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December 9, 2005
In 1999, Chris Locke called a chapter of The Cluetrain Manifesto “Internet Apocalypso.”
In July, Mel Gibson announced he has written and will direct a movie called “Apocalypto.”
Last night, a show opened in Boston to excellent reviews. Its title: “Apocalpyso.”
Oh, Johnnie Cochran, where are you in our hour of need?
[Tags: cluetrain apocalypso ChrisLocke rageboy]
December 8, 2005
Hoder, the remarkable Iranian blogger and force for good got googled at the US Border and was denied admission because something he’d written in his blog was used against him. Read it and be amazed/depressed. [Tags: blogosphere hoder]
December 7, 2005
I’ve just published an issue of my newsletter, the Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization. Here’s the table of contents:
| The year of unique IDs: We’re about to get very interested in assigning meaningless numbers to lots of things. Very interested.
Living
My
|
December 6, 2005
Jenny Attiyeh’s podcast site is featuring an interview she did with the three of us at the social software conference a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t listened to it, but I remember being particular depressed and snappish — the Internet is being murdered and my ThinkPad had just broke — but, fortunately, Chris and Stowe were delightful. [Tags: JennyAttiyeh ChrisNolan StoweBoyd podcast]
December 5, 2005
Jeneane‘s got a job consulting with Bubbleshare, so I took a look. It’s a photo sharing site with a couple of twists: It’s about creating albums to share with friends v. family. (Yes, I know the “v.” means “versus, but it just sort of looked good.) And there’s no registration: They send you an URL for your album after you create one. The site is free but a premium service is on the way; the free service stores low-res images and requires you to renew (for free) your albums every year if you want to maintain them.
I can’t tell how they’re going to do, but they’ll do better now that Jeneane is on the case. [Tags: JeneaneSessum bubbleshare photos flickr]
Two men from far apart
sit near each other in the
hotel breakfast room,
leaning forward to snatch
the food from their spoons
so that they are not under the drip.
Both bend in homage to
gravity’s superior food handling skills.
They move together precisely,
as if programmed,
a tableau in which the absurdity of life
asserts itself, absurdly, as if it were
as real as gravity.
* * *
A root floats in the flat sea
banging against the land’s clean stone interface.
Its presence says nothing of where it came from,
a struggle we lose on the margins
but win everywhere we live.
* * *
At nine in the morning
it’s close to dawn.
The tilted earth still holds us tight.
December 2, 2005
[Remember: In the blogosphere, we are required to forgive one another’s bad poetry. It’s the law.] [Tags: poetry]
December 3, 2005
Lloyd Davis has posted a clip of my presentation at the London conference, a text summary of it, and a video one-question interview(tm) that features me at my jetlagged, adrenalin-receding best. As Rageboy has pointed out to me, the last features a full-pate exposure at the end. (Lloyd also expertly moderated the Open Space-ish meeting of the Open Rights Group last Tuesday.)
The Oxford Internet Institute has posted the video of my presentation there. It’s close to the one I gave at Online Info – yes, I have a couple of stump speeches – although the questions are obviously different.
December 2, 2005
Congratulations to Euan Semple on being named Information Professional of the Year.
December 1, 2005
I spent the day with Nokia (very very interesting), and am about to go out to speak at an evening event, which means I will have managed to avoid seeing anything at all of Helsinki or Finland…except, of course, the Finns I got to talk with today. It’s been a fun and fascinating day, but I need more landmarks, dammit! :)
Tomorrow, I have a morning to wander. I’ve been advised to go up to the tippy-top of the Tower Hotel (all eleven floors) to get a panoramic view. After that, I’ll do whatever the concierge tells me to. And I’m looking forward to it. I’m sorry I only have a morning…
November 30, 2005
Ted Nelson is giving a talk to about twenty people at the Oxford Internet Institute. (I just gave a talk on taxonomy and the mmiscellaneous.) Ted invented the word “hypertext” and for many years worked on the Xanadu project, a hyperlinked web that gains some advantages over the Web by allowing a degree of centralization. [What follows are the notes I took while Ted was talking. They are quite approximate, and probably dead wrong in spots.]
He talks about the great British engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who wanted the width of RR tracks to be set at the optimally safe distance but lost to the economic interests of the carriage makers. He likewise talks about Nikola Tesla “who invented the modern world,” including the electrical grid. Tesla wanted to give free electricity to everyone in the world by “charging up the electrical field of the planet so that anyone with a coil could just tap off what they like.” Westinghouse stopped backing him as a result of this. “What’s the business model?” Finally, he talks about Wernher von Braun vs. Chuck Yeager. Yeager gets credit for breaking the sound barrier, although (says Nelson) a British pilot preceded him. Nelson says that Yeager later said “I could have gone orbital, but they told me not to.” This was in 1947. Why did we hold Yeager back, he asks. Because, von Braun felt that if he let a little plane got orbital instead of large rockets, it would disrupt his political agenda. Von Braun shared Heinlein’s vision of colonizing space. (Ted says this story is “partially conjectural.”)
The point: There are hidden agendas in most technological decisions. He asks why programs insist on us not entering spaces or hyphens into phone numbers. “The real technical reason is the programmer is a jerk.” The engineer, says Ted, passively-aggressively requires the user to do something “rigorous.” This is the techie mentality at its worst. Software is too important to be left to the techies; they need an “overarching vision.” The reason computer games are so much better than office software is that the people who create computer games love to play games while the people who make office software “don’t give a shit.”
“Today’s computer world is based on techie misunderstandings of human thought and human life.”
He talks about Doug Engelbart who shares Ted’s view that “the current computer world is absolutely lousy.” He lays this primarily at the foot of Xerox PARC’s assumption that the computer GUI ought to imitate paper. Rather, it should enable rapidly changing links among the thousands among ideas and scraps. He shows some great examples of French literary works (e.g., Victor Hugo) literally cut and pasted together. But Xerox PARC called a simple hide and show operation “cut and paste,” thus making it harder to do complex rearrangement of pieces.
From the ’60s, Ted has had the idea that we should have a hypertext world in which anyone can publish, with automatic payment to the authors. “For the last 45 years, I’ve been trying to realize this design vision.” He focuses on the data side because it requires managing vast numbers of links, and paying the rights holders. “I want to make it possible for everything to be remixed.” (Xanadu is now called “Transliterature.”)
His point overall: The computer world is not technologically determined. It is an accident. We can thus change its basic premises.
Q: You are wrong to think that the market is a conspiracy against good ideas, and that freedom is being constrained by regulation and standardization. On the contrary, some regulation results in a greater good.
A: The market hasn’t had a chance for anything else.
Q: You’re like the techies you don’t like. You offer us ideas we should like better. E.g., I like editing on wysiwyg, paper-emulating word processors. And bad sw often results from the people specifying it not really knowing what they want.
I do believe in the great designer theory – Buckminister Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orson Welles…
Q: The problem is with the market itself, which results in tech gear being created for a dollar day in China. You should be attacking the market, not the techies.
Ted: Good luck. [Tags: TedNelson taxonomy EverythingIsMiscellaneous
I got to go to lunch with Ted. Between the noodles he demo’ed ZigZag, which is rather hard for us spatially-impaired to explain. But, here goes. It’s a database designed to permit multidimensional views of information. So, if you feed it information about the line of British royalty, you can view the info by, say, date, and it will arrange itself visually on the screen appropriately. Ask to see familial relations, and it will suitably rearrange itself. It is very much not a row-and-column view, a view Ted finds only occasionally suitable to the data. I think (but my spatial impairment keeps me from knowing for sure) that this would be a cool tool for visualizing facets.
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