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March 6, 2002
The copyright office has ruled that Internet radio must pay royalties that broadcast radio doesn’t have to pay … according to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act , a law that is giving us what we don’t deserve. Doc has pointers to more details (as well as a call for a march on Washington). A new site, SaveInternetRadio.org has pulled together lots of details.
Stupid stupid fuckers. This is so depressing.
Riding on the Daypop Top 40 is a page with photographs that “prove” that the Pentagon explosion on 9/11 could not have been caused by an airplane. It was caused instead by a truck bomb, according to this site.
I can give you the name of a friend in DC who saw the airliner hit the building. He’s a journalist. He watched the plane come down. So, what the photos on that site actually prove is that we don’t have reliable expecations about what a plane hitting a slab of a building will do.
Hiawatha Bray has a good column on the return of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act, Fritz Hollings’ extremist response to the entertainment industry’s demand to have their stranglehold on creativity backed by law and hardware. As Bray writes:
Read it and gasp: ”It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies.”
This proposed law got derailed by public opinion in December. The addresses and phone numbers of the members of the Senate Commerce Committee are here. You can send an email to Hollings via a Web form here.
Chip writes:
Who would have thought that that bastion of yellow journalism, the Enquirer, would devote space to acquaint millions of ordinary Americans with Enron and the pipeline?
The article is quite provocative. But, the source of The Enquirer’s information is (yes, I’m about to go ad hominem) the Executive Intelligence Review, a Lyndon Larouche organ. Larouche is a paranoid, neo-fascist, anti-semitic nut job who believes that Israeli and British intelligence were behind the “failed coup” of September 11, the British monarchy was behind the Oklahama City bombing, and the Grateful Dead were “generated as a British intelligence operation by the Occult Bureau…” This would be funnier if Larouche weren’t so intelligent (in some sense) and didn’t have such a devoted following.
Jeneane takes issue with some of what I plan (um, planned) on saying to a conference on instant messaging. I, naively, suggest that the at-work use of IM will take on the flavor of its at-home use. Jeneane responds:
For me, IM in the work world has become less like chatting and more like an air raid siren—red alert, incoming incoming! I need help putting out a fire. Which is all fine—that’s what we’re paid for. But it’s definitely not like my home IM experience.
Tom Matrullo thinks I’ve too readily assimilated the at-home use to other, more public Web conversational forms:
IM is more like typing through a telephone; it can be intense and tends to grab all my attention. … [I]n my experience of IM conversation, not much in the way of public speech seems to occur, and there seems little motivation for masks and personae.
What you say seems right on the mark. Thanks for the help, Jeneane and Tom.
March 5, 2002
On Thursday I’m supposed to give a keynote to an instant messaging conference in Boston. Why, you ask? I don’t know, I reply. Presumably they expect something Cluetrain-y from me. (By the way, Andrew Orlowski has one of the best commentaries on Dvorak’s “critique” of Cluetrain. Orlowski’s comments both make a lot of sense and make me intensely uncomfortable. I still like Halley’s spirited defense, though, not to mention that she’s been pushing the blog envelope with short sexual reminiscences. Wait, wasn’t there a track I was supposed to be on here?)
So, here’s roughly and telegraphically what I’m going to say. Please pass it through the fire of your criticism so that it may come out as pure and and brilliant as a diamond. I.e., kick the shit out of it now so I won’t look like a total fucking moron on Thursday.
Instant Messaging and the New Conversation
How IM will affect business?
We are in a new age of conversation. We can differentiate different types of conversation — IM, chat, email, Usenet, Web pages, etc.— by how interruptive they are and how interactive they are. But this leaves out a crucial dimension: groups. The Internet is about groups. (Metcalfe’s Law vs. Reed’s Law.) While the persistence of IM messages is quite low, the persistence of IM groups is quite high. In other words: buddy lists rule.
We need to make more of buddy lists. First, we need a way to move threads among all the different conversation forms: see the threadsML initiative.
Second, research (e.g. Albert-László Barabási shows the self-organizing networks naturally create “super nodes.” These are invisible in buddy lists. There ought to be some way of developing them.
The importance of groups goes beyond their mathematics, of course. In the real world, there’s a Paradox of the Masses. We are each individuals but as we join a crowd, we become more and more faceless. There’s a positive and a negative to this (being just one more member of the voting public vs. being just one more consumer in marketing’s crosshairs). But the Web resolves the paradox: We are members of the Web masses only through our individual voices. IM and buddy lists are an important way of being individual within a mass.
But Web conversations are different than the ones we’re used to having, particularly in the real world of business. Business has been about control, which is itself part of a larger cultural neurosis. Let’s look at that briefly. Then let’s look at some examples of Web conversations to see their characteristics: funny, passionate, admitting of fallibility, etc.
