Web 2.0 v. laziness

Seth Porges at CrunchGear is arguing that the Web 2.0 “bubble” is going to burst when people get too lazy to continue to supply the sweet, sweet collective intelligence it needs to survive. As Porges points out, “without your neighbor/classmate/sister/girlfriend’s tireless devotion to keeping her profile up-to-date, MySpace would merely be a place for FOX to promote its properties.”

This is an interesting argument, but I’m not sure the examples Porges gives are all that convincing. The test case is Porges’s own migration through the social networking sites: Friendster used to be cool, but soon after joining up, Porges ignored his account there and moved over to MySpace. Then, when he grew too old for the highschool-yearbook vibe at MySpace, he moved over to Facebook, the country club of social networking. According to him, this same wanderlust and ennui is going to hit Digg and Wikipedia soon, causing them to fold.

This may be all well and good for Porges, but it doesn’t seem to fit the facts. As of this post, MySpace is ranked 6th in internet traffic. Additionally, Wikipeida just added its 2,000,000th English article. While I think the argument might apply to social networking sites—they depend on a critical mass of users, and if that mass moves somewhere else, they fold—it doesn’t appear to be affecting MySpace; both it and Facebook are continuing to grow. Further, and more importantly, what people do on Wikipedia and Digg is extremely different from what they do on MySpace and Facebook. I’m not sure that even a competing internet encyclopedia would cause users to leave Wikipedia. Porges himself points out that social networking sites appeal to different crowds—even Friendster is seeing a resurgance in Asia. If a competing encyclopeida emerged, it would likely have a completely different user base and produce a different kind of product. In short, I don’t buy Porges’s argument. Laziness isn’t going to bring down Web 2.0.

Mischaracterizing sources (Wes Anderson edition)

Jonah Weiner has a new piece in Slate bashing Wes Anderson for, among other things, his depiction of non-white characters in his films. Weiner’s argument centers primarily on Anderson’s new movie, The Darjeeling Limited, which is set in India (and which I have not seen). While the argument is largely compelling, one of Weiner’s claims so misrepresents a scene from The Royal Tenenbaums that it damages the whole. Here’s the quote:

Anderson generally likes to decorate his margins with nonwhite, virtually mute characters: Pelé in Life Aquatic, a Brazilian who sits in a crow’s-nest and sings David Bowie songs in Portuguese; Mr. Sherman in Royal Tenenbaums, a black accountant who wears bow ties, falls into holes, and meekly endures Gene Hackman’s racist jabs—he calls him “Coltrane” and “old black buck,” which Anderson plays for laughs; Mr. Littlejeans in Rushmore, the Indian groundskeeper who occasionally mumbles comical malapropisms (Anderson hired this actor, Kumar Pallana, to do the same in Royal Tenenbaums and Bottle Rocket). There’s also Margaret Yang, Apple Jack, Ogata, and Vikram. Taken together, they form a fleet of quasi-caricatures and walking punch lines, meant to import a whimsical, ambient multiculturalism into the films.

While in aggregate I think Weiner has a point, I think his summation of the scene between Danny Glover’s Henry Sherman and Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum is tremendously misleading. Here’s the scene that Weiner is referring to:

I think it is really difficult to describe Glover’s reaction to Tenenbaum’s racial taunts as “meek endurance.” On the contrary, the scene explodes into a furious shouting match, and, unlike Weiner’s claim that all Anderson’s non-white characters are “virtually mute”—with the implication being that they are one-dimensional caricatures—Glover’s dialogue is succinct and his performance in the scene is extremely nuanced.

I understand the impulse that led Weiner to overstate his case here: once you have created a theory, it is easy to assume that that theory is totalizing and to try to apply it to all situations. This is a problem faced by everyone who has ever tried to create an argument. However, I think the Glover example suggests the difficulties in trying to be this totalizing. A more nuanced argument would account for this apparent aberration—I would suggest that it might have something to do with Glover’s status as a professional actor, a status that is not held by many of the performers who played the roles of the offensive characters Weiner lists—or possibly scrap the argument in favor of one that could account for this scene.

Why hasn’t anyone called Steve Jobs on his DRM letter?

