{Thursday, November 03, 2005}

 

DRM's power grab gets more naked


I think this week may be when the supposed middle ground of DRM vanishes. Walt Mossberg and Chris Anderson have both spoken against harsh protection, but stopped short of condemning DRM outright, unlike David Berlind.
This week we have had Sony/BMG adopting the techniques of virus writers to wrest control of your PC from you, and the MPAA proposing legislation to cripple all our video cameras and computers unless we are "professionals".

This is the first of my 5 points: DRM Turns your computer against you.
Sony will feel a backlash due to the value destruction they inflict on their customers (point 5), and their sales will fall. Microsoft should disable the CD Autorun feature used as an infection vector by Sony, as Apple did 7 years ago.

The MPAA attempt, though is serious. They managed to pass a similar law in 1998 that mandated Macrovision video signal corruption, and faulty AGC circuitry for non-professional video recorders. This is why you can't run your DVD player signal through your VCR, and why dubbing copies of your home videos is so awkward.

I worked long and hard at Apple for 5 years making the digitisation of video work easily and seamlessly, so we could all edit video, so my children could create and share with the world, and this stupid law will deliberately undo our work and break our computers and cameras on purpose.
It goes without saying that it will do nothing to prevent large scale commercial copying of movies, as this is done with professional equipment, and is already illegal and subject to huge fines. All it will do is yet again invert the legal presumption of innocence (point 4), and assume that my boys' videos, and your own recordings are copyright violations, and stop them from being digitised.

The 'Analog Holes' they want to stop up are our eyes, ears and mouths.



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{Tuesday, November 01, 2005}

 

six things that seemed amusing to me this week but probably aren't if I have to explain the context



  1. I keep seeing things that aren't so much 'Web 2.0' as 'me 2.0'
  2. I had that Emma Bovary in the back of the cab once...
  3. If you buy a Sony CD it saves you the 15 minute wait to get rooted
  4. I now realise that Our Island Story was an extended set up for 1066 and All That
  5. Was the Master jealous of the Doctor in Dr Who because he never finished his PhD?
  6. That much Halloween candy is bound to bring on apocolocyntosis

Inspired by the latest 5ive, which is much funnier.




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{Tuesday, October 25, 2005}

 

Technology should be amoral


Nicholas Carr's 'The amorality of Web 2.0' has an underlying rhetorical premise that is flawed, and Tim O'Reilly's defence ignores this.

Technology should be amoral. Morality is difficult stuff that should be left to humans to deal with. At best, technology can help inform humans to make moral choices, but to argue, as both sides in this debate seem to be doing, that technology can be moral in itself is to take a dangerous step.

We have millennia of literature arguing against devolving moral choice to simple mechanistic reasoning, from the Solomonic compromise, through the cautionary tales of golems to the modern myths like Brazil.

Indeed, lets look at contemporary cases where we are asked to devolve moral judgements to machines. David Weinberger's Copy Protection is a Crime essay sets out this category error clearly - that DRM eliminates leeway by handing control to stupid mechanisms:
In reality, our legal system usually leaves us wiggle room. What's fair in one case won't be in another - and only human judgment can discern the difference. As we write the rules of use into software and hardware, we are also rewriting the rules we live by as a society, without anyone first bothering to ask if that's OK.

David Berlind and Walt Mossberg have picked up on this too, realising that code is not good at subtlety and judgement.

Similarly the Censorware Project and the OpenNet Initiative document the shortcomings of using computers to decide whose idea can be seen online by crude keyword filtering.

When designing software and the social architecture of the web we do need to think about these issues, but we must eschew trying to encode our own, or others, morality into the machine.

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{Monday, October 24, 2005}

 

20 million served


Technorati passed 20 million blogs today. The 20 millionth was Les CE2/CM2 Anquetil, a blog from an elementary school in Reims, France, in the heart of Champagne country. They started the blog to celebrate running 2 miles in a Relay Marathon.

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{Sunday, October 23, 2005}

 

Tags and cognitive load


I've talked about this before, but not written it down.

One of the criticisms of tags is that they are 'just keywords again', which is true. The key difference is that they are experienced differently by the users, in a way that imposes much less cognitive load.

iPhoto has had an image keywords feature since it was first launched, but I don't know anyone who uses it. Conversely, Flickr's tagging is used by most of its users.

Part of this is down to the effect of working in public rather than private, as discussed in another context in Cory's classic 'outboard brain' essay, where the sense of public performance changes the psychology of annotation.

Flickr PhotoBut a key part of it is the cognitive load of the user interface.

With iPhoto, in order to tag something, you need to first dig around in the menubar to bring up the Keywords dialog, illustrated here.

Then you need to create a new Keyword (which is buried under the popup at the top).

Then you need to select the photos that you want to tag with that keyword in the main window, then go back to the Keywords window and click 'Assign'.

This is not just a four-stage process, it has 2 stages that impose a big cognitive load, of the kind Cory describes as

one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Flickr PhotoBeing handed a list of keywords and asked to add your desired ones is in effect asking you to construct a personal ontology of the world; to break the world into categories you want to keep track of. To hold the entire universe in your head in one go, and chop it into meaningful chunks. That's too mentally exhausting for most people. Plus, as creating a keyword is a 2-stage process, it feels a bit like they are rationed.

Then, the implied second task is to go and find all the pictures you have taken that fit that keyword. Again, this involves scanning through possibly thousands of images looking for the right one.

Now these aren't actual constraints; you can just create one tag and apply it to one photo, but the process makes it feel like a big deal, and something that you should consider carefully before doing it. So hardly anyone does it.

Conversely, Flickr prompts you for tags for each batch of photos you upload, and shows you each individual photo with a place to type tags in next to it. You look at the picture and type in the few words it makes you think of, move on to the next, and you're done. The cognitive load is tiny, because you have the picture in front of you and you can't help but think of words to describe it.