If voice, passion and connection drive the Web then, IM is not just creating a new network of groups but is also (almost necessarily): Messy (the clean line between personal and business is smudged), subversive (IM as passing notes in the back of the classroom), hyperlinked (driven by interest) and entertaining (multiple persona, exaggeration, humor). IM at work is not much different than IM at home. IM is part of the permanent, pervasive adolescence enabled by the Web ,, and part of the rebirth of play.
Apparently I am not alone in detesting the Opryland Hotel. Julian Bond writes:
…Did you notice the fake birdsong coming out of speakers in the undergrowth? The revolving bar in the waterfall atrium, where the waterfall is *so* loud you can hardly hear the person next to you? The “Dancing waters” fountain and light show every evening at 7:30? The Liberace look-a-like performing on the piano from his second story balcony with full electronic orchestral accompaniment? The strange way that none of the restaurants are open for breakfast because they are always closed for refurbishment? Or that all the rooms look inwards.
But then if you cross the parking lot to the Mexican restaurant or wander into Nashville to one of the many themed C&W bars, it doesn’t get much more real. Strange town altogether…
And AKMA blogs — complete with a photo — about the time the Society of Biblical Scholars convened there.
March 4, 2002
If you don’t want to hear me whine about my hard life in a hotel, please turn your attention elsewhere. I wouldn’t blame you for an instant.
The worst hotel in America is … [drumroll] … The Opryland.
What makes it suck so bad?
Does it have its good points? Of course. For example, there’s a sense of camaraderie among the guests who are wandering lost among the potted mangrove trees. But I’m just not in the mood to talk about the positives.
Thank you. I feel better now.
It looks like Steve MacLaughlin‘s idea of a home storage network was so good that it’s being done. According to Tony Perkins column in Red Herring (March 2002), Sony calls it a Personal Network Home Storage System and it’s designed first for multimedia: 450 hours of DVD, 1,500 CDs and 600,000 high res images.
Using a wireless home network, consumers will be able to user their TVs to manage and interact with their Walkmans, PlayStations, and video cameras. [Sony President Kunitajke] Ando also hinted that, by 2003, every TV as well as nearly every product Sony produces will come standard with an IP address.
I’m assuming that you’ll also be able to network in non-Sony products.
Perkins reminds us that the XBox has similar designs and Apple also wants to own the home entertainment network. And Moxi. The fact that this will be TV-centric only seems like a mistake to those of us who spend most of our day in front of the computer.
Sue the bastards, Steve!
March 3, 2002
Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper has an article that actually gets it right about the intellectual ferment on the Web.
Rather than saying that it’s just a bunch of foul-mouthed teenagers ranting about sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and sex, Jeff Warren writes:
Instead of self-contained essays, the Web’s new intellectual hothouses offer diverse networks of opinion, and active participation.
Reader power is where the Web really comes into its own.
Other than Jeff’s focus on Mature and Respectable blogs (presumably to legitimize blogging to his readers), this is piece is a welcome alternative to the hostile crap
the media has been writing about blogging. (Full disclosure: He quotes me a couple of times.)
Some lovely maps of the Internet at Albert-László Barabási‘s site. He’s the Notre Dame physicist who found that there are 19 degrees of separation between any two randomly chosen sites on the Web. (This is back when there were only a billion pages on the Web.) More significantly, he and his team have discovered a pattern of nodal clustering that seems to pertain not just to the Internet but to any self-organizing network. I had a chance to talk with him a couple of weeks ago — a very enthusiastic and engaging fellow. He has a new book, Linked, coming out soon.
Kevin Marks responds to my posting of a little Oscars-scoring program that I wrote in <shame>Visual Basic</shame>:
You don’t wanna use that, you wanna use this:
Makes binaries for Mac, Windows, Linux and load of other Unixes. Free trial version that lets you have 10 lines of script per element. The scripting language is HyperTalk, give or take.
Or if you really love Basic, use this:
No, I don’t love Basic. Back when I was running DOS I far preferred C. (I could never master C++ or Java.) But VB has one compelling strength if you’re strictly an amateur programmer: Microsoft has made it really easy to bash together a UI. (Make your OS too hard to develop in and then sell the dumbed-down kit so people can develop in it! It worked!)
Ah, let the flames begin.
Jock Gill, White House Technology Advisor to Pres. Clinton, has a fiery, enjoyable partisan column at Democrats.com that paints a picture of
An incumbent corporate elite determined to establish a risk free, global regime without regulation, with guaranteed profits for owners and with all disputes resolve in secret without appeal.
Note: I’ll be on the road to Nashville the rest of today and tomorrow, so the blogging may be a little thin. I’m giving a talk at SHARE, an IBM national user support group.
A multi-personaed person possibly named Matt Moore or Daniel Byron has started “evil twin blogs.” One charts his travels and stays in India. The other is more contemplative, although I’m not confident that I’ve characterized either well. From the second blog:
To understand the dour, masochistic nature of Reformist Christianity you can either read ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ or, if lacking the time, simply sit down to an English meal…
It’s interesting that we’re seeing a multiple blog disorder growing to accommodate our multiple voices.
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