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April 23, 2003
At the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference.
First things first: Great wifi. They’re even renting wifi cards, although you gotta think that this is the last ETech conference they’ll expect they’ll need to rent wifi cards at.
It looks lilke there are 500-600 people here. Howard Rheingold is about to speak…
April 22, 2003
The discussion of authenticity and self and blogging leads me to wonder once again why no one is writing a novel in blog form. Or are they?
And which literary characters do you think would make good bloggers?
Roskolnikov
Ishmael
Emma Bovary
Cyrano de Bergerac
Mercutio but not Romeo
Huck Finn but not Tom Sawyer
Hester Prynne but not Arthur Dimmesdale
Daisy but not Gatsby
Blofeld but not James Bond
Spider-man but not Superman
Steve Himmer replies:
Aside from novels being presented via blogging software (such as Alex Golub’s and my own, there are actually a number of projects using the blog format as their basis. Some are listed here, and there’s also Plan B.
The best blognovels though (whether a blog can actually be a ‘novel’ or is necessarily a different form… I’ll leave that question alone for now) might be the ones that don’t reveal themselves as such, I think.
Thanks for the pointers, Steve. I actually meant to refer to people writing blogs that are fictitious (and not in any fancy POMO way) and that over time add up to what we would recognize as a novel.
Tom asks three questions. Simple little things, really. Oy gevalt!
Here are stabs at answers to two of them:
First, Tom draws a contrast between my assertion that our Web selves carry on their lives purely in the public of the Web and Doc‘s recent blog about the World Live Web as connected to the real world. Tom asks how we can ever know anything reliable about a RW self based on the Web self. Well, that depends what “reliable” means. If it means reliable enough for a transaction, then a credit card number suffices (and a digital ID is overkill). But that’s not what Tom means. If “reliable” means what it does in RW friendships, then I guess you have to meet the person f2f. (And, in a fit of pointless cleverness, let me do the ol’ switcheroo: How can our knowledge of a RW self tell us anything about a Web self? Or does the fact that that question makes little sense mean that we think the Real self is the Real World self?)
Third, I suggest that the questions of authenticity, etc., arising about weblogs apply to any narrative, not just to weblogs. Tom replies by asking what’s specific about weblogs in general. “But that’s another post,” he promises. I look forward to it. But there is something specific about weblogs that make questions about self and truthfulness appropriate: weblogs are in fact public selves…which is where my initial post started.
(Tom also corrects a link in one of my previous blogs. I’ve back-fixed it. Thanks, Tom.)
Michael O’Connor Clarke explains why he’s quit Friendster. Well put.
Here‘s what makes me queasy about the place. I’ll be joining Michael in non-Friendster land soon. I’m hanging in experimental-like just to see if anything develops. Also, I want to use it as an example during my talk at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conf I’m flying to tonight.
For those who are keeping track, I’m sick as a dog: sore throat, sleepy, even a touch of fever (although my wife — famous for her warm hands during my illnesses — denies it). I am not looking forward to flying transcontinentally tonight, and I doubt the people inhaling my toxic fumes will be happy about it either.
From the UK’s unreliable tabloid, The Sun:
By SIMON WHEELER
A bid by Madonna to trick fans who download music from the internet without paying backfired – when a hacker caused mayhem on her website.
All 11 tracks from her new album American Life appeared to be posted on Madonna.com for downloading. But when the files were played back listeners heard Madonna saying: “What the f*** do you think you’re doing?”
One angry computer buff got revenge by hacking into the website and adding his own message, saying: “This is what the f*** I think I’m doing.”
He then left links to a site where the songs really could be downloaded for free.
Madonna.com was taken down for several hours yesterday so the message and links could be removed.
(Thanks, Greg, for the link.)
April 21, 2003
As you probably already know, there’s a fascinating thread about authenticity and truth in the selves we’re constructing via weblogs. This piece, late in the thread, by Burning Bird is a good place to start. And this piece by Jonathon Delacour is seminal.
I love this topic but I don’t see what’s specific to weblogging about it. Don’t the same questions apply whenever we talk? I have never told an anecdote or story that wasn’t fictitious in some sense. Except on the Web, our self is purely public and written, so we can’t fall back on the myth of the Inner Private Real person that allows us to act as if there’s the possibility of our “outer expressions” corresponding to our Inner Real Self. I.e., the false possibility of authenticity is closed off to us in the virtual world. (I’m burning to say more but I have to go out to a meeting. Ack!)
Now that Frank Paynter has changed his name to “Freedom Paynter” because “Frank sounds too French somehow,” and the NeoReactionary Republicans are accusing the Right-Wing Republicans of being “Franco-Republicans,” I feel impelled to take a stand and say:
Not only is the country beautiful and the art is beautiful and the food is beautiful, but the people are friendly and warm and I agree with France’s position on the Iraqi war: If this was a war about WMDs, we should have given the inspectors more time.
So, to protest the “French” to “Freedom” translation, I am going to start referring to the Republicans as the “Gaullist Party.”
PS: Frank was joking.
I blogged the other day about a Bayesian spam filter that runs as a service to which you can hook up your local Pop email client. Bayesian filters learn from their analysis of the word usage patterns of content that a user has initially sorted into spam and non-spam piles. This new service, Death2Spam, pools the sortings of all of its users. Since I am a very happy user of a Bayesian filter (PopFile) that runs on my own machine, I asked the service’s creator, Richard Jowsey, why we should prefer a service like his that pools all subscribers’ spam sortings.
Q: What do you about the “my spam is your important msg” problem? Shouldn’t a well-trained personal collection be more useful than a large multi-person collection?
A: Damn fine question, sir! Yes, and no. Our generic database is currently 99% accurate for the average user. It contains word-probability analysis from about 100k messages. And does the basic job really well, for most people. BTW, all our server stats are freely available to worthy causes like anti-spam research. Interesting reading.
We’re presently adding a “premium” (aka geek) version, which will allow you to combine personal database probs with the generic data, weighted per your preferences. Plus support for adjusting upper and lower unsure limits. Plus a URL crawler for nailing micro-spams. Plus the mandatory (but largely vestigial) black/white lists. That ought to keep everyone happy… :)
Micro-spam? I don’t know what that is but I have a bunch of offers for extending it, thickening it and making it last longer if that’ll help any.
FWIW, After a few months of using Popfile, occasionally correcting its mistakes, it’s now about 99.5% accurate. That is, about 1 in 200 messages that it’s classified as spam is in fact non-spam.
Our daughter Leah has noticed two war signs that, depending on where you place commas, are completely ambiguous about their position:
| NO |
| WAR |
April 20, 2003
Valdis Krebs, who works on the automated mapping of social networks, points out that the late Mark Lombardi’s astounding, hand-drawn maps of political connections have been gathered into a traveling exhibition. As Valdis points out, even the titles of the works are provocative. You can see some examples here.
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