Dan Bricklin responds to my paraphrasing of his comments about Bluetooth. This is interesting material:

I think you got the Bluetooth thing kind of right — though I’m not especially in favor of “802.11″ as it is, but rather “a standard IP-based transport that we can just connect to without special stacks”, which 802.11 is as currently used (and why it’s so successful) and Bluetooth didn’t want to be. He seems to like Bluetooth’s simple, pre-defined P2P rendezvousing, assuming that we couldn’t do as well or better in a more general IP-based system. (P2P with only 7 devices sounds pretty lame long-term.) Most of my complaints at the meeting were about him proposing applications (like replacing the connection to a monitor or video feed or even 3G) that need much more bandwidth than the 700Kb/sec or so he claimed for Bluetooth. (For example, a minimum monitor today running at 30 frames a second with 1024 x 768 pixels x 24 bit color needs 30×1024x768×24=566Mb/sec.) Bluetooth is much more complex and application-specific than 802.11. IrDA (the red infrared windows) is in just about all laptops yet almost none of us use it, and it was built with similar protocols as Bluetooth (actually, it’s some of the same people and IrDA-emulation is one of the many specific Bluetooth application stacks). … As I told him [John Landry] afterward, of course, I do agree with some of the premises of his new company as he presented it, just not the wonderfulness of Bluetooth or general broadcast of “common” material determined by someone “who knows best”.

Re: Bluetooth (I read this the night before the meeting and was thinking about): — Bill Howard about price and speed: “Adding a $150 Epson Bluetooth adapter to a $300 Epson printer (Stylus Photo 890) seems a big hit on price, especially when color photos-Epson’s claim to fame-take a long time to print (for text documents, the speed is fine).” (A 2MB picture takes over 20 seconds to send over Bluetooth. To share 50 pictures I took with you takes over 15 minutes.)

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I spent Friday at the Massachusetts Software and Internet Council’s board retreat. I carefully took notes on the other guests’ presentations and just as carefully left my notepad there. So, here are four highlights as I remember them, in no particular order.

1. Something David Boloker of IBM said in his clear and succinct talk on Web Services set off both John Landry (ex-Lotus CTO and now an investor and multi-board member) and Dan Bricklin who were both in the audience of about 25. Landry is enthusiastic about Web services as a way of integrating applications but thinks that the vision of applications roaming the Web, searching out services, and melding themselves into mega-meta-apps is overblown. In particular, he isn’t convinced of the value of large, public UDDI directories that list all the available services of various apps. Boloker replied that he saw UDDI’s value mainly within private application spaces; for example, within an automotive suppliers exchange, a UDDI directory of parts and app services might be helpful. Bricklin pointed to a consequence worse than the under-utilization of these directories. He’s worried that the Web services protocols are being architected to serve such a wide range of possible-but-farfetched uses that they are getting freighted down with baggage for a trip no one will take; he pointed to SOAP in particular. I hadn’t heard this concern before.

Landry, Michael Kinkead and Bricklin

3. John Benditt, who until recently was the editor of MIT’s Technology Review, talked about how nanotechnology — in particular, carbon nanotubes — will be used within computers. He said that within 18-24 months, flat-panel TVs will be available at prices competitive with the normal tube-based models, with better quality picture, driven by nanotech. A sheet of carbon nanotubes will replace the electron gun, for they emit electrons when you run a current through them and can thus be used to excite the phosphorescent coating that produces the light that wastes our time. He said that companies such as Samsung are promising this, and that the technology will be applied to computer displays after TVs. Cool! He also said that if you place two layers of nanotubes perpendicular to one another, you can cause the tubes to align or not, thus providing an incredibly dense storage mechanism, eventually packing a terabit (ok, here comes some math: a terabit = 1/8 a terabyte = 128 gigabytes?) into a 1 cm square surface. And it is non-volatile, i.e., you can turn off the power and it retains its state. Finally, he said that companies are working on nanotube CPUs which would let Moore’s law reign into the foreseeable future.

4. Landry talked about the importance of wireless, which he sees as the next leader in the 7 year technology cycle. He and Bricklin were at each other like cats in a sack over Bluetooth. Bricklin is all like “802.11 is going to kick Bluetooth’s butt” and Landry is all like “Bluetooth works and is being built into devices” and Bricklin is all like “It’s too expensive” and Landry goes “It’s $4 per chip from TI” and Bricklin is all like “Your pits smell” and Landry goes “He who smelt it dealt it and besides Bluetooth can support up to 7 simultaneous connections” and then Dintersmith did a flying anvil at Benditt but missed and landed on a plate of cookies that dumped on Judith Hurwitz who put Dintersmith into a powerlock while Benditt did the drum solo from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on him with his own PCMCIA card. And then I had to leave because my Mom was like honking the car outside for me.

