Gadgetopia

Internet ‘96: A fascinating look at the Internet back in 1996. It wasn’t a greatest of places, actually. Many screencaps. McDonalds…wow.

I decided to peruse the Wayback Machine’s earliest archives to see what the internet looked like in 1996, when I was 14 and evidently had much less free time than I do now. Much to my chagrin, few websites from these early years have been successfully archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet.

With friends like these … Tom Hodgkinson on the politics of the people behind Facebook: This is a very long rant against Facebook, and social-networking in general. It gets deep into the politics of the founders and over-capitalism, and all that, but I was struck by this bit towards the beginning.

A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval.

The Internet sucks the soul out of the relating to people in general, but are the advantages worth it? The Internet allows a large quantity of relationships of less quality. Is it worth it?

Cyber Monday: I had no idea tomorrow had a name.

The term Cyber Monday refers to the Monday immediately following Black Friday, the ceremonial kick-off of the holiday online shopping season in the United States between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas.

[…] The term “Cyber Monday” is a neologism invented by Shop.org, part of the U.S. trade association National Retail Federation.[1]. It was first used within the ecommerce community during the 2005 holiday season. According to Scott Silverman, the head of Shop.org, the term was coined based on research showing that 77% of online retailers reported a significant increase in sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving in 2004.

Deane is one who finds beauty in the code that defines a website, but here’s a guy, artist Brian Piana, who finds art in the layout of a website.

In my work I use deconstructed abstractions of actual websites to create new compositions in a removed, off-line environment. The layout, structure, and purpose of these sites directly inform the compositions and narratives of my work. Colors and shapes are governed almost exclusively by the original website’s design, and the linked pages of a single site are often included, providing a schematic of the site’s underlying architecture in my final composition…

I thought that was a pretty interesting take on things. I’ve been shopping for something for my office walls, and there are some things in Piana’s gallery that I wouldn’t mind using. Or it could become a DIY project… Hmmm…

via MentalFloss

Things Turn Ugly in the ‘Hacks vs. Flacks’ War: There’s a nice little catfight brewing over at Wired. When reading this quote, a “hack” is a journalist, while a “flack” is a P.R. person.

[…] Chris Anderson, the executive editor of Wired magazine, chided “lazy flacks” who deluge him with news releases “because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching.”

Chris Anderson, executive editor of Wired magazine, detests lazy publicists.

“I’ve had it,” Mr. Anderson wrote on his blog on Oct. 29. “I get more than 300 e-mails a day and my problem isn’t spam. … it’s P.R. people.”

After picking the fight, he then made it personal, posting the addresses of 329 unsolicited e-mail messages he had received and telling the senders that he had permanently blocked them.

It’s that last part that has people upset.

Way Too Good for Facebook or MySpace?: I knew it was going to come to this at some point — social networking sites are getting more exclusive. This article profiles aSmallWorld which is the apparent king of the elite social networking sites.

Membership in these networks, not unlike the exclusive country clubs where the rich and powerful hobnob, is carefully guarded. At aSW, only a subset of established members have the power to invite new users to join. In developing the site, founder Erik Wachtmeister rejected the prevailing Web 2.0 business model of attracting large audiences so you can sell ads to big brands. Instead, he confines membership to the relatively small group of people who travel in the same elite, often moneyed, social circles. “One’s network on the site is less useful if it is diluted by people you don’t know,” says Wachtmeister. His goal was “to create a private place where people could be much more forthcoming with information.”

Two points here:

1. Chris Pirillo sort of did the same thing. Sometime back he had a mailing list for entrepreneurs (it may still exist, I have no idea). I don’t remember what the joining fee was, but it was pretty steep. The idea is that the cost weeded out everyone but those who were very, very serious about doing business online.

   I wasn’t moved enough to join, but the idea was very attractive to me. I was envious of the discussions I assumed would take place inside. (For more on this general concept, see “Do we put more intellectual value on information we pay for?” and “The Quality of Free Discourse”).

