Very interesting and perceptive piece by Esther Dyson about real-time blogging and its impact on conferences.Quotes:
“No, it won’t make private meetings public. But it will make for more two-way communication at public meetings. Listeners can simultaneously query the speaker and communicate among themselves instead of everyone remaining silent while one person at a time speaks. ” And:
“A conference is always an attempt to orchestrate. Now, it is also something to annotate. ”
CNET has published a useful piece from knowledge@wharton about Larry Lessig’s book, The Future of Ideas. Standfirst reads:
“The hype is deserved: Lawrence Lessig’s “The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World” offers a devastating analysis of how the freedom and creativity originally built into the Internet are now being built out of it by corporations and lawyers with a vested interest in controlling what people do online and deciding who has access to what.”
Intriguing meditation by Clay Shirky on the difference between communities and audiences. Excerpt:
“As group size grows past any individual’s ability to maintain connections to all members of a group, the density shrinks, and as the group grows very large (>10,000) the number of actual connections drops to less than 1% of the potential connections, even if each member of the group knows dozens of other members. Thus growth in size is enough to alter the fabric of connection that makes a community work. (Anyone who has seen the userbase of a discussion group or mailing list grow quickly is familiar with this phenomenon.)
An audience, by contrast, has a very sparse set of connections and no mutuality between members. Thus an audience has no coordination costs associated with growth, because each new member of an audience creates only one new connection. This single connection is not even a mutual one — you need to know Yahoo’s address to join the Yahoo audience, but neither Yahoo nor any of its other users need to know anything about you. The disconnected quality of an audience that makes it possible for them to grow much (much) larger than a connected community can, because an audience can always exist at the minimum number of required connection (N connections for N users). ”
The Irish Times reports that the local version of the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? TV game show has found itself at the centre of further controversy after all four potential answers to a question on last weekend’s show proved incorrect. Needless to say, a “computer error” was blamed. Ho, ho!
Sobering piece by Thomas Friedman about the crisis in the Middle East.
John Robb on why weblogs and instant outlining are superior to email and instant messaging
”Here’s my thinking on why Instant Outlining (I/O) and weblogs provide value beyond what’s provided by e-mail and instant messaging. Both IM and e-mail are great tools for conversations between consenting individuals. Beyond that, e-mail and IM break down, and weblogs and I/O take over. Here are three reasons why:
Scalability and information overload. Everyone is facing information overload. There is too much information that the average person needs to know to function effectively. So how should you get this information? Right now, most people get it through e-mail. However, for those of us on the leading edge of online workflow, the volume of informational e-mails has exceeded our ability to parse it. Why? E-mail is a terrible one-to-many publishing tool. Not because the technology can’t do it, it can, but because the volume of information published by an increasing number of publishers crowds out its basic functionality: conversations. Finding a valid conversation in the stack of inbox spam from friends, co-workers, and nameless hawkers of “penis enlargers” is frustrating and increasingly futile. In contrast, weblogs and I/O provide publishers a place to put relevant information where it can be found by interested parties. It rationalizes the flow and allows it to scale. It is a parallel processing environment for the mind.
Passive vs. active. E-mail and IM demand my attention and my time (a dwindling resource) when I am least able to provide it. The tools force me to read something I am not prepared to read (granted, e-mail is more passive than phone calls). In contrast, Weblogs and I/O leverage my time. They put me in control. I can batch process my interactions with individuals and groups. I can expand my circle of personal interactions and collaboration with little fear of being overwhelmed by the resulting interactions. For me, the ability to time-shift in a passive collaborative environment makes me infinitely more productive. Thinking in a massively active and interruption driven environment is like wearing a thought inhibiter.
Quality and complexity. Weblogs and I/O allow me to construct and publish complex thinking. Further, it archives that thinking so it isn’t lost. The conversational nature of e-mail and IM make sharing complex thoughts difficult and more time consuming. It’s hard, if not impossible to build a body of work that conveys a complex idea or plan. Additionally, I can’t easily leverage previous thinking or the thinking of others to create a more complex work. The ephemeral nature of e-mail and IM is like thinking in quicksand. ”
O’Reilly Network: Lessig on the Future of the Public Domain. Eleven times in the last 40 years Congress has extended the term of existing copyrights. And this is a practice which they’ve gotten into because copyright holders see great advantage to extending their copyrights, so that they continue to milk returns from their particularly successful properties. [Tomalak’s Realm]
Lovely column by Dan Gillmor on what’s wrong with ICANN and a proposal for getting us out of the mess before the DNS breaks.
Jon Udell has written a fantastically insightful and useful article on the problems of, and tentative solutions to, collaborative online working.
The key to tea on t: a cautionary tale
Yesterday morning I was desperately finishing a piece for the London Evening Standard. Just as I wrote the last sentence (and my mobile phone rang — call from the Features Editor wondering where the hell was my copy), the dreaded warning about coming to the end of my iBook’s battery charge appeared. Desperate to ensure that my machine kept going, I reached over to find the power lead — and upset a cup of cold tea onto the machine.
A feeling of utter panic ensued, but I had sufficient presence of mind to e-mail the article before shutting down the machine. Then a frantic period of wiping and drying and praying. Switched the machine on and it refused to boot, displaying instead something that looked like a screensaver from the nuclear industry. Booted OS X from the cd-rom (one of the lovely things you can do with Macs and not with PCs) and found that I still had my beloved machine and its data. Phew! But then discovered that I couldn’t access email and other programs because my password was continually rejected.
On closer examination, it turned out that the offending passwords all contain the letter ‘t’ and this was not registering when I hit the key. Confirmed this by opening Text Edit and trying to type some text — came out as “rying o ype some ex.
Hmmm. The tea must have damaged the keyboard, despite my remedial efforts. Phoned supplier: did they have a spare in stock that I could try? Nope: but as the machine was still under warranty I could phone Apple tech support and they could ship me a ‘customer installable part’.
Phoned Apple and had series of charming conversations with my fellow countrymen in Cork. Described problem and then had long and fruitless diagnostic conversation with support guy who was clearly trying to determine whether my missing ‘t’ was due to a hardware fault. In the end I ran out of time (life has to go on, iBook or no iBook) and rang off.
Brooded on problem all day and then phoned my friend and Lead Superuser Quentin. He immediately recognised my curious radioactive-warning, boot-refusing screensaver as a sign that the machine was convinced it was a Firewire drive — which is something you engineer by holding down the ‘t’ key. Ergo there must be some liquid residue under the key which was convincing the system that the key was being continually depressed. Got a fine watercolour brush, dipped it in filtered water, and gingerly washed the underside of the key. Replaced the kepboard and pressed the ‘on’ button, heart in mouth. Bingo! What a thing it is to have ingenious and knowledgeable friends.
But how did Q know about this? I’ve just ransacked OS X — the missing manual and can find no mention of this vital snippet of information. Just goes to show, I suppose, that computing is, at heart, a craft industry.