But seriously, it was a great way to spend a day. I learned a lot.

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BTW, Dan comments in his blog on a Pew study of how people actually use Broadband. [Spoiler ahead:] We don’t use it the same way they use TV. We actually create and share content rather than simply viewing it.

Dan also has some excellent save-yourself-the-trip blog coverage of what used to be called PC Expo but now has been renamed to “PC-Cella” or “12:06pm” or”Pepsi Presents 12:06pm” or some damn thing.

[Full disclosure: I "sampled" (= stole) the "Pepsi presents..." joke from the Simpsons.]

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I’ve been doing email with some academic researchers about a paper they published. They kindly sent me PDFs of other papers and have sent me more as the discussion enlarged. They’re sending me the PDFs because the academic journal that published the papers charges for access to the online versions.

So, a journal that undoubtedly sees its mission as filtering and distributing serious and important research in fact now is in the access-prevention business. It sucks no less for being typical.

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[No spoilers ahead]

Saw it yesterday afternoon (at the Loser Matinee). Liked it. I’m a sucker for Spielberg’s facility with the language of the cinema; that is, he puts a movie together real good. I even tolerated Tom Cruise who I actually find pretty creepy to look at. The last third dragged, though, as it spun through plot twists as if we couldn’t see ‘em coming.

But, ultimately, it pretends to be about something but is in fact about nothing. The premise is ludicrous, even accepting that the police might find themselves with the ability to predict when murders are about to happen. We would prevent the murders but wouldn’t necessarily punish people for the murders they haven’t committed. The inability to see that distinction drives the plot, and drove me to distraction.

Also dragging it down: a nondescript John Williams score and an overly-muted palette. On the positive side: Lots of witty touches in the sets.

Peterme liked it less than I did. And he refers us to OneGuysOpinion who liked it even less (and who gives plenty of spoilers).

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An anonymous source has forwarded to me a pay-for-download article: “Can You See the Real Me? Activation and Expressoin of the ‘True Self’ on the Internet” in Journal of Social Issues (vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 33-48), by John A. Bargh, Katelyn Y.A. McKenna and Grainne M. Fitzimmons of NYU. It gives evidence that there’s some reality to the self we present on the Net.

The researchers begin with Carl Rogers’ belief that people often feel that elements of who they are don’t surface in face-to-face interactions. Their hypothesis is that the anonymity of Internet encounters enables those elements to surface. They then did a set of experiments that confirmed this. Further, “features of Internet interaction facilitate the projection onto the partner of idealized qualities.” While this sounds to the naive (= me) like a Bad Thing, in fact:

…these are precisely those features that previous research has determined to be critical for the formation of close, intimate relations: Internet communication enables self-disclosure because of its relatively anonymous nature … and it fosters idealization of the other in the absence of information to the contrary…

Note that this study looks at anonymous interactions, not at long-term relationships built up through email and weblogs.

Normally, I wouldn’t pay much mind to this type of research, but since it confirms my prejudices, I’m suddenly all in favor of it. (You can find the abstract here.)

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Jonathan Schull, founder and CTO of Softlock, has an excellent response to Joe Gregario’s “cogent and pithy” blog entry on Google and Heisenberg. Joe argues:

The web needs to change to accomodate Google. Link, link to, be authoratitive on a subject, keep current and offer information others want and need and you’ll succeed in Google’s eyes. Let page-rank stand as the carrot and the stick of good web behaviour.

Jon, correctly guessing that I’ll be drawn to his coinage “linktoitiveness” the way an Atlantic City mayor is drawn to a hotel room with a suitcase of money on the bed and a two-way mirror on the wall, suggests that being linked-to is not the only mark of page quality. We know empirically that it’s a damn successful heuristic, but we also know that the system can be gamed and that the most popular kids aren’t the only ones you ever want to eat lunch with.

On the other hand, we could also say that Google isn’t trying to find the most worthy pages for us, just the ones we’re most likely looking for. The search for worthiness is best accomplished through other means, i.e., give up.

Anyway, it’s a really tasty can o’ worms that Joe and Jon have opened up.

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Dave is munching on baby carrots and trying to undo his association of smoking with his daily routine. Dave, welcome back and, having watched my mother die of lung cancer (my proposed tagline for the tobacco industry: “The Fun that Killed Your Mommy”), you’ve got all my best wishes for kicking the habit. But please expect it to take years and even decades.

In the early 70s, when I was a graduate student and dorky practices were considered acceptable, I smoked a pipe. I didn’t inhale. I stopped when our first daughter was born. Five years later, I still found myself reaching for the pipes I’d thrown out. My daughter is twenty now and, believe it or not, I still get the urge. Rarely, but it’s as if the smoke got woven into my DNA. I almost involuntarily inhale deeply when passing through someone else’s pipe smoke. (Mmmmm, Amphora!) I can’t imagine the difficulty of withdrawing if I’d been mainlining the stuff directly into my lungs.

