The Spam King of Nigeria and Other Stories

Ordinarily I'd just post a like like this one on the side bar but :apophenia: a google horror story: what happens when you are disappeared is a crazy one. A couple years ago I did a scenario planning session that revolved around spammers hacking email accounts and impersonating people from your past. That's not exactly the story, but as "phishing" attacks get more and more sophisticated it's heading in that direction. And google's centralization of power sure is going to help in that process.

I've been terrified of google for a long while now for exactly these reasons. They just have too much power, too much information centralized in one location. (Or really centralized and multiplied across multiple locations) It doesn't really matter if google is good or evil, or both because that much info placed into one interface and virtual location ensures that bad shit is going to happen. You know like your entire digital identity being hijacked, used abused and then sold off as scrap to the highest bidders. Add in google's god awful customer service (and a company with engineers at the helm is almost always ensured bad customer service) and the you've got an awfully frightening entity.

Notes on Yahoo Microsoft

Couple quick notes on the Microsoft- Yahoo deal:

- Yahoo and Microsoft are two of perhaps only four companies, the other two being Google and Amazon (via it's Alexa purchase) that have massive databases of information spidered from the web. Given how much effort now goes into gaming these same spiders that historical database just might be extremely valuable. The spidering infrastructure they have is probably even more valuable, except Microsoft already has much of that built via their MSN search already. How much value is there in keeping this out of other's hands?

- Microsoft going into debt for the first time? Signs of a financial empire finally crumbling? There cultural clout of course has been plummeting, but they still have a near monopoly on business desktops so who knows.

- Apple + Yahoo rumors = very interesting.

- The US tech world is always so US centric. Where do the foreign search engines stand in all this? Are there other datamining powerhouses that are below the radar but with a whole lot at stake in Yahoo's fate?

No Comment

Notes on the iPhone

- I wasn't planning on buying this thing, really. But after a trio of raves from some of my favorite interface commentators, I quickly realized I pretty much had no choice. There is no question the game has changed with this device.

- There was a period of time where the iPhone sat in the cradle, iTunes with the AT&T sign up screen loaded and the Treo on speakerphone hold with Sprint. For a half hour or so I sat there essentially debating which corporate force I should commit my soul (or at least my personal data) too.

- Of those three corporate monstrosities Apple is by far the scariest to me as it functions as a dictatorship. Whatever control Sprint or AT&T have over me is at least modulated by their natural bureaucratic inefficiencies.

- The fact that Apple went with what is apparently the weakest/worst cellular company shouldn't be surprising as they are also naturally the company most likely to give in to Apple's demands.

- The fact that I am once again an AT&T customer has not really set in yet. Once it does I'm sure it will be depressing.

- Palm/Treo is just too sad of an entity to be counted as either a corporate monstrosity or a threat. If they had expanded upon the Treo 300 in any sort of semi reasonable rate of progress over the past 4 years they'd have a device at least as exciting and useful as the iPhone. Who knows what the story is over there, but it's got to be too pitiful for me to want to hear it.

- There are about 18 million things that my Treo 700p does better than the iPhone, yet I have no intentions of ever going back. The Treo is just too damn heavy compared to the iPhone. Not in weight really, but in thickness, in processor slowness, in interface sludge and a stubborn resistance to evolution.

- The iPhone is really a computer. It's explosive success in part comes from being the first mobile device designed as such and actually succeeding. Most phones are designed like overgrown pocket calculators. The Palm and Treo owe there success to working well with the limitations of late 90's chips and making a great intermediate device. The iPhone is the real thing.

- The iPhone fits in my pocket so well it convinced me to eliminate half the items in my pockets.

- The iPhone is too symmetrical, there are no great tactile clues on how to orient the phone when you take it out of your pocket. It is just as intuitive to hold it upside down as it is right side up.

- The multitouch interface is incredibly intuitive, you feel like an expert user from practically the first touch.

- An incredible effort has gone into making this thing feel smooth and seamless.

- All the organic sliding looks and feels great and also owes an incredible debt to the much maligned interface designs of Flash websites.

- The iPhone interface designers could learn a fuck load from the early Palm's insistence on eliminating as many unnecessary clicks as possible. There is a subtle tendency to hide poorly thought out interface ideas under animation effects. It's not to bad yet but I can easily see it becoming an issue in the future.

- There is some serious inconsistency in the interfaces. Notes gets a big WTF for one, did someone's grandkid code that one? Weather gets a whole icon on the home and then leads to an essentially flat app, no detail. The little one that annoys me is the edit button on the sms & email apps, it's in a different place on what are otherwise nearly identical interfaces. The lack of search in contacts is mystifying as there are contact search functions in other parts of the phone, it's a bit odd.

- What retard decided there was no need for any sort of multi-selection? Deleting email one at a time is a serious chore and copy and paste just doesn't exist. This better be a temporary glitch not some one button mouse obsessive disaster.

- As much as it pains me to say it, the flexibility of the multitouch interface seems to trump the tactile feedback of hard buttons. If anything there might actually be one hard button too many on the iPhone.

- Tactile buttons aren't going anywhere though, they just need to be built for specific uses and separated from the general device. The iPod aspect of the "phone" is in parts exceptional, but doing something as simple as skipping to the next song can be a laborious chore.

- Adding physical buttons back onto the iPhone is pretty much the kiss of death, the computer in your pocket effect only works as long this device stays as slim and seamless enough to be able to forget you are carrying it.

(update - I quickly realized I'm wrong on this, a standard phone like five way button where the home button is now would be great. A button or two on the left & right of that would really help too.)

- Externalizing the physical buttons into an external device (an iPod remote for instance) seems like the best solution, but it's still a compromise, the proliferation of devices does not end with the iPhone. It may be the most convergent of all mobile devices yet, but convergence is starting to look like a phenomena that occurs in tandem with, rather than in opposition to the seemingly exponential growth of devices.

- Is anyone working on a tactile touch screen? A screen capable of producing some sort on non audio-visual feedback? The future is begging for it.

- The iPhone needs 3G badly, the difference between using it on WiFi and on AT&Ts network is radical.

- The lack of 3G sucks for us early adaptors, but it might be great for WiFi. I'm almost certainly reopening my personal connection up to the public, after knee jerk adding a password to it. I wonder if Apple will start shipping Airport stations that default to open?

- Using the iPhone gives you a totally different understanding of WiFi, a real understanding of what a WiFi mesh might be, as opposed to an isolated set of access points that you laptop into the internet from.

- If this phone shipped with 3G wireless data, WiFi would be pretty much a mute point.

- The difference between using a WiFi mesh network and 3G network provided by a cellular company is intensely political. Yet the only difference the end user might will generally notice will probably be in their cell phone bill. And it's unclear whether that difference will be an increase or decrease.