Flickr PhotoAperture, Apple's new application for professional photographers, seems to have come up with a better solution than iPhoto. It has a pane in the general photo view that lets you freely enter keywords (one at a time, by the look of it, but I assume they go into the list below as you do so). However, the list of tech specs includes a long list of predefined tags. This is puzzling - why do they feel the need to list tags for 'Bridesmaid' and 'Groomsman' and so on as a feature?


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{Friday, October 21, 2005}

 

In honour of Nelson, 1758-1805


The was fought 200 years ago today, preventing Napoleon's fleet from invading England. Admiral died during it. He was commemorated by Robert Graves in the poem '1805', so I'm posting this public domain recording of Robert Graves reading 1805, courtesy of the British Library.




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{Thursday, October 13, 2005}

 

Armando Ianucci explains how to combat deceitful rhetoric


he says:

Resolving a problem by re-stating the obvious is an increasingly popular conversational gambit. For example, how many times have you phoned up a monolithic corporation to complain about bad service, practically spewing tears as you relive the 15-month frustration you've just been through, only to be told: "I hear what you're saying"?

As if, though on the phone with you, they weren't hearing what you were saying but were in fact hearing what a Tweenie was saying, or even doing something entirely unconnected with hearing what someone was saying, like launching a cruise liner or putting sausage-meat inside a car battery.

Of course they are hearing what you're saying, but it's no more effective a solution to your problem than declaring: "I'm sitting on my buttocks."


Do read the whole thing.

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{Friday, October 07, 2005}

 

Typing URLs now Illegal in England


Daniel Cuthbert has been convicted of computer hacking and fined $1000 for typing a URL into a browser.
The Open Rights Group is being set up to fight this kind of idiocy. Go and pledge your support today.

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{Thursday, October 06, 2005}

 

At web 2.0 conference


I'm at

Web 2.0 Conference: October 5-7, at the Argent Hotel, San Francisco, CA



Come find me!



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{Tuesday, October 04, 2005}

 

Five business blogging questions


Suw asks:

What are the top five issues you think are important in the world of social media in business? What keeps you up at night? What should be taking centre stage at BlogOn 2005?


Suw's Blogon Event is designed to explain to corporations how blogs can work for them, so my questions are for those embarking on a public corporate blogging project:
  1. Are you ready to talk honestly in public, and avoid the ritualised language of press releases?
  2. Can you accept that having your words easily indexed and found is an advantage rather than a problem?
  3. Are you prepared to join the conversation, by linking, tagging and comments, and responding to criticism on your own blog?
  4. Do you realise that faking blogs is worse than ignoring them?
  5. Will you remember that the Web is made by people, not machines, and if you abuse their trust, they will tell everyone about it?


I'd like to pass this on to Tom Coates, danah boyd and Doc.

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{Monday, October 03, 2005}

 

Resilient File Formats


On the question of which file formats succeed, the answer is those that are resilient. The ones that provide a method for expansion, and a way for multiple versions to coexist safely.Backwards compatibility is a necessary part of this, but it is not sufficient - forwards compatibility is what wins out.
I see 3 big generations of file format here:
  1. RFC 822 style (ASCII key:value, as in Mail headers and HTTP headers)

  2. IFF style (keyed binary blobs with length offsets) (IFF, AIFF, TIFF, QuickTime, WAV, AVI, MPEG4)

  3. SGML style (ASCII <tag> </tag> model) (SGML, HTML, XML, XHTML)

In each case, these define a way for different versions of the same format to coexist by defining that it is OK to discard elements you don't understand.
This provides baseline compatibility (old parsers generally don't crash on new data, unlike more naive formats), but still requires work to define the sub elements of the format to interoperate.
It provides for graceful degradation, with older or less-featured clients able to display the subset they understand, rather than balking completely.
If you replace an element with a more general one, you may need to continue to include the old version for the previous generation of parsers.
Having worked at Apple on QuickTime for 5 years, and spent 10 years before that tracking it, I've seen that it does take some care to adapt and update in a way that will not break old clients, but the benefits for users of your format are immense (the unofficial motto there was 'no movie left behind'). Of course, if your users are happy, this helps your adoption.
HTML took this from SGML, and in many ways expanded it further due to the toleration of sloppy markup from user-agents, to the point where people writing parsers had a bit of tough time of it.
XML was an over-reaction to this - it instituted draconian parsing by design, and effectively gave the green light for everyone to make up their own format without consideration for others at all (with namespaces as a figleaf to cover this, and coerce coexistence post hoc).
Microformats build on the older model of backward compatibility through selective enhancement. This is a bit more work for the parser and format designer, but much less for those creating data using the format, who can readily pick up the latest version to enhance their existing HTML without harming their other uses.
Working within XHTML does impose constraints on how you can express things, but as Cory Doctorow put it last week:
"It's like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn't go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that'll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity... But these days, there's not much traditional constraint. I've got the engineer's most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I'll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools.


Working with constraints is what makes for good Art, and good Engineering, whether the constraints are cultural or structural.
Without shared meaning there can be no communication. Microformats work to converge shared meaning without disrupting other uses, and to enhance rather than replace what you are doing already.


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{Friday, September 30, 2005}

 

Future of TV thoughts


I've been spending the day at the future of TV conference I mentioned below, and am hearing recurring themes from people here, which mesh with a lot I've been thinking.

I spoke about a key technological driver, which is storage. Classic broadcast TV had everyone watching at the same time, because there is no storage at all. The next iteration is a central archive, but these are fragile - witness the BBC's loss of large numbers of programs from the 80s due to videotape erosion. Tivo, iPod and BitTorrent are manifestations of storage moving to the edge, streams becoming files, and giving us more choice. Streaming is a throwback to the 2nd model - Rick Prelinger says 'streaming is for sissies'. Multiple copies spread to the edges are more resilient, and more remixable, and so create a larger cultural footprint.

