Cyberculture: February 2003 Archive Page

"And now with Blogger, they can watch the people who are building the pages that comprise Google's map to gain knowledge about their map that they can't get from scraping." Jason Kottke --Google is Not a Search CompanyKottke.org)

"Hence its note to Word Spy, an online dictionary that compiles and defines new words popping up in the media. At issue is this Word Spy entry: 'google (GOO.gul) v. To search for information on the Web, particularly by using the Google search engine; to search the Web for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend.' | Google lawyers sent the site's editor a letter (portions of which were later posted to an online discussion board) saying that it wants 'to make sure that when people use "Google," they are referring to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching in general.'" [My wife insists on sending me to the store for such items as Kleenex, Tylenol, Kool-Aid, and Band-Aids. Sometimes she wants me to purchase the cheaper store brand instead, and sometimes she insists that she really wanted the brand name she specified. If your office copier is not a Xerox but a Canon, do you canonize copies? Thanks for the link, Mike.--DGJ] --Protecting Google Brand "Tricky Business"Boston Internet)

"That happened to Cornell University on Wednesday: It sent welcoming letters to 1,700 high school students who had submitted early-decision applications, including nearly 550 who had already been rejected in December. 'Greetings from Cornell, your future alma mater!' the e-mail letter began... Within a couple of hours the university followed with an 'oops' letter, admitting that it had made a mistake..." --(Big) Red Faces at Cornell over E-Mail ErrorNY Times (Registration Req'd))

Here's a little salt for that wound, kid. Oh, whoops... sorry about that.

The lone link on this page disappears when you try to click it. Actually, your browser automatically loads another page that is completely blank. That link is labeled "FAQ". I'm sure the most frequently asked question on this page is "What the...!?" --DGJ --From the "I Don't Get It" DepartmentPurple)

This article will whip your head around a couple of times... take it slowly, and don't stop until you get to the Looney Tunes references. "To mainstream researchers, Loebner is a self-aggrandizing fool and his contest is hokum: at best irrelevant and at worst a public disservice that encourages bad science..... [T]he closer one looks at the history of the Loebner Prize, the more it appears that Loebner's real offense was showing up the biggest stars in "real" artificial intelligence as a bunch of phonies. Thirty years ago, Minsky and other A.I. researchers were declaring that the problem of artificial intelligence would be solved in less than a decade. But they were wrong, and every year the failure of computer programs to get anywhere close to winning the Loebner Prize underlines just how spectacularly off the mark they were." John Sundman

[Sundman identifies himself as a technophobic cynic, but he clearly had so much fun writing this piece that his allegiances don't really matter. This character study of Loebner is a peach: "Loebner has many enthusiasms. He likes prostitutes. He likes marijuana. He likes pornography. He likes the Loebner Prize. He likes wine and fine paintings. And he likes Hugh Loebner. He spoke enthusiastically about all those things. But I was surprised to learn that he didn't seem to care much about artificial intelligence, per se. |His interest in the field has always been pragmatic, he told me, never philosophical. He's a hedonist who thinks work is an abomination and sloth is our greatest virtue. He got interested in A.I. because he hoped the day would come when robots and A.I.'s could do all the work and people could play all the time." That line sounds like something from R.U.R. Except for the parts about prostitutes, pornography, and marijuana. --DGJ --Artificial StupiditySalon)

"Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA....|hink of DNA as software, and enzymes as hardware. Put them together in a test tube. The way in which these molecules undergo chemical reactions with each other allows simple operations to be performed as a byproduct of the reactions. The scientists tell the devices what to do by controlling the composition of the DNA software molecules. It's a completely different approach to pushing electrons around a dry circuit in a conventional computer." Stefan Lovgren --Computer Made from DNA and EnzymesNational Geographic)

Can the robot uprising be far away?

