most of the columns and articles I’ve written about KM.)

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Google as an Open Source Dictionary

I had a moment of lingual anxiety (surely the Germans have a word for this!) looking at something I’d typed. “Hippie” had seemed obviously right but now it seemed queasily wrong. Surely it should be “hippy.” So, I did what any red-blooded webizen would do: I typed each into Google. Hippy: 133,000. Hippie: 315,000. “Hippie” it is.

In the blue bar at the top of the search results page, Google writes “Searched the web for hippie.” Click on the underlined search term and you are taken to its definition in www.dictionary.com where in this case you learn that “hippy” is an acceptable variant of “hippie.” But I don’t need dictionary.com to tell me what’s acceptable. I’ve got 315,000 reasons to think that “hippie” is right.

Sure, this will drag language down. There are 1,550,000 pages that use the non-word “alot.” Clicking on “alot” in Google’s blue stripe takes you to www.acronymfinder.com where you’ll learn that ALOT stands for “Adaptive Large Optics Technologies” and “Airborne Lightweight Optical Tracking.” Nope. “Alot” is a misspelling of “a lot.” Or maybe – language authoritarians stand back! – maybe it’s the new spelling of “a lot.”

Note: I am, in my heart, a language authoritarian.

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The Silence of the Blog

No real blogging for me today since I spent the day (and the day before and the day before and the day before and the day before and the day before and the day before) putting together an issue of my newsletter. JOHO is so long that no one has ever read an entire issue. Ack.

Here’s the table of contents:

Many of the lead articles showed first in this blog, a trend that will continue. Sort of makes you wonder why I would spend so much time putting together a ‘zine in addition to the blog. Hmmm.

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A Desperate Plea for a Statistician

Having spent too much of the day in traffic missing more than my share of the lights, I got to thinking. It’s statistically probable that somewhere someone in the United States is having a phenomenally bad run of luck when it comes to stoplights. With let’s say 150M drivers in the country, what is the longest string of missed lights experienced by some poor schlub at the extreme right of the bell curve? Has one person out of those 150,000,000 hit every red light for a week? A month? All fall and not a single green light?

(I used to ask students in my philosophy of science class, “How many of you have ever dreamed of a plane crash?” You start working the numbers and you realize that when there’s a plane crash, there are probably dozens of people who are convinced they prophesized it in a dream.)

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XP, The Background Pirate

Has anyone noticed that the Windows XP default desktop background is almost
identical to the Sharp Actius’ desktop background?

Sharp Actius	Microsoft XP

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The End of Spam

At the risk of sounding Ginger-ish, you should keep your eye on SpamSubtract. They are getting ready to launch a product that promises to take a big bite out of spam.

Here’s what I know: The team behind the product is fantastic. Grade A genius-level programmers and first-class, good-hearted folks. Here’s what I don’t know: What they’re doing. It should be Very Interesting.

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The Generosity of Blogs

Mike Sanders admits — oh the shame of it! :) — that he has at times ego-surfed. He poses the useful question: Is vanity at the heart of blogging? (Mike’s answer is a resounding No.)

I agree with Mike. Blogging is by its nature generous. As RageBoy has pointed out, blogging occurs within a network if not an actual community. Weblogs were, in fact, originally a way for individuals to filter and recommend other sites. They’ve expanded their nature, but the prototypical blogs — Doc’s or Dave’s, for example — are full of references, recommendations and reflections. Pointing people away from your site to others is an act of generosity much frowned upon by the Commandants of Stickiness who run most commercial sites.

The generosity of weblogs is a reflection of the generous nature of the Web itself. Without links, there is no Web. Its very architecture is hyperlinked. Or, more exactly, since hyperlinks aren’t an accident of nature, the Web’s nature is generous. In fact it’s an architecture of hope. (More on this in my upcoming book, heh heh.)

Now, one could say that bloggers put together rich sets of links and recommendations because they want readers to like their blogs and thus they are ultimately selfish. You could say that about every human action … and is there a college freshman who hasn’t said exactly that? Mother Theresa, Albert Schweitzer and Mahatma Gandhi were all supreme egoists by this criterion. But we’re much more complex than that. If you reduce all human motivation to self-concern, you not only miss everything that makes life fun, you also lose your ability to discriminate self-sacrifice from self-indulgence…but maybe that’s the point.

[Others responding to Mike: Tom, Doc, Jeneane Jennifer.]

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Wicked fun

Textism’s snarky commentary on Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth is wicked. I’d never heard of Mau. He seems to be a self-important designer. I laughed anyway.

A Powerpoint presentation is making the rounds that’s pretty funny. It’s a customer complaint (from Tom Farmer and Shane Atchison) that uses many of the standard business presentation conventions. (You can see it as an HTML page here.) [Thanks to Bruce Milne for passing this along to me…and thus to us. PS: Bruce adds; “I’ve now seen this from 3 other sources within a span of 3 hours- ya gotta love this Web thing (unless you run a DoubleTree in Houston….)”]

Also, the latest mnftiu is up. This guy David Rees is a freaking genius. [Thanks to RageBoy for sending out the alert.]

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Net Rhetoric

Yeah, sure we’re not entirely confident we know what weblogs are. They can be defined semi-technically by talking about technology that enables people to post frequent updates to a personal site without having to know anything (or much) about the Web’s infrastructure. But that’s like defining novels by talking about how they’re printed and maybe adding that they tend to be at least 150 pages long. The question is: What are we going to do with this technology? What are we going to write on those blank pages? And the answer is: We don’t know because we – all of us – are still making it up.

This is far from the first time the Net has invented (or enabled the invention of) new literary, rhetorical forms. Email has its own rhetoric. So do discussion boards, chat, instant messaging, mail lists. Even FAQs are new to the world as a literary device. Of course you can find precedents for each of these. Of course none is a radical break with previous literary forms. But rhetorical innovation is always based in, and depends on, the existing structures of discourse. Otherwise it’s what we technically call “gibberish.”

The rapid evolution of new forms of rhetoric results from the new forms of human connection the Net allows, for rhetoric is the “how” of connection. It is not a mere flourish decorating human sociality. It is how we’re social. And since humans are social animals, new rhetoric and new literary forms are a reinvention of what it means to be human.

Of course, this still doesn’t tell us what weblogs are, or, more important, what they will be.

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Juicy Bit from Tom Matrullo

Tom gives the NYTimes a well-deserved pasting for writing about “Eric Corley’s efforts to demonstrate that the DeCSS code that breaks the ‘protection’ code on DVDs is free speech.” For example, Corley printed the code on the front of a t-shirt. Especially in contrast, the Times’ piece is a toothless gumming of the topic. Tom writes:

When a T-shirt has more critical first amendment power than the nation’s most prestigious newspaper, it’s fair to say that news is now the promise and the burden of the Net.

You go, Tom.

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