In-Room Chat as a Social Tool — an experiment by Clay Shirky and friends

Fascinating piece by Clay Shirky reporting what happens when you give participants in a group discussion a chat-room, the contents of which are projected onto a screen so that all meeting participants can read it. As ever with Shirky, the commentary is intelligent and judicious, and frank about both the pluses and minuses of the experiment. Two interesting points: from the photographs, it looks as though most of those attending the meeting were using Apple PowerBooks or iBooks (which indicates a non-representative sample); and the observation by Shirky and another participant, Steven Johnson, that the online Chat had “sucked the humor out of the discussion”. (The jokes were mostly in the Chat transcript, it seems.)

Wi-Fi goes mainstream

One of the (few) good things about 2002 was the way 802.11b networking took off. This BBC Online story confirms that by making the WiFi revolution one of its top stories in the end-of-year roundup. It also includes a link to Cantenna, a company that sells converted Pringle cans (see illustration above) as longer-range Wi-Fi antennae.

Breaking Windows — the Lindows suit
“NYT” story.

” Microsoft filed its trademark suit against Lindows.com, saying it was using a copycat name, and then asked the court for a preliminary injunction to halt quickly what it deemed an illegal practice by an emerging rival.

Nonsense, Lindows.com replied. ‘Windows’is a generic term, it said, first used more than two decades ago for software systems that could display programs or data in rectangular windows on PC screens. Lindows .com submitted declarations from expert witnesses and trade press articles from the 1980’s, when several software companies were offering desktop environments. They spoke of the ‘window wars’ of those years and had headlines like ‘Microsoft Does Windows.'”

Dan Gillmor’s review of a terrible year

Makes for bleak reading — the Bush regime’s sell-out to Microsoft, the fact that corporate sleaze and wrongdoing remains essentially untouched, the colossal erosion in civil liberties ‘legitimated’ by the ‘war’ on terrorism, etc. Dan says there are some upsides. Personally I don’t see any right now — with the possible exception of Open Source.

Jon Udell’s bookmarklet

A brilliant piece of programming — and an illustration of how innovation happens so quickly on the Net. After you’ve “installed” your bookmarklet in a browser, you can look up books at your local library (provided its catalogue system is run on some industry standard software). Let’s say you’re on a book-related site (Amazon, BN), and a book’s info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN. Choose a hardcover edition for best results.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library’s lookup service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result. This is what Web services are all about.

Broadband and movies: the reality

Most of the media industry seems to think that broadband is about delivering movies to couch potatoes. Some of the studios have now set up MovieLink to provide just such a service. This is what it’s like in practice. Quote:

“MovieLink boasts some 200 movies for rent. I chose Braveheart, which for some reason was much cheaper at $1.99 than most other selections, which were $3.99 to $5.45. I did get to watch the movie on my computer. But it was a struggle, and in that struggle one question kept nagging at me: Why the heck do the studios think they know how to provide me with a service like this?

MovieLink’s user interface for choosing movies is a mess. It’s modeled after the e-commerce systems pioneered by companies like Amazon.com. That means everything is presented in a hierarchy of categories: action, romance, Western, etc. There’s no method for searching actors, directors, or–oddly–even studios.

Worse, though, is the service. The data files are huge. At 952 megabytes, Braveheart took just less than five hours to download using our DSL line at home. Video-on-demand? Hardly. In the same time we could have made 20 roundtrips to our neighborhood Blockbuster. Then there’s the fact that MovieLink requires you to watch the movie within 24 hours of starting to play it or have it expire. Blockbuster lets you keep a movie for three to four days. Both, however, feature equally unfriendly help. As soon as I clicked the play button on my movie, MovieLink offered this: ‘Do you want to play Braveheart now? If you play Braveheart now, you must finish viewing it by Tuesday, 11/19/2002 2:56 p.m.'”

NY Times: “I think the moment is right,” he said, to treat the Internet “the way we refer to television, radio and the telephone.” That is to say, stop capitalising its initial letter. It’s arrived and become part of our lives. The Telephone and the Phonograph once had automatic capitalisation in every newspaper style guide. But there came a point where the thing had become so familiar that it was dropped. [Scripting News]

The gulf between Big Content and the rest of us

Peter Chernin, CEO of Fox Network, gave a keynote address at Comdex — the first entertainment big-shot to do so. Jonathan Peterson has done a commented version of his talk. It’s very revealing and would make great material for a class discussion on digital rights. And here is an intriguing critical dissection of the RIAA’s statistical ‘evidence’ for their assertion that downloading is killing the music industry. The bottom line seems to be that the record companies are releasing far fewer albums than they did two years ago. No wonder sales are down.

Grief and its timewarp

It’s four months today since my Sue died. It feels more like a hundred years. This has been the bleakest Christmas I’ve ever spent. In trying to come to terms with it, I went looking to see what has been written about grief — and found very little that is useful to someone who is non-religious like me. The only exception so far is C.S Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Like me, Lewis met his wife late in life. Like me, he fell hopelessly in love with her. And like me, he was devastated when cancer took her away from him. His book is the most accurate account that I have encountered to date of what grief is like. Strip away Lewis’s attempts to reconcile his belief in a merciful God with the cruel fate that this God has permitted and one finds an exact description of many of the feelings I have experienced — only articulated more vividly than I could achieve.

Lewis is also very good on the well-intentioned assurance that one will eventually ‘get over’ such a loss. “The words are ambiguous”, he writes. “To say that the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had a leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he will get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it’. But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it…. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present, I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I will presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again”.

Neilsen’s Top Ten Web Mistakes of 2002

Sounds corny, but isn’t. He even identifies my pet hate — sites that are coy about revealing the price of what they are selling. When I go looking for product information, I am after two things: (a) specification and (b) price. Any site which give me prices up front stands a better chance of getting my business. Otherwise I move on. Another Neilsen pet hate is inflexible search engines — i.e. ones that will only give you a result if you get the query exactly right. (Useless if you don’t know how the database behind the engine has been designed.)