Matthew Ingram at Gigagom blogs about an upcoming Twitter feature called Twitter Annotations. Well, it’s not actually a feature. It’s the ability to attach metadata to a tweet. This is potentially great news, since it will give us a way to add context to tweets and to enable machine-processing of tweets, not to mention that URLs could be sent as metadata rather than as subtractions from the 140-character limit. This is yet another example of information scaling to the point where we have to introduce more information to manage it. How about one of those bogus “laws” people seem to like (well, I know I do): Information sufficiently scaled creates a need for more information.

Twitter is specifying the way in which Annotations will be encoded, but not what the metadata types will be. You can declare a “type” with its own set of “attributes.” What types? Whatever you (or, more exactly, developers and hackers) find useful. Matthew cites a number of folks who are basically positive but who express a variety of worries, including Google open advocate Chris Messina who warns that there could be a mare’s nest of standards, that is, values for types and attributes. Dave Winer takes Google to task for slagging off on Twitter for this. I agree with his sentiment that Goliath Google ought to be careful about their casual criticisms. Nevertheless, I think Chris is right: Specifying the syntax but not the actual types and attributes will inevitably give rise to confusion: What one person tags as “topic,” someone else will tag as “subject,” and some people might have the nerve to actually use words for types in, say, Spanish or Arabic. The nerve! [THE NEXT DAY: Here's Chris' original post on the topic, which is more balanced than the bit Matthew excerpts, and which basically agrees with the next paragraph:]

But, so what? I’d put my money on Ev Williams and Biz Stone any time (important note: If I had money). You couldn’t have seriously proposed an idea as ridiculous as Twitter in the first place if you didn’t deeply understand the Web. So, yes, Chris is right that there’ll be some confusion, but he’s wrong in his fear. After the confusion there will be a natural folksonomic (and capitalist) pull toward whatever terms we need the most. Twitter can always step in and suggest particular terms, or surface the relative popularity of the various types, so that if you want to make money by selling via tweets, you’ll learn to use the type “price” instead of “cost_to_user,” or whatever. Or you’ll figure out that most of the Twitter clients are looking for a type called “rating” rather than “stars” or “popularity.” There’ll be some mess. There’ll be some angry angry hash tags. But better open confusion than expecting anyone — even the Twitter Lads — to do a better job of guessing what its users need and what clever developers will invent than those users and developers themselves.

12 Comments »

On the Media features Ethan Zuckerman explaining the worldwide movement to save the beautiful Brazilian galvão bird. “Cala Boca Galvão!” indeed, my fellow bird-huggers!

Seriously, youll enjoy the 5 minute interview.

1 Comment »

I write this as someone who is personally thin-skinned about being corrected. I don’t mind being wrong about big things, like, say The Meaning of It All, but I seem to have some bad ego mojo wrapped up in having it betrayed that I generally don’t know what I’m talking about.

Nevertheless, I’ve been admiring Scott Rosenberg’s series of posts about trying to get the Wall Street Journal to correct a misspelling of an author’s name. Start here, then read this, then this, as Scott opens the issue up, from a small error to some much larger thoughts.

I gave a talk a couple of days ago in which I put onto the same slide Steven Levy and Jay Rosen. Steven in Wired wonders why publishers don’t automatically update ebooks with corrections. Jay has been arguing that the Sunday morning news shows have an ethical obligation to fact-check their guests afterwards. In both cases, the media are acting as if publishing something locks it the way printing it on paper does.

It’s actually quite amazing that we don’t yet have normal, expected ways for online journalistic media to correct errors, the way the word “sic” denotes that an error was in the original text being quoted, or the way many bloggers put errors into strikethrough font once they’ve been discovered. What is the standard way that online news media express and correct errors? Why isn’t there an answer to that question 15+ years into the history of the Web?