- Playing with the iPhone really does feel like you are playing with the future. Yet function wise the only real difference is in the interface. Other than perhaps the very nice visual voicemail, there are no applications on the iPhone that aren't already bundled together in most of the smart phones that have been on the market for a while already. Is this device just a slick slight of media trick, or has Apple (and/or Steve Jobs) really singlehandedly pushed us into the next generation?

Sometimes the internet has too many words already

So we've pretty much been on sabbatical for a half year at least, and likely will remain so for an indefinite amount of time...

All Free

Freebase is exactly the sort of thing that you only take seriously once you know Danny Hillis is behind it. Hillis is a bit of an underground hero in a world where many of his nerd peers skyrocket to fame in the business press, if not in popular culture as a whole. A nerd's nerd, his best known company went belly up in the 80's, his current one flies well under the radar and the NYT article linked above introduces him by mentioning his time as a Disney Imagineer, although it's never been clear he did anything notable there. But that first company was years ahead of it's time, his slim book Pattern on the Stone is easily the definitive text on how computers actually work and his Long Now Foundation one of the more audacious and mindboggling non-profits around (and one in which I'm technically a "charter member".) So yeah, when Danny Hillis launches a venture, you know the nerds at least are listening.

Freebase is the latest in a long series of essentially failed attempts to transform information into meaning. Or more specifically to transform computer readable information into computer readable meaning. Many have walked that path before, and in the end there is only one real success story, but that success story was Google with their Page Rank algorithm that made them a success. And like Google, Hillis is starting this venture with the best of intentions, and like Google Hillis is already starting say things that should make you very afraid.

The rhetoric of Freebase is all about freedom, openness and sharing. Everything about it says this is for you, this is for free this for the good of the world. Yet with a simple turn of a phrase or perhaps a slip of the tongue, Hillis lets on that he doesn't just want to share a lot of information, he wants it all. “We’re trying to create the world’s database, with all of the world’s information,” are his words and they probably sound familiar to anyone who has read a bit about Google over the past couple years. Despite loudly saying "don't be evil" Google is known to talk about the goal of "organizing all the world's information."* A phrase perhaps better suited for a cartoon supervillian than a large corporation.

The all might sound innocuous enough at first, until you place it into the context of Google's own actions. Perhaps you have a Gmail account, or at least send emails to someone who does. All the worlds info includes everything on those emails, do you want Google organizing all that information? The Gmail terms of service originally indicated that emails you delete might not actually be deleted off their servers, does that make "all the world's information" sound a little different then before? Some information is meant to disappear, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Google it seems is not willing to make that distinction, although ironically they more than any other entity have the power to make things disappear. Instead of a situation were information is either available or not, we are creeping towards a world where information is either available through the front of Google, or it's only available the back, to those who can move through the backdoors of their databases.

Now I'm a huge fan of Hillis' work, and on a certain level Freebase is designed precisely to mitigate some of Google's emerging database monopoly, yet it's pushing forward with the exact same hubris that has made Google's "don't be evil" mantra such a sick joke upon the world. The rhetoric of freedom and openness may sound as universal as "all the worlds information", but it speaks to humans, while the information gathering is done by Turing machines. Hillis and the Freebase team are probably genuine in their interest in doing something for the world, but in the end they can only represent the interests of those that share their tech forward beliefs. Nestled safely in Silicon Valley it's probably easy to think the whole world shares those sentiments, but nothing could be further from the truth. The result it seems is a strange incubator where the supernerds slowly morph into supervillians, bent upon conquering the world (of information.)

*Google seems to have backed off this as public stance of late, but it still pops up on their site in places like their corporate philosophy page.

Political Targets

Reading Googlection 2008 makes it look like the Republicans are way ahead on using search engine advertising to push their candidacies for the US president. It's not super surprising knowing that Karl Rove comes from a direct marketing background and the GOP has historically been better at micro-targeting voters. It is ironic though that for all the Democrats diversity rhetoric, they still market themselves to the masses, while the Republicans push a monoculture world view and then push their candidates to diverse niches...

A Question for 2007: When is inequality a good thing?

The internet was supposed to be the great equalizer, the tool that would let anyone become a publisher, a news source, a movie director or the creator of even new medias. Shockingly enough in large part it succeeded and the predictions came true. Anyone on the right side of certain economics and techno-literate thresholds can indeed go online and distribute their works for little or no cost. We live in a world of publishers now and it's great in many ways, for one it enables this blog to exist. Yet something also went horribly awry in the process. We got everything the internet promised, everything except the equality.

In a world of millions of news sources we still focus our attention on a select few. There has been a bit of a reshuffling at the top for sure, new information powerhouses have stepped up and dominated, while some of the old media players have stumbled while others danced nimbly into newly global audiences. But information continues to follow a power law curve, which roughly means we focus 80% of our energies upon what emits from just 20% of the providers, and the top 1% command half of our total attention. Wealth too follows this distribution, with the super rich dominating absurd amounts of the world's cash flow, and the payouts to the top dogs at the likes of Google, MySpace and YouTube only reinforce this inequity.

Equality is a concept wrought with it's own inequities. We pay incredible lip service to it as a concept, but rarely implement it well in reality. There are only a few people willing to defend say the extreme difference in earnings between top Wall Street executives and the entire quarter of New York City's population that lives below the poverty level while also living in one of the world's most expensive cities. But there are few still who are actually willing to do something about it.

One of the ironies of inequality is that it's almost always looked at a bad thing, when in fact it often is exactly the opposite. Take your blood for example. You may have left small drops from cuts and scratches around your childhood haunts. You've probably given a few samples that now sit in testing labs or medical disposal sites. You might have donated a few pints that now sit in blood banks or circulate in some form through another persons body. But the vast majority of your blood stays within your body and you wouldn't want it any other way, would you? Your blood evenly distributed across the globe wouldn't do anyone much good, would it? That globe of course is an inequality in itself, stars, planets and atmospheres are ultimately the result of a radically unequal distribution of elementary particles.

Equality of course can also be stunningly boring. We wouldn't want all flowers to be equal in shape and coloring, nor do we enjoy it when every building looks the same. But none of that takes away from the fact that the inequalities of power, wealth and culture we tend to focus on have awful and far reaching consequences. Consequences we don't often actually address. There is a danger in shifting more attention towards the overlooked space of positive inequalities, a risk of de-emphasising the existing problems even further than they are now. But with that risk comes the potential to find solutions. Perhaps, but just perhaps, the fact that so little is actually done to address the radical inequalities in America and beyond stems from that discord between the idea of inequality being bad and prevalence of subtle examples of where it isn't. More than that though is the prospect that somewhere within the examples of positive inequality lies an answer, or at least a start of answer to how we can transform the negative inequalities around us into a better state of being.

So it's 2007 now, maybe ask yourself, when is inequality a good thing?

The Long Tale of 2006

2006 is racing to a close and you may well be aware that Time Magazine has named "you" person of the year. If you work for a financial firm on Wall Street, in the City of London or on whatever expensive piece of real estate you've landed you probably could have figured that out by looking at your record breaking bonus check. Of course if you worked in New York's financial industry you were already making over $8,000 a week before that bonus even kicked in.