"They aren't videogames, after all; except for the occasional cut scene, we almost never use video. We use images rendered on the fly--and the images are the surface of the game, the interface, the cotton candy. The meat of the game, the heart of it, is in the underlying code. These are games that run on processors, not on magnetic tape; algorithm and interactivity is what they are....Indeed, given the visual crudity of the original videogames, it's hard to believe that even non-gamers could have thought that 'video' was the single factor about those games that needed mentioning. But of course, the prevailing culture has never understood the game qua game." Greg Costikyan --Death to VideogamesGames * Design * Art * Culture)

A post from a few weeks ago, which I missed.

"When the company receives a call from someone who's clearly lost it -- which can happen several times an hour -- [psychologist]Chessin comes on the line to help the caller rediscover their happy place. Then the engineer returns to discuss the technical problem in detail." --Psychologist Helps Victims of Data LossSFGate)

At first I thought this article was a hoax, especialy when it mentioned that Chessin used to work for a suicide hotline. But I can imagine that busy (expensive) engineers don't want to be detained by the incoherent, impotent rage of hard-luck hard-drive-deprived callers. Still, this isn't a "Teen Helpline -- We're Here Because We Care" scenario -- the data recovery bill averages $900. Still, that would be a small price to pay for some of the work I've done. Hmm. I think I'll stop blogging and start backing some stuff up now...

"It's time for a reality check. Hypertext is not, and has never been, all that. Electronic literature is a tiny field and mostly, no one cares about it, except for a handful of endlessly bickering insiders. Maybe 200 people in the world are even marginally interested in the academic arguments....From the outside, though, it looks a bit like cursing a toilet manufacturer for providing the pot you shit in. If you felt better back in the outhouse, why not simply use that instead?" Diane Greco (no permalink; 24 Feb 2003)

--Hypertext & The OuthouseDiane Greco)

I enjoyed Greco's rant. Let me note first that she means something very specific when she refers to "electronic literature" and "hypertext" -- she means what I would call "canonical literary hypertext" or "that set of commercial hypertexts that tend to be studied in graduate seminars on hypertext theory," rather than the kinds of hypertext that millions of people encounter every day on the Web. Her conclusions suggest that critics who are unhappy with the state of literary hypertext should go back to what they were doing before hypertext came along. (This is how Mark Bernstein misreads my position, BTW.) But there are other alternatives -- such as looking at other kinds of cybertext that has not been oversaturated with scholarship. I'm thinking about computer games (particularly interactive fiction) and weblogs. While Espen Aarseth's Cybertext was written before the blogging boom, it offers a very thoughtful survey of a wide variety of different kinds of creative electronic texts. I tell my students to rent Landow's Hypertext, but I make them buy Aarseth's Cybertext and Killian's Writing for the Web.

"When writing a website the writer needs to be focused on the reader; that is write for readers. Even though human readers are those who are going to be active and do something about your site, one of your primary readers is Googlebot. Writers need to be aware that building information has an effect on your site and also any site to which you create links within that information. The web is a connected world and what you do on your site may greatly affect not only your position in search engine results, but also other people's position and how Google perceives their web pages." Elwyn Jenkins --Writing for GoogleGoogleVillage)

While Elwyn does acknowledge that human readers (or at least scanners and skimmers) are the primary audience for your web site, I think it's also worth noting that if your writing appears to be optimized to attract Google hits, expert readers may be able to detect the Googlebot bias, and may find themselves less likely to link to the page that you have designed to be so useful to the Googlebot. Just a thought.

"Dear Strong Bad,|Right now I am putting off writing a paper for my English class. Can you write my Englilsh paper? I don't even care if it's good or not. I just don't want to do it." --A Well Thought-Out Englilsh [sic] Paper, by Karl "The Yellow Dart" SmithHome Star Runner)

Never underestimate how a cool nickname and a little bit of cash can affect the grade of your "Englilsh" paper.

"People will soon be able to publish their own website via their phones as blogging goes mobile." --Blogging Goes MobileBBC)

Sounds a bit much like drafting a press release to fill a Sunday evening news gap, but journalists have been quick to grasp the social significance of weblogs. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Dave Winer on scripting news quotes from my "On the Trail of the Memex" in order to disagree:

Here's one for the history books. "For all intents and purposes, Google owns the Web, by virtue of its superior and highly popular search engine." I don't agree. Teoma appears to be as good a search engine as Google...