So, please, Dave, be patient with yourself. We want you around for a long time.

Oh, and fuck the tobacco industry.

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A brief report on yet another disappointingly-attended conference: Collaborate East in Boston.

Actually, this won’t be much of a report because I was only there for a 4-hour seminar. I did stick my head into the grand hall where the keynote was to be given by Robert Reich; the rows and rows of folding chairs had been replaced by a handful of round tables, making it look like the set up for a bar mitzvah for an unpopular only child. Reich is running for governor in Massachusetts and the size of the audience measures the popularity of the conference much more than his popularity. At least I hope so since I voted for him in the primary.

I also stuck my head into the exhibit hall; the press wasn’t allowed in until the hall opens because we apparently couldn’t stand to learn that the booths don’t magically assemble themselves while whistling merry tunes. The exhibitors include many of the important players, but if the size of the floor is an indication of the health of the industry, you might want to consider investing in Nigerian beefsteak mines. On the other hand, if you want to speak with some of the key players in the field, this would be a great opportunity. Likewise, the conference schedule could keep you busy for a couple of days. What’s bad news for the industry and the conference organizers could be excellent news for attendees.

The seminar I participated in had just 10 paying participants, but they were the type of people the conference organizgers undoubtedly wanted: mainly from large companies, trying to figure out how to use collaborative technology to save money and make money. When we went around the table asking why people were there, I was surprised that almost all of them were interested primarily in software to enable virtual meetings. Obviously that’s important, but as Jeffrey Stamps and Jessica Lipnack (the “Virtual Teams” authors) put it, the synchronous collaborative tools need to be complemented by the asynchronous. After all, we’re always working collaboratively even when we’re not meeting, so we’re really looking at a new context for work, not just some new tools.

Francois Gossieaux of eRoom
with Lipnack and Stamps

The seminar seemed to go well. In part that was due to the inherently gonzo approach taken by the session’s sponsor. eRoom is an important company in this space, but not only was there no — no! — eRoom presentation, they even invited two speakers who are affiliated with Open Text, eRoom’s competitor. You have to respect them for that.

Jaclyn Kostner, eTeamwork author,
makes a virtual appearance

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Any bets on who will be the first capital-J to be fired because of something she or he blogs?

The scenario is easy to predict in its general shape: A journalist writes something in her blog that draws letters to the editor that say: “How can we trust this person to report the news fairly when we know that she holds such outrageous, insensitive, prejudiced beliefs? If she’s a bigot on the Internet, how can we trust her not to be a bigot in your newspaper?” The journalist refuses to retract. The newspaper fires her.

Unfortunately, the early adopters of bloggery among capital-J’s, who are some of my favorite and most respected bloggers, are the best candidates because the fact that they were early adopters indicates that they are unafraid of speaking their minds. Ulp.

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HWM, a glossy magazine from Singapore for the hardware industry, surveys the field of new cell phones and opens its review of the Mitsubishi Trium Eclipse as follows:

Somewhat traditonal in its design, the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)-ready Mitsubishi Trium Eclipse is a dual band 256-color display phone that comes with built-in microphone for hands-free operation.

Gosh, a cell phone with a microphone! What will they think of next?

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I’ll be late blogging today because I agreed to participate in a session on “The Future Workplace” at the Collaborate conference this morning. I agreed because it’s local and I’d be going anyway to see what’s up. More important, I like the company — eRoom — that put the panel together, and I’ll get to spend some time with co-panelists Jessica Lipnack and Jeff Stamps, the urbane authors of “Virtual Teams.” I did somehow manage to ignore the fact that it is a four hour panel. Oy veh.

So, this is a meta-blog entry. Which works for me because last night I had two meta-dreams. In one, I analyzed the dream of a friend. My advice to her: When she says that the fire in her dream probably did not stand for orgasm, she should take the “not” out of the sentence (and maybe the knot out of her orgasm). In the other, I was writing an apologetic note to the organizer of the “Future Workplace” panel. Not only was a I a no-show at the panel, but I couldn’t even remember how I spent the morning I missed it. But then (in my dream) I realized that this was because I was only dreaming that I missed the panel.

Must have coffee…

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Steve Yost writes with regard to what Halley has termed my Unfuck gesture:

I wonder if it’s best made clear that your palm should be facing away from you — at least that’s the way I see it, as a sort of blessing/peace sign. Palm toward you looks too much like its negative to catch on as obviously benevolent.

Actually, I initially posted a photo showing the back of my hand, but it just lacked the impact of the full frontal. I have assumed that the proper gesture is palm toward the gesturer, with a quick upwards thrust. But I claim no special authority on the matter.

