Cyberculture: June 2003 Archive Page

"The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems." Jakob Nielsen --Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (Alertbox)

I'm guessing Nielsen has noticed that lots of people have been writing and thinking critically about Google lately. This article isn't really about Google at all -- it's an introduction to information foraging, and uses "cute" subheadings that extend the metaphor.

I think it's great that Nielsen has provided such a useful introduction to the concept, but people who clicked on the link in order to read what Jakob the Usability Guru has to say about Google will probably be a disappointed. Maybe he should have written two articles instead -- one that offers the introduction to information foraging, and another that begins with the assumption that reader already knows about information foraging, and thus is able to appreciate the following (which is buried deep in the article):

Information foraging predicts that the easier it is to find good patches, the quicker users will leave a patch. Thus, the better search engines get at highlighting quality sites, the less time users will spend on any one site.

"We?re quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that's how we treat e-mail now. But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you?ve got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time. So I'm guessing that we?ll start to see that sort of timeline become more and more important." Tim Brown --Master of Design  (Technology Review)

"A weblog, also known as a *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the reader sees the most recent post first. The style is typically personal and informal. Freely available tools on the World Wide Web make it easy for anybody to publish their own weblog, so there is a lot of variety in the quality, content and ambition of weblogs, and a weblog may have anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of daily readers. Weblogs first appeared in the mid-nineties and became more widely popular as simple and free publishing tools such as Blogger.com became available towards the turn of the century...." Jill Walker --Final Version of Weblog Definition (jill/txt)

Jill has responded to comments on the first draft. I quibbled with her use of "personal" and her focus on creative/diary weblogs rather than filter/community blogs, but her definition probably suits her intended audience (readers of an encyclopedia of narrative theory).

Hurrah for the National Do Not Call Registry website. But wait...

"A person who wants to be included on the list will receive an e-mail from the government, then must send back an e-mail reply as confirmation. But a problem's arisen, as at least one major processor of e-mail -- Yahoo -- is blocking the confirmation e-mail..." Bambi Francisco

--Yahoo blocks FTC do-not-call mail (Marketwatch)

"Google Inc., want to know how to compete with Microsoft? Endear yourself to us all. Listen to the likes of us the little people of the Internet. Make the toolbar cross-platform and you will endear yourself to all of us. Change the 'BlogThis!' to enable us to blog to whatever blog tools we use. When Microsoft pushes us all into using a Microsoft Operating System, the Microsoft Search Engine, the Microsoft Word Processor, the Microsoft Weblog Tool, the Microsoft Password System, and the Microsoft Telephone through which we blog to our Microsoft Blogging site, we (all us bloggers, the 3 million of us and the other 10 million who are taking up blogging in the near future) will use the Google Search Engine that has cross-platform support to all the blogging companies." Elwyn Jenkins --Google Toolbar 'BlogThis!' Disappoints Fans (Microdoc News)

"The Vatican has revealed it has taken on a team of experts to protect the Pope's website which is attacked by some 10,000 viruses a month and at least 30 mainly American hackers every day." --Pope Moves against Hackers (ABC - Austrailia)

"In the light of Microsoft rumblings about creating its own search services, we need to ask just where Google is going with a toolbar built only for a Microsoft product. Microsoft are shaping up to take Google out!" --Microsoft and the New Google Toolbar (Microdoc News)

Elwyn offers his usual thoughtful critique of all things Google. Lots of contextualized links to relevant info elsewhere on the Internet.

"the new google toolbar not only blocks popup ads, it comes with a 'blog this!' button for blogger integration." mecran01 --Google *is* the OS (KairosNews)

Is this the first sign of what happens now that Google has purchased Blogger? I don't use Blogger, so I won't be able to experiment with that feature. Anyone want to share their experiences? Until I get my comments feature activated on this home-grown website, you can post your comments on KairosNews (free registration required). Or, you can post on WebWord (no registration required.)

"The move underlines how desperate the music industry has become to staunch the flow of illegal downloads, which are beginning to devastate compact disc sales. In 2000, the 10 top-selling albums in the US sold a total of 60m copies. In 2001 that dropped to 40m, and last year it was 34m." David Teather --US Music Industry to Sue Individuals in Drive Against Net Piracy (Guardian)

When the subject of illegal file-sharing came up in a recent class, one of my freshman smirked and said, "They [i.e. the recording companies] should get over it." In the long run, they will... but history is full of examples of innovation delayed by powerful institutions that feel threatened. In the early 20th century, local musician unions prevented radio stations from playing recorded music, on the grounds that doing so took jobs away from professional musicians. But pre-recorded music won out over live bands, and today it's a lot harder today to make a living as a professional musician.