Maybe Temoa is just as good, but at the moment anyway, Teoma isn't nearly as popular. Winer does make an excellent point that I didn't address: "BTW, anyone who believes that Google actually owns the Web should remember that Microsoft owns the browser. Google is a good search engine and blogging tool. We don't know how they will connect them yet. I bet they don't either." --Google Don't BlinkScripting News)

DADDY: Peter, the weather is so nice... let's play a game.
PETER (age 4): I do NOT want to play any game that's in the world. I want to play a game that's NOT in the world.
DADDY: Peter, what kind of game is not in the world?
PETER: (pointing towards computer) On a CD.Games: Not in the WorldLiteracy Weblog)

Here is the complete text of a message in my inbox today, from someone who signed it "freak":

"help find information about the beleives of the pilgrims in 1620"

How Not to Request Help OnlineE-Mail)

Sorry. Please do your own homework.

"When we view the computer as an interactive artifact the computer exists as our partner in the completion of important tasks. We ask the computer to do something and it, by proxy, does it for us. We should, instead, view the computer as a tool that we use to perform tasks: we use it so that we can do the important task. Calling the computer a tool may seem a simple matter of word choice but changing the view of the computer from interactive artifact to tool has a significant impact on how we think about the computer, what we expect of it, how we design for it and how we train for its use." Chris Dent --The Computer as Tool: From Interaction to AugmentationBurning Chrome)

"I HAVE just ploughed through the first five books devoted to an Internet art form that fascinates me and may well be unknown to you. Where to start?|Say for the moment that the weblog - a log of the World Wide Web, as it were -can be personal publishing at its most liberating, an online guide through the thickets of the Internet, a journal or diary, easily updated and nestled in a global neighbourhood. It can be fresh and unpredictable, still something of a mystery to the American weblog pioneers of the 1990s who populate these books. " Bernard Lane --Welcome to Bloggers WorldAustrailian IT)

Good capsule summaries of books I'm going to ask my university library to carry.

"Hypertext as mediated by the Web browser has not proved to embody the qualities of the ideal post-structural text longed for by literary theorists such as George Landow; neither has the World Wide Web fulfilled the document-association function of the memex, the hypothetical research tool Vannevar Bush described in his 1945 essay, As We May Think. Bush’s memex was not merely a form of photo-mechanical hypertext, but also a means for the full-scale transfer of complex collaborative thought processes, as encoded by individual researchers via their own personal document association schemas. While weblogs, the most influential textual genre truly native to the World Wide Web, do facilitate the exchange of information across the Internet, that information must be carefully filtered in order to be useful. Google’s February 2003 purchase of the popular weblogging platform Blogger signals a shift towards content production that may create a conflict of interest; nevertheless, Google’s proven ability to mine the data encoded in annotated trails of linked documents may create the synergy necessary to fulfill Vannevar Bush’s vision." Dennis G. Jerz

--On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google GalaxyDichtung Digital)

Thanks to Nick Montfort, Clancy Ratliff, and Charlie Lowe, each of whom responded within hours of my request for help on my rough draft. I had this article ready to go this weekend, when Google's purchase of Blogger sort of threw me for a loop.

"Andy Serkis' computer-aided performance was one of the best things about 'The Two Towers.'... Is Hollywood ready to acknowledge and honor digital performances, or even human-digital hybrids? This year, the answer seems to be a resounding no." Ivan Askwith --Gollum: Dissed by the Oscars?Salon)

"The dot-com economy is long gone, but that hasn't curbed the public's appetite for shopping, banking and generally amusing themselves on the World Wide Web, according to a recent study.|Significantly more people are using the Web to send pictures and videos, shop, download music, play games and do their banking, according a study that compares last year's habits with those of 2000.... That surge comes too late, however, for many now defunct Internet start-ups that tried to capitalise on people's urge to spend online." --Survey: Web Use Trends Ever UpwardZDNet)

--Google Blogging Right AlongWired)

There's nothing new in this Wired story that wasn't already covered by blogs over the weekend.

