For those who need to understand how the Web is changing the way businesses work
Meta Data
| Issue:
June 4, 1998 Author/Editor: David Weinberger Central Meme: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy Favorite Beatle: John. Duh. Current Personal Crisis: Grudging admiration of Barry Goldwater feels like a media trick Home page: http://www.hyperorg.com Contact information: Click here. |
Contents
Displaying Intelligence: The part of
our computers slowest to change is going to change in a big way ... and
will alter the fundamentals |
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Special Issue Update Reaction has been strong -- and often printable -- to the Special Issue of JOHO in which we and Chris RageBoy Locke discuss the importance of metaphors in a side by side format. Although this was an attempt to further our tradition's progress in understanding some of the great ideas of Western thought, apparently many readers took it as a sort of pro(se) wrestling match and actually took sides! What's more surprising is that although clearly I kicked RageBoy's intellectual heinie and left him with internal bruises he couldn't reach even with a Chinese back scratcher, some of the readers of RageBoy's newsletter actually thought Chris bested me. It just shows you the sorry state of Western thought. In the next issue, JOHO will report further on what you, the readers, had to say. And look for more special issues... |
Displaying intelligence
There are four main parts of a computer. (Don't play dumb. You know this already.) There's the CPU for processing, the mouse and keyboard for input, the hard drive for memory, and the monitor for seeing things. We've seen major advancements in all of these areas except one.
- CPUs now go so fast that soon they'll actually reverse the flow
of time. But, consumers can't figure out why they need to double their CPU
speed when all most of us are doing is typing anyway. (Fortunately, Microsoft,
in its devil pact with Intel, has figured out how to motivate users to make
the move: they continually make their software slower. Clever boys!)
- While Microsoft has tried to come up with ways to get us to upgrade our
keyboard ("Let's break 'em in half, slap our logo on 'em, and claim
it's the new ergonomic, natural way to type") and mouse ("Let's cross
breed mice and unicycles! People will love 'em"), the big change is just
beginning to happen: voice recognition.
- Hard drives physically now can contain more information than any human being could read in a lifetime. Gimme two!
That leaves the measly old display. What's been the big innovation? Two more inches measured diagonally? Hey, let's get really revolutionary and add 3 inches! Yawn.
I spent two days at the Society for Information Display in Anaheim (great place to live and raise kids, if the rest of the world is infested with plague-bearing rats) and I've seen the future. Well, sort of. What I actually saw was a ton of hardware, most of which won't make a nickel's worth of difference.
[Full disclosure: I was at SID because I'm doing some marketing consulting to Displaytech, a company that makes microdisplays.]
There were a bunch of people showing big, beautiful displays, typically some type of gas plasma flat panel thingamabob: clear, crisp, heavy, expensive. Having a big screen certainly enhances your viewing experience, and I certainly would like to have one for my TV if I were willing to admit I care that much about TV and if my wife were suddenly to be possessed by an alien from the planet CableMe that has come to investigate the giant slab in our living room that enables our kids to fulfill their constitutional duty to watch 16 hours of TV a day.
In other words, who cares?
But I do care about two other directions monitors are taking that will overcome the two fundamental limitations of today's monitors: First, they are confined to one space. Second, they're stupid.
Currently, a display is a piece of furniture that sits in one spot. Imagine instead that your entire working area -- desk and walls -- was capable of displaying digital images...not display-furniture on top of furniture, but furniture that has no surface except that of the display. (You'll probably get this type of wrap-around display by projecting images, not by making giant CRTs or plasma displays. Cheaper, lighter, more robust, less power draw.) Your desktop will have real piles of paper next to virtual piles. (I once had virtual piles. Hurt like the dickens.) Your cubicle wall will turn into a Web windshield. All of the crampedness of Windows will go away.
In fact, Windows was designed to overcome the limited real estate of current monitors. It's because there's so little land to occupy that we need a windowing system at all, one that can layer and hide windows as required. If we had a larger space, our operating system would change in very substantial ways.(I stole this idea from Haviland Wright.) That's one sign that this type of change is important.
Now take a different (but not inconsistent) scenario. Imagine that you do the geek thang and have a tiny display attached to your eyeglasses. Imagine just for a moment that the images displayed are as bright and clear as what you see on your current 17" monitor. (The technology is just about here for mass production of these microdisplays. You could see 'em at SID if you could put up with being in Anaheim.) Imagine also that somehow attaching displays to your eyeglasses becomes a "gotta-have" rather than a "What a nerd!" thing. You'd get some immediate benefits, like lighter laptops, much better power consumption, and privacy.