Across the East River from Wall Street there are parts of Brooklyn where the average household income per year is less than that average wall streeter is making each week. If you lived in one of those household you might be a bit more surprised about being named person of the year, no? Of course this radical inequality in income distribution isn't exactly news to anyone, it's been around ages and statically mapped out by the Italian economist Vilfedo Pareto about a century ago. If you graph that distribution out what you get is something called a power law curve. In 2006 though the trendy terminology was "the long tail", a phrase for just one part of the power law curve, the part where those of us making less than $8,000 a week happen to reside.

The long tail is in large part a phrase created and popularized by Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson in a book and blog of the same name. While I doubt Anderson intended it as such, the long tail is one of the more misleading pieces of rhetoric around. What Anderson wants to focus on is the stuff that drives Time magazine's "you", the increasing world of user generated content, movies, sound files, Flash animations, blog posts and all the other amusing detritus of unknown quality filling out the internet. And there is no denying that this stuff is exploding, sometimes in quite interesting ways. But what makes the long tail so disingenuous is that what happens in the long tail has almost no ramifications on what happens in the head. The language of the long tail often takes on the rhetoric of democracy or even revolution, but the fact is that nothing about the influx of user generated content necessarily impacts the inequalities encoded into the power law curve. If anything the long tail presupposes inequality, and Anderson is in essence saying "pay no mind to the inequalities at the top of the internet, look at all the exciting stuff over here in the tail".

Of course it's become increasingly apparent that the internet is wrought by, if not outright characterized by inequality. Web traffic is even more concentrated to the largest web sites.* Of course a couple of those top 10 sites are actually places like YouTube and MySpace where large amounts of user generated content drives traffic and then deposits money in hands not of the creators, but instead in the coffers of the large corporate landlords. Nicholas Carr aptly compares this setup to sharecropping. One can see foreshadowing of this effect in Chris Anderson's writing, for all his hyping of the long tail he sees far more concerned with creating the structures and situations in which long tails can occur than he is concerned with what things might actually be like inside those long tails. The owners of the MySpaces and Flickrs and the producers of video editing softwares are getting rich by enabling an unprecedented amount of people to make and distribute their own 'content'. And way off at the edge of these systems are a few alpha users who also may be getting rich, or at least famous to their peers by making some of that content. They aren't in the long tail though, they are in privileged head. Those in the tail might have a little fun, but they get neither the audience nor financial rewards that demarcate success in this 21st century culture.

No matter how you spin the long tail, and without a doubt there are aspects of it that are interesting and perhaps even admirable, you can't detach the long tail from the power law curve that it is part of. And as long as we are talking about a power law curve, we are talking about radical inequality. Unfortunately that's something that's predated 2006 for quite some time and doesn't look to be leaving with the new year either...

• If you follow that link though, you might notice the story has a rather misleading headline "The Shrinking Long Tail - Top 10 Web Domains Increasing in Reach". That the top ten domains are increasing in reach is a fact, at least if the statistics in that article are correct, but that fact has no correlation the long tail shrinking or rising in any manner. It's perhaps easier to think about it in terms of income. When the rich get richer, does that mean there are less poor people or more? That's just not a question that can be answered without more information. The top websites are getting richer for sure, both in terms of money and in terms of attention paid to them, but there may well be millions of new tiny sites stretching the tail out further and further.

The Second Trap

Clay Shirky on the Second Life overhype. I'm pretty partial to what he terms as "virtual reality is conceptually simple" argument. A large part of that hype I think comes not just from the simplicity, but by how easily it is for traditional marketing people to map their "real world" tactics to Second Life. To develop a web marketing campaign requires understanding of just how the web actually works. Second Life however is close enough to the real world that is very easy to just map traditional marketing tactics over. It's basically a big old baited trap for marketing people who are looking to get involved in the web, but don't quite get how it works...

Perhaps more than anything the mistake is in thinking that the value of internet is about what shows up on the computer screen. In fact the value of internet is in how it functions as massive relational database, and whatever shows up on the screen at any give time is thinest of thins skins to a couple datapoints.

What ultimately is funniest to me about Second Life though, is how closely it mirrors the cyberspace that William Gibson painted in Neuromancer when he coined that term. I was raised on that vision of the future the same way an earlier generation was promised jet packs and video phones. And when that vision actually became a technological reality, all I can do is shrug and turn back to the real future unfolding in completely unexpected directions.

Irreversibly Google

The story of Google is in many ways the archetypal engineer's dream. They invented a better way search the web, set up in a garage-like space and rose to the top. But engineer's also value results that can be reproduced, and part of what makes Google so scary is that it can not be reproduced. As hard as Yahoo and Microsoft are trying, with obscene amounts of financial, engineering and computing resources at their disposal they can't generate search results as good as Google's. The search world is already oligarchical, but as google rapidly turns into a verb, it is well on it's way to become a monopolized space.

Page Rank you see is an irreversible and an irreproducible process. Page Rank is the name for the key aspect of Google's search algorithm, the engineering breakthrough that make Google so much better than all those now dead or battered search engines of the 1990's. And it's also the thing that makes it so damn hard, if not impossible to make a search engine as good as Google's. You can reverse engineer Page Rank of course and you can be damn sure both Yahoo and Microsoft have invested plenty of time to that effort. The problem though is that Page Rank just would not work if you ran it today, and that's why Yahoo and Microsoft just can't provide the same quality of results as Google.

At it's core it's a problem of the data set. Page Rank's big break through was that it realized that links between webpages could be used as a way to judge the quality of a piece of content. If a page was linked to by multiple sites odds are it was a better page than one with no incoming links. Furthermore if the links came from other high quality pages the odds would be even higher. I wrote that all in the past tense though, because Page Rank is a victim of it's own success. The internet is now filled with massive amounts of pages generated with the explicit goal of hacking Google, of pushing sites up higher in it's search results. The internet as a dataset is now dirty, if not filthy.

This is a problem for Google of course, but it's not nearly the same problem it is for them as it is for it's competitors. Google needs to deal with the many sites trying to hack it's results, but it has a major tool to fight them, the data generated by Page Rank before search engine optimization became a profitable and fulfilling career. It means Google weighs slightly towards older sites, ones established in the era of clean Page Rank, but it also means that anyone trying to reproduce Page Rank by spidering the internet today, just can not get results nearly as good as Google's. So until someone devises a brand new algorithm, it's going to be Google's internet and the rest of us are just searching for our own small little piece of it...

Economics/Attention

It's the year 2006, how do you get away with publishing a book without ever googling your title? I have no idea but Richard Lanham's new book The Economics of Attention curiously has no references at all to Michael Goldhaber's The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net, hmmmm. Goldhaber's work was published online in a peer-reviewed journal nine years ago. It's core premise is practically identical to Lanham's. Google the title of Lanham's book and Goldhaber shows up as the third full result, behind only references to Lanham's book. I'm all of nine pages into that book so who knows how it stacks up, but it sure hasn't started out right, at least if your a nerd like me who reads the bibliography first...