10 Comments »

I am at the Norwegian national broadcasting company’s meeting. 1,500 people from all sides of the company. The day opens with someone who seems to be fulfilling the role of jester — a woman dressed in a flamboyantly orange dress, eliciting laughs and applause, including by lifting her skirts and sticking Michael T. Jones’ head into her bosom. (Jones, Google’s Chief Technology Advocate, is there as the morning keynoter). The comedian introduced a woman who seemed to deliver a poem — the morning has been in Norwegian so far — and now, after offering Jones another head boob, the morning begins. In other words, so far just another boring American-style conference.

Jones begins by saying that he only has questions, not answers. Publishers seem uncomfortable with the Net, he says, even though they’ve always dreamed of enabling everyone in the world to see their content. He points to StateOfTheMedia.org from Pew. (Joseph Pew said, when asked what he would do as president, ” Tell the truth and trust the people,” which Jones recommends as an approach to most of life.) The site shows that since 1980, the viewership of the evening news in the US has halved. Broadcasters ask where the audience went and how to get them back, which is the wrong question, he says; they went away by choice and you can’t force them back.

Jeffrey Cole at Annenberg surveys what people are doing online, over time, across multiple countries. Only a third of the people would strongly care if their daily offline newspaper went away. 30% of Americans read the news everyday online. Things have changed, and that they changed so quickly means that people didn’t like how things were. It’s like opening up the door of a prison, he says.

Rupert Murdoch is very concerned that the Net is destroying the news and publishing business. His solution is to charge for it, but it puts him in awkward position: He has to show it to you so you’ll want to buy it, but take it away from you so you’ll pay for it. That’s up to him. But it’s hard to do because so much of the news comes from wire services and is available in multiple papers. Jones says he’s glad Murdoch is charging because it’s an experiment, but is skeptical that if people aren’t reading newspapers, they will once they have to pay for it.

Thomas Jefferson thought information was the best way to improve life. “The information of the people at large can along make them safe…” [I need to look this up because I suspect "info" doesn't mean in that quote what it sounds like today. Later: I looked it up. It seems that "the information of the people" meant education, not information in our current sense.] Everyday there are 1B Google searches. There are 1.3B email users worldwide. There are 1.4B people online. 2B youtube videos are watched daily. [Wow, twice as many as searches.] 24 hours of video are uploaded every minute. More people are watching YouTubes than broadcast television. Even so, only 22% of the world uses the Internet. “Everything you think is good about the Internet hasn’t happened to most people yet. But it will.” Probably through mobile phones.”What is the Internet? It’s a thing you see on a mobile phone.” Or so it will be for most people.

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Eric Schmidt told Michael that that’s the company’s reason for existence, and it makes money just so it’s able to acccomplish it. That’s why they translate, do text to speech, “I think it’s a very noble thing. I think Jefferson would be proud.”

Michael talks about the quest to organize info. He was on a yacht with 6 bedrooms. In each room, the books were color coordinated with the decor. “I thought a person from Google should never be exposed to that, because that’s organizing information stupidly.” Then he shows a Google Earth view of all the ships in the world. (Michael came out of Google Earth.) You can zoom in and get info about each. Or, all the airplanes in flight. Or 100M stars. They have a feature now that lets you place the oil spill anywhere on Earth so you can get a sense of its size. Another feature maps the home towns of the allied soldiers who have died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; click and you can see their story. Michael’s point is that these sort of tools do something that traditional media doesn’t, contextualizing and providing impact. “Info can be used to shape society.” It’s not Google’s job to do the shaping, he quickly adds. They are just the toolmaker.

He says he was asked to predict 50 yrs ahead, so he looked to 50 yrs ago for a hint. What he saw were Cessnas and Mini-Coopers. Fifty yrs later, they’re the same. That’s because people don’t change that much. But every component part is different. Everything is always changing: growing or dying.

Some change is like a pendulum swinging back and forth; that’s not real change. Instead he points to the drunken walk algorithm: If you walk with a steady sized pace but make random turns, the distance you’ll walk to get from here to there is the length of your stride times the square root of the number of steps. A lot of nature does random walks. It takes 30,000 yrs for a helium atom to get from the center of the Sun to the edge, but then only 9 mins to get to earth in a straight line. When things change wildly, it means the things that are changing are not the important part of the thing (like collars changing on shirts). When you make plans, you want to look for the things that are not changing. [I think I missed part of this. I'm jetlagged.]

