Memex 1.1

An amazing post by Joel Spolsky which is an excellent example of why blogging is such a useful augmentation of our collective intelligence.

Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file.
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If you started reading these documents with the hope of spending a weekend writing some spiffy code that imports Word documents into your blog system, or creates Excel-formatted spreadsheets with your personal finance data, the complexity and length of the spec probably cured you of that desire pretty darn quickly. A normal programmer would conclude that Office’s binary file formats:

* are deliberately obfuscated
* are the product of a demented Borg mind
* were created by insanely bad programmers
* and are impossible to read or create correctly.

He then goes on carefully and lucidly to explain why that ‘normal programmer’ would be wrong on all four counts. Wonderful stuff.

The Observer carries the kind of internet scare story that delights the heart of every Daily Mail reader. But with one curious omission. The gist of the story is this:

When Max Gogarty, a 19-year-old gap-year student, landed a coveted blogging spot on which to chronicle his two-month backpacking adventure around India and Thailand, he could have never predicted how his moment of triumph would backfire so spectacularly.

But within 24 hours of his first posting on the guardian.co.uk travel pages, the teenager was swamped by a tidal wave of internet hate mail as he became a victim of the phenomenon of ‘going viral’. As the north London teenager was touching down in Mumbai, hundreds of comments - many vitriolic - were appearing not only on his blog, but on scores of message boards and social networking forums, including Facebook and high-profile gossip sites such as Holy Moly.

The astonishing reaction was provoked when surfers spotted that he had the same surname as Paul Gogarty, a travel writer who occasionally contributes to the Guardian. Readers presumed he was a privileged public school boy whose father had secured him the blog spot and whose gap-year travels were being funded by the newspaper.

The resulting ‘cyber-bullying’ has now forced Max, an occasional scriptwriter for the E4 teenage drama series Skins, to ditch his weekly blog while he and his family cope with the consequences of global internet exposure.

What’s not mentioned is that the Guardian has a policy of allowing people to post comments anonymously, which IMHO is a good way of encouraging people to behave badly, because they don’t have to take responsibility for their views. I’ve always thought that was a bad decision. This story confirms that.

Robert Scoble visited Switzerland and insisted on telling us about it thus:

What was really fun was having raclette cheese dinner with famous author Bruce Sterling. Of course I intruded on the dinner with my cell phone camera. It’s a 40 minute video, where Laurent and Pierre explain raclette. What’s really interesting is that we had people all over the world who were watching us live. At about 9:30 we sit down with Bruce Sterling, famous science fiction author.

It doesn’t get interesting until about 13 minutes when Bruce tells us the difference between a blogger and a novelist.

At 20 minutes in we discover that Yahoo has rejected Microsoft’s bid so you hear our initial opinions…

Wow! “Famous author Bruce Sterling”, eh? What really struck me was the confident way Scoble thinks that his admiring public would be willing to sit through 13 minutes of aimless chat to get to what he regards as a really interesting bit. Who does he think we are? And, more importantly, who does he think he is?

James Cridland wasn’t impressed, either.

What all this reminds me of is what the Nobel laureate, Herbert Simon, said to a journalist who asked him what newspapers he read. “None”, said Herb, before going on to explain that at his age time was precious and he wasn’t going to waste it on reading stuff to which people hadn’t devoted much time or thought.

From todays Register…

Dough-faced Carphone Warehouse chief and Daily Mail director Charles Dunstone has decided to keep his thoughts to himself from now on - he’s deleted his blog from the TalkTalk website.

Well, he’s a busy chap who has to get out of his pyjamas every day.

This morning’s Observer column…

Watching Scoble in action is like taking a puppy for a walk. He is insatiably curious, and he follows every lead, no matter how daft. When some new social networking service appears, you can bet he will overdose on it. He was a predictably early subscriber to Facebook, on which he rapidly acquired 5,000 ‘friends’ (the maximum permitted by the service, apparently). He is also, needless to say, a subscriber to Plaxo.com’s contact-management service and became interested in seeing how much overlap there might be between his Facebook friendship network and his Plaxo contacts. Which is where the fun began…

Rory Cellan-Jones has written a pre-emptive of 2008

January

At CES in Las Vegas, Bill Gates makes his final keynote before stepping down at Microsoft. Guess what? The digital home of the future is here at last and it is powered by Windows Media Center.

One week later in San Francisco, Steve Jobs uses his Macworld keynote to show us round the iHome (“way cool”). It is run by a revamped Apple TV set-top box, and allows you to get all your stuff – movies, music, photos and groceries – piped to you through iTunes….

Neat idea. Wish I’d thought of it.

It’s ten years to the day since Jorn Barger coined the term ‘weblog’. Now he offers Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers…

My favourites:

2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.

3. If you spend a little time searching before you post, you can probably find your idea well articulated elsewhere already.

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6. Always include some adjective describing your own reaction to the linked page (great, useful, imaginative, clever, etc.)

7. Credit the source that led you to it, so your readers have the option of “moving upstream.”

Interesting Guardian column by Jeff Jarvis.

According to the marketing firm Alloy, 96% of teens and tweens use social networks; they are now universal. And I think this means that they will maintain friendships longer in life. Which, in turn, could lead to richer friendships. No longer can you escape relationships when you move on; you will be tied to your past - and to the consequences of your actions. I hope this could make us better friends.

But because you can’t escape your past, this also means that you could do one stupid thing in life, forever memorialised in Google, and you are embarrassed in perpetuity.

The Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, jokes that we all should be able to change our names and start fresh at age 21. But I think we’ll be protected by mutually assured humiliation: we will all have our moments of youthful indiscretion and so we will have to forgive others’ if we want them to ignore ours. So you inhaled - so did I, what of it? That will be the golden rule of the social internet. And I say that could make us more tolerant.

There are other benefits to living life in public and, as a result, collaboratively. When the photo site Flickr began, its co-founder Caterina Fake said it made the fateful and fortunate decision to “default to public”.

Oh dear. According to the Blog Readability Test, this blog is suitable only for College (Postgrad) readers. That makes it the same as Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker.

Martin Weller’s eminently readable blog is rated ‘High School’, which figures because he writes in a clear and accessible way. The Guardian Online Blog is rated ‘College (Undergrad)’.

Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the link. His blog is rated at ‘Genius’ level, btw. How come he has more readers, then, eh?

UPDATE: The image above is just one that’s been cut and pasted from the Blog Readability site. But the site also offers visitors a snippet of HTML code that they can paste onto their blogs to display their ‘readability’ score. Charles Arthur, Editor of the Guardian’s Technology section, thought there was something fishy about this and astutely investigated further. It’s a wicked world out there.

Great post by Jeff Jarvis, refuting an assertion by the Editor of the New York Times in a recent lecture.

First, I have never said that the crowd of bloggers would replace mainstream media and professional journalism. That’s a red herring that is too often attributed presumptively to bloggers and their advocates. It’s never properly cited because it can’t be. Where’s the link to the quote with me saying that? It’s fiction. I don’t say that. I don’t believe that. Jay Rosen shot that fish in the barrel a year and a half ago when he responded to hearing it again from Keller’s deputy Jon Landman…

It goes on. Worth reading in full. The issue really is about turning symbiosis into synergy.