Emergence 06: Closing Panel

Jeanette Blomberg is an anthropologist from IBM. So funny how easy it is to write a sentence like that now, as opposed to say 5 years ago...

Mark Jones is the service design lead at IDEO Chicago. He looks like Andy Dick.
Rick E. Robinson is smart, but I missed his particular credentials, beyond the Ph.D that shows up on his slides.
Jennie Winhall of RED.

Robinson:
"people live differently because of what a service allows them to do."
calls for a return to "longitudinal research" - focusing on continuity and change. big, expensive, expertise intensive.
Communispace has a 100% client renewal rate.
Noah takes a photo of himself everyday for 6 years.

Winhall:
"Service designers have no way of measuring costs of changes to design."
"Strong argument against over designing of services."

Social Hardware

Somewhere off on the periphery of my online home there is a whole conversation brewing about the merits of "social software". The spark for this round apparently is someone named Ryan Carson and his blog post on why he doesn't use social software. Now this is the sort of conversation I try and filter out and ignore. It was sort of pitiful from the start, a blog post is a piece of social software, so using it to proclaim you don't use social software is pretty much a nonstarter. Then there was Carson argument, which is essentially "I'm too busy, plus I'm married now", or in other words he's too lame and important to be interesting...

Now somehow Carson elicited a ton of response from some rather smart people, although Fred Stutzman's is probably the one most worth linking too. What was interesting to me though from these response was not what was said, although some was certainly insightful, but what was not. There was plenty said about social software but nothing at all about social hardware.

Now it's easy to say you don't have time for social software, although if you have time for email then clearly you are lying, as email is social software in it's purest form. More than that, do you have time go into conference rooms for meetings? Do you have time for drinks after work with colleagues and clients? Do you have time to attend conventions for work? Do you have time to meet friends for coffee, or go to a concert or ballgame or maybe head to a museum? Or if you are a married man like Carson, do you have time to go to a restaurant with your wife? A conference room, a convention center, a bar, a coffee shop, a stadium, an art gallery, these are all pieces of social hardware. Large objects constructed to allow you to interact with other people in a wide variety of styles. If you have time to be social you have time to use social software. Maybe you prefer other forms of socializing, but that is a choice you make. Everyone has time to be social, so to argue that social software is in trouble because it takes too much time is absurd.

A computer by itself, is a piece of antisocial hardware. It is all about a person alone in from of a glowing, captivating screen. But once that computer is connected to a network it has potential to become a social tool, but only if unlocked by software. This software can come in any flavor, look and feel capable of being generated by a Turing machine. And making new flavors and fads is pretty cheap, certainly a lot cheaper than creating a new bar, restaurant or convention center. Yet while what can go on the screen may be infinite, the social aspect of it all remains deeply tied to the hardware, making the machine social is simply the act of linking various nodes of a network together.

Social software is the art of managing links on a network over time. Instant messaging is a temporary and private link in real time. Email is temporary and private but time shifted. A blog post is also time shifted, but is public and if not permanent than at least has a much longer half life than a typical email. The classic social network apps like MySpace, Friendster and Facebook are different. Instead of turning links on and off when needed, they establish links once and then make them essentially permanent. What happens next is just a series of other social software styles overlaid onto this network. Most of the fuctionality of these sites is as blasé as it gets, replacements for email, blogs, photo albumns and bulletin boards, usually in a somewhat inferior form to the more deadicated versions of those apps. What makes them unique is merely that you can now use your social network itself as a modulating factor. It's a classic case of constraint unlocking potential. By constraining functionality to just a space determined by the semi-permanent links of a person's social network, these sites can channel other existing pieces of social software into a more vibrant, and from the looks of the use numbers, addictive form.

It's not quite a "nothing new under the sun" thing, there is a new twist to the new social softwares, but there is not that much new. To say that you don't have time for social software is essentially the same thing as saying you don't have time to be social at all. Maybe you prefer more of a hardware setting, to socialize at a country club or dive bar or at church or at ballfield. Maybe that leaves you too drained to keep up with your Facebook feeds. But it's not because you don't have time for social software, it's because you've made a simple choice to pursue a different social avenue. One that presents a different set of nuances and twists then what is available online. That's your choice and perhaps it's a great one. But social software is no more time consuming than any other social structure and it will continue to evolve in interesting directions. Now keeping up with those directions might indeed be tiring, but only if you are conscious of it. The people who actually are using these things without thinking about it are the ones truly pushing the form, to them their community lies in part in software, and from here on in, that is pretty much something to take for granted.

The Abstract Dynamics Bookstore

Occasionally I've thought it might be a good idea to build up a little Abstract Dynamics bookstore of sorts using Amazon's rather powerful API and referral setup. But given how little money I've ever made off my experiments with their setup and given how much time it would take it has never happened. Until now, when Amazon decided to make it ridiculously easy to set up. So easy that it was live before I even really got to mull over the appropriateness of it all. Basically it's a store dynamically generated by Amazon using 9 of my selections as a base, it's an experiment do with it what you will, while I figure out if there is a way to get way past that nine selection limit...

Abstract Dynamics || a store (beta)

Another Time

Every once and a while you catch a moment that makes you precisely aware of the sort of things you take for granted. I cherish those moments, it's rare opportunity to actually be able to see yourself in a bit of perspective.

I had one today after placing an order for a small sample quantity of items from a large industrial company. Their New York rep sent an email saying they'd mail me an invoice, and being a sample I would need to prepay before shipment. Somehow that bewildered me, I knew I needed to prepay, but I was ready to swipe my debit card that instant, or at least send the numbers over. It just seemed so slow, so out of touch with the rhythms of my day to day. Especially since I pickup my mail maybe twice a month. I've been spending years trying to eliminate mail, now my whole project is on hold till the US Postal Service comes through? How slow, how primitive! And all that was before I realized the invoice wasn't even getting mailed from here in NY, on reread it seemed like it was getting mailed from Switzerland...

Of course the real primitive here is me. I've been living too much of my life on internet time, instant gratification time, always on, high speed download time... If I want to get into the business of physical goods I need to learn the rhythms and pacings that make them work. One step at a time was the mantra when I finally learned how to make physical computing projects work, and that is probably how I'll need to address the issues of manufacturing real goods, things with real weight, things that move on the backs of trucks and across oceans in twenty-foot equivalent units. Maybe it will be frustrating, maybe it will be a welcome pace, either way I'll need change my perception of time, my culture of time, just a little to make it work.

The Value of Metcalfe's Law

For whatever reason Metcalfe's Law has been all popping up everywhere I look over the past 24 hours.

The July issue of IEEE Spectrum has an article "Metcalfe's Law is Wrong" that is probably the crystal under which all this attention can be formed.