Old school search looks at the content, and tries to derive metadata from it. With text we can find keywords, but with audio and video this is difficult. The classic attempt is to scrape closed captions, try shot detection, try phonetic transcription, but all of these don't help much.

Traditional media production goes through a broadcast funnel that strips out all the structure that was there while it was being made - shots, scenes, production notes, alternative takes. DVD production is finally preserving some of this, but it is often explicit recreation.

Then there is the afterlife of media, which is its cultural impact and the discussion, recommendations, remixing and inspiration that goes on afterwards, and which provides the richer context and description.

What is happening is that the edge culture, the long tail, is spreading a bigger footprint, while the locked-up media from the centre is shrinking it context. My cousin Robert does video restoration for the BBC, and often relies on discovered amateur recordings to reconstruct destroyed recordings.

So how do we help this? Tagging, citing and annotating are already working for text and pictures, lets do this for audio and video too.

A good step would be to converge on a way to add media metadata that is easy to create and share. We've started a microformat process by collecting media metadata examples.

Another thing I heard from multiple people is a desire for a way to pay for the media created by remix culture. My mediAgora idea comes to mind.

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{Thursday, September 29, 2005}

 

Art imitates Life



Kevin Compares iPods
Originally uploaded by mollyeh11.
from Cory's 'Themepunks' :
Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so prone to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to shit if you looked at them cross-eyed? It's because the iPod was only meant to last a year! [...]
He handed her a white brick, the size of a deck of cards. It took her a moment to recognize it as an iPod. "Christ, it's huge," she said.

"Yeah, isn't it just. Remember how small and shiny this thing was when it shipped? 'A thousand songs in your pocket!'"


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{Tuesday, September 27, 2005}

 

The Future of Television


September 30th, 2005 11:30am - 12:30pm
Getting Ready for Prime Time: Online Video and the Future of Television
at The Hillside Club 2286 Cedar Street Berkeley, California
I'm speaking at this conference about Content Discovery and Search relating to online video -looks like an interesting day.



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{Friday, September 23, 2005}

 

Come to Tag Tuesday


September 27th, 2005 6:30 - 8:30pm
Tag Tuesday - Scott Golder and Technorati Blog Finder
at 77 Natoma Street at 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA USA
Meet other Bay Area tag developers, hear Scott Golder present his research on Collaborative Tagging, and hear how Technorati Blog Finder combines bubble-up taxonomy and direct tagging.


We skipped this in August due to Barcamp, but we're back.

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{Tuesday, September 20, 2005}

 

Three indications that XML may be overdoing things a bit


Knuth has trouble with validation.
Cisco makes a router that validates XML.
A roomful of RDF experts recommend scraping.

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{Tuesday, September 13, 2005}

 

A too-short history of the Long Tail?


Chris Anderson writes in Always On:
the Long Tail model, which was born in March 2004.
[...]I met with a guy named Robbie Vann-Adibé who at the time was running a digital jukebox company called Ecast. During the course of our conversation, Robbie asked me what percentage of his top 10,000 tracks I thought sold at least once per month?
[...]The answer was 98%—that is, 98% of Ecast's top 10,000 tracks sell at least once per month. When I get something this badly wrong—when I have a data point that's just way off the line—I have to ask whether one of two things is true. Either you've got an outlier—meaning (in this case) that there's just something funky about the digital jukebox business—or there's something going on that warrants further investment.

This timeline seems a bit odd to me. Personally, I think I first articulated this in r, K or RIAA?:

[in biology] you'll see a clear distinction between r and K reproductive strategies. I'll summarize briefly - K strategies work in a stable, restricted environment that is near to carrying capacity (eg the Billboard chart and radio playlist, or record shop stock). In this case, the successful strategy is to have few offspring, and invest lots of effort on nurturing them and helping them to survive.

r strategies work in an unpredictable environment where you are not near the carrying capacity of the environment (the Internet). Here the successful strategy is to have huge numbers of offspring with a low investment of effort, let them loose and expect that enough will do well and survive to keep your species going.

If you're a K strategist that finds yourself in an less predictable and less closed environment than you thought, you need to move closer to the r model, and spread your seed more widely. It seems the Record Industry is doing the opposite.


I can understand Chris not reading obscure websites I wrote 3 years ago, but how about Gary Wolf's Wired article in October 2003 which said:

All of Amazon's important innovations - starting from the concept of a Web bookstore - have suggested a profound change in the bookselling business, a change that makes it possible to earn a profit by selling a much wider variety of books than any previous retailer, including many titles from the so-called long tail of the popularity curve. 'If I have 100,000 books that sell one copy every other year,' says Steve Kessel, an Amazon VP, 'then in 10 years I've sold more of these, together, than I have of the latest Harry Potter.'


I think Chris Anderson was editor of Wired at the time.

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{Monday, September 12, 2005}

 

5 short arguments against DRM


I have seen several discussions of Digital Rights Management again recently. Having blogged on this folly at enormous length in the past, I thought instead I'd apply my targetted frame technique. Here are some anti-DRM arguments framed for 5 different groups:


Computer Users: DRM turns your computer against you


I know sometimes it seems like your computer has it's own agenda, when it refuses to print or copy or find your documents. DRM does this on purpose. It is designed to stop you copying and pasting, printing and sharing things. I don't think you want this.


Computer Scientists: DRM will fail through emulation

One of the basic precepts of Computer Science is the Church-Turing thesis, which shows that any computer can emulate any other one. This is not theory, but something we all use every day, whether it is Java virtual machines, or CPU's emulating older ones for software compatibility.

The corollary of this is that code can never really know where it is running. For a rock solid example, look at MAME, the Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator, that runs almost any video game from the last 30 years. The games think you have paid a quarter when you press the '5' key.