With all the hubbub over the launch of AmazonMP3, Amazon’s DRM-free music store, I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Steve Jobs’s open letter to the music industry from back in Feburary. In the letter, Jobs claimed that DRM was forced on iTunes by the music companies, and that

If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Well, it seems Amazon has pulled this off. The rub is, of the big four companies, Amazon only has EMI on board, the same EMI that earlier in the year allowed Apple to sell higher quality, DRM-free music on iTunes for $1.29 a track, a $0.30 premium over regular tracks. This move seemed contrary to the spirit of Jobs’s letter; if EMI was letting iTunes sell DRM-free tracks, why did they cost more, and why were there still DRM tracks being sold? The big difference in Amazon’s approach is that they have created a DRM-free store, not added a DRM-free premium like Apple did. Additionally, some of the Amazon tracks are only $0.89 each, a $0.40 savings over the DRM-free iTunes tracks.

In his letter, Jobs claims that the iTunes deal was revolutionary at the time, and he’s right. However, the Amazon model is going to crush the iTunes model: in it’s first day, it was already snagging customers from Apple. As the store catches on (and it seems likely to), the other major music publishers are going to get on board, and when they do Apple is going to have to make good on Steve Jobs’s DRM letter.

Open source law

New Zealand is using a wiki to create a publicly editable draft of its new police act. The draft is here while the homepage describing the project can be found here. According to the site, the project is being monitored by a review team, presumably to prevent vandalism. Here’s a description of the motivation for the project:

The Police Act Review has maintained an open process throughout, and wiki technology offers a novel way for people to have a say in the law-drafting process as well. This may well be one of the first pieces of legislation ever developed in New Zealand with the aid of such an online tool

This project appears to be incredibly open; the government is even soliciting alternative versions of the law:

To help get you started, we've included some headings and a few example clauses. But don't feel constrained. For instance, if you'd prefer to work offline and upload a complete Act for others to comment on, by all means add it beneath the one we've started (there's a space provided under the "Alternative versions" heading).

It will be interesting to see how this project is received and what it produces.

via Boing Boing

Predicting the future

A few weeks ago, Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web posted a list of ten future web trends. At the time, I didn’t take much notice because the list was pretty standard and not very interesting to me. However, yesterday MacManus posted a follow-up article where he listed trends that users had mentioned in the comments to his previous post. It’s interesting to compare the two lists; for instance, MacManus lists boring web trends that will never happen (the semantic web), while his readers list pretty interesting web trends that will never happen (intelligent agents).

All jokes aside, both lists are also intriguing for their attempts at prognosticating the development of future technologies. I’m always fascinated by this behavior: on the one hand, the prognostications are always somewhat off, but, on the other, futurism has an effect on what kinds of technologies are developed. MacManus mentions the history of AI in his first post, noting that it has been a goal of computing since the 1950s. However, there is been practically no progress in the field. Most of the examples MacManus lists are actually human intelligence being connected through computers, as with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The only true attempt at AI that is mentioned is Numenta, which is attempting to build computers based on (what sounds like) a connectionist, neural network model. I don’t think that this model is much of an improvement (at least as far as AI is concerned) on the cognitivism model which computers are based on now, so I would be surprised if it led to true AI, but it is an attempt at something new. The point is, the holy grail of AI has been desired for years, even though it hasn’t been practical to apply, because of the effect of the kind of future prognostication that is represented by these posts.

Using this lens, the two articles represent lists of what people desire the future to be. Fortunately, both are a bit more positive than Richard Watson’s chapter on the future from his forthcoming book Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years, where he sees a future of depressing loneliness and disconnection. MacManus and his readers are much more positive, seeing a future where the web will deliver new systems to improve people’s lives. Simply by virtue of the fact that both versions of the future coexist right now, the new web that emerges will likely contain elements of both.

London’s CCTVs haven’t reduced crime

According to this story from The Evening Standard, London’s CCTV system doesn’t appear to have lowered crime rates very much. According to the article, “four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.” The article suggests that two more effective approaches would be adding additional police officers and street lighting.

“We have estimated that CCTV cameras have cost the taxpayer in the region of £200million in the last 10 years but it's not entirely clear if some of that money would not have been better spent on police officers.

“Although CCTV has its place, it is not the only solution in preventing or detecting crime.”
...
A report by the criminal justice charity Nacro in 2002 concluded that the money spent on cameras would be better used on street lighting, which has been shown to cut crime by up to 20 per cent.

That last detail is particularly interesting to me. Cory Doctorow’s piece on the report refers to London’s CCTV system as a “panopticon.” As you might recall, Benthem’s Panopticon works by training the inmates of the prison to police themselves by making them feel that they are under constant surveillance. The article implies that street lighting is much better than video surveillance at achieving this effect.

Via Boing Boing

J. G. Ballard hates computers

According to The Guardian, J. G. Ballard claims that “I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.” The comment comes as part of the paper’s series of photos of writers’ workspaces. Here’s Ballard’s:


This comment strikes me as extremely bizarre, particularly the assumption that underpins it: that it’s possible to tell what technology has was used in the composition of a text. (Ballard claims that he writes his books out in longhand.) This sort of thing is typical of technology extremists, and, as is often the case, they are based on unverifiable assumptions. The only out for him that I can think of is that, as an author, he actually knows other authors and may have inside knowledge about their composing processes.

Via Boing Boing

Texting for democracy

The CNET News Blog posted this story on a report by researchers from the University of Michigan and Princeton that claims text-messaging young voters before an election makes them “significantly more likely to vote than those who didn't receive a text message reminder.”

According to the description, in the study students were text-messaged reminders before the election, and in the group that received reminders participation was up 4.2%. However, there is no indication that the researchers called or emailed control groups to see what role text-messaging actually played in the increase. Another point: according to the press release, the real authors of the study were the Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project, a nonprofit, and Working Assets, a cell phone company; the two were assisted by doctoral students from Michigan and Princeton. All told, the buzz around this story strikes me as ill-considered. Even though the headline reads “Texting boosts young voter turnout,” the substance of the report seems closer to “Reminders boost young voter turnout, but only by a little.”

Emergent network outages

From The New York Times

Though it was the kind of chaos that malevolent computer intruders always seem to be creating in the movies, the problem was traced to a malfunctioning network card on a desktop computer. The flawed card slowed the network and set off a domino effect as failures rippled through the customs network at the airport, officials said.

[. . . ] experts say that some of the most serious, even potentially devastating, problems with networks arise from sources with no malevolent component.

The complete New York Times story

Emergent spider web

via Boing Boing

“Spider experts say the web may have been constructed by social cobweb spiders, which work together, or could be the result of a mass dispersal in which the arachnids spin webs to spread out from one another.”

“Television is about one thing: video”

This story in the New York Times describes Sony’s new Bravia TVs and their ability to connect to the Internet to play videos. However, you have to by a $300 dongle (see left) to attach the set to your home network, and the TVs will only be able to get video from certain, Sony-approved sites, including Yahoo, AOL, and Sony’s own Crackle. (In contrast, HP’s digital TV solution lets users play video content that is stored on their computers.)

Frankly, this limitation on Sony’s product makes it seem pretty ho-hum. In other words, the Sony Bravia Internet Video Link (catchy, huh?) isn’t iPhone of digital media on the TV. The article mentions research by HP that shows “more than half of consumers are interested in using a television to watch the digital content stored on their personal computers — and the Internet.” Unfortunately, the Sony solution won’t let consumers watch their own digital content, only content that is uploaded to the approved sites, none of which, it should be noted, are popular destinations for online video—no YouTube, no iTunes, no Amazon Unbox. The extreme miscalculation of this plan is evident in this quote from the article:

Sony says the severe limitations are by design, for a couple of reasons. Primarily, it asserts, it is tough to ensure picture quality and user experience if it allows its customers to download content willy-nilly.

Sony appears to completely misunderstand people’s motivations for viewing digital media. First, users don’t (primarily) care about the quality of their video. DivX never offered great quality, but it was good enough, and people could put their movies where they wanted them—on discs they could play on the TV. If Sony thinks that people are going to flock to buy this product so they can watch user generated content on video sites no one has ever heard of, I think they’re going to be in for a surprise. Second, the operative user experience here is not dependent on quality. It is dependent on people being able to watch their media when and where they want to, to ”download content willy-nilly,” you might say. The Bravia Internet Video Link doesn’t allow them to do that, so I can’t see that it is going to be a big draw for consumers, and Sony’s seeming ignorance of what consumers want might even alienate them from the brand.

Google Books reality check

My enthusiasm for Google Books has waned somewhat since my previous post. First, I had a rocky relationship with the service over the weekend. I spent some time adding books to my library, which was for the most part good, clean fun. However, once the books were in the system, there didn’t seem to be any way to sort them for display. Books are automatically displayed in the order in which they are entered into the system; it is impossible to sort them by author or title. I guess the “organizing” in “organizing the world’s information” doesn’t mean what I think it does. The tagging feature is also a little too robust: even though the tags are separated by commas, the system automatically formats the tags when they are saved, eliminating multi-word tags. You can work around this by placing strings that contain more than one word in quotation marks, but that gets awkward. Also, the tags are case sensitive, but I don’t know why. I’m not sure that I need to differentiate between “rhetoric” and “Rhetoric,” for instance. Together, these features make the tag system a bit unwieldy; who can remember if they capitalized the second word in a string when they are tagging their 300th book?

Next, I was trying to liven up my course page for Literature and Mathematics by adding the title page from Flatland, but for some reason it won’t display. Apparently this feature still has some bugs to iron out.

Finally, today I found two less than glowing reviews of the service in First Monday. In “Inheritance and loss?: A brief survey of Google Books” Paul Duguid argues that Google Books relies on the quality control of the libraries whose books it is scanning, but this quality isn’t necessarily inherited to the system. Second, in this podcast (transcript), Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses the ways that the Google Books project threatens the Fair Use doctrine of copyright. Overall, it seems like the folks at Google still have a lot of issues to work out with this particular offering.

Google Books adds social features

Google Books has added a couple new features that enhance the social networking capabilities of the service. The most interesting allows users to embed sections of public-domain books directly into their webpages. Below is an example from Thomas Hobbes’s translation of Aristotle’s On Rhetoric.

The tool is fairly simple to use. All you have to do is click on the in the toolbar, then highlight the area you want to embed. When you’re done, a popup window with the embed code will appear.



The second feature allows users to add books to an online library (see the Add to my library link beneath the ISBN). Although I haven’t fooled around with it much, this feature seems similar to services like LibraryThing. This can’t be good news for them. Not only is the Google feature going to have more users, but it’s free (LibraryThing charges users to add more than 200 books).

These two features have turned Google Books into the YouTube of reading. It won’t be long before people are embedding books in their MySpace and Facebook profiles. I bet that savvy publishers are going to allow new books to have portions embedded on sites, just like some music publishers allow their songs to be posted on people’s MySpace pages.

Human-animal hybrids

William Saletan in Slate reports on the combination of human cells with animal eggs in the UK. The resulting embryo would have 13 animal genes and over 20,000 human genes. The research has been allowed in the UK with the stipulation that the embryos be destroyed within 14 days of their creation.

I recently read Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and this story reminded me of his description of hybrids. Hybrids are, roughly speaking, the combination of nature and society—or, in this case, subject and object—to form a new entity that isn’t easily quantifiable as either. One of Latour’s arguments about modern culture is that it attempts to categorize all hybrids as either natural or societal, a move that the British government appears to be making here. On the one hand, the number of animal genes is limited by the government to make sure that the embryos aren’t too non-human. But, on the other hand, the embryos have to be destroyed within 14 days of their creation because they aren’t human enough. It looks like Latour called this one.

Speech-to-text using your cellphone

Read/Write Web has posted a review of Jott, a mobile phone service that allows users speech-to-text functions such as dictating email messages. They have just released a service called “Jott Links” (and an API) that allows users to interact with websites like Zillow and Twitter using voice commands and speech recognition.

On the one hand this seems like a no-brainer, the perfect application of this technology. I spent a summer during college working for Speech Technology Magazine, and back then speech recognition software was mainly marketed for people with motor disabilities and those who liked to dictate their texts. With the proliferation of cell phones, it seems like this deployment of the technology should be a perfect fit for most people’s lifestyles. However, the limitations of the technology make me wonder how it will work. I could be hopelessly out of the loop here, but the speech recognition programs that I was familiar with back then depended on creating profiles of individual users, slowly learning how to decode the user’s speech through a trial-and-error process that required a lot of feedback in the form of corrections. Will Jott’s service do this, or has speech recognition evolved beyond this problem? If not, it could be a serious drawback. If a user wanted to post a message to a public service like Twitter, he or she will certainly want to make sure that message doesn’t contain any embarrassing malapropisms.

It will be interesting to see if this feature catches on. There have been some significant developments in interface design lately, most notably the huge response that Apple has received for the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which was just released today. Perhaps they will coexist, and we will get used to an everyware-esque situation where our interactions with computing devices will fit much more naturally in our everyday actions.