Metcalfe's law basically states that a value of a network grows exponentially with the number of nodes. A telephone network with only one phone is worthless. One with two is usefully only to the few people who can reach those two phones. But a phone network with a million phones has a massive value. The authors of the IEEE article don't dispute the existence of "network effects", the fact that as nodes increase networks rapidly increase in potential value. What they dispute is the exponential math that Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, uses. The authors instead argue for logarithmic growth, or something close to it. They are probably right.

They also make an important point that "Metcalfe's law" is not a law at all, but merely a empirical observation that serves as a useful guide for analysis. What they completely miss is the wide open flaw in Metcalfe's Law, which can be summed up in one word, value.

What the fuck does it mean when you say the value of a network increases, with the number of nodes? Well it depends on what sort of value you are talking about. A network of phones in a world of deaf people has no value no matter how many nodes it has. What a network gains when it adds nodes is not value but potential value. That potential value only can turn into "real" value when valuable content flows through the network from node to node. You just can't sit down with Metcalfe's law, in either the original exponential or new logarithmic version, and use it to calculate the value of your network based on the number of nodes. All those nodes are worthless if they don't have anything to say to each other.

You can build a network, you can get a guideline of it's potential value, but to unlock it you first need to figure out just what value you are talking about. And then you need to get that value into the network in a way that is communicable and then and only then will the network actually begin to produce the values you want.

update: not 10 minutes after I posted this I stumbled on Metcalfe himself responding to the IEEE article in quite an interesting manner. And as usual Fred Stutzman has some interesting things to say as well.

The Innocence of Power Laws

I've been reading a short book - an essay, really - by John Kenneth Galbraith called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. It's his last work, written while he was in his nineties, not long before he died. In it, he explains how we, as a society, have come to use the term "market economy" in place of the term "capitalism." The new term is a kinder and gentler one, with its implication that economic power lies with consumers rather than with the owners of capital or with the managers who have taken over the work of the owners. It's a fine example, says Galbraith, of innocent fraud.

- Nicholas Carr Rough Type: The Great Unread

I've long argued that the "natural" shape of most markets is a powerlaw, and that any deviation from that shape is due to some bottleneck in distribution. Get rid of the bottleneck and you can tap the latent demand in the market, unlocking the potential of the Long Tail.

- Chris Anderson The Long Tail: A billion dollar question

Many have noted the irony that my book on niches appears to be a hit. It will enter the NYT Bestseller list this week at #13 (moving up to #10 next week) and is already #14 on the WSJ bestseller list (moving up to #11 next week). I can live with that irony!

- Chris Anderson The Long Tail: The Long Tail economy

Rosen's answer could not possibly have been more honest. The best way, by far, to get a link from an A List blogger is to provide a link to the A List blogger. As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated - with the best of intentions, mind you - by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite. A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant's little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal's hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.

- Nicholas Carr Rough Type: The Great Unread

Part of the reason the book is successful, I believe, is because as I was writing it the smart readers of this blog helped improve the ideas, catch my errors and suggest dozens of applications and dimensions of the Long Tail I never would have thought of myself. So today's recognition is also a recognition of the power of tapping collective intelligence. I couldn't have done it without you!

- Chris Anderson The Long Tail: A top ten bestseller!

Hot Hot Networks

As the current summer heatwave takes itssmall toll on the internet, it's pushed a couple hidden issues a little closer to the surface. One is just how fragile the internet is (and is not) and the other just how god damn hot and power hungry it is.

In Albert-László Barabási's Linked he demonstrates that the internet forms what he calls a scale-free network. One of the interesting characteristics of a scale free network is that it is virtually indestructible as a communications medium. No matter how many nodes you take out, big ones, small ones, whatever, you still, in his models at least, you can still communicate across the network. You can slow the network down incredibly by taking out key nodes, but you can not destroy it as a communications tool.

But that is the internet as this big thing, this mass that Barabási studied and then modeled via graph theory. That is not the same thing as what we can call your "personal internet". Your personal internet is your email, your blog, your online bookmarks, your MySpace page, and the like. The precise contents vary from person to person, maybe X relies on MyYahoo and Y on YayHooray. But regardless of the specifics your personal internet is a handful of sites and they are not nearly as resilient as some hypothetical scale free entity. Just taking out your email for a few hours can pretty much destroy your internet communications, while having your site, or main news-source out can leave you hanging half off the network. Or as someone on one of my mailing lists tossed out: "And of course if both Dreamhost and GMail go down at the same time, then that means it's time to go onto the roof and have a beer." Which of course is a great idea, but how many days do you want to stay on the roof, and how much beer do you have stocked up?

The second issue is in a way about Moore's Law, you know the one about computer speeds doubling every 18 months or two years. I've had a minor disagreement with Art Kleiner over the past couple years on just how seriously to take Moore's Law. Been highly skeptical of any attempt to prediction the future with the accuracy of a law, I don't think it can be taken for granted. In fact at least anecdotally it seems to be slowing down now. I just replace a four year old laptop, and I went from a single 1.9GHz chip to a dual 2GHz, which is barely double in four years. Part of this is a technological issue, and part is an issue of demand, speed just is not as important a selling point as it once was and hence there is less drive to push it at the speed of Moore's law. Art's point is that you need to factor in price, that Moore's law is better seen as a doubling of processing speed per dollar rather than a raw doubling, and it's a good point.

But what neither of us have factored in, is the cost of computing in terms of how much power it is consuming and how much heat it is generating. Faster chips run hotter and suck in more electricity. While chip designs are getting more efficient at least at times, the over all trend still seems be towards more power consumption and more hot hot hot servers and laptops. Unless this can get reigned in, Moore's law might just run smack into a brick wall of rising power costs. It might still be possible to double the cost of computing per dollar of microchip every couple years, but it might not be worth the added cost on your electric bill...

update: reader Gummi sends this link, a few choice quotes:

"Chips will be as hot as nuclear reactors by the end of the decade... and as hot as the surface of the sun by 2015, if they continue on their current design path, according to Pat Gelsinger, Intel's architecture chief."

"The nub of his presentation is this. Moore's law will remain true for the next ten years: but the thermal properties and power requirements of future chips conforming Moore's rule of thumb will be unsellable, unless design approaches are radically revised.

""'No one,' as Gelsinger puts it,'wants to carry a nuclear reactor in their laptop onto a plane'. "

Could Global Warming Kill the Internet?

The current summer heat wave has been blamed for taking out MySpace for 12 hours, and more anecdotally the internet does not seem to be weathering the weather to well. The few mailing lists I subscribe to are filling up with tales of server fires and emails failing or being delayed far more than usual. Tales that are mirrored pretty accurately in my own webhosting and email accounts.

The internet is a big network of servers, and servers are hot. They devour electricity, they run hot and they mainline air conditioning. When the global thermostat goes up, the servers start going down. It is all a bit of sci-fi now, but could it be that one of the big casualties of global warming might just end up being the internet?

update: Dreamhost (who I use) have posted a fascinating mea culpa about why they went down in the heat. The power demands of these hosting companies and datacenters is pretty insane...