Dan Gillmor's column reports that Google has purchased Blogging Company Pyra, which means that Google is becoming the AOLTimeWarner of the Internet. So far, I've been happy with whatever Google has done... but think about it -- I search the web with Google, I search Usenet with Google, I read the news with Google, and now (while I won't swtich to Pyra for my blogging software) potentially millions of bloggers will be using Google software. Is Google any less cool? No... but competition is good, and this news worries me just a bit. --DGJForget AOL -- Google will Bring Blogging to the Next LevelLiteracy Weblog)

"'The Internet allows us to do all kinds of things quickly and efficiently, and that includes hoaxing,' Jerz says.|Jerz, an assistant professor of English at UW-Eau Claire, learned of the Olsen hoax when a skeptical student emailed him the fake CNN story....News hoaxes aren't the only ones that spread by e-mail, says Jerz, who often sees financial scams, false computer virus warnings and tales of fictional missing children. All of these are examples of 'memes,' the intellectual equivalent of genes, ideas that reproduce themselves by jumping from brain to brain, Jerz says. Many vanish quickly, but others spread swiftly." Tom Giffey --Gotcha! Olsen Twins Hoax Had 'em Fooled (Leader Telegram)

This local news story from the Eau Claire paper offers a good summary and reflection on the Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen hoax that was spreading across the Internet about two weeks ago.

"If recent rumours are to be believed, AOL is getting ready in the next month or so to add blogging to the home-page services it offers users.|It is a sign of how far these regularly updated pages of web links with personal comment have come in the past five years." --Blogging for DollarsThe Age)

Hrmm. The article mentions "recent rumors" about AOL but doesn't invite comment from an AOL spokesperson. Maybe AOL is planning to join the blogging scene, but this article is speculation and reflection, not news.

"Google adds fresh pages to its database everyday. You can search these fresh pages to find new information from today, yesterday or over the last 7 days if you wish. The only thing is, do not head to Google." --Search the Fresh Internet in Google with GooFresh!Smoogle)

A description of GooFresh, a website that lets you filter your Google results by date. About that name... "FreshGoo" would have more character.

"Things like the Back and forward button, we never intended that to be a permanent part of the interface. But people get locked into metaphors. You have to be careful with the metaphors you put in front of people because once they click onto one, that's it." An interview with Netscape creator Marc Andreessen --Web Browsers: 10 Years Old ("Conversation With Marc Andreessen")Wired)

"I want to invent a word which describes the experience of following all those links on the sidebar of someone's blog. Yeah, I know blogrolling exists. But that's just for making the links. When I visit DFWblogs or Grumpy Girl , I get hooked on all these fascinating blog names (ethnic lounge, not so girlie, bathtub gin, sqeeshee) and want to check out every site. Blurging? Blurfing? Nameadexing? Linkalogging? Gimmee a second to think of something...though I do like the toyish sound of Linkalogging." Jrice --What Do Ya Call ItKairosNews)

"Game importers and Internet cafés remain vulnerable. Police are cracking down on players of Counter-Strike, Age of Empires, and digital backgammon and chess. More than 50 people have been arrested and face up to three months in prison and 5,000-euro fines." --More Fallout Over Greek Game BanWired)

"Over the past month, the U.S. military has periodically sent e-mail to Iraqi military and government officials urging them to protect their families by helping U.N. inspectors and turning away from Saddam Hussein.|U.S. government officials won't comment on the campaign, but according to sources in Iraq and Iraqis living in the United States, each time the e-mails are sent, Internet access all over Iraq soon suffers a 'service outage.' Service resumes after the U.S. military missives have been purged from inboxes. " Michelle Delio --U.S. Tries E-Mail to Charm IraqisWired)

"In its relentless pursuit of the power curve of Moore's law, at the expense of the much less interesting price curve, the entire electronics industry may be unknowingly trapping itself in a giant and attenuated version of the dot-com bubble--living years into the technological future, only to be painfully snapped back to the human and economic present." Michael S. Malone --Forget Moore's LawRedHerring)

Moore's Law observes that computers become twice as powerful every year and a half. But who really needs twice as much computing power every 18 months? The CEO of Google announced that he wasn't planning to upgrade Google's computers to make use of the newest, fastest computer technology -- instead, he will use the same money to buy a larger number of cheaper computers.

