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May 3, 2002
Howard Greenstein is raising the alarm about the latest court-based intrusion, this time requiring SonicBlue to report on its users activities so it can be more accurately sued.
May 2, 2002
I’ve often looked at Tom’s blog‘s logo and I can’t figure out why he has it capitalized the way he does: IMproPRieTies. I know I’m going to feel like a dolt when someone explains it to me. Are there words hidden in there? If so, why not:
imPrOprETies (for the beauty of his writing)
or
IMProprieTIES (for his mischievious fashion sense)
or even
iMprOpRiEtIeS (for his demand for the maximum of being)
I’m quite nervous about speaking at the Nantucket Conference tomorrow (Tagline: “It’s on Nantucket. It’s a Conference. Did we leave anything out?”). This is a confabulation of about 170 people, mainly New England high techers with a slant toward hard core business and finance people. So, with my usual perversity, I’m trying out a presentation that is focused directly away from the bright light of money. I’m trying to communicate in 45 minutes what I think Small Pieces is about. That means getting abstract and conceptual in public. As I’m saying on my title slide: “Today’s debut is tomorrow’s rough draft.”
I want to end by saying the way in which the Web is ours because I think this is something that business usually doesn’t appreciate. We’re off having ourselves a good time on the Web, blogging with our buddies, emailing our pals, being who we are, and then we go to a business site and suddenly it’s all about them. “Oooh, aren’t our products just so gosh-durned splendid? Please sit still while we tell you all about them!” Bullhorn at a cocktail party. But I don’t want to say that the Web is “ours” in an Us vs. Them way. I mean that it’s putting us small pieces together in new ways.
So, I thought I’d try the following formulation:
The Web is nothing without links. It’s architected on links. But
Links = Passion + Voice
I put in a link because I care enough about something to send you towards it and away from my own site. And I do so within a context (a page, an email msg) written in my own voice. In fact, my choice of links is very much an expression of my voice. Without voice, the Web would be a mere information resource.
And this gets at what is for me the contradiction that above all others — e.g., the contradiction between the Web being both mass-ive and full of individuals who don’t become face-less in the mass — gets at the pull of the Web: On the Web we join with others who share our passions, but we do so in our own unique voices. Sameness and difference, the ultimate contradiction. If the Web lets us resolve such a basic duality — which means embracing both sides fully and simultaneously — no wonder it matters so damn much.
Now, let me pull back from the dread disease: Ontological Overstatement. It’s not as if we’ve never overcome this contradiction before. In fact, we resolve the duality every time we have a conversation with someone in the real world. The importance of the Web, in this regard, is that as a medium (because of its hyperlinked architecture) it enables the resolution of this duality on a scale we’ve never seen before.
(Oh, this should go over real well at a hard-core financial conference. Sigh.)
In line with yesterday’s Fun with Numbers, here’s another puzzler. All you have to do is figure out how many zeroes follow the numbers in the following factoid, culled from today’s Boston Globe:
There are 5____ tenured professors of philosophy in the US.
BONUS: Of those, 7____ are African-Americans.
ANSWER backwards: dnasuoht evif. Bonus: ytneves
May 1, 2002
From a quiz about communications comes this factoid:
The US Postal Service was handling ___ pieces of mail per year as of 1886, according to the US Bureau of the Census.
See if you can get within an order of magnitude of the right answer.
ANSWER (Backwards): noillib owt
The always intellectually generous Peterme responds to my comments on an article on postmodernism by Chip Morningstar
Chip has an even better essay on his site, describing the design of the first multi-player virtual environment. Some interesting thoughts on “creating a world” online.
I figure you’ll enjoy some of the links here (talks of “space” on the web!)
And I wrote a response to Gladwell‘s “Social Life of Paper” essay that you saw a bit back… it’s stimulated some decent thought on my site…
Peter goes after both the argument and the rhetoric of Gladwell’s article and his comments have changed my mind about it. I had thought I really liked it.
Freepint, a site that publishes an interesting and useful UK newsletter called PubCrawl, has published part 1 of Laurel Clyde’s intro to weblogs. Straightforward, informative, balanced and voiceless. Here’s her tell-’em-what-you’re-going-to-tell-’em paragraph:
This article will first discuss the question, “What is a weblog?”, and
then describe types of weblogs. Following this is a section dealing
with how weblogs are created, with reference to popular weblog
creation software and services. Some examples of quality weblogs are
described and an overview is provided of weblogs in the field of
library and information science. Some lists and directories of
weblogs, and search engines for weblogs, are identified. The article
concludes with a brief discussion of what weblogs might do for you.
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