Corporations: DRM has to be undone to be used

Microsoft has been touting DRM features in the next version of Office that will only allow approved people to copy or forward or print documents that they can read. But if they can read them, they can describe, paraphrase, retype or photograph them. If you can't trust your employees, but think you can trust your computers more, you have deeper problems than document leakage.


Lawyers: DRM makes machines judge, jury and executioner

Law is complex and subtle, with elaborate and oft-satirised processes and procedures for making, enforcing, fight and settling contentious issues. Due process is there for good reasons which I don't need to rehearse to you.

DRM undoes all this with the simplistic, hard-edged certainty of a machine. It will refuse to let you copy video you have shot yourself, or prevent citation by copying and pasting. It will make presumptions of guilt rather than innocence. Some tasks we can delegate to machines; law and jurisprudence should not be one.


Media Companies: DRM destroys value

By adding DRM to your products, you make them less attractive to your potential customers. This will reduce the amount they are willing to pay for them, significantly.

Companies that bet on DRM die off. Apple's iTunes store (often cited as a DRM success) will burn Audio CDs, so it preserves the customer value.


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{Wednesday, September 07, 2005}

 

Being Poor


John Scalzi’s angry reaction to TV commentators’ astonishment at people not evacuating New Orleans led him to write Being Poor - a heartfelt explanation in the form of a series of examples. And then the commenters came and added their experiences, on and on and on in heartbreaking detail.
John reflects on it all:

Overall, writing the "Being Poor" piece and seeing the response has been one of the moving writing experiences that I've had in a very long time, and much of that I owe to the commentors who stepped forward to add notes from their own lives and experiences.



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{Wednesday, August 31, 2005}

 

Neologism du jour


Podcrastinating - verb - to spend time at the computer listing to Podcasts, instead of working, as opposed to listening to podcasts on your iPod while doing other things like driving, cycling or ironing.



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{Tuesday, August 30, 2005}

 

Earth deja vu


The Messenger probe took a great movie of Earth as it left for Mercury.

The spooky thing for me is that my old friends at Planetary Visions Limited spent a big chunk of the 90s making computer visualisations from satellite data of just this kind of thing - here's a year's worth of weather, so the real pictures are curiously familiar.

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{Sunday, August 28, 2005}

 

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Edward Scissorhands as geek parables


After seeing and enjoying Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I realised the boys hadn't seen Edward Scissorhands, so we watched that together too.

Seeing them consecutively made me realise that they both are parables of how it is to be a geek in the world. The way Edward Scissorhands gently satirises Californian suburban life was much clearer now I've been living it for a while. At it's core, though, it is a classic 'geek versus jock' battle over a girl, but there is a lot of layered subtext about trying to make sense of unusual abilities in an world with other assumptions.

The father of Edward's adoptive family waxes lyrical on Ed going into business on his own "There's nothing like running your own business. I've never done it myself, but from what I gather it's the greatest satisfaction a working man can have. So I guess the bank's going to be your next step, huh?"
His loan is of course denied through blank incomprehension, and he is led into crime.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by contrast, has Depp as a post-dotcom bubble geek, with enough money to indulge his rococo taste in factory design and furnishings. It also has a darker subtext, with Wonka's paranoia about his secret formulae being stolen, and his mass onshoring by replacing the local workforce with imported Oompa-Loompa's who literally work for beans.

In both films a good, ordinary family is the path to redemption, but Edward ends up estranged and alone, making beautiful sculptures no-one sees; Wonka, by contrast, brings Charlie's family into his own hermetic world. I'm not sure if either of these is a moral ending, though.

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{Thursday, August 25, 2005}

 

Bar camp Video


Scott Beale is hosting Dorrian Porter's impressionistic video of Bar Camp, which I helped compress.

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{Tuesday, August 23, 2005}

 

Memetic targetting


Arnold Kling tries to apply thinking to politics - I think there is something to this, but it goes back to coalition building. In order to gain support for a cause we need to be able to craft arguments for it that appeal to different political worldviews.

For example, here's the argument against copyright term extension reframed for different political views:
Liberal collectivist
The shared culture of society should belong to the people together, not to faceless corporations.

Libertarian
Our ability to express ourselves freely should not be constrained by a state-granted monopoly.

Liberal Economist
As non-rivalrous goods with a vanishingly small marginal cost of reproduction, cultural goods reach maximum utility by being freely replicable.

Conservative
Creating property rights in goods that can be duplicated at will is inflationary, and undermines the value of real physical property that is the bedrock of a stable society.

Each of these is a facet of the issue, and a defensible position, but if you have a mismatch between the argument and the political frame of your audience, you will be met with incomprehension or hostility, and won't win for your cause.

Updated: Doc Searls and Larry Lessig debated this very issue right after the Eldred case. Doc's thoughts, Larry's response.

In answer to Doc's comment about 'Commons' putting off the libertarians and the right, I'd like to suggest 'Digital Commonwealth' as a more neutral political term.



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Foo, Bar and Dormice


This weekend's and set me thinking about how important physical proximity is. One of the tenets of the Open Source movement was that in the Internet age, physical co-presence is no longer needed - your operating system can be run from Finland, your VoIP service from Luxembourg, and both can draw on global collaborators.

Perhaps it was this idea of decentralisation that got Tim O'Reilly to put his publishing company in Sebastopol in the first place - and certainly they do a great job of publishing books by scattered authors.

However, if you're going to visit O'Reilly there, you need to make at least a day of it — from my house in San Jose I can get to Boston by air in about the same time it takes me to drive to Sebastopol — so Tim making a virtue from a necessity, and organising a camp there was a brilliant move. One of the strengths of Foo is that it brings in people from further afield than the Bay Area.

Conversely, being based here means that there are lots of events going on, and Bar was an example of what that clustering can do.


Which brings me back to Markoff's What the Dormouse Said, whose thesis is that it was the combination of the chip companies, Stanford, and the SF counterculture that built the computing world we live in now. They needed the physical proximity then, and going to PARC to hear from Doug Englebart and Larry Tesler about those days was fascinating.