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Jeneane points us to the Greenpeace weblog, as voice-y as you’d expect.

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Jacob Shwirtz got to hang out with Cameron of
BlogDex. If you want to read the sorts of things
these two guys talk about at a party, go to
Jacob’s blog. Pretty durn
interesting.

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If you are confused about Slashdot – a site that’s become a verb – but are ashamed to admit it, here’s an interview with the site’s founder that will explain it all to you in the privacy of your own bedroom.

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Halley’s Comment has made a surprise (and welcome) return, well ahead of schedule. Bless those unpredictable elliptical orbits!

(BTW, I like Halley’s verbalization of my proposed gesture as “Unfuck you!”)

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AKMA blogs an article he’s written on
cyberspace’s effect on our relationship to the
Bible. Wow! AKMA, recently-tenured theologian at
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, is the author
of one of the best introductions
to postmodernism, What is PostModern Biblical
Criticism?, and is a serious multilingual
scholar, as well as being one of the most
interesting (= insightful, entertaining,
compassionate) bloggers around.

He suggests two major effects the multimedia
world of the Net will bring to biblical
interpretation:

… first, a
demystification of words as means of communication,
and second, a relaxation of what has been the
constitutive hostility of modern academic biblical
studies to allegory. At the heart of both these
proposals lies a sensitivity to the explosive
breadth of means for communicating information in
cyberspace.

Fascinating. But for me, as a Jew, its fascination rests in part on
seeing how matters look to a thoughtful, scholarly,
imaginative, playful and ultimately serious thinker
from a different tradition.

For AKMA, demystifying words is a good thing, for we
believe too naively in the possibility of literal
translation and we exalt printed words over other
forms of meaningful communication and expression:

Though the Word became flesh and
dwelt among us, the Word was not manifest as a part
of speech or a siglum; the Word effected communion
with humanity by becoming human, not by becoming an
inscription.

As a Jew, we were given a set of words. They come
from the mouth of G-d, but they’re written in human
language. We get over the translation problem by
learning Hebrew and Aramaic. (When I say “we,” I
mean them other Jews; I don’t know either language
and I only believe in G-d enough to feel that if He
exists, He’s got a lot of ’splaining to do.) Yet,
the Jewish tradition from the beginning has been aware of the hermeneutical problem of translation, for we don’t believe that even in the
original language there is a one-to-one relationship
of word to meaning. When G-d speaks in human language,
we still need to engage in an overwhelming task of
“translation” and interpretation. That’s why there
are no (?) fundamentalist Jews who believe you can
understand the scripture just by reading it out loud
in a firm, scolding tone of voice.

But scripture isn’t the only way G-d speaks.
Creation is another. So, while the Torah obviously
holds a special place for Jews in G-d’s creation, it is not
the only source of revelation. But what gives the
Torah its special place? The fact that, unlike the
rest of G-d’s creation, it’s in words. So, yes,
printed (well, hand-lettered) words do have a
special, “over-valued” place in Judaism.

Notice, of course, that having a special place
doesn’t mean having an exclusive place. Not only words convey G-d’s meaning.
So does the rest of creation. So does love. So does science. So does observance and practice and tradition. But
words are special. At least G-d’s words are.

So, if the multimedia Net results in letting some of the air out of words’ tires for Christians, I don’t think it will have the same effect on Judaism. For a text-based religion like Judaism – one that famously anticipated the hyperlinked nature of information – the Web shines as an aid to scholarship and to the conversations that are the way Jewish scholarship proceeds and succeeds. And, more important, for a community-based religion such as Judaism – Jews are a people, and observance requires living with other Jews – the Web enables a connectedness within diaspora that may indeed touch something deep within the collective us.

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AKMA writes:

As academic biblical
interpretation moves more rapidly and
comprehensively into domains other than the printed
word, practitioners will need to learn how to
evaluate interpretations on unfamiliar terms. Under
present circumstances, the dominant critical
question posed to (verbal) interpretations consists
principally in whether they appropriately honor the
historical context of the text’s origin; such
questions well suit a discourse of interpretation
that trades in propositions as its currency. When
interpretations involve not only verbal truth-claims
about interpretive propositions, but also shapes,
colors, soundtracks, and motion, the matter of
historical verisimilitude recedes among a host of
other questions.

By rattling this cage, AKMA is making the cage
visible. Our idea of truth is all wrapped up with
our understanding of words. Truth pertains to words,
we believe. When it comes to pictures, we talk about
“accuracy” or “realism” but not truth. (That’s why
AKMA’s reference to Magritte’s “This is not a pipe”
is so apt.) But if truth has instead to do with
revelation — un-covering, in Heidegger’s sense
— then confining truth to the realm of words
cages us. Words may have a special
place in uncovering our world, but they are not the
only shovel in the tool shed.

