Listics

Congratulations and best of luck to all involved.

Technorati Tags: twitter japan, joi ito, biz stone, ev williams

• Ars Technica with a bit about net neutrality in Canada…
• Promises, promises… why are there two Stormhoek blogs with content about the South African vineyard by the same name? Who developed them and who locked who out of which of them? Did Hugh have an open ended ticket or is he permanently stashed as far as possible out of sight?
• Sergeant Solo
• Nielsen’s “Top Blog Posts”
  [link corrected... thanks mme. l.]
• Overture Dream Host Set-up
• Blackbaud
• Technology360
• Religion and the Racist Right
• CMSMS
• Reuters’ Calais
• Neurocommons
• SharePoint2007
• lullabot
• media girl
• Open Source Maturity Model

Ben Paynter has a couple of pieces in Wired (Issue 16.03). In the first one he shares his experience firing a Goliath Sniper Rifle.  The second, “One Man Hi-Def Film Studio,” briefly describes Richard Welnowski’s mobile movie studio, and the benefits of the post production services Welnowski can provide.

My preceding post highlighted a perspective from Kenya. After writing it, I moved on to see what the blogosphere is sharing about the meetings at Davos. Robert Scoble offers two short video subjects that I hoped would be of interest. He says,

John Gage, chief researcher at Sun Microsystems. Talked with me about helping people in Africa.

Daniel Shapiro, talked with me about conflict resolution. He is a professor at the Havard Law School and works with governments around the world to try to decrease violence and increase democracy.

What an amazing opportunity Robert has been given:  the opportunity to engage some of the top minds and most influential people on the planet in brief conversations to share with us, the people who can’t be there.

After watching those two Qik-ies, how would you grade him?

That big sucking sound you hear is the disappearance of Robert Scoble from the tech blogging scene. Don’t believe me? Count his posts. Ask yourself how “tech” are they these days? See what I mean? Gone. pfffft… no more Scoble. Okay, buh-bye, we’ll miss you and your excited ravings, Robert. Fortunately, the blogosphere abhors a vacuum, and coming up fast are two new faces in the tech blogging world. Mr. Steve Rubel, formerly some kind of marketing guy probably best remembered for dodging the ethics bullet in the Edelman/Wal-mart blog scandal has declared himself technoid, and a wonderful thing this is! Rubel says, “Tech bloggers (and I put myself squarely in this group)” have become lazy. Then he vows to mend his slackadaisical bovine ways. No longer will people seeking dry details about bits and bytes, speeds and feeds, chip-sets and semiconductor properties of rare earth elements need to consult with a boring old engineer who probably has adhesive tape mending the bow on his coke bottle glasses. Now we can tune in directly to the tech wizardry of the Long Island marketeer himself! Just as exciting, in my humble-humble-mumble-mumble, is the emergence of Loren Feldman (previously thought by many to be a satirist and social commentator) in the land of tech flogging and vlogging. Hey Scoble’s gone. Somebody has to do it! Watch here for his insightful comments on some new Mac Sushi database thingy, and then watch here for his corrections. Exciting stuff!

Okay. I have my tongue in cheek about Rubel. “Tech blogger,” my ass. But I think 1938 Media is really on to something. Keep up the good work Mr. Feldman.

Technorati Tags: how can we miss him if he won’t go away, say bye-bye to mr production values, say hello to the new kidz in town, lazy cows, bento boxing, apple sushi, Loren Feldman, Steve Rubel, Robert Scoble, bang, bang, interrobang

I see that JR at Duly Noded has also signed up for David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect conference.  Unlike a lot of tech  gatherings, David’s spring conclaves actually create some shared understanding of our networked information infrastructure and some political momentum toward addressing threats and challenges we face.  Today is the last day to get the early bird registration price!  See you there, Jim.

Technorati Tags: F2C, F2C2008, Network Neutrality

I can’t do that, Dave.

Why do I miss all the transformative moments in Web technology? (I ask because I’m sure you had to be there…).

Technorati Tags: parking in goofy, the long hike in from left field

I’m a blogger, and on some modest level a web publisher, a designer.   I have mixed feelings about both Facebook and twitter.  I think that they are places to gather clues about current affairs, but they have a tendency to attract advocates like iron filings to a magnet, and I’m not all that convinced that they are anything but a couple of current attractive utilities.

In the late eighties and early nineties most of us who were online had boundaries established by service providers such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL.  When browsers emerged and the web overlaid networked resources like Gopher and usenet, most of us who were in these private walled gardens clapped our hands in joy that we could now be free.  The Internet Service Provider business became one of simply providing connectivity, and no matter the collusive arrangements between companies like Yahoo! and AT&T your ISP remains just that, a simple boat launch access to the Ocean of Information available on the Internet.  You don’t need to use the Yahoo! crap.

Now, with a marketing model reminiscent of the early days of Apple when they made it available free on the school-yard, the Facebook folks have accumulated a huge user base by giving it away.  Regardless of the metaphor, whether you call it the Hotel California, a giant Skinner Box, or a Roach Motel, some material percentage of Facebook users have online experiences  that are largely bounded and defined by this 21st century heir to the walled gardens of Prodigy and AOL.  This regression can not be all good since people are denying themselves the opportunity to be exposed to the standard tool-sets we use to create on the web in favor of the proprietary (and amazingly limited junk) offerings of Facebook.

Within the walled garden, Facebook users are provided tools to develop Facebook applications that layer complexity on the Facebook experience.  When I first loaded the Super-duper Fun Wall Graffiti Posting and Virtual Road Kill application, I was only empowered to throw dead pets at my friends (and of course to receive the same from those friends who had similarly tricked out their facebook experience with the S-dFWGP&VRK functionality).  Yesterday I received proof that Facebook is an evolving realm with ever more layered complexity.  I received an invitation to make snow angels with a friend.  Naturally I accepted, and I passed the invitation on to five friends — not, I must add,  out of a profound love of creating snow angels or a desire to see if I could catch virtual frostbite and soak my virtual winter clothing as much as to “level-up.”  The developer said that if I invited five more people I’d have even more opportunities for virtual things to throw and activities to perform with my friends.

I would love to link to that facet of my Facebook experience, but the wall around Facebook is high and virtually impenetrable.   When you’re on the island, behind the wall, in the roach motel, whatever… it’s easier to link out to the real world.  So we can find opportunities to share real stuff with our kindred Facebook-noids.  We can promote causes, worthy and unworthy.  We can organize interest groups.  We can link to external information relating to these causes and groups.  We can embed nasty little down-sized videos and stuff.  We can receive in-line advertisements from large corporations and we can advise our friends of the color and consistency of the mucous our new cold has brought to us.

The external linking that people do creates a little sandbox of clues, and may (along with the community organizing aspect) make Facebook more valuable than a dead trout.

On twitter we have the opportunity to slap each other with dead trouts, if we can keep it to under 140 characters.  Twitter is a utility that appeals to everyone’s internal network router.  We can ping each other all the live-long day.  Doo-dah.  But, twitter is also a place where clues can be gathered.  If you’re careful and don’t “follow” bandwidth hogs like Calacanis and Scoble, you can find a lot of worthwhile information.  If you do follow the more prolific tweeters, you have a lot of noise to filter.  I read JP Rangaswami’s blog and I follow him on twitter.  Yesterday on twitter I thought he pointed to Howard Rheingold’s posts about treating Facebook friends as “a public.”  (As I look for that “tweet” now, I can’t find it.  So somebody else must have pointed me that direction.)  Meanwhile, on his blog he was going on about cricket scores in the India/Australia matches.

Honestly, I suspect that even if I understood cricket I wouldn’t really care about the matches, but it’s telling that JP finds ubiquitous access to the global ocean of information merits his attention and gratitude.  I haven’t seen that kind of appreciation expressed for the ability to make virtual snow angels on Facebook but the ability to flog each other with dead trouts has fired his imagination.  Yes, in fairness, the enterprise uses for a twitter-type utility are huge, and the interpersonal/locational awareness the constant pinging affords can give a work team a real advantage.  But my experience with twitter has been on the personal level, not the professional.  I have seen people swarm a friend with support and good wishes simply by updating their photos to include peas.  (The woman, facing breast surgery, was using frozen peas instead of an ice bag compress and her friends showed solidarity with their pea pictures).  I have seen a fellow who was probably quite drunk insult me for the whole world to see.  I have followed links that I never would have found otherwise.  Indeed, the compressive aspect of the shared information allows us share what’s happening while it’s happening in a way that approximates an RSS news feed.  I prefer to catch a scent from twitter, rather than to be faced with a mountain of information from an aggregator.  And we each have only so much bandwidth for this work, so if we are fishers in the ocean stream, then it’s nice that there are lots of shoals and reefs at which we can anchor and expect to land a big one.