"When you play a multiplayer FPS video game, like Counter-Strike, you enter a complex social world, a subculture, bringing together all of the problems and possibilities of power relationships dominant in the non-virtual world. Understanding these innovations requires examining player in-game behavior, specifically the types of textual (in-game chats) and nonverbal (logo design, avatar design and movement, map making, etc.) actions." Talmadge Wright, Eric Boria and Paul Breidenbach --Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games: Playing Counter-StrikeGame Studies)

I got an e-mail from Bob Mosley, compiler of the Columbia loss FAQ, which called to my attention the latest updates to the Columbia FAQ resource, which was assembled rapidly by scores of volunteers on the day of the incident, --STS-107 "Columbia" Loss FAQsci.space.*)

"A homepage really has two main goals: to give users information, and to serve as their top-level navigation for information that's inside the site.... [S]ample sites allocated less than half the screen space to useful pixels." Jakob Nielsen --Homepage Real Estate AllocationUseIT.com)

"MMRPGs are pervasive virtual environments populated by human-controlled digital people from around the globe. | Players develop characters, work towards goals, solve puzzles and engage in social fluttery. They're the visual marriage of text-based adventures and chat rooms, and women are flocking." Alex Krotoski --Online Role-Playing Fits the BillGuardian)

Interesting... while Slashdot just posted a thread savaging The Sims Online, the article above praises it (but it apparently hasn't been released in the UK yet).

"That people are gravitating from the television to the Internet, especially for information, is, of course, extremely good news--at least for us. But while they are coming more, they are believing less: Last year the UCLA survey indicated that 58% of Internet users believed that most of what they read online was 'reliable and accurate.'" Dan Ackman

--For 53% Reliable Information, Click Here Forbes)

Unlike many journalists summarizing (and dumbing down) academic articles, Ackman offers an unusually close examination of the original academic study. I like it when news summaries of academic articles acknowledge when the journalists are moving beyond the gaurded conclusions offered by the academics, and into the kind of headline material that attracts readers (and undergraduates doing research online).

"The social structure of the Network Age is already evident, and we can potentially anticipate a great deal about the next few decades of our lives by examining the essence of the network, both in its literal and figurative manifestations. But understanding the order of the coming age of distributed culture requires us first to examine our most recent eras, Modernism and Postmodernism, because it is within this longer context that the next age begins to make sense." --Postmodernism is Dead: Now What? Distributed Culture and the Rise of the Network AgeIntelligent Agent)

See also "Cybertext Killed the Hypertext Star", Nick Montfort's insightful review of Aarseth's Cybertext. Thanks for the link, Mike.

"Some see it as part of the same cultural continuum of reality TV programming. Others see a broader trend in which digital technologies are allowing everyone to participate more directly in media experiences. Under this scenario, an era of decentralized media is fast approaching in which the idea of "consumers" of mass-market media will become obsolete, because people will be making, not consuming, culture." Leslie Walker discusses the mainstreaming of blogs. --New Kids on the BlogWashPost)

"But after being heralded on the cover of Newsweek and on '60 Minutes,' the $25-million 'Sims Online' has turned into an expensive letdown for Redwood City, Calif.-based EA. Sales are sluggish, reviews have been merciless, and many in the video game industry wonder whether online games will ever find a large following." Alex Pham --'Sims Online' Gives Creators a Painful Reality CheckLA Times)

A Slashdot poster sums it up well: "With The Sims Online, you basically end up with a graphical chat room. The tasks you perform are repetitive and dull. Each involves clicking on something and staring at the screen until that task finishes or your happiness levels go down far enough to finish it for you. Fix that up, rinse and repeat. All in all, the game ends up being a glorified IRC chat room that you pay for." And this is the next big thing in gaming?

"The kicker for economists is that these virtual economic relationships have broken into the real U.S. economy. When players found EverQuest's bartering rules inadequate, they started exchanging the armor, spells, and other Norrathian objects of value at real-world auction sites. These transactions are conducted not in Norrathian PP but in U.S. dollars and then completed between avatars inside the game. (You pay in dollars at a real-world site, then the seller's avatar gives your avatar the goods in Norrath.) You can even buy another player's avatar, complete with its accumulated skills and assets. Sony tried to stop all these transactions and persuaded eBay and Yahoo! Auctions to bar them on the grounds that they involve Sony's intellectual property. But this kind of protectionism is hard to enforce whether the goods are real or virtual: Trade in Norrathian goods and services simply migrated to other sites." Robert Shapiro --Fantasy EconomicsSlate)

"But here's the dirty little secret that may go farther in explaining why usability stinks: Most developers and designers don't give a rat's ass about it. The developers want the thing to have lots of features, so usability is the designers' problem. The designers want the project to look great, so how it works is the developers' responsibility. And most companies never even bother to test their sites or applications for usability." Fredric Paul --Putting a Bad Interface on ThingsTechweb)

"The Fake CNN News Generator was online only a week, but generated a lot of controversy after ersatz news stories were picked up by local outlets and reported as real. Phony stories about the death of musician Dave Matthews, or the Olsen twins attending local universities, for example, appeared in a number of local newspapers, as well as regional radio and TV news reports. Fake stories were generated the site's visitors, who filled out a form with the story's headline and text. After hitting a button, the site created a convincing facsimile that included CNN's logos as well as live links and banner ads." --Fake CNN Website Taken Offline Wired)

Humph. I thought the "Olsen Twins Attend UWEC" spoof required some effort on the hoaxer's part, and accordingly publicized it as a creative achievement -- but it turns out to have been a fill-in-the-blank exercise. For example, the Wired story includes a partial screen capture of a story about the Olsen twins attending Notre Dame.

I built a bloated icebox made to store
my ripe ingredients. Its shelves are crammed
with shrunken tentacles, and scalps are jammed
beside the vats of larva, pulp, and gore.
The handle's slick. It's hard to shut the door
against the swelling mold. It must be slammed.
This foul refrigerator of the damned
will always stretch to hold a little more.

The fearful call this fridge a gate to Hell,
the brave can't wait to stick their heads inside,
my neighbors can't endure the rancid smell
and wonder what the sticky magnets hide.
But now it's time to bid you, friends, farewell,
and save the nutrients your skins provide.
Jacie Ragan

--The HoardGorelets: Refrigerator of the Damned)

"The Refrigerator of the Dammed" lets you play with virtual tiles (refrigerator magnets) on a horror theme. Part of Gorelets.

"By providing a basic FAQ addressing what are expected to be the most common questions asked by persons new to the sci.space.* heirarchy and/or those regulars who are only now finding out about the tragedy, it is hoped that the degradation of the groups' signal-to-noise ratio that usually follows events of this nature will be curtailed to a tolerable level, as well as hopefully reduce the level of baseless and unfounded speculation that tragic events such as the loss of Columbia tend to foster." --STS-107 "Columbia" Loss FAQGoogleGroups)

An Internet community devoted to space science posted this FAQ page in order to protect itself against the inevitable rush of newbies. Note -- this FAQ page seems to have been compiled in advance of the onslaught of questions, which means that in this case, perhaps FAQ stands for "Fearfully Anticipated Questions"? (Found via Robot Wisdom.)

"NASA warned members of the public Sunday against trying to sell purported Columbia debris on eBay, as local law enforcement agencies struggled to cordon off and protect the hundreds of pieces of wreckage." --NASA: No Debris Sales on EBayWired)