But now imagine that the system can track your head and eye movements. This isn't rocket science. (Even rocket science isn't rocket science. ) As you move, you get 360 degrees of computing. You have a virtual space, a virtual cubicle, that moves with you.
Ok, it's a freaking nightmare! Thank God for eyelids! But it's going to radically change our computing paradigm from looking into a 17" data periscope (21" if we're very important indeed) to operating in a spatial environment.
What will this mean for accessing the Web? If you haven't read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, then you ought to. The first few chapters give a vivid picture of the world we're entering. (The book then devolves into a dumbass Kevin Costner style movie.) (You can get Snow Crash here:
http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/books/amazon.html#snowcrash
If nothing else, the change in paradigm (damn, used that horrible word twice in two paragraphs! Your money will be cheerfully refunded at the ticket counter) might open up a crack for an alternative to Windows ... or maybe just the introduction of Microsoft Windows360 some time in the next millennium.
Follow-ups
Sites vs. Pages
It's actually conceivable that something I wrote in JOHO will turn out to be right! Consider this a proof of the power of random chance.
A few issues ago I was maintaining that we will eventually have office tools that enable us to create a web site as easily as create an office document, and that momentous things would follow, including the end of hunger, the greening of the desert, and the discovery of monkey remains in the Boston Garden.
Microsoft has started talking about Office 99 which will include the ability not only to save a document in XML (much like you can save in RTF now) but also to post your web document to a web site along with a newsgroup-style discussion area. So, now when given the assignment to write a business plan, for example, I can instead create a site for my group to kick around ideas.
For the article discussing why this matters (and a rebuttal from Frank Gilbane) click here.
Zorba the Greek
By weird coincidence, after publishing the "Corba the Geek" joke in the last issue, I found myself two rows behind Anthony Quinn on an airplane. He was there with his two young children (about 6 and 2 years old, and, yes, Anthony is in his early 80s) with whom he was playing in a friendly, physical way. The only drawback was his continuous cries of "Hoopah! Hoopah!" throughout the entire 6 hour flight.
AOL buys ICQ
We've touted ICQ from Mirabilis before.
I like the product a lot -- it's a real time chat system and more -- but,
I wouldn't pay $300 million for it, especially if I already had a realtime
chat capability (Instant Messenger) as part of my offering. On the other hand,
I would pay $300 million just to get the "aol.com" out of my email
return address, so maybe you shouldn't take my word on this.
I love Holland. It's a beautiful country, with humane, tolerant people who
have the decency to speak English. But why is it that as soon as I walk out
of the airport and approach a taxi driver, he inevitably recognizes me as American
and speaks in English to me? (Could it be the ten gallon hat and the spurs that
jingle-jangle? I don't think so.)
Apparently, I just give out waves of Americanosity. Comments, explanations,
conspiracy theories?
Here's one of the very few sports stories I've enjoyed.
The Boston Garden (which is, I'm informed, actually a basketball stadium,
not a garden) is being torn down so that a local bank can put its logo on
a new stadium. Last week, in the rafters were found the remains of a monkey
that apparently had been living there for untold years, surviving on half-eaten
hot dogs and popcorn. No one knows where it came from.
But we do know that hundreds of thousands of American men read the article,
thought "Free hot dogs and popcorn, permanent viewing post for every game,
and pee wherever you want," smacked their hand on their forehead and groaned,
"Why'd it have to be wasted on frigging monkey??"
This, ladies and gentlemonkeys, encapsulates my view of what sports does to
otherwise moderately full-function human males.
Question for our Dutch Readers
Monkey Boston Garden
Downward Definitions
A couple of issues ago we ran a quotation from Chairman Larry Ellison (Larry bought the "Chairman" sobriquet from Frank Sinatra's estate) in which he made Network Computers succeed by redefining them as any computer that costs less than $1000.
Jeff Papows, CEO of Lotus, is using the same tactic to turn Lotus Notes into a "knowledge management" system. Here's an exchange from an interview in PC Week (May 11):
PC Week: Where will knowledge management appear in Notes and Domino 5.0?
Papows: 5.0 includes significant and expanded capabilities, including the ability to search beyond a single Notes database. [Real time] is a major part of our knowledge management capability. You'll see some tooling and work done in 5.0 for real-time capabilities.
So, let's get this straight. "KM" means being able to search across multiple Notes databases --a horrendous weakness that Notes has been getting beaten up on for years -- and realtime chat? Wow! No wonder people are excited!
Why Search Engines Suck
1. Australian Ron pointed out to me an article that definitely doesn't suck (um, probe) that helps explain why search engines suck
http://www.webtechniques.com/features/1998/05/webm/webm.shtml
The author, Lincoln Stein, is a columnist for Web Techniques magazine and has published more than one non-probing article on search engines. [For those just joining us, we at JOHO are beginning a futile campaign to replace the term "sucks" with "probes."] In this one, he tries to catch "rude robots" at work. A robot is a piece of software that visits web sites, usually to index them for a search engine. A rude robot is one that sneakily gets around the "Don't index me" signs that a site can post (more technically known as the Robert Exclusion Standard).
Stein finds that at his sample site -- the Genome Project -- 42% of the hits come from robots. Let me repeat that: FORTY TWO PERCENT of the hits have nothing to do with human beings visiting the site. So not only do search engines probe, but they're tying up traffic and bogusifying attempts to measure web usage.
This is search engine spam. It probes.
You can get more information on the Robot Exclusion Standard at:
http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html
2. Want to see why search engines probe the deep one? Try to find the modem initialization string for the Motorola 56K Modemsurfr (that's not a typo, it's marketing) at the Motorola site:
You'd think this would be one of the most requested pieces of information. Just try it. I dare you.
Quality98
When you configure Outlook98, you are treated to the following screen:
Please read this until you have establiched that it is in fact in error. [Hint: The misspelling in the previous sentence is no accident.]
To verify this, go to: Tools ) -> Accounts ) -> Properties (Mail) -> Connection. The version number is 8.5.5104.6; it is from an official Microsoft CD.
Ah, that quality feeling!
Middle World ResourcesA Compendium of Resources |
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Cool
Tool Alexa is your content browsing buddy. It installs itself at the bottom of your browser and makes sensible suggestions about other sites you might want to visit. It also tells you how heavy the traffic is on the site and gathers what shreds of data it can about who owns the domain name. (Would somebody mind hitting my site a few hundred thousand times so it looks a little better in the Alexa ratings? Thanks.) The links are surprisingly good. And its "archive of the Web" that supposedly lets you connect to pages that have 404-ed sometimes works. But wait, there's more! It also lets you access a dictionary, a thesaurus and the Encyclopedia Boretannica! You can get Alexa at http://www.alexa.com. |
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Internetcetera
The Delphi Group has published its latest knowledge management survey,
completed in April. The survey of 500 document management professionals
finds that 51% of respondents report an active effort in knowledge management at their company.
42% view KM as a way to add value to information, and 37% view it as
a "major new strategic initiative." Thus, almost 80% of respondents
view KM as something really important.
Put differently, close to 80% of document management professionals are
desperate to find a new field of employment.
You can read it yourself at http://www.kmworld.com/delphistudy/index.cfm
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Email, Rumors, Rude Remarks
My college friend, Jeff "Woof" Kassel is bidding
to join the prestigious JOHO Checker Board by pointing out the following piddling
inconsistency:
The current e-mail version of JOHO
contains the following two passages:
If you must know, the "Jews for Zeus" line was a late replacement of a joke
even far weaker. I typed it in after spell checking the sucker.
But, frankly, Woof, I don't owe you any explanations given the dirt I have
on you from your college days. So, every time you humiliate me in public by
finding errors in JOHO, I will be forced to retaliate with an embarrassing
moment from your Bucknell days.
For example, perhaps our readers would be interested to know that you used
to open up the seam of normal blue jeans and sew in a triangular patch so you
could get that oh-so-with-it bell bottom effect.
I'm starting mild here, Woof. Don't make me drop the big one. You know what
I mean...
(Is it official? Do I now have zero friends left?)
"We scan a lot more pagers than we actually index." (I suspect Excite
isn't actually scanning pagers -- just another little CNN/AP typo, the mark
of quality.)"
and
"(In 1992 I generously waived all royalty compensations and donated
my accumulated earnings to Jes for Zeus;"
Alright, I guess I'm being picky, but shouldn't your spell checker (or your
dog Checker) have picked up on this?
Bob Treitman, the Chief of the JOHO Checker Board, writes:
At the risk of finding myself skewered in the next issue of JOHO, I must, as the self-appointed Head Poobah of the Association to Remove the Apostrophe From the Possessive Its (ARAFPI), notify you of the following violation:
I had read the same article and was also struck by it's, well, ripeness.
A letter of apology to your 7th-grade English teacher is in order. Please, avoid the use of 'probe' in your correspondence.
I really can't blame Miss Marks (really her name) for this error. She almost always got the possessive of "it" right ... when she wasn't too busy instructing me in the ways of love.
(The above was simply a desperate attempt to distract you. Did it work?)
In the previous issue, in responding to a message from David Scarbro about some weird animal metaphors he found in the press, I made passing reference to an "Interleaf cargo cult." David writes back, professing confusion:
I don't understand. What's a fanatic religion devoted to carrying boxes have to do with electronic publishing? If you could use an animal metaphor, perhaps it would be less confusing.
I'm sorry for the confusion. The cargo planes are carrying crates of processed emu carcasses (a delicacy in the Hebrides). I thought that was obvious.
Jon Pyke replies to the judicial ruling that "sucks" has now been replaced by "probes," and makes passing reference to a short piece in the previous issue on how the "Soup Nazi" became the "Soup Guy" in a car advertisement:
On the basis that we have the ability to take a perfectly good English word and completely alter its original usage (Gay and Sucks being two good examples - but Paradigm being the best) I would propose Tedious as a good alternative to Sucks - for example - "my goodness, that's tedious" or "my job is tedious" - has a certain class about it, don't you think ?
Who the hell is Seinfeld ? That entire bit is "tedious" :)
Who is Seinfeld? Let me see if I can explain this to you. Take Benny Hill doing one of his really clever bits, like riding on a tricycle while wearing a rain slicker, and then take away the tricycle, the rain slicker and Benny Hill, and you have Seinfeld.
Too bad you missed it.
Stephen Cummings, referring back to our claim (repeated on NPR) that the Web is going to connect us to household appliances, asks:
If, while traveling, I send a turn-yourself-off message to my stove and it replies "Unable to respond due to fire wall," should I send my garden hose a spray-the-house message?
Stephen, it's no wonder your appliances are acting in such an unruly manner. The Web is a democratic place in which we work by consensus. Your assumption that "you are in control" and "you are the center of the decentralized universe" must irk your appliances no end. It's no wonder they refuse to be "housebroken." No, you should set up a discussion forum (unmoderated!) and have the trust that your appliances will work things out for themselves. I think you won't be disappointed. And you'll find that giving up your paternalistic wet-brain-centrism will lift a great burden from your weary, white shoulders. Trust me!
Jeff Millar cites the following from the previous issue:
On a monumentally tangentially related note, at one of this past week's conferences, when someone asked where we should eat, I chimed in with "Not seafood." This got parsed by several people as my insisting that we eat "Nazi food."
And then Jeff asks:
Is this related to Woody Allen's insistence that, "He didn't say 'Did you eat' he said 'Jew Eat'! I heard him!"
Actually, it relates to this almost-forgotten snippet from the war museum scene in Annie Hall:
MAX: Did you know that marines mined old water?
WOODY: Marry my own daughter?
MAX: I said "Marines mined old water"
WOODY: I heard you say "marry my own daughter." I heard it!
And now you know ... the rest of the story.
Bogus Contest: Bad Titles
My daughter insists that you can judge a book by its cover. In fact, you can judge them by their titles.
Here are four real books with stinky titles:
Peter Coffee Teaches Computers: This PC Week columnist isn't really writing a book for PCs, is he?
Beard on Bread: James Beard's baking book was topped, in disgustingness, only by his follow up, Beard on Pasta.
No People Like Show People: This book published in the 50s and now out of print told of the glamorous and eccentric lives of Hollywood stars. But someone should have read the title out loud a few times to see that it sounds like the answer to the question: "Who likes show people?"
Learn Microsoft Internet Explorer in 24 hours: Let's see, the first five hours are on how to click on the blue underlined text, then there's 7 hours on mastering the "back" button...and no bathroom breaks.
Please chime in with your own examples of bad titles. (And if you're in the Boston area, be sure to visit the Softpro bookstore, presided over by our own Chief Checker, Bob Treitman ... sorry Bob, I couldn't figure out how to be more subtle...)
Remember, here at the Bogus Contest, To Enter Is to Win™.
Editorial Lint
The following information was found trapped at the top of my washing machine when I ran some issues of the JOHO through it.
JOHO is a free, independent newsletter written and produced by David Weinberger. He denies responsibility for any errors or problems. If you write him with corrections or criticisms, it will probably turn out to have been your fault.
To subscribe or be removed from the JOHO mailing list, click here. There is no need for harshness or recriminations. Sometimes things just don't work out between people.
Dr. Weinberger is in a delicate nervous state, but if you want to send positive comments to him, his email address is [email protected].
Dr. Weinberger is represented by a fiercely aggressive legal team who responds to any provocation with massive litigatory procedures. This notice constitutes fair warning.
Any email sent to the JOHO may be published in JOHO and snarkily commented on unless the email explicitly states that it's not for publication.
The Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization is a publication of Evident Marketing, Inc. "The Hyperlinked Organization" is trademarked by Open Text Corp. Information on preemptive trademarks™™ can be found at http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/trademarks.html.