2. Someone else — and I can’t remember who — said he thought it was almost dishonest to accept connections (“friends,” whatever) from just anyone. He was kind of a big shot, I remember, and his theory was this: “A lot more people ‘know’ me than I, in fact, know. By being selective and only making connections with people I do, in fact, know, I’m keeping the system honest.”

   I can’t disagree with that logic. I get LinkedIn requests from people I don’t know, or people with whom I’ve had one email conversation. The thing I always keep in mind is that with LinkedIn, they can ask me to introduce them to someone I know. Am I comfortable doing that? If I’m not, then I usually don’t accept the connection.

   The bottom line is this: of what value is a “connection” if there’s really no “force of relationship” behind it?

Elitist or not, you can’t deny that for some billionaire, there’s a lot more value in aSmallWorld than in, say, Facebook. Much like there’s more value for them to hang out at the country club than at McDonalds. They do business with people like them, so they need to go where people like them are, and the signal-to-noise ratio is high.

Geez, did I just write that? Maybe I’m just trying to kiss up so I can get in…

Pay To Play: Fair Price for Good Community: Josh Clark nails another good post today as he discusses a new “communal bike rental” program in Paris.

For 29 euros a year, you can “check out” a bike for 30 minutes whenever you need one. He discusses why the city of Paris specifically decided not to make the program free:

“You get what you pay for” has a corollary: “People behave according to how they pay.” By spending a little coin, a psychological shift happens. I become an owner. I expect that I’ll have access to bikes in good, unvandalized condition, and I expect that others will return bikes to their stations when they’re done. Because of those expectations, I’ll be that much more careful with how I treat the bikes myself.

So, so true. I’ve written about this before in a post entitled “Do we put more intellectual value on information we pay for?” I said this:

Do you put more value on information you pay for? Do you pay more attention to something you paid, say $5 for, than something you read for free on the Net?

[eBook PDFs on Amazon] probably have no more information in them than a well-written article on some development Web site. But are you going to pay more attention to them because you paid money? It strikes me that I would. If I paid $7 for an article about .Net datagrids, I’d print it out, and find some quiet time to read it and try the examples. Is it just me?

Another example of this —

I pay for LinkedIn, the business networking system. They have a new “Answers” section, and — as you would expect — it gets some spammish “questions” from time to time. People looking for jobs, people trying to recruit, people looking for outsourcing, etc.

I’m really uptight about flagging all those types of questions in the system. I get a little offended when someone craps up my nice, clean system that I pay for. I’m an owner, not a freeloader, and I have a vested interest in keeping LinkedIn in as good a condition as possible. I’m paying for it, so I have a tendency to pick up after other people to make sure my investment stays as nice as possible.

I’ve often thought about creating a Gadgetopia forum or community. If I did, I think I would charge a nominal fee for it — maybe $25 a year. Not because I could make a lot of money at that rate, but just because I think the participants that did pay would put more value on the information and invest more time in the community.

For years, MetaFilter charged new members $5. A small sum, sure, but enough that you weed out a huge group of people who just rack up free accounts for anything. I know that the $5 dissuaded me from joining, if only because I would have had to go track down my wallet, fish out my credit card, etc.

Free is, well, free. There’s no barrier to entry. And sometimes small barriers to entry can be good things.

How do I know this person? Through the Web!: Jon makes an interesting point here. There’s a whole category of people that you “know” via the Net only. You may have talked to them on the phone or met them in person, but the Web is “where” you met them.

Like other social applications, Facebook wants to know how you’re connected to people. So it asks: “How do you know this person?” and presents these choices […] The choice I usually want — “Through the Web” — isn’t available.

Geeks Will Not Be Silenced: Breaking: Digg Riot in Full Effect Over Pulled HD-DVD Key Story: Digg had a bad night tonight. Or a good night, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

The power of Web 2.0 is in full effect over at Digg, where users are revolting over Digg’s decision to pull a story (that netted over 15,000 diggs) and reportedly boot a user for posting the HD-DVD AACS Processing Key number, which would allow someone to crack the copy protection on an HD-DVD.