Wireless Warfare in the Streets

The Wi-Fi in Your Handset - New York Times

It's a pretty innocuous headline and photo, but make no mistake this is an early salvo in what looks to be a heated battle over the control of the wireless infrastructure. The cell phone service providers are on one side, the equipment makers and software companies on the other. Governments? They are both omnipresent yet conspicuously absent from the core of the debate, they seem to only have a clue as to what is happening at certain key junctures (ie when municipal WiFi discussions get serious like in SF or Philadelphia).

At the core this is an issue of information, an issue of which corporations are controlling the gateways between you and the network(s) you need to access to connect to the world. To a large extent it seems the wires are already laid down, at least for the moment it seems there is plenty of fiber in the ground and the providers are reduced to the status of commodity sellers. Net neutrality might change that, but that is an issue for another day. It is the wireless protocols that are up for grabs. So far the cellular companies have a massive lead, they have the infrastructure both to provide and to profit built up, running and accepted by the public at large.

But with that advantage comes a huge arrogance, and perhaps a short-sightedness as well. The cell companies think they can call the shots and in the process they've pushed aside the handset makers and locked the software and information technology companies out almost completely. They also have with typical phone company airs completely failed to win the confidence of their users, do you know anyone who actually likes their cell phone company?

The cell phone companies are gambling on controlling the airwaves, on staying oligarchical. This threatens a whole other group, perhaps we can call them the network idealists, the coders and hackers, activists and enthusiasts that drive the networked underground of global information projects. I call them Benkler labor, after Yochai Benkler and his theory of networked productivity.

The anti-cellular company strategy combines a hodgepodge of consumer dissatisfaction, plain old desire for better prices, Benkler labor and in places old school government public works projects into the creation of a so far mythical, but theoretically very possible, wifi meshwork. If there are enough accessible wifi hotspots overlapping each other in a giant mesh of wireless connectivity, it becomes possible to route around the cellular providers. Instead of a handful of capital intensive cellphone towers, the plan is to provide connectivity via a swarm of wifi routers connected to people's broadband lines in their homes and offices. It sounds a little precarious to me, but if you were a mid to large sized company coming face to face with the fact that your livelihood is dangerously close to being controlled entirely by a handful of cellular companies any way out probably looks like a good gamble.

At the moment at least the wifi forces are all about open technology, they are at such a disadvantage compared to the already built up and profitable cellular networks that they need every advantage they can get, and open network infrastructure is a key one. Some of the players are idealistic about it, others I suspect not, but for the moment at least this is in a large part a battle of openness versus closed and controlled access to the networks, which is what the cellular companies have now and want to keep. If the cellular companies win this battle it is tantamount to handing over your personal information to your provider. It isn't pretty, but you probably have done it already. They know where you are, or at least where your phone is. They know how to reach you. They know who you talk to, and if they wanted to I'm sure they could figure out exactly what you said, although it would not exactly be legal in the US for them to do so. All they want to do is add the contents of all your emails, web browsing and file sharing. Yeah not too much.

The stakes are high, whoever controls the pipes in which your information flows essentially occupies a position where they have the potential to exert incredible control over you. Whether that potential is realizable though is a huge issue. The wifi activists offer a solution with unclear long term ramifications. They want to ramp up the wifi network to a point somewhat akin to where the wired internet lies today. One that is relatively open, somewhat balanced but with huge weakness just beginning to emerge, as American's are learning with the current net neutrality legislation churning in congress. In other words we are on the verge of a round of corporate warfare with potential to be as messy as that "real" warfare engulfing the middle east. So pick your carrier carefully, who knows where this leads...

GAM3R 7H30RY

GAM3R 7H30RY is McKenzie Wark's experimental online book, created with the Institute for the Future of the Book. I've always found Wark's writing both fascinating and infuriating and what little I've read of this work keeps up the pace. But what is far more interesting is just accurately the digital book format mirrors the same sort of fascinating/infuriating oscillation.

In the end the format both fails and succeeds in big ways. Like Bruno Latour's similar, yet less ambitious experiment Paris: Invisible City, the content is just incredibly ill suited to be read on a computer screen. Part of the problem is resolution, computer screens today tend to have resolutions around 100 pixels per inch. Reading comprehension off a screen apparently doesn't match that of printed matter until the resolution is about 200 pixels per inch. When you are reading the news, or some blogger, or the sports scores this does not matter much. But when you are trying to grok a complex academic text, forget it. I once read the entirety of Hardt and Negri's Empire on my "smartphone". I enjoyed it completely, yet I could not recall a single thing from the text.

The other side of the problem is posture, academic texts are also not meant to be read while sitting upright at a desk, and putting a hot laptop on your lap is not exactly the same as curling up with a good book, is it? But this again is ultimately a technical issue, and like with the screen resolution issue odds are it will be solved soon enough. Which brings us to the good stuff.

What's great about GAM3R 7H30RY is the incredible amount of commentary it is generating. It is pretty much the most dynamic feeling text out there. Lots of call and response going on and it makes it all feel very alive, like a breathe of fresh air in a stagnent library. Not only does it capture the vibrant energy that occurs in good blog powered exchanges, but thanks to it's ajax interface it actually pushes past into something even better.

The real question I have, and it's one I seem to ask all the time, is how much of this scales? How much of this is repeatable and how much is just a function of time, place and circumstance. There certainly might be some first mover advantage here, the novelty generates interest, which generates more feedback than the next experiment will get. Then there is the matter of the books structure. Wark is a highly stylized writer, and he loves playing with form. In this case the form is an almost ritualized structure of rather discrete paragraphs. Chunks of text that do not need a huge amount of context to be understood.

I suspect this structure is extremely helpful in fascillitating feedback. The pauses between paragraphs are so big and so deliberate, it makes it very easy to pause to type out a comment. You actually need to actively click to get the next paragraph, so it's pretty much a choice of two actions, react or continue on. The big question here is whether that amounts to something more like a parlor trick, or a writing tactic that can be replicated with relative ease. Or maybe it's a red herring, but then again maybe every academic book in some future will be written in these little chucks, explicitly to provoke feedback.

In the end though, I'm still waiting for the printed version to read this thing...

Low Level Corporate Warfare, Wireless Style

Things are starting to get interesting in the world of wireless infrastructure, in a low level corporate warfare sort of way. Perhaps nothing sums up the stakes than this little bit from Wired, on why Nokia has slipped off their index of 40 most "wired" companies:

"What’s an innovator to do? Carriers, not handset makers, now dictate the cell phone feature set."

Well, what will they do? Last week they dropped a clue by announcing they will provide free wifi in New York parks. That's small time compared to what FON wants to do, which is build a world wide free wifi mesh network. Funnily enough it looks as if there is a Nokia-FON connection already existing. Nokia apparently even has a charming name for it all "Anarchic Wireless Networks". More to come I suspect...

Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality is not exactly the easiest issue to understand (just ask Senator Ted Stevens.) I have what must be an above average grasp of the issues involved, and for the longest time I couldn't quite explain it simply. But the easiest way to break it down is that the cable and phone companies want to turn the internet into cable TV. Premium internet, pay per channel basis. Want to send pictures to your friends and family, head over to the equivalent of public access, the fast connections are reserved for the big players. That's not really the bad part though, the bad part is that congress is RCH away from legislating this corporate vision into reality. Way more info over at Save the Internet

Economies of Design and Other Adventures in Nomad Economics

Ok, time to go a bit more public. That image that should be showing above is the front cover of the public draft of my first book Economies of Design and Other Adventures in Nomad Economics which you can buy by following this link. You can also download the pdf for free. It's a public draft which means its far from done, filled with typos, and due to the magic of print on demand it should be updated frequently. It's also the first(ish) draft of my first book, which means I've learned a tremendous amount just in pulling it together. If things work out the second draft will be a complete rewrite and a far better organized one at that. But the raw ideas are out on paper and I'd love to get as much feedback as possible, so please read, enjoy and comment!

The book also has a site, and like the book it's so far been semi-public. No longer. Feel free to point your browsers to nomadeconomics.org just what will happen there is slightly indeterminate, but hopefully informative and entertaining.

The YouTube Presidency

In 2004 the American political system began to come to grips with the internet era. They got the ecommerce bit down real quick. Howard Dean lead the way and everyone copied him before he could even finish shrieking. 2004 also marked the point where online media, blogs in particular began to make themselves noticed, although their overall impact on the results of that election is probably rather minimal. Here in 2006 blogs are pretty much taken for granted, although just what the impact of that will be is uncertain. And what's about to get noticed I think is YouTube.

Unless YouTube has taken it down, embedded below should be a clip poetically titled "President Bush pants like a dog". Not exactly what the White House media team wants you to watch is it? But like it or not this looks like the new style, the new format for video, and what sells on YouTube isn't exactly what sells on the 6 O'Clock news. I doubt it will have much impact on these upcoming elections, other than perhaps an outlier or two of sorts, but what happens in 2008? Instead of a president who looks good on TV are we going to have a president with the best MySpace profile and the ability to make the funniest YouTube clips?

Jokes aside, politicians are going to have to come to grips with the new way people watch TV/video. And that's not an easy task as TV appears to be in a bifurcation of sorts. On one hand people want to come home to longer and far more complex shows to play in their Tivos, and on the other hand they want the funniest and dumbest clips to watch on their desks at work. Is the YouTube president the one who avoids making the biggest mistakes, or the one who can constantly generate positive viral clips to feed the streams?

Perhaps the answer is to skip participating and just become the host. I thought up most of this post sitting is Steven Johnson's class where someone quite aptly compared YouTube to America's Funniest Home Videos, which I might add is much better than my own "like TV only worse". And if being the host is the way out and YouTube is really America's Funniest well then there is the answer to 2008, Bob Saget for president!

How Wide Can a Website Be?

The New York Times has redesigned it's website. It looks like the cross between a blog and the International Herald Tribune and that's good. Mainly cause the IHT has had one of the best designed sites on the web for years, but hey it's nice to see "MSM" acknowledging just who runs the internet news game too. More importantly navigation is a breeze, find things is no problem. Well you can't find the write up of today's Met's game in the sports section only on the front page, but I'll assume that's a glitch.

There is one real problem with it though, although I'm not sure it's their's or mine. The freaking thing is too wide, 975 pixels apparently. Web designers have been trying to grab all these extra pixels for years now, and with the Times it looks like management caved in to them in order to "take advantage of the larger monitors now used by the vast majority of our readers" and that's a mistake. Now I'm not some user bitching cause I have an antiquated machine with a tiny monitor, I'm actually a total resolution whore, I want as many pixels as possible, crammed as closely as possible. So much so that last I looked my 14" 1600×1200 pixel laptop was actually higher than anything then on the market, so much for progress...

So I have one of these larger monitors they are talking about, but I can't see all the content on the Times site, it's getting cut off on the right. Why? Well just because I have a large monitor, doesn't mean I want to give it all over to the New York Times. There are other things on my screen and I like them there. Designer's have always had a hard time grasping this, so it's always taken the clients to reality check their arrogance. But if there is any class that can best designers in arrogance hands down it's a TImes staff member, and now we have a deadly combo.

Except it looks like the joke might just be on them, cause just what is getting cut off in my browser window? Nothing I care about, no, what's getting cut off is all the ads! Maybe this wide site thing isn't so bad after all...

OurSpace?

Loads happening in MySpace land this week. Well there are loads happening every week there, what's interesting this week is actually what's happening at that intense spot where MySpace, politics and media meet.

The good first. What's been happening in California where MySpace is being used to organize massive student protests is I think quite remarkable. We are talking about an incredible political emergence of a highly marginalized group, and it's being lead by high schoolers. That is empowerment, that's the internet dream of the network routing around obstruction. I'm a little concerned with what the half life of the movement might be, but I'm 3000 miles away so all I can really do is watch it all unfold.

But then as the Space giveth the Space taketh away. And in this case it shut down "200,000 'objectionable' profiles". Those inner quotes by the way are from the Financial Times, just what objectionable contains clearly is an open question of sorts. Now in this spamified age a web site shutting down some accounts is hardly a new thing. But few if any sites have accounts that their users invests so much in as MySpace. If danah boyd is right that MySpace is now an important place for teenagers to formulate and discover their identities, and do believe she is right, well then we now have to face the fact that those identities are now owned by News Corp and News Corp has the ability to delete teenagers identities as they see fit.

Now having your MySpace profile deleted is hardly the end of the world. The intensely network nature of MySpace does mean that it's exponentially harder to rebuild a developed profile than say starting a new WoW character, but in the end it probably only takes a weekend to reconstruct an extensive MySpace profile. However if you've ever been a teenager, and I really hope most of my readers have been, well you might remember that not every teenager had the best perspective on what the end of the world might be. Just how much of a threat is having your MySpace page deleted? It's a pretty tricky question to answer and from that Financial Times piece it's something MySpace management has thought a lot about.

“MySpace is more potent and powerful than even we knew,” Mr Chernin [president and chief operating officer of News Corp] says. “And it is becoming a more integrated part of people’s lives.” However, as efforts grow to attract more advertisers to the site, News Corp is facing two challenges. Young users have to keep wanting to use the site, rather than switch to a “cooler” alternative.
Also, advertisers have to feel confident their reputation will not be tainted by “inappropriate” content.