[NOTE: Anything I write about Judaism
constitutes an act of arrogance since I know little
and believe less.

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Norman Jenson of OneGoodMove writes:

I just saw your post on CYC and the link to Andy Clarke’s book “Being There.” I would agree with your comments; it was an eye opener for me as well. Since you enjoyed Clarke’s book so much let me recommend Flesh and Machines – How Robots Will Change Us by Rodney Brooks, on the off chance you haven’t read it yet. I read this several months ago and made a few comments about it on my site . Clarke also has a new book titled “Mindware An Introduction to the Philosphy of Cognitive Science” that is quite good.

Thanks for the links and for the cogent comments on your site. I’m a fan of Brooks, although I like his critique of AI (”The world is the model”) more than what I’ve read of his positive comments about the nature of the mind. But I should read more before Issuing Pronouncements … not that ignorance has ever stopped me.

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When the light turned green, the car ahead of me just sat there. I gave it a good five seconds (i.e., 0.5 seconds) and then blasted my horn. “What did you do that for?” asked my wife. “The light is still red.”

So it was. I hadn’t noticed the righthand turn light.

So, how do I apologize to the driver ahead of me? We lack a gesture by which we beg forgiveness. I propose the following:

Use it often.

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I didn’t blog anything today because I had nothing to say.

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CYC is now available as an open source download. This is Douglas Lenat’s massive attempt to compile a database that will be able to answer the most ordinary of questions, simulating common sense, things that we humans know because we live in a contextual world: Is a kiss an appropriate way to say goodbye to a cab driver? If I run over a raccoon, which will pop, the raccoon or my tires? Which makes a better tool for cutting through the tape on a package I receive in the mail, a dime, a quarter or a CD?

CYC is so fundamentally wrong about how the mind works that it staggers me that we fall for it. Andy Clarke’s Being There brilliantly shows why. (I wrote about Clarke here.) So does Hubert Dreyfus’ stuff.

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Unfortunately, CYC (or whatever software is running the web site) isn’t smart enough to know how to put commas into long numbers; it reports the file size of the download as “39955940.” Have I ever mentioned how much this irks me?

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The Boston Globe yesterday ran a story on the front of its “Living/Arts” section about the reporter’s evening at a fire walking session. For $95 the Globe journalist was helped to find the spiritual strength within that allowed her to walk over hot coals without pain or scarring.

I’m no scientist but I’m sure someone will correct me when I say: What a load of crap! Isn’t the “miracle” of fire walking due simply to the fact that hot, ash-covered coals don’t transfer heat very quickly? I mean, I can put my hand into an oven for a few seconds without getting burned even though the air inside is 375 degrees, but if I touch the aluminum pan inside, I burn immediately because aluminum transfers heat much more quickly than air does. Same temperature but one burns and the other doesn’t. No spiritual/mystical explanation required.

The Globe ought to be ashamed of itself for spreading this type of crap.

[Alternative last line: Hey, Globe, put it in a blog!]

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Virgil Iliescu has put it in a blog.

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With some too-patient hand holding by Kevin Marks, I seem to have succeeded in getting blogger.com to wrap this blog with the appropriate RSS tags. As a result, aggregators around the globe can now ignore JOHO on purpose.

Click on the “xml” button to the left to see this blog the way it looks to a machine.

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As one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, I thought I’d pass along this outstanding example of “clueful” marketing that arrived in my inbox this morning:

From: Jenny Witherspoon [mailto:Jwitherspoon998@yahoo.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 7:57 PM
To: 100@FREE MEMBERSHIP THIS WEEK!
Subject: hello

Hello this is Jenny Witherspoon I am one of the featured girls on www.amatureacadamys.com We are giving away 100 % FREE memberships for this week to see how people like it. Please check it out and let me know what you think! Hit me up on AOL Instant Messenger My Screen Name is JennyAmature82 If you don’t like watching XXX videos , webcams, and looking at my NUDE pictures you may not want to join.

Regards,
Jenny Witherspoon
www.amatureacadamys.com

She really seems to have read and absorbed our book! This is non-money-focused (”FREE”), acknowledging that connection is more important than shoving coins over the line. It’s all about joining with other people (”memberships”) rather than mass marketing to a faceless crowd. In fact, she even gives out her IM account number so we can make direct contact! She doesn’t put on a phony veneer of perfection — you can really hear her own voice. This doesn’t sound like it was written by a committee and then deloused by lawyers! She signs her own name. And she’s totally upfront about the fact that her product isn’t perfect, acknowledging that we may not even be interested in it. Wow! It’s great to know we’ve had this type of effect!

I’m so proud!

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Well, here’s a briarpatch of postmodern netiquette (= “nettlequette”?). If you’re reading this because AKMA sent you over here because I chided Ms. Witherspoon on her spelling while introducing my own spelling error, you will notice that my blog entry in in fact makes no reference to Ms. Witherspoon’s spelling. I had taken that line out because there is no actual misspelling in her message except of “amateur” in her domain name. But I thought I’d taken out that reference before I posted it. Apparently not. So, AKMA must have read a posting that was up for just a few minutes this morning, and I’ll be damned (actually, I will be damned, but that’s a different story) if I’m going to re-introduce the inaccurate sentence about her spelling just so AKMA’s tweak still makes sense. (I am, however, leaving in my misspelling.) As for AKMA’s main point – that I am an annoying, self-righteous twit who recognizes flaws in everyone except himself – well, yes, I assume that that’s obvious.

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Kevin Marks points us to a BBC piece about Afghan women blogging their way back into the daylight, and Halley reruns a related blog entry. It’s one of those things that makes you think this Internet stuff might actually make a difference.

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Graeme Thickins points us to a Salon review (By Andrew Leonard) of a book — Ruling the Root by Milton Mueller — about the way in which the special interests that control ICANN control the DNS and thus inhibit free speech. Sounds interesting although the review makes it sound as if the regrettable advantage the incumbent brands have in holding onto their names and variants means that the Internet is doomed. To me, the most alarming point in the review is:

“With the emergence of domain name-trademark conflicts, the WHOIS protocol took on a new function,” writes Mueller. “It became a surveillance tool for intellectual property holders…Copyright interests now view expanded WHOIS functionality as a way to identify and serve process upon the owners of allegedly infringing Web sites”

Sounds like a must-read.

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Ryan Ireland wants to start a group read of the book Empire by Hardt and Negri. If you’re interested, head on over.

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Steve Yost disagrees with my comment about why companies aren’t adopting collaborative software at the pace at which reason would seem to dictate.

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Michael O’Connor Clarke links to a very funny database of chat quotes. Be sure to see what Michael selects as his favorite. Very funny. (Kudos to Michael for having the least visible permalink on the Web. Runner up: Eric Raymond.)

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Scoop! Newspaper Ontogeny Recapitulated!

Turbulent Velvet has a fabulous piece on pseudonymity that provides a context to the modern phenomenon by looking at pseudonymity in 18th Century newspapers. Fascinating and, of course, directly relevant to what’s going on with weblogs.

It reminds me of Dan Bricklin’s terrific piece on the ways in which 18th Century pamphlets were similar to today’s home pages. Dan wrote this before weblogs were so common so it is even more relevant today since weblogs are what home pages were supposed to be.

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Hierarchy and Collaboration in the Globe

Back-to-back articles in the Boston Globe talk about the present hierarchical assumptions of business and the future of collaboration.

DC Denison pins his story on hierarchy on the intelligence failure that culminated on 9/11. He quotes Philip Evans, author of Blown to Bits, who says information hierarchies used to work because information itself was manageable.

The solution, according to Evans, is to create a system that allows for multiple, overlapping points where information can be sorted and analyzed. ”If we get better at sharing information across organizations,” he says, ”we’ll get better at processing an abundance of information effectively.”

The problem with information hierarchies isn’t that some people have more authority than others, it’s that the information flow is one-way and codified. In a non-hierarchical, web-based system, authority figures emerge, but they’re only as respected as their work entitles them to be. This is how it works with the columnists you choose to read … except now anyone can be a columnist even without being anointed as such. That’s why blogging seems like a transformative business tool to many of us.

Scott Kirsner’s article today talks about the present and future of collaborative software, a category that has not taken off with the rapidity with which it deserves. Many of the major players are in the Boston area. including eRoom, SiteScape, Lotus and Groove Networks. But Redmond, and its $51M investment in Groove, looms over the region and the article.

Here’s the essential problem for the industry. Kirsner writes:

Simon Hayward at Gartner points out that the business world may take a bit longer before it embraces collaboration software as it has embraced e-mail. ”The technology can do a lot of great things, but the limiting factor is organizations’ interest in using it,” he says.

Yet Kirsner’s article is clear that the benefits of using collaboration software are multiple and manifest. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist, although maybe you do since Lockheed Martin is the article’s lead example of a company using the stuff. So, why aren’t organizations more interested in using it?

One explanation: We are in the realm not of scientifical business management but organized religion. The issue isn’t business efficiency but the maintenance of power. Collaboration software does indeed hyperlink the hierarchy. And that’s just plain scary to The Establishment, the status quo and/or The Man. The price of admission is business’ corrupt soul.

(Notes: 1. The Globe’s window for free access to these columns is only a week or so. 2. Denison quotes me.)

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The OED and Blogging

Peterme reports that the Oxford English Dictionary is considering including the word “blog,” which Peterme coined. But the OED can only accept printed pages as sources for word coinages.

How long do you give that rule before it’s amended in a flurry of embarrassment? I presume it was originally meant to keep the OED out of arguments about oral origins: “I was the first to use the word ‘magikal’ with a K. It was in a shouting match I had in 1964.” Now it just keeps the OED out of relevancy and accuracy.

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Blogthreads at Last!

BurningBird has announced plans to build a service that will put the thread into blogthreads. If you register your blog with her new service (which is a few months away from launch), it will automatically scour it for links to other blogs so that when Tom replies to AKMA and Jeneane replies to Tom and then Tom replies to Jeneane and then Jennifer replies to AKMA, all that will be saved and will be made reference-able and link-able as a blogthread. Excellent!

This is something we really need. In fact, I hope that BurningBird’s work will be taken up by sites that are in the business of aggregating blogs — Google? DayPop? Are you interested? — so that blogthreads can be assembled from blog entries on sites that haven’t registered with BurningBird and, most of all, so that they can be indexed and returned by the search engines. Wouldn’t it be cool to search on, say, “forgiveness” and have Google and/or DayPop tell you not only that AKMA, Tom and Jeneane have blog entries about this but that there is an extensive blogthread on the topic?

I’ve written before about this and about the broader need for a threading standard; a conversation about the broader standard continues over at QuickTopic for anyone who’s interested.

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The End of AI: The Movie

MAJOR SPOILER AHEAD!!! If you haven’t seen Steven Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick’s AI, do NOT read any further. (Also, Rosebud is a sled.)

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I volunteered for the 6:45AM shift staffing the phones at the local public radio fund driver this morning and got to talking with the station’s technical infrastructure manager about movies ‘n such. (Yes, it was a slow day in the fund drive. So call and contribute already! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!) I was reminded of my cousin-in-law Mark Dionne’s explanation of the ending of the movie AI.

I had assumed that the end was a Spielbergian moving-but-vapid paean to the power of love: The robot boy has become human and can’t rest until his absent Mommy requites his love. Yeah yeah, I thought, sad but uplifting.

About a year ago, Mark told me a different interpretation that made much more sense. Mark is a topnotch software engineer. He saw the ending as saying not that the robot boy had learned to love but just the opposite: the robot was programmed to continue until he heard the “I love you” from his motherly unit. All those thousands of years he was stuck in a loop. No love. Just an unfulfilled conditional. When Mark said this, the ending became much more cynical and much more satsifying to me.

Note: “Love Is Just an Unfulfilled Conditional” ^TM; is soon to be a major song from Garth Brooks. On the B side: “Our Love Is So Sub-Routine that I Can’t Function.” To be followed by “There’s a Method to Your Madness (You’re in a Class by Yourself).”

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Clued Game Development

Andy Mahood, columnist on game simulations (that is, games that are simulations, not simulations of games) at PCGamer, gave the product of the year award last year to Microsoft Flight Simulator which, in his view, narrowly edged out IL-2 Sturmovik. According to this month’s column (July), not only did the Sturmovik developers try out their ideas in public at gaming message boards and other online forums, the company has been collected bug reports and enhancement requests there as well. They’ve been issuing “an aggressive series of patches” whereas “Microsoft recently issued a statement saying that it would not be providing any sort of patching process for the bugs found” in their product.

Concludes Mahood: “Is it too late to change my vote?”

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Me at Wordsworth. Tonight.

Self-promotion: I’ll be at Wordsworth bookstore in Harvard Square tonight at 7pm to talk with the debonair Scott Kirsner about “Small Pieces.” You’re welcome to attend, but only if you’re either not hostile or easily intimidated into silence.

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Brian Millar’s Unpronounceable

Brian Millar, who is in my pantheon of the Just Plain Funny, is collecting words he cannot pronounce or at least is so uncertain about that he is afraid to say them out loud.

My list includes:

macadam
coccyx
Scorcese

And my number one word that I can’t pronounce:

President Bush

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Terrorist Stockpile

“I don’t think there was actually a plot, beyond some fairly loose talk and his coming in here obviously to plan further deeds.”
-Deputy Dense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on CBS News about the Dirty Bomb Plot, as reported by Reuters, 6/13

Since Abdullah al-Muhajir (nee Jose Padilla) was picked up on May 8, and since Ashcroft’s announcement over a month later was precipitated by no relevant event, and since Ashcroft wildly overstated both the readiness of the plotters (they were just talking) and the damage a dirty bomb would do (it might kill scores, not hundreds of thousands), it’s only rational to assume that the announcement was timed for Bush’s maximum political advantage. Has anyone advanced any other reasonable explanation?

So we also have to assume that the administration is stockpiling Abdullah al-Muhajir’s who have been “picked up,” ready to be announced the next time the Bush crowd thinks there’s a political advantage to scaring the crap out of us and our children.

If lying about getting blow jobs from an intern is an impeachable offense, what’s the penalty for spreading panic among an already frightened citizenry because it helps you stay re-electable?

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Eric Norlin, who is “incentivized” by a small explosive capsule implanted next to his heart not to tell us too much of what he knows, says that the news was timed to “learn about the inner workings of the [terrorist] organization. ”

Even assuming that there were no political considerations in the timing, that doesn’t explain why Ashcroft’s announcement wildly over-stated the stage of the plans and the effect of a dirty bomb. The terrorists are not the only ones being manipulated here.

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MiscLinks

Vergil Iliescu points us to 12 Flowers, an online exhibition at The Edge of scans of flowers by Katinka Matson. The high res slide show starts here. Gorgeous.

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Frank Paynter interviews the fearless Jeneane Sessums, making it clearer than ever why so many of us love her. And Frank’s developing quite an interesting rhetorical form.

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The ever-vigilant Chip has written up a report on Al Gore’s recent speech to Wisconsin’s Democratic stalwarts.

I like Al Gore. Really. But the Democrats are going to have to do better than this. Gore is right to call Bush on what in calmer times would be seen as outrageous acts of environmental and economic pillage. But my spidey-sense tells me that Bush and his cronies are right now setting the stage for an act of great evil, a theater piece that threatens to be apocalyptic. No, I don’t know what it is, but I bet it involves a pipeline, an invasion, and the transformation of the norm of liberties. It’s being done out of a well-placed fear, the desire to get reelected, greed, racism, and incredible short-sightedness. Personally, I’m scared shitless.

Michael Moore for president.

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A Pocketful of Standards

Ed Nixon was prodded by my blog about HTML validation to point out that the Web Standards Project is up again. Its mission: to “fight for standards that reduce the cost of complexity of development while increasing the accessibility and long-term viability” of web sites. The standards they like include XML, CSS, XHTML, DOM and ECMAS. Here’s a bluffer’s guide to each:

XML: Smarter tagging of documents (and other types of information) so that computers can do more interesting things than just display them in the right font.

CSS: Define the look (and more) of document elements external to the document so they can be displayed in the right font … and so those definitions can be applied – and updated – across multiple documents. Part of the conspiracy to turn authors into text monkeys.

XHTML: Anal-compulsive HTML. Makes sloppy tagging habits so that the pages are more predictable to computers. No shirts, no end tags, no service.

DOM: A standard computer-eye view of the internal tree structure of a document so its elements can be found and understood in relation to one another. You never knew a simple document was that complex.

ECMAS: JavaScript removed from the vagaries and self-interest of the vendors and put into the hands of responsible adults.

If you’d like actual information, you can start with the Web Standards Projects’ own list of links.

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Invalid Validation

AKMA points us to Dorothea who points us to the W3C HTML Validation Service, a nicely done tool. Put in an URL and it instantly comes back with the list of syntactical errors in its HTML — attributes that need to be within quotation marks, paragraph tags within block elements, ALT attributes left out of graphic links. Why, there are hundreds of mistakes in the very page you’re reading. It’s completely, totally, unredeemably INVALID! In fact, the home page for OASIS , the SGML/XML standards group, is INVALID, XML.com is INVALID, the O’Reilly home page is INVALID, Linus Torvalds‘ home page is INVALID, and the 12-line home page of Google has a bold-faced FATAL ERROR in it.

Reminds me of an old joke. A man goes to a doctor. “Doc, it hurts when I go like this,” he says, poking himself gently in the foot with his index finger. “It hurts when I go like this,” he says, poking his knee. “It hurts when I go like this,” he says as he pokes his thigh. He proceeds the same way up to the top of his head.

“Yup,” says the doctor, “You have a broken finger.”

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A Rumor of War: Request for Confirmation

I have heard a rumor through a friend of a friend who is shipping out to Afghanistan that we are in the middle of a the largest call up since Vietnam and are massing soldiers and supplies along the border in Afghanistan preparatory to the invasion of Iraq (through or over Iran?).

Surely if this is true, we would know about the size of the call-up. I don’t. Do you? Is there any truth to this rumor?

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That NYT article

Doc is a must-read today, even more must-y than usual. (Hmm, that somehow came out wrong, but you know what I mean.) He has the definitive comment on David Gallagher’s piece on “warbloggers” in the NY Times. And he also has some great quotes from David Bowie in a John Pareles piece in the aforementioned Times. Bowie says, matter of factly, that the music industry isn’t going to be around in a recognizable form in ten years and that “Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity.” Rock on, GlamBoy!

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