I don't really feel like I am a stakeholder in the file-sharing issue, but I do like watching the fur fly.

"I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a medium sized public university, in a computer classroom for next semester. Every student has their own machine with an internet connection. I am thinking about using a weblog for them to post their work and critique each other. Do you guys have any other cool ideas on what to do and what NOT to do?" flard --Innovative Uses for a Computer Classroom (SlashDot)

Replies to this post on Slashdot range from flame-bait to rather interesting. I didn't see any brilliant new suggestions in the comments I read, but it is interesting to see how these Slashdotters construct the "computers in the writing classroom" issue.

At UWEC, my fresh comp students were in the computer room three hours a week, and in the regular classroom two hours. But the room was a public lab that we had to reserve for teaching. Students who weren't in the class had a habit of marching in and taking a seat. A few students who sat in the back this year said they were distracted by the interlopers, and certainly whenever for a few moments I wanted to stop the keyboard clicking in order to have a brief discussion, or asked a student to read from his or her paper, the presence of strangers in the room was really disruptive.

Another huge problem with teaching in the UWEC labs is that the students were completely isolated from everyone except the people to their right and left. They couldn't see around their monitors (and reguarly tried to hide behind them in order to avoid being called on), and they couldn't hear each other over the whirring fans.

The classroom where I did my teaching demonstration at Seton Hill has recessed computer monitors, and I found it much, much easier to interact.

Because students are human, they will occasionally zone out and goof off. They will IM each other, check their mail, and play games. I really didn't mind that -- I learned to be generally tolerant of a certain amount of background noise (since some students used their computer during lectures to keep notes or to review the assigned readings). And the absence of clicking was generally a good sign that I had their attention... when the material was not riveting, even the most dedicated students started clicking just a little bit... and that would be a good sign that we needed a change of pace.

There were some weeks when I didn't really require three hours in the lab, so the presence of computers was distracting; and some weeks when the students wanted more lab time.

"Build great, innovative software, sell it to the users at a reasonable price, make millions of dollars, benefit humanity, retire young. And if you mistreat your users, you'll loose them, because you have a hundred competitors. The old Silicon Valley was built on this dream, and it worked for two decades.|But this dream is nearly gone. It's getting crushed between the awful power of Microsoft, and the onrushing juggernaut of open source. A 30-person company can't compete with Microsoft. And a 30-person company will have a hard time competing with 300 open source contributors giving software away for free..." --The Missing Future (Random Hacks)

"This past year has seen the world of Weblogs, aka the blogosphere, grow in power and stature, if not to the general public, then to the other media. So we've created a graphical depiction of what I believe to be the most influential blogs, pushing the direction of media coverage and perhaps even public policy. | The bigger the mouth, the more influential the Weblog. The position of the mouth shows its political orientation (left or right) and whether it's doing more blogging (top) or more journalism (bottom)." Mark Glaser --Mark Glaser's Guide to the Blogosphere (OJR)

"In fact, our language is littered with words that once used to be brands. Escalator, pogo, gunk and heroin are all examples, as is tabloid, which was originally registered by a drugs company in 1884 and came to mean 'small tablet'." --Google Calls in the 'Language Police' (BBC)

This is a light-weight riff on the observation that widespread use of the verb "google" may threaten Google's trademark. Note those quotation marks in the headline... who, exactly, is being quoted? The picture of the roller-skating police officers looks like a psychological scare tactic, but the caption ("Definitely not Rollerblades.") makes it almost defensible.

Incidentally, the term "hoovering" is popular in the UK but not in the US.

It's pretty easy to think of coke, kleenex, band-aid, xerox, etc.

Google is Already Spidering my New SiteLiteracy Weblog)

My digital move from UWEC to Seton Hill is happening much faster than I had anticipated. My UWEC weblog, which changed several times a day, seems to have encouraged Google's spiders to check out a good chunk of my website on a regular basis. The cache was rarely more than a day behind the pages that updated most frequently, and if I made a minor change to a web page that didn't change frequently, the change was usually in Google's system within a few days.

I've been working on my Seton Hill website for about two months now; it's been "live" all that time, but Google didn't find it because I wasn't linking to it, and nobody else was, either. Now, just a few days after my farewell post to my UWEC blog, Google has found this one, and has so far indexed about 150 pages on the site. That's pretty darn efficient.