I'd have to add into there that News Corp answers not only to it's advertisers and users but to it's own political agenda as well. Unless it flames out into a mass exodus odds are some sort of dynamic psuedo-equillibrium is going to form between those forces. And just how that psuedo-equillibrium is constituted is going to have a huge impact on what happens in MySpace. Is it a wide open commons for kids to express themselves however they see fit. Or is it a regulatory environment, one where they can express themselves only within a particular set of boundaries set my New Corp execs? And since the later seems almost a given now, perhaps it better to ask just how regulated will it be? Is it just deleting spam, or is it deleting messages that go against News Corps favorite politicians? Deleting trolls or deleting pro-ana profiles?

Man I sort of hate to bring Deleuze into this, particularly my least favorite essay of his, but really I can't think of any better way to end this than a link to "Society of Control"....

The Internets of Things

People are making tiny computers and sticking them in everything, this much is pretty clear. So is the fact these things are starting to talk to each other. Just what to call these everythings though is a whole other story, but from the rather sub-academic linguistic mess comes one compelling figure of phrase, the internet of things. And well this is the internet and this is a blog, so let me just do my duty and add my own iteration to the word slop and suggest we need to get a bit more Dubya Bush on that phrase and start talking instead about the the internets of things.

The world may have laughed painfully when George Bush started talking about the internets, but the very fact that we can talk about the internet in the singular is a rather remarkable historical fact. A fact of protocol. Whether or not that the wireless objects increasingly percolating around us will all talk the same language, speak the same protocol, is in geek terminology a non-trivial problem. That is to say it is a resolutely political issue, and one with ramifications that could well effect us all.

Who writes the protocol(s) for the internet(s) of things. I first asked that question over in the comments on Adam Greenfield's v-2.org. An quite accurate and rather dismissive response came in from internet of things coiner Bruce Sterling: "Geeks are writing the protocol. Geeks are the class of people who write protocols." Which is sort of like saying "monks are the people who write books" back in 1300. Completely accurate and completely irrelevant to the issues of the future. We quite likely are a generation and change away from a world where being able to write code is as second grade as being able read and write. Now of course writing protocol is a rather special class of programing, the same way say writing novels or legal statues is a specialized class of writing. But that just begs the question, are the protocol(s) of the internet(s) or things getting written by the lawyers or novelists? And if it's both and more as it may well be well you can kiss that internet singular goodbye.

The unity of the internet comes two protocols embedded in the five letters of TCP/IP. We'll save you the details and histories and just say that that birthing process occurred in a rarefied embryonic stage of networked cultured. So rarefied that a surprising percentage of the main players went to the same California high school. More importantly perhaps though, it was only through luck and a naive disinterest that institutions like AT&T, Xerox and the US Department of Defense never sunk their claws into the processes going on in their nether regions. You can bet that the NSAs, Sonys, Microsofts, Nokias and Deutsche Telekoms of the now are not going to let similar opportunities to mar the protocols of tomorrow slip past unmolested.

Yes the geeks are writing the protocol today, but which geeks? The Chinese government geeks? the Redmond option whore geeks? Russian mafia geeks? American dwarf linux geeks? Sony DRM geeks? favela internet cafe geeks? If its an internet of things than only one can really win. If multiplication prevails we have not an internet, but internets of things. And the difference between the two is quite literally of Tower of Babel proportions. Are these things in this together or do they take sides in the networks around us?

TheirSpace

Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad? is danah boyd's latest essay on the big social network sites, and her continued defense of MySpace against rising media driven fears. I'm pretty much in agreement with her on the level she has framed her argument, as the freedom of users to create their space versus the attempts of managers and concern parents to control it. Yet something big is missing from that story, something about MySpace being created by an internet marketing company know for spam, adware and spywear. Something about it being bought for a rather large sum by news corporation known for pursuing power first and profits second.

Through out her writing danah constantly invokes a bottom up defense of youth culture. Essentially that the kids are alright they just need space and privacy to develop their own identities. It's an argument I'm totally sympathetic to, but it becomes completely problematic when one realizes that something like MySpace just isn't a traditional bottom-up youth culture situation at all. Rather it's something more like an engine, a structure to contain the bottom up energy and transform it into something else entirely.

Now that probably comes off as rather critical, yet it actually purposefully devoid of value judgments. If all MySpace is doing is giving kids a place to be themselves on line and transforming that into ad revenue its a rather benign operation in my book. But is selling ads the only reason for MySpace as a company? Is it the only reason News Corp was willing to pay many hundreds of millions for the service? Without inside knowledge it's difficult to answer, but it is an undeniable fact that the MySpace database is filled with a massive, perhaps unprecedented, amount of demographic data.

MySpace knows their users basic info, name, email, age, etc. Then it also knows their friends, their friends data, their favorite bands, the way they speak, who they like, who they don't. Heck it can probably run a simple algorithm and figure out your favorite words (assuming you use MySpace). A more complex algorithm and it can probably imitate they way you talk.

Not only does MySpace have an absurd amount of personal data on people, the sort of stuff traditional demographics companies have been collecting for decades. But it also has something perhaps far more valuable, a wealth of data on the relationships between all those people. And just what emerges from those relationships remains to be seen. We can speculate a little though.

Imagine a new friend request, good looking person, same style, likes the same books and movies you do, never met them but sure you say yes. Something maybe a touch off, a touch cold, robotic maybe. But they are in your network, in the conversation churn. But slowly they push in odd ways, push certain products, certain activities, push for more info. The future of marketing just might read the same zines as you, buy the same punk 7" as you, watch the same YouTube as you. Perhaps they might even know just what you'll buy better than you.

That's just a scenario, imagine another one. One where it's not about the personal touch, but instead the bigger picture. Youth culture has always relied on reality moving faster on the ground than it does in the board rooms. The ability for kids to find and build their own worlds outside of the ones filled with parents teachers and cops. But what happens if MySpace can see trends faster in their data than kids can actually see them on the ground?

Just a scenario, but remember it might be my space and your space, but it's their data in the end...

Power 2.0

Most tellingly, the company [News Corp] spent $400m on MySpace.com, the social networking phenomenon that has proved hugely popular with 35m regular users on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr Murdoch has undergone a Damascene conversion, admitting he hugely underestimated the power of the web. He said last night: "It is a creative, destructive technology that is still in its infancy, yet breaking and remaking everything in its path. We are all on a journey, not just the privileged few, and technology will take us to a destination that is defined by the limits of our creativity, our confidence and our courage."

- Guardian Unlimited | Internet means end for media barons, says Murdoch

So, as Squash points out, Rupert Murdock is now chugging hard at the Web 2.0 Kool Aid. In fact he's even managing to sound even more like a dot.com flashback victim than even the hardiest of the 2.0 players. Yet nothing at all illustrates shocking inequalities of the "long tail" than that $400 million that Murdock dropped on MySpace. In the old model a media company had thousands of paid employees, journalists, anchors, video editors, printers, delivery guys, all there just to get the content made and to the audience. Now the same company, has millions of "users" doing the creation and distribution work for free. Is that empowering the little guy, or is that empowering Mr. Murdock and co's bank accounts?