And yet, the collaboration tools they dreamed of then are now coming to fruition, in the way that I can contact friends in both camps, and others worldwide from my computer or sidekick.
I managed to get a live broadcast up from Bar camp so far-flung friends could watch and react via IRC, but attempts to get video out of Foo camp were stymied by their NAT and router. Global textual collaboration has been here for a while; adding video and audio is still a work in progress.

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{Friday, August 12, 2005}

 

Adam Smith and microformats principles


Lynne Kiesling quotes Adam Smith
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
microformats.org says:

microformats are not:


Smith contrasts:
The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals [...]
He will accommodate, as well as he can, his public arrangements to the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people; and will remedy as well as he can, the inconveniencies which may flow from the want of those regulations which the people are averse to submit to. When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear.
microformats.org continues:

the microformats principles


I grant you, the microformats prose is terse in comparison, but I see the commonality between the two. Do read Lynne's post in full, and thank you Megan for pointing it out.

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{Sunday, July 24, 2005}

 

Beauty in made landscapes


Updated - Stanford stupidly took the site down, here's Burtynsky's own site.
I saw the Burtynsky exhibition at Stanford today. He takes haunting pictures of landscapes transformed by industry into scenes of devastation and strange beauty. Quarries that look like stacks of boxes or an auditorium, then you see a tiny vehicle and realise the scale.Shattered Ozymandian fragments of ships in Chittagong, towering over the people cutting them up for scrap.
Go look at them now.

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{Saturday, July 23, 2005}

 

The rush to judgement


When I heard radio reports of the London police shooting a suspect in the tube, my heart sank. It sounded like a failure to capture a suspect, it sounded like another possible attack, but most of all it sounded like the last chapter of Blink, where Gladwell analyses closely how easy it is a for a group of armed policemen in hot pursuit to make fatal snap judgements.
He summarized in Slate:
We tend to think that high-speed chases are a problem because of the dangers they pose during the chase. That's true enough. But the real problem is the danger they pose after the chase. I cannot tell you how many cops I talked to who spoke of how disoriented and crazed and incoherent they were after racing after someone through streets at 120 miles per hour. You finally cut off the suspect's car. You charge out of the cruiser. You yank open his door. Your pulse is 175. Your heart is in your throat. Your body is awash in adrenalin and cortisol. And everything we know about human physiology and psychology says that no one can make intelligent snap decisions under those circumstances.

Today the police said the man was unconnected to the attacks.

Updated: Blink's chapter discussed the shooting of Amidou Diallo. Jean Charles de Menezes was the man killed in Stockwell.

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Digital Freedom in the UK


At the OpenTech conference today, there was a debate around establishing a British equivalent of the EFF. This seems a very good idea to me - with the UK's ability to push legislation through parliament in a hurry, and the ambiguous situation regarding European legislation versus UK common law, a group prepared to fight test cases and lobby about Bills in parliament. I signed Danny's pledge. My only quibble is with the name - lets talk about Digital Freedoms, not Digital Rights, as DRM has polluted that term already.



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{Wednesday, July 20, 2005}

 

Apollonian or Dionysian?



Apollo 11 landing

Google's lunar effort is amusing, but the panorama's shot by Apollo 11, Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 astronauts are the real thing.
Unless you believe the Google Ads chosen for the panorama site, that is.

You can hear Neil Armstrong's first unscripted words on the moon:
The surface is fine and powdery. I can kick it up loosely with my toe. It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the sole and sides of my boots. I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.

That echoes across 36 years clearly. I don't remember it well, being under 3 at the time, but my parents bought a TV set specially for the occasion.


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{Monday, July 18, 2005}

 

Microformat conversations


I've been having lots of conversations around microformats recently, with a gallimaufry of thoughtful and interesting people. Deeje has been experimenting, Suw has implemented events, and Danny O'Brien said
'RDF was the LSD of the 90s'


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{Sunday, July 10, 2005}

 

Talking about tags and microformats


Back in April, I attended the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium, which included some coverage of tags. they just posted presentations there that only work in IE6 here's a direct links to Windows media files for:David Weinberger's 'From Trees to Tags'
Me reporting back on the Tags Birds of a feather discussion


Last week at Where 2.0 I was chatting with Chris Pirillo about tags and microformats, when he produced a pair of microphones and started recording.

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{Saturday, July 09, 2005}

 

London calling


James Lileks talks of England's spirit revealed through Holst. My internal soundtrack was by Elgar, but reading blogs I heard the sound of The Clash coming through.
London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared and battle come down
I heard about the London bombings through wikinews and blogs. I watched people trying to make sense of these attacks together, collecting facts and telling their stories. Calling out to us.
London calling to the zombies of death
Quit holding out and draw another breath
And calling out defiance, pride and history too, whether from near or far.
London calling yes I was there too
An' you know what they said - well some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
An' after all this won't you give me a smile?

I never felt so much alike...

My father and sister both went through affected tube stations that day. That bus blew up right outside my old office in London.
I'm proud of England's response, and that people are getting back to work and play. I intend to do the same.


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{Thursday, June 30, 2005}

 

Geo microformat at Where 2.0 today


June 30, 2005 - 18:15 - 19:15 - Geo microformat BoF meeting - at the Borgia Room, St Francis Hotel, San Francisco, CA
From GeoURL to vCard, people are publishing geo and location information on blogs and the web in many different ways. What are the advantages and disadvantages of all these various current practices? Is there a possibility of proposing a simple microformat that addresses today's practical needs while allowing for more precision and flexibility in the near future? Join us in a discussion of current formats, current needs, and what we can do to work on defining a geo/location microformat.

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{Saturday, June 25, 2005}

 

Gnomedex calendar the microformat way


Watching the reports of Gnomedex, I heard about a demonstration of extended RSS processing that the Microsoft IE team did regarding a calendar. Dare Obasanjo explains:

Dean then started to talk about the power of the enclosure element in RSS 2.0. What is great about it is that it enables one to syndicate all sorts of digital content. One can syndicate video, music, calendar events, contacts, photos and so on using RSS due to the flexibility of enclosures.

Amar then showed a demo using Outlook 2003 and an RSS feed of the Gnomedex schedule he had created. The RSS feed had an item for each event on the schedule and each item had an iCalendar file as an enclosure. Amar had written a 200 line C# program that subscribed to this feed then inserted the events into his Outlook calendar so he could overlay his personal schedule with the Gnomedex schedule. The point of this demo was to show that RSS isn't just for aggregators subscribing to blogs and news sites.


Now, being able to subscribe to an event calendar is very handy, but there is a much simpler way - using hCalendar and Brian Suda's x2v calendar parsing tool.
I adapted the conference calendar page, to add an "hevent" to each session ( with help from Ryan and his hCalendar creator).

Now you can subscribe to it directly using the x2v link. This is available today, not in a future release of IE, and you can easily add events to your blog or webpage this way for people to subscribe to





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{Monday, June 20, 2005}

 

Microformats gets .org-anized


I'm at today speaking with Tantek, Rohit and lots of other adopters.
We've just launched microformats.org as a home for this new movement.
The conference tag is .
Tantek's Supernova Microformats slides
My Supernova Tags slides

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{Wednesday, June 15, 2005}

 

First Tag Tuesday





Kevin talking about tags
Originally uploaded by niallkennedy.

(From the tag tuesday blog)
I got a lot out of the first Tag Tuesday, and met lots of people with interesting ideas. As requested, here are the slides I projected on the ceiling.
Eran Globen took good notes on me and Stewart speaking down by the bay, before tsunami warnings broke the meeting up.

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{Monday, June 13, 2005}

 

Using the DMCA for good


Donna's posting of EFF's legal guide for bloggers reminded me that a DMCA takedown can be used for good as well as evil.
There are spammers who copy entire blog posts from others to act as fresh bait for their search spoofing tricks.
This is commercial use, and a violation of most CC licenses (and indeed default copyright).Stephanie Booth recently did this to a spammer at www.famous-people.info who plagiarized one of her posts which mentioned Jennifer Garner in passing, on what was a Google Adsense supported spamblog. When she sent a DMCA notice, they took down the page and apparently lost their Adsense status.

Danny Sullivan has a similar problem.

I have heard it argued that using the DMCA for this is encouraging reliance on what is in many ways a bad law that should be repealed, but in this case I think it is very positive, as it reinforces the 'everyone is a publisher now' worldview that CC and EFF promote. The DMCA's most pernicious aspect was the distinction between "professional" businesses who are allowed to copy video, and the general public, who aren't. Copyright makes us all publishers by default, so we should take advantage of this.

How to do it:
If you look up the IP of the server: >ping www.famous-people.info
PING famous-people.info (65.77.133.197): 56 data bytes
then whois 65.77.133.197 that IP address, you can find the host ISP, and send them a DMCA takedown notice, which they have a procedure in place to deal with.

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{Thursday, June 09, 2005}

 

Tag Tuesday


With many thousands of users adopting tags, we thought it would be a good idea to gather tag developers every month to exchange ideas, and encourage code that works well together.

Our inaugural meeting will be:
June 14, 2005 - 6:30 - 9:30pm - Tag Tuesday First meeting - at Gordon Biersch, 2 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA USA
Meet other Bay Area tag developers, and hear Stewart Butterfield of Flickr and Kevin Marks of Technorati talk about tags.


Also, there is a new Tag Tuesday blog.

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{Tuesday, June 07, 2005}

 

WWDC Keynote in chunks


Jobs demo'd Podcasts with chapters in iTunes, so how about his keynote with chapters too?
WWDC 2005 Keynote with chapters

Here's Apple's tutorial on how to make chapters - QuickTime has had this feature for over 10 years, so we can only wonder why Apple don't use it themselves.

As to the topics of the speech, running bits of Mac OS on Intel has been going on since 1996; the tricky part of it is getting endian-flipping right when serialising to disc, as Greg Chapman's technote from 2000 makes clear. You don't know you have it right until you have written and read files both ways between different endian architectures.

Chapters in podcasts is a good idea, but this needs a bit more to be actually useful - it needs iPod support (the skip button going to the next chapter), and we need the info back from the iPod about which tracks and chapters have been played, and which ones skipped. With that there are a lot of interesting things that can be done.

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{Thursday, June 02, 2005}

 

Missing the point completely



Scoble issued an invite to Bitman's place, a site supposed to teach children about computing.

So, always keen to find something interesting for my boys, I had a look.

The first 'game' is 'configure the computer system for the characters'. You get some virtual money and have to choose a system config (CPU, RAM, drive, Fan, video card etc) for different uses.

Hello?

This is exactly what is totally bloody annoying about buying PCs
You pick a bunch of components and the bloody thing flakes out because of some internal dependency between them.



This is not teaching about computers, this is teaching how broken the Wintel purchase process is. Sorry Robert, go buy that team Logical Journey of the Zoombinis and get a sense of how you teach through play.


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{Friday, May 27, 2005}

 

Bacon Bacon Bacon


Andrew and I made a movie while cooking breakfast the other day:

Download Bacon movie here.
It's in homage to the badger movie

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Pulp's Common People meets Tank Girl


Pulp's Common People meets Tank Girl
You either just said "Yes!" or "Huh?" Anything I could say in either case would be superfluous.

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{Thursday, May 19, 2005}

 

Solving Lileks' dilemma


James Lileks has been writing on the web for years, and is consistently brilliant. Tonight he posted a dilemma he has:
I have this template: title on top, illustration, text below, navigation button on the bottom. Everything I’ve done has been a tweak of that basic idea, and it gets irritating; you see the picture, scroll down, read the text, scroll back up to see the picture again, scroll back down to click next. What if –

Nah.

No! What if I do the unthinkable, and make the text a graphic? I’m still playing with this – it’ll mean larger file sizes, but maybe I should start to think ahead to a day when the majority of visitors have modems faster than a cold slug on sand. Here’s the old version. Here’s the new idea. It's still too busy, but you can see what I'm aiming at. It means more work – an incredible amount of work, frankly – but it makes the site look more like the book version I’d love to do.

Now Lileks is used to the tables and spacer images layout model, but there is a way he can have his text and his layout without making everything a graphic - HTML + CSS.
I spent 15 minutes in BBEdit and CSSEdit to make a 21st century XHTML+CSS version.
Note that it is simpler HTML than his old version, but has the approximate layout style of the new version (I'm an engineer Jim, not a typographer). I even got drop shadows in Safari.
I have nothing against DreamWeaver - friends of mine work on it - and I'm sure it can do CSS too.

Done right, this should actually be less work than either of Lileks’ alternatives.

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{Monday, May 16, 2005}

 

My tail is longer than yours...


This is a belated response to Dave Rogers and friends, which started out in Shelley's comments, where I said:
The long tail is not a myth, and the many do outweigh the few. Pick a few words around a topic that you are interested in and search for them at Technorati and see who you find.
The top 100 is not the most interesting page on our site by any means. I wrote about this before - Call off the Search

Dave replied:
I think Kevin misunderstands the use of the word "myth" in this context. Whether or not "the many do outweigh the few," it is the few that most profit. If the Top 100 is not the most interesting page on Technorati, then where does it rank in Technorati's hierarchy of interesting pages? Second? Third? Why is it on the front page at all if it isn't very interesting? Is it not in Technorati's interests to maintain the attention of those in or near the top 100 to influence their attention-directing authority for Technorati's advantage?
Finally, why can Technorati claim to be "the authority" on what's going on in weblogs, and then specifically disclaim any responsibility to anyone who relies on that "authority?"

I still have hope that Kevin Marks will reply, it is the weekend and he probably has a life, but so far, nothing heard.


Mike Sanders in Main Stream Bloggers (MSB) Assert Their Authority:
It didn't take long, but the Main Stream Bloggers (MSB) are asserting their authority.
Last week I wrote:
The long tail is a blogging myth in which the heavy-traffic bloggers try to convince the little guys, like you and me, that we are really the important ones in the blogosphere. And we should keep on blogging and linking to the big guys, since collectively the bottom 99% has much more viewership than the top 1% - or something like that.

then characterized my statement above as a decree. I don't follow this; the Top 100, like most of the rest of Technorati, is a reflection of others' links. Mike doesn't understand the difference between a gaussian and an exponential distribution either.

That was last weekend when I was suffering from food poisoning, and I saw this needed a considered response, rather than a dashed-off one, so I put it off. Dave prodded me again this weekend:
Technorati, again, as near as I can tell, is held in positive regard, at least by the members of the "A-List." I'll leave it to the reader to decide if this was an act of inspired genius to create a list that simultaneously flatters the egos of the people most in a position to criticize the company, draws attention to itself, and exploits the attention-directing "authority" of high attention-earning webloggers (the A-List) to draw even more attention to itself. I'd say probably not, since it's been done before; but it's still a pretty effective way to garner attention and achieve a measure of insulation from criticism.

But here we are a week later and I find myself talking to myself. Neither Keven Marks nor Dave Sifry deigned to entertain my questions. Perhaps I wasn't obsequious enough to merit being taken seriously. Perhaps I lack sufficient authority. I'm absolutely certain there's a "reason." But I don't think there's any explanation that can restore the fiction that "markets are conversations."


Well, I'll try. I got into blogging in the first place after following the Cluetrain writers here. In particular, Chris Locke goaded his newsletter readers into starting blogs, and I did so. My first few posts had a similar blustery tone to the one that Dave and Mike have employed with me here, pointing out where I thought others' pronouncements were unsupported or based on misreadings. That Mike thinks I am now a 'Main Stream Blogger' gave me pause, as I feel I have been having a conversation with those who are interested in some of the same, often esoteric, things as I am. What I found over time was that neither obstreperousness or obsequy added value, but considered discussion did. I found that things I wrote could be reflected back to those I cited, and they would sometimes respond, or others would join in. When I met the people I'd been reading and writing with face to face, the conversation was easily picked up and carried on.

By tracking people linking to me or mentioning my name, Technorati helps me in this distributed asynchronous conversation (thats how I found Mike and Dave's comments, after all). However, as I've said before, "I can read your thoughts, as long as you write them down first". In order to be in the conversation, you need to be writing and linking. Perforce, this means that those who write and link more, and are written about and linked to more, are those who most see the utility of it.

As blogging spread from ten thousand people writing about technology to ten million writing about their lives, their interests, their hopes and fears, characterising any of it as 'mainstream' is a readers choice, as you can only focus on a few narrow tributaries of the Mississippi of writing that surges through our computers every day. Technorati's top 100 list, and listing of the number of inbound links and blogs by search results is a way for you to see how others have linked before - you can click on the little speech-bubbles and see what they said in linking to them, we expose that directly. The top 100 are not some fixed group, they come and go, but in general they link a lot themselves, and write frequently.

Dave continues:
Markets are about exchanges of value, and those with something to sell will always seek to manipulate the buyers' perception of value. Even if that means pretending to be engaged in the latest hip, trendy, feel-good, manufactured belief system created to garner attention and manufacture the perception of authority for its authors.

Markets are indeed about exchanges of value, but the market price is an emergent property of this spontaneous order of transactions between individuals, an information network that defies representation and measurement. A market is a spontaneous order, as is a conversation. The subtleties and complexities of these interactions are a source of fascination for me, as they do defy easy representation or theory, and we know that the analyses we can derive from blogging are only partial reflections of a complex reality, but we hope that they may be found useful, and that we can improve them and add to them over time.

He concludes:
If this criticism garners attention, that is not my intent. My intent is merely to state the truth as best I can perceive it. Any effort to engage in a conversation regarding whether or not Technorati believes "markets are conversations" at this point is merely a further effort to manufacture and shape perception. Hopefully that will inoculate me from having to engage in any pointless, back-and-forth, damage control efforts with either Mr. Marks or Mr. Sifry. If all of you would continue to do me the good favor of ignoring me, I'd appreciate it.

Bullshit. Of course you wanted my attention, or you wouldn't have repeated it in different places and phrasings. So quit the passive-aggressive reverse psychology posturing and think a bit.

Of course conversations are meant to shape perception; if they didn't there would be no point. Doc Searls and David Weinberger express this well, and differently. Doc explains that the root of information is that we are trying to form one another. David points out that without each other we are not human - look at children raised by wolves, and says we are writing ourselves into existence online.

Blogging is an arrogant act, as you say, Dave, and a personal one, but we are accountable and responsible to one another, and we reveal a lot about ourselves by writing continuously over time.

A while ago Dave Rogers wrote:
To be as authentic/truthful as possible, corporate Web sites must be shaped--as are all conversations--by the voices of the participants. And because the best conversationalists are also the best listeners, this requires Corporate sites that demonstrate that the company knows its visitors--not as mere statistics, focus groups or fat wallets, but as living, breathing, unique individuals--each of inestimable value, not because of what they can give to the company but because of who they are. As Tom asserted, these are sites that "have an interest in what the world says"--not just themselves.


We're trying to build a site that reflects what the world says, but it will also reflect what you look for within it. The web is Caliban's mirror, and Technorati a magnifying glass in front of it. If you don't like the reflection, you can change where you look, but you can also change what we reflect back with your writing and linking.

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{Sunday, May 15, 2005}

 

10 million blogs on Technorati


Around 20 minutes past nine last night, Technorati indexed its 10 millionth blog.

As far as I can tell 飞啊,飞啊,飞 - 博客.CN[blogger.cn/blog/中国/china] is a chinese blog about art glassmaking. It has some beautiful Chihuly photographs.

The endless variety of blogs continues to amaze me.

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{Saturday, May 14, 2005}

 

Creative Commons licensing the Katherina movie teaser trailer


An old friend of mine in the UK is making a movie, Katherina, which I am looking forward to seeing. It's a big-budget 35mm production, using British and American talent both in front of and behind the camera about Saint Catherine of Alexandria, who was famously martyred by being broken on a wheel for challenging church authorities in 329AD.

He's put together a great teaser trailer based on what's been shot so far, and he asked me how to get it up on the net, as I know this online video stuff.

A few years ago the answer would involve complicated hosting and mirroring, and an upfront guess on how many people downloaded it, but it struck me that this was a chance to show how things are different now.

I convinced him to use a Creative Commons license on the trailer, and I've put up a high-quality Bittorrent of the Katherina trailer.

So, download it, tell your friends, and tag any comments with .

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{Friday, May 13, 2005}

 

What are they saying about me?


A very natural human question, and one Technorati can help you answer.
The lastest group of people we're helping directly are the Salon journalists. That page shows which of their stories are getting the most attention from bloggers in the form of links in the last 48 hours.
Richard has a more detailed explanation, with screenshots.

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{Thursday, May 12, 2005}

 

JAH - Ajax without XML


With all the excitement, it's worth pointing out a simple technique I call - which can be Just Async HTML, or Javascript Async HTML to taste.

This works on the microformat principle that XHTML is XML, but with the added advantage that Javascript already knows how to handle XHTML DOM's so no xml parsing is required.

You just include <script language="javascript1.3" src="jah.js" ></script> in the <head> and then link to dynamic pages with <a href="javascript:jah('kevin.html','target');">kevin</a> where target is the id of the HTML element you want to replace.

Here's a very simple static example.

If you want an elaborate dynamic example, go see Kottke, he gets paid for this kind of thing.

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{Wednesday, May 11, 2005}

 

Long Tails, Big Heads and Feet of Clay


One thing that struck me after talking with Chris Anderson about The Long Tail was that his formulation is in some ways only a small step towards the end of the tail; his focus is mainly on how to exploit niche markets for products like books or movies.

There's an old joke that seems apposite here:
Q. How do you get to run a small newspaper business?
A. Start with a large newspaper business and wait a bit.

A true long tail business is one that copes with the ultimate niches - where there are just one, or even zero customers. You need to be sure that your submission model can cope with these limiting cases and not choke, especially as you do not know a priori which ones are going to garner customers.

So, what businesses fit this model? The obvious one is eBay. Omidyar's model of a perfect marketplace is tuned so that it is stable if you don't find a buyer (eBay takes a small listing fee), but works better if you do (eBay takes a percentage). Most auctions only have a single successful buyer, but they expanded the model to allow multiple identical goods to be sold too.

Another example is cafepress. They don't even set a listing fee, working on the assumption that the effort to build a product list is enough of a hurdle, and have prices set so that a production run of one item is cost effective for them (they aggregate sales and pay monthly). They also have a higher payback rate if you do gather more orders and let economies of scale kick in on their back end.

Longer standing examples are the venerable photo-processing by mail business (now undermined by digital cameras) and the newer videotape to DVD service offered by YesVideo. In a similar field, there is CustomFlix, which does on-demand DVD distribution, though with a setup fee that puts breakeven above a single copy (and expects you to make the DVD yourself first).

Perhaps the purest of all these businesses is PayPal, which gives away free small transactions, and makes it up in volume from bigger retailers.

If you plan your business to cope with this end of the tail, you'll be perfectly placed to reap economies of scale as you attack from below both the niche seekers and those still mesmerised by the Big Head.

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