While my UWEC site had been dormant for about three weeks, I started posting on it again, in order to encourage the bots, spiders, and real human beings to start visiting it on a regular basis again, and thus perhaps have a bigger audience when the move took place.

I posted the announcement on my old weblog, posted to a pair of interactive fiction news groups, pinged weblogs.com, and e-mailed about four webloggers to inform them of the link change. I really haven't spent much time publicizing the new site, but the response was tremendous.

Now I'd like to watch to see what PageRank does to some pages where my UWEC website was the top hit.

• One of my UWEC pages is the top Google hit for "blurbs," but my Seton Hill site (which has the same content but no off-site publicity) is nowhere in sight.
• I just changed my York Corpus Christi website (another top Google hit) to redirect to the new page, and since Thursday is the day the medieval church would have celebrated the Feast of Corpus Chisti, and this Sunday is the day the modern church will celebrate it, I plan to Google for Catholic and Medieval blogs and send a handful of them a brief note.
• There are already a few links to my new "Literacy Weblog," and at the moment my Seton Hill site is the eighth listed in a Google search. [Update 30 June: Now the Seton Hill version is second.]
• A Google search for "Dennis G. Jerz" brings my UWEC site up first, but my Seton Hill site up fifth. [Update 30 Jun: Now the Seton Hill site is third, but it's not my new home page -- it's the index page for my writing subdirectory.]

At the moment, while Google does seem to be paying some attention to category listings (which at the moment aren't actually filtering things... sorry about that), it hasn't seem to be searching any of the permalinks.

For the record, in my last month at UWEC, the stylesheet I use on my weblog was getting about 1500 hits per week, but my website as a whole was getting just under 50,000 hits per week. So, as far as the rest of the Internet is concerned, the value of my website far overshadows the value of my weblog, but the bots visit my site far more often than it would be necessary to index an archive of online teaching aids.

"Microsoft, which has been talking tough on spam, is putting its money where its mouth is. The company revealed Tuesday that it has filed 15 civil suits in the United States and the United Kingdom against spammers who it says have sent more than 2 billion unsolicited messages to users of Microsoft's MSN and Hotmail E-mail services." Tony Kontzer --Microsoft Takes Spammers to Court (Information Week)

Would it be over-reacting to say that I'd prefer to give random strangers free reign in my in box than to let Microsoft do something that would force me to thank them? Is this a PR ploy from Microsoft? Or am I just hunting for another reason to hate the makers of Clippy the Annoying Office Assistant?

On Barger, Books and BlogsLiteracy Weblog)

Unless I'm mistaken, Jorn Barger doesn't seem to have updated his Robot Wisdom weblog in weeks (yeah, yeah, I'm the pot, he's the kettle, I know).

The 2 Blowhards critique of book culture reminds me of "Theory: Write a web-book in a day", a usenet posting by Jorn Barger. Barger responded to my input by telling me that I should go find my own Internet where I wouldn't bother the idealists.

Barger incidentally coined the term "weblog" in a 1997 Usenet posting. The term was met with some snarky responses about bias and yellow journalism, but Barger replied as if the "yellow" comment is a superficial complaint about his choice of background color. Was Barger playing dumb, or did he miss the point of the critique? The exchange reads ambiguously to me.

Barger's Web Resources FAQ of 1999 is similarly terse and provocative -- which is consistent with Barger's casting of himself as a free-floating radical. He has in the past threatened to stop blogging unless he gets consulting work, and he seems to have disappeared from Usenet as well.

"Biographies? Serious travel books? Moneylosers for most of their authors. How so? Well, say you're lucky and your agent nails a $100,000 contract for you for a biography you're dying to write. Sounds good, huh? But run the math: First, subtract the agent's fee (10-15%), and then subtract taxes. You've got to write the book on the, say, $55,000ish that remains. Keep in mind that almost all books take longer to write and publish than expected. But, heck, you're a fast worker -- it'll only take you 3 years. That means you'll be living on $17,000 a year. And wait: you've gotta do some research -- what's a biography without research? Visiting some archives, interviewing whoever's still alive ... Guess where the money for these travels and aventures comes from? Your own pocket." --Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book (2 Blowhards)

For more depressing statistics on how institutions crush our creative fantasies, see "Courtney Love Does the Math," which presents the recording industry execs as a bunch of mean, evil dudes.