Four rules of innovation Michael gives when talking within Google. 1. Info is only useful when it can be understood. (He credits Muriel Cooper.) 2. Things can get better by being simpler. (Bruno Munari) E.g., iPod doesn’t have a speaker or a way to add or delete music. And 40% of the users of Google Earth have never tilted it. 3. “To create, one must first question everything.” (Eileen Gray) 4. “Success can only be achieved with a kind of pioneer spirit and the repeated use of three tools: failure, introspection and courage.” (Soichiro Honda.) People interpret failure incorrectly. Embrace failure as an experiment that gives you data to try the next experiment. As an example, Google’s speech recognition isn’t all that good, but because of the feedback, it gets better. Likewise, you can train their translation software.

How to solve the great problems of the publishing industry? 1. Please users. 2. Please customers. (Advertisers are the customers.) 3. Ask the right questions. 4. Accept change. 5. Embrace failure. 6. See the essence. Be sure you’re solving the right problem.

5 Comments »

BoingBoing points (via Michael Geist) to a music industry astroturf site that shows overly-happy, oddly attractive, and suspiciously diverse youths getting the maximum pleasure from cross-border DRM. We are urged to inject into our social networks our support and emotional attachment of the denizens of this fake network of non-existent corporate shills. With expected quickness, the commenters unearthed the stock photo the RIAA used.

It oddly reminds me of the “Send ‘em back” site that urged today’s youth to return the mp3s they’ve shared.

1 Comment »

[NOTE: This post uses some awful words because they are important to what Lisa is researching. The spottiness of my liveblogging may be especially misleading in this post.] Lisa Nakamura is giving a Berkman talk called “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: Internet Games, Social Inequality, and Racist Talk as Griefing.” She’s going to talk about ROFLcon and Twitter. She begins by showing some tweets from ROFLcon that simply repeat the word “nigger.” She says that as a researcher, she’s not trying to place blame. She wants to know what these racist tweets are trying to accomplish. What are the ties between racism and social production in griefing?

ROFLcon is a conference celebrating Internet “memes.” Christina Xu from ROFLcon says that she thought that these tweets were coming from people who were not at ROFLcon. “It was straightup griefing,” says Lisa. And it didn’t happen during the race panel (which Lisa moderated). It happened during the keynote when Moot (Chris Poole, founder of 4chan) was speaking. Two years ago, there was boombox disruption of his talk.

The Net is an attention economy, says Lisa, and the use of words such as “nigger” enables you to “jump the line.” But, she says, there are lots of bad consequences. Chris Lander pointed out in a tweet that different platforms have different forms of hate: Racism is for the Internet, and homophobia is for Xbox (where players use”fag” as a generic insult). “Racism is a meme,” Lisa says; it works just like a meme. The word “nigger” has become completely toxic, which is why it’s used frequently by griefers [i.e., those out to disrupt an online activity]. “Griefing is about mocking those who take the Internet too seriously.” We are currently in a moment of what Lisa calls “enlightened racism,” in homage to Douglas’s “enlightened sexism“: You take the social gains and use it for permission to reintroduce retrograde images. E.g., “The Man Show” knew that it was ridiculously sexist to have women in bikinis bouncing on a trampoline. It’s all about the humor, the currency of Net memes. TV’s “post racial humor,” says Douglas, allows a nostalgia for sexism and racism, e.g., Mad Men. But, says Lisa, post-racial humor is a confusing mode for young people. The extremism of The Man Show’s sexism says (or so we would like to think) that there is no sexism, although of course there is. The N word is so extreme that to use it is to implicitly state that one is not racist and racism is no longer an issue (or so the users think), but it is.

She shows a video of 4chan’s “Patriotic Nigras” ruining a SecondLife social meeting (online, of course) just to “make people angry.” “Patriotic Nigras” are not primarily African-American. If you call out their racism, then say you’re a racist because it’s all about lols. (Or so they think.)

Leeroy Jenkins is quite famous for outrageousness at World of Warcraft, but people don’t talk about his adopting of minstrel-speak, Lisa says. You’re not supposed to talk about that, though, because it’s just about the lulz. It’s hard to call this out because you’ll be told you don’t get Net culture. To protest it is to declare oneself unqualified to comment on it. But, Lisa says, we need to teach children that racism is not acceptable. If sexting is bad, a child saying the N word over and over is also bad for that child. Youth are going online to interact. This is where they learn to be civil. We need to be able teach them. If the words are banned, they’ll count it as nothing more than “ass-hattery” to be routed around.

Lisa concludes by showing us a vid of some Chinese goldfarmers. “One’s person’s lulz is another’s non-lulz.”

To what extent does this racist humor occur in non-English cultures?
A [audience]: Donnie Dong said that on Chinese boards there are ethnic insults.
A: [lisa] Griefing is transnational.
A: [audience] Korean youths will sometimes play on American servers and announce that they’re young Koreans in order to annoy the older players.

A: How about YouTube comments that have racist comments? That doesn’t seem to be enlightened racism. Does enlightened racism provide an ethical framing for Youtube’s racist comments?
A: People do that on YouTube in part because there are so few other places where Americans can talk about race.

Q: Is racism or enlightened racism better?
A: I don’t think either is good. Enlightened racism is a symptom of a society that thinks that racism isn’t a problem any more.

Q: Will this change when the constituency of the people who determines the lulz changes?
A: Could you start a meme of blond frat boys invading a space and griefing?

Q: If you watch Arizona politics, the idea is that men are the underdogs now.

Q: Will enlightened racism eat itself? Maybe someone from the inside can critique it? Griefing the griefers? Is that happening?
A: [audience] At SomethingAwful, there’s a lot of calling people out.
Q: Maybe the enlightened racism meme will be tired?
A: I’d trace it to Dave Chappelle. He was unhappy that he had licensed people to say things they shouldn’t. He was mocking them, but it gave them license.

Q: Once there are more people online who are not white males…
A: People socialized into this culture may have a hard time of it transnationally, or in the workplace, or wherever this is not the idiom.

Q: This type of humor is balkanizing and isolating. Griefing is about shutting down conversation spaces….

Q: How do we know that it’s white males, since these are often anonymous posts? Might these be a deconstruction of racism? [E.g., gays taking back the word "queer."]
A: I wish, but I don’t think so.

Q: How does enlightened racism affect structural racism?
A: Irony has become a mode that people retreat into when they don’t want accountability. Enlightened racism is still racism.

Q: Is it possible you’re conflating different forms of discourse? Maybe this is just a particularly disruptive form of static…
Q: Maybe it’s a form of play. It’s like playing violent video games: expressing something that you’re unable to express. It’s playing taboo, which is fun. Maybe it’s like a form of play in which the players know the rules. It may be a procedural rhetoric…
A: Yes. But who gets to decide? The people who are gay should be the ones who get to decide if “fag” is an insulting term, etc.

TAGS: -berkman

3 Comments »

Many of us have taken the Myers-Briggs test to determine exactly what type of personality we have. It places us along four dichotomies: Introversion-Extraversion, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, Judgment-Perception. You can express your personality type by using the first letter of the dominant element of each polarity (with an N for intuition since Introversion in a rather extraverted way claimed dibs on the I).

I propose three dichotomies that define your sort of Net personality. I’ll define each by its extreme expression:

1. Exceptionalist (E) vs. Ordinarist (O). Exceptionalists believe that the Internet is exceptional, extraordinary, and disruptive, the way, say, the printing press was. Ordinarists believe that the Internet is just another new medium, no more revolutionary than, say, CB radio.

2. Technodeterminist (T) vs. Contextualist (C). Technodeterminists believe that the Net by itself brings about transformations against which it is futile to struggle. Contextualists believe that technology by itself does nothing and changes nothing; other factos determine the effects of technology.

3. Optimist (H) vs. Pessimist (P). Optimists believe that the Net is, or brings about, good things. Pessimists believe otherwise. (Note: Since everyone believes their beliefs are true, everyone thinks they are a realist. When someone actively asserts s/he is a realist, s/he is actually asserting a form of counter-optimism, i.e., pessimism.) (Note: The “H” stands for Happiness or Hope.

I’d love to get a fourth dichotomy for symmetry with Myers-Briggs. Let me know if you can think of one. People who see the Net as a tool or as a world? People who see the Net as a participatory space or as a communication medium?

For the record, I am ETH, although I am a very weak T. Nicholas Carr is (as I read his book) a strong ETP. Ethan Zuckerman, danah boyd and Larry Lessig are, I believe, ECH’s. Seth Finklestein may be a OCP, although I think he would be a weak O.

24 Comments »

I’m embarrassed to say that I just read Randall Munroe’s fabulous color survey from early May. Readers were asked to supply names for colors. It’s a rich experiment: Naming and discrimination, gender differences, hacking, tagging, spamming, hilariousness. The results also seem to support prototype theory’s idea that we agree on what the “real” (prototypical) colors are, at least within a culture: This is blue, but that one is a variant that needs a modifier in front of it (“light blue”) or for which we use a variant name (“teal”).

Randall writes the webcomic XKCD, of course, which is the Doonesbury of his generation, except while you can imagine Garry Trudeau writing a satiric HBO series, you can’t imagine him running and analyzing a color survey.

(I heard about Randall’s color survey via the Mainstream: Christopher Shea at the Boston Globe blog. Christopher also points to Stephen von Worley’s color map. BTW, that post by Christopher also has a great note about iPad censoring a graphic version of the oft-banned James Joyce’s Ulysses. Anyway, I’ve really got to do a better job keeping up with XKCD.)

6 Comments »

Alert reader George Janczyn points out the truth I’ve been avoiding: Joho the Blog isn’t sizing correctly. It seems to be of fixed width, with the right-hand column shoved out of the frame. Resizing your window doesn’t resize Joho. That’s true in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

It didn’t used to be so. And I haven’t changed anything in my Word Press template. I also can’t find any particular elements of content that are sized too large. I’m stumped.

The body of Joho consists of a table with three columns. The overall table is sized at 95%. The left and right columns are at a fixed 150px because if I made them a percentage, they’d wrap funny. This has not been a problem until a couple of weeks ago. (Yes, I tried laying it out “properly” using floating divs and CSS. After losing a couple of days at it, I figured I was struggling to do with divs exactly what tables were designed to do easily.)

I have tried setting the columns to percentage widths. I have tried setting the middle column to a fixed size. Nothing seems to affect the bad layout. I have inspected the elements on the page using Chrome’s inspector, and have found that the computed width of the table is 1432px, while the style widths I’ve set are not that wide. I’ve also looked at the two inserted graphic elements that happen to be in the blog posts currently displayed, and neither is sized very wide. The problem persists using all of the styles offered at the top of the page next to the “Hard to read?” text.

So, I’m stumped. Any suggestions?

LATER that day: See the comments for the solution. Thanks!

12 Comments »

Berkman Buzz for the week:

Ethan Zuckerman’s algorithmic World Cup:
[link]

OpenNet Initiative on Internet connectivity in Cuba:
[link]

Christian Sandvig addresses a certain addressing system:
[link]

CMLP evaluates a kerfuffle-rrifc DMCA notice from the NYT:
[link]

Andrew McAfee stands up for the iPad and App Store:
[link]

danah boyd discusses the failures of COPPA:
[link]

Herdict on new Internet controls in Vietnam:
[link]

Doc Searls updates his clues for newspapers adapting to the Net:
[link]

Weekly Global Voices: “Japan: Threatened theaters decline to screen ‘The Cove’”
[link]

Be the first to comment »