The front page of Digg consists entirely of stories flaunting the number or criticizing Digg for its actions. We’re not going to post the number, obviously, but there’s a screencap of the ensuing chaos after the jump.

Cats Can Has Grammar: This is a great examination of one of the current Net memes — annotating cat pictures — and why it has ended up the way it has.

If you spend any time at all observing net culture, then you’ll have been unable to miss the recent explosion in popularity of lolcats. This relatively recent phenomenon is the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and overlaying absurdist captions on the images.

Wikipedia has some more on the lolcat meme which I’m slightly embarrassed to say that I love. I love cats, which helps. I mean. come on, tell me this isn’t friggin’ adorable. Or this. Or this. I could look at these all day.

(Something else I find interesting —

I’m quite sure we’re going to get some comments like this: “I like cats too…under the tires of my truck [snort]”. This is fine — I realize not everyone likes cats. But here’s something that never fails to fascinate me: it seems you can’t just dislike cats quietly. If you don’t like cats, you must apparently threaten them with violence.

I don’t like dogs. They’re usually too big or too annoying, and they invariably smell like crap. But I have never threatened violence on a dog. They repulse me, and I’d rather they stayed the hell away from me, but I’m not going to couple that thought with… “or else I’ll run it over with my car.”

Think about that before you comment. And anyway, don’t the big plastic testicles hanging from your tow hitch need to be polished or something?)

Students give up social networks for Lent: This is just sad.

For some, it’s chocolate. For others, it’s coffee or cigarettes. But as this Easter approaches, some young and devout Christians are anxious to return to what they gave up for Lent: Internet sites Facebook and MySpace.

Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us: I know you’ve heard of this video by now, and if you haven’t watched it, donate five minutes of your life right now. It’s brilliant, both in content and presentation.

I didn’t get choked up like Cory did, but I have to say it’s something else. The underlying message along with how the author presents and films it will reverberate.

Meme: You hear the word ‘meme” a lot these days, referring to stuff that gets passed around via email, usually. (Apparently it rhymes with “theme,” not “them” like I thought.)

Well, there’s a lot more to it, and this page is an interesting read. Did you know the term was coined by the most prominent atheists of our time to relate it to evolutionary biology?

[The term ] coined in 1976 by the zoologist and evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins, refers to a unit of cultural information transferable from one mind to another. Dawkins said, Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. A meme propagates itself as a unit of cultural evolution and diffusion — analogous in many ways to the behavior of the gene (the unit of genetic information)

So what are the bounds of a meme? That’s one of the big arguments between “memeticists” — apparently scientists who study memes.

Though Dawkins defined the meme as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation”, memeticists vary in their definitions of meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous and precise understanding of what typically makes up one unit of cultural transmission remains a problem in debates about memetics.

In my mind: one meme = one YouTube link. There, solved.

Godwin’s Law: There’s so much about the Internet that I don’t know yet.

Godwin’s Law (also Godwin’s Rule of Nazi Analogies) is, in Internet culture, an adage originated in 1990 by Mike Godwin that states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made the thread in which the comment was posted is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.

Does anyone remember the very first Web page they ever visited? I do.

I was in the computer lab at Sioux Falls College with my buddy Paul back in 1994. We searched InfoSeek for Arena Football and found the official site — Times New Roman on a grey background in Mosaic.

Then we searched for “sex” because that’s what all the news outlets had concentrated on — how the Web was just full of sex stuff. We found a lingerie store, though I wonder how they were doing ecommerce back then.

Good times.

Sons save mom overseas with webcam: Apparently she had fallen into a diabetic coma. They got paramedics there in 10 minutes.

A Web camera in a Norwegian artist’s living room in California allowed her sons in Norway and the Philippines to see that she had collapsed and call for help, one of the sons said Friday.

Karin Jordal, 69, collapsed Thursday in her living room in Pinon Hills, California, and was motionless on a couch when her son Tore in the Philippines checked in through the Internet.

A friend and I were talking tonight about the perils of setting up a Web community to compliment a real-world community. For instance, a community Web site for your church, or for your neighborhood — so a group people that would interact with each other both online and off.

(And by “community,” I mean two-way interaction — a Web site where people can post things themselves: a newsgroup-ish type thing.)

Now, Web communities can go downhill in a hurry. There’s a bigger chance for misunderstandings, and people have a tendency to be bolder and more frank when they’re writing than when they’re talking. Thus, Web communities can fragment when someone pisses someone else off, a flame war starts, feelings get hurt, etc. We’ve all seen it happen, I’m sure.

With a purely Web-based community — like we have here, for instance — there’s not too much at stake. This Web site is the only way most of us “know” each other, and if we all got in a big fight, we could all just fade back into the Net. The Internet, after all, is a big place and we never have to “see” each other again.

But say me and Matt got in a huge, vicious flamewar, and it got really ugly. And now say that he and I go to the same church. And our kids are friends. And they go to the same daycare.

What if Fabian and I were assigned the same shift to work the concession stand at the local school fundraiser?

That said, is there a greater danger when your Web community is paralleled by a “real” community? The Web-based interaction is the one more prone to social disaster, and wouldn’t that leak over into the “real” interactions?

Thoughts, anyone? Examples?

R.I.P. Christine Clouse, aka “Crys Clouse”, 1979-2004: I stumbled on this last week. This girl and I exchanged some emails two years ago and were involved in a handful of posts on the MT support forums about a plugin she wrote for Movable Type.

Just a few weeks ago, I tried to email her again because the plugin broke with MT 3.2 (turns out it didn’t — the problem was about three levels removed from that). She never got back to me. Now I read that she was killed over a year ago.

I am sorry to have to report that Christine Clouse, age 25, of Lawrence, Massachussetts, died after being struck by the Haverhill-to-Boston noontime MBTA commuter train on Thursday, March 11, 2004, in Lawrence General Hospital.

It’s odd how you cross paths with people on the Net, and they drift in and out of your realm of perception for years to come. Then sometimes they don’t drift back in, and you didn’t have enough connection with them to realize it.

Blogger Twins: The Amazing Race is one of the greatest televisions shows ever conceived and produced (and I mean that with all sincerity). A set of twins from Brooklyn have created a Web site solely to try and persuade CBS to cast them in season 9.

You can help us catch the eye of the casting directors by linking to this site from yours, emailing anyone and everyone you know in the television industry, and following our progress as we find out whether we are or are not going to be cast.

I had the distinct honor of being the guy who added this tidbit to the TAR9 page on Wikipedia. I rule.

Via Boing Boing.

Is weather news and forecasting a commodity? Since the Internet has given us all easy access to the National Weather Service information, do we really need anything else?

My wife simply has to watch the local news report for the weather. Everything around our house stops about about 10:10 p.m. so Annie can turn on the local news.

Last night, when she interrupted “Mad TV” for this, I asked he if she had ever looked at weather news on the Internet. She hadn’t. So I took her to weather.com, entered our zip code, and showed her a 10-day forecast with nice little pictures. She was thrilled.

I mean, think about what your weatherman is doing. He talks a lot, but how much of that do you really need to know?

• Do you care what the high temperatures were around the region? I don’t — I just want to know what they are in my immediate area. To be honest, I don’t really care what the temperature was, just tell me what it’s going to be.

• Do you care about a “low pressure front” sweeping across the area? I don’t — just tell me the five-day forecast, because the only thing I care about is how the front is going to affect that forecast. Put another way, if I know it’s going to be 80-degrees tomorrow with a 40% chance of rain, do I really care why? No, not really.

It used to be that the local weather gave you access to information you couldn’t otherwise have. These guys that gave you the weather knew all the secrets. But now all the secrets are available to everyone, so are they adding value?

I hate writing this post because I don’t want to slam the local news. But is the weather portion of that newscast adding anything to what we already know?

The Internet has really leveled the playing field on access to information, weather news being a good example. And since the reach of the National Weather Service is, well, national, that’s pretty much the only place I go to find out what kind of day it’s going to be like tomorrow.