"Eurobloggers who wish to use their real names may be out of luck. For better or for worse, Europe lacks a First Amendment and the respect for limited government, private property and free enterprise that America still enjoys. And Europe sure doesn't have a Judge Stewart Dalzell, who correctly predicted seven years ago that 'the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.'" Declan McCullagh --Why Europe Still Doesn't Get the InternetNews.com)

So.. blogs are so powerful now that a legislative body is considering enforcing the right of the fisked to fisk back.

"While I'm an admirer of Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin, I don't see either of them shooting for literary effects -- rather, they excel by exploring and extending the possibilities of IF. I think my list of 'favorite IF authors' would probably not contain any surprises, but I think Graham Nelson's Jigsaw probably deserves a mention for the clever treatment of the romance, and the way the game manages to bring so many nations and eras to life." Dennis G. Jerz --Dennis Jerz Interview (Interactive Fiction) (Avventure Testuali)

A few months ago, I fired off answers to a few e-mail questions submitted to me by Francesco Cordella, editor of a delightful bilingual interactive fiction fan site. He's now posted the exchange on his site.

WebWasher Jumped the Shark?Literacy Weblog)

For about five years, I've used WebWasher -- a free program that blocks ads from web pages. Since then, it's probably saved me several days of time that I would have spent waiting for ads to download or trying to figure out how to close an annoying pop-up without accidentally clicking through. But it seems the last 2 or 3 versions have started garbling the HTML as it tries to filter out the ads. Is this something the ad people are doing deliberately, to annoy people like me? Maybe the developers of WebWasher are running out of steam and not able to keep up with the evil marketers. I can't really complain, since WebWasher was a free service.

"I nonetheless found the darknet command line calm and comforting. Not threatening at all. I suppose it had something to do with the rhythms of the interaction, for while I knew the machine was capable of unleashing unthinkable power, I also knew it would sit dormant forever, waiting for my fingers to hit the keys. There was a kind of deep, deep patience in that prompt and cursor, those courier incantations whose art I've now lost. And that deep patience--that sense of time, of scale, of sustainable rhythm--also seems lost now, bulldozed under by the broadband blast of streaming screaming everything." Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --Darknet Nostalgia (Kirschenbaum)

Reading Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" was almost a religious experience for me. Elsewhere, Matt acknowledges that using the term "nostalgia" to refer to the preservation and study of the cybertexts of just a few years ago trivializes this important cultural archaeology.

For some reason, the text of his permalink seems to be black on black -- hit CTRL-A to select all the text on the page.

Purple BarbieLiteracy Weblog)

I recently re-read Brenda Laurel's Utopian Entrepreneur, which got me thinking quite a lot about what the landscape of cyberspace will look like when my daugher Carolyn starts exploring it. And just now I found that the link to Brenda Laruel's legendary "Purple-Moon" website forwards to a Barbie website. Of course I knew that Mattel bought out Purple Moon years ago, but really... Barbie just rankles me.

"The instructional methods that help students learn technology ('Do X or else undesirable Y will result; don't do A or else undesirable B will happen; you must do Z first and then C, or else you will have to start over again') are so alien from the paradigms of humanities pedagogy ('Everybody's opinion matters; the instructor's voice should not dominate the classroom; don't damage anyone's self-esteem') that not only students but colleagues who might be observing your teaching may have a hard time adjusting to what you're accomplishing." Dennis G. Jerz --Teaching New Media (KairosNews)

This is from a post I made on KairosNews. Just trying to clear the cobwebs out of my brain after spending two weeks packing, moving and trying to unpack.

"[T]he younger people are, the more likely they are to text. | More than eight out of ten people under the age of 25 are more likely to send someone a text message than call. | But, at the other end of the scale, just 14% of those aged over 55 said they preferred to text." --Young BBC)

This article summarizes a report issued by a mobile phone company -- take both the article and the report with the appropriate caution, since people are notoriously inaccurate whenit comes to answering pollster's questions about their own behavior.

Webloggers kick Trent Lott out of his job! Weblogger Salam Pax gives the best on-the-scene reports from Iraq! Webloggers take down the top management at The New York Times! Well, two out of three ain't bad.... But most journalists -- if not the public -- couldn't keep their eyes off the train wreck and continued to follow Romenesko during the scandal." --For Bloggers, NYT Story Was Fit to Print (OJR)

It's good to be back... my new permanent digital home isn't up and running yet, but I'm back online after my move from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania.