Technology: November 2007 Archive Page

Gamers with Jobs reviews Amazon's Kindle.

Now that Jess has finished vampire romance novel number 324, I spend some quality time goofing around with the Kindle. It's surprisingly easy to get non-Amazon material on it. I just plug it in to the USB cable which perpetually hangs off the back of my laptop, and it shows up as a hard drive. I drop .txt and .mobi files into the "Book" folder and they show up. I convert a handful of PDFs to .mobi files using Mobi Creator and they work perfect, Tables of Contents and all. Sweet.

Earlier I blogged about the skeptical reviews on Amazon's site, but the knowledge that I can read student papers or classic literature on this thing makes me much happier. The price is too much for me, though...

This story brings Facebook shaming to another level.

It tells the story of an intern at a bank who emails his bosses about needing to take a day off work in October to take care of some family business in New York City. But his bosses discover a picture of him at a party in Worcester, Massachusetts, uncovering his duplicity. Worse, his boss attach ed the picture to a response email to him and BCC the entire North American staff of the bank. And, even worse, in the picture the intern--a young man named Kevin--is dressed a fairy--complete with green wings and a star-tipped wand. "Nice wand," the boss adds in his email.

Uh, no, it doesn't.

Interesting rhetoric, via YouTube. It re-mediates an animation that takes far too long to load, which is credited to Vishal Agarwala, who is apparently an undergraduate at the University of Florida.

The presentation is a useful tool for informing young people exactly why Facebook works so hard to get young people to love Facebook. A call for action, it is naive (right up there with the perennial freshman comp thesis statement, "Advertisers should stop hurting women's self-esteem by publishing images of idealized women"), and when judged by the standards of journalism, it is alarmist and one-sided.

Yes, young people should know why corporations want their personal information.

Sorry, but you can't put the real you on Facebook if you want to protect your privacy.

Tom Brokaw, via businessandmedia.org:

"I was at The Washington Post earlier today," Brokaw said. "And in the lobby they've got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is ... 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic paper roll that comes when they run out of paper and the ink is recharge and I looked at all that and I thought - 'Ten years from now, will it be here?' I don't know. Probably ... if you would do a hardcore analysis - probably not. It'll be probably digital 10 years from now."

In 2000, Salon posted an amusing spoof of Ginsberg's Howl.

I saw the best minds of my occupation destroyed by venture capital, burned-out, paranoid, postal,

dragging themselves through the Cappuccino streets of Palo Alto at Dawn looking for an equity-sharing, stock option fix,

HTML-headed Web-sters coding for the infinite broadband connection to that undiscovered e-commerce mother lode in the airy reaches of IP namespace,

who poverty and ripped Yahoo tee shirts, cubicle-eyed and wired on Starbucks sat up surfing in the virtual ether of one-million-dollar, one-bathroom condos next to the railroad tracks, skipping across the links of killer Web sites contemplating ... Java,

An excerpt from a story about The Laptop Club, a group of kids who crafted their own laptops from construction paper.

Name: Mandy
Age: 8 How often do you use a computer? Five times a week.
What do you like to do when you're using a computer? Play games and write stories and poems.
What will computers look like in the future? Well you see, if we had whole days to work on it, and bigger paper, I think we could make it way more detailed.
Who is better at using a computer, you or your parents? Games + me = good. Parents + trying = bad. I am better at using games and if you guys try them, you get crushed.
[ After being told this interview would be published on the internet ] "I'm going to be popular! I should make a blog button, right now."

While the second-most-common rating that Amazon customers have given this product is five stars, some 40% have given the Kindle one star.  The vast majority have not purchased the product, but are simply warning other would-be customers about bad experiences with previous e-book purchases, including e-books purchased from Amazon.

I still want one...

Via Newsweek:

It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

"The book," says Jeff Bezos, 43, the CEO of Internet commerce giant Amazon.com, "just turns out to be an incredible device." Then he uncorks one of his trademark laughs.

Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally--he's a big reader, and his wife is a novelist--he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. "Books are the last bastion of analog," he says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We're in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world's largest virtual store. "Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn't." Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0.

Inside Higher Ed has an interview with Christine L. Borgman

The scholarly communication system has evolved over a period of centuries -- it doesn't shift quickly. Scholarly journals still look a lot like they did in the 17th century, for example. The tenure system is a much stronger driver of scholarly infrastructure than is technology. Scholars are rewarded for publishing journal articles and books, in the right places. They are not rewarded for good data management, except in a very few fields. Rewards for open access publishing are indirect, such as more citations, and recognition of these benefits has been slow to emerge.

BBC:

A Dutch teenager has been arrested for allegedly stealing virtual furniture from "rooms" in Habbo Hotel, a 3D social networking website. The 17-year-old is accused of stealing 4,000 euros (£2,840) worth of virtual furniture, bought with real money.

According the Beeb:

A supposed asteroid, which it was feared was going to have a near-miss with Earth next week, has been identified as a spacecraft.

Just in case you were heading to the kitchen to make a tinfoil hat, I should clarify... that's an Earth spacecraft -- the European Rosetta.

Well, Google didn't say "glarbifulous" on its own, but I had a good reason to search the internet for a nonsense word.

In order to confirm my feeling that the Associated Press's preference for "Web log" is far less popular online than the traditional "weblog," I did a quick Google search.

12,900,000 Google hits for ["weblog"]

I expected that. For years, my own blog has been ranked anywhere from 99 to about 180 out of however many hits there are for "weblog," and I've been tracking that number every year when I submit my annual faculty report. I thought that maybe that number was a little lower than I remembered, but I realize that Google's numbers fluctuate as it re-indexes older sites.

I wasn't surprised when I found only a paltry

250,000 Google hits for ["web log"]

... since only AP writers format the term that way. But when I tried to exclude the AP articles that use "web log," I found... 

24,700,000 Google hits for ["web log" -AP]

Why do I get ten times more hits  for what should be a more restrictive search? 

The Googly weirdness does not stop there. When I include AP, why do I get 25,000 more hits than when I exclude it?

275,000 Google hits for ["web log" AP]

The nonsense word "glarbifulous" appears nowhere on the internet (though that will change once Google notices this post). I was quite surprised, then, to see that after excluding "glarbifulous" from my search, I find...

175,000,000 hits for [weblog -glarbifulous]

That's more than ten times as many sites as I get when I don't exclude the nonsense word. How can so many more pages NOT have a word that doesn't exist?

Maybe Google has paid closer attention to the quality of pages that contain the word "weblog," removing a lot of junk results that it figures are pointless. But maybe when I ask Google to do a search for something less popular, it thinks I might actually be interested in some of the sites it would otherwise ignore. Suddenly, every single page in its database that doesn't include "glarbifulous" becomes potentially relevant, since each of those pages has met a criterion that I have specified.

That seems to make sense, but it also seems, well, twisted. I just did a search for "the" by itself, and "the -glarbifulous" and got similar results.... about twice as many hits for the more restrictive search.

According to Rebecca Blood, in early 1999, Jesse James Garrett posted a list of 23 web sites that posted links and brief commentary. The Wayback machine's archive of Garrett's site returns this list from early 2000.

bradlands
bump
camworld
flutterby
genehack
gulker
hack the planet
honeyguide
jjg.net infosift
linkwatcher metalog
ltseek
macronin
nowthis
obscure store
peterme
psyberspace
rasterweb
rc3.org
researchbuzz news
robot wisdom
scripting news
windowseat
whump.com more like this

It might be interesting to see what happened to each of these sites.  When I started blogging later in 1999, I hadn't heard of a single one of these, though I was very familiar with the genre of what was then called the "list of links."  In February of 1998, while working at the University of Toronto' s Engineering Writing Centre, I urged web authors to "Annotate Your Lists of Links."   Later that same year, one of the e-school staff members e-mailed me a link to Arts & Letters Daily, which was precisely that -- an annotated list of links, carefully selected and always worth visiting. 

When I first started blogging in the spring of 1999, I closely copied the format of A&L Daily, which used multiple columns, did not date its entries, and used "[more]" as the link. (I first dated an entry on July 20, 1999, because I was writing about the 1969 moon landing, and I wanted to emphasize that the event took place exactly 30 years earlier, and I've dated every entry since then -- about 5500 separate entries.)

Arts & Letters Daily, which did not focus on technology issues, was not on the early 1999 list of 23 sites that have become accepted as the canonical list of early blogs. There must have been many, many other sites that were not part of this particular subnetwork; I seem to remember Blood's claims that

Before the weblog genre had a name (the term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger, 10 years ago next month... his site, "robotwisdom," is one of the canonical 23), home pages had guest books, web-based discussion boards had postings and threads, and in the pre-Google days when new content was hard to find on the web, a "What's New?" page (with a collection of short links) was an important part of large, active websites.  Many sites featured a "link of the day" or a "link of the week," though you often had to click the link to find out what was on the other end.  Dating from about 1995 was the concept of the "Web Ring," which was a standard interface that webmasters put on their home pages, with "next" and "previous" links that went offsite, to other pages in the "ring" (populated by a centrally-hosted database). 

After Googling for a bit, I just learned that the Web Ring concept was invented by Sage Weil, apparently in May 1994. In 1995, he started a company that was eventually bought out by GeoCities, which was in turn bought by Yahoo!  I remember now that the Yahoo! Webrings was a bit controversial, since Yahoo! didn't implement all the features of the original WebRing concept, though recently a Webring 2.0 concept was spun off from Yahoo!

One final note... an undergraduate student of mine, Kirsten Schubert, wrote a term paper on weblogs in 2002, which was well before there was any published scholarship on the subject. It's a good time capsule of what was available at the time -- general articles on hypertext rhetoric and digital authorship. (When teaching that class, I hadn't yet come across Mortensen and Walker's 2002 article, Blogging Thoughts -- the first academic essay focusing on blogs.)

WCBS-TV:

The spam scam involves users unknowingly sending their MySpace friends e-mails and posting comments on their profiles that plug a ploy for the supposedly free gift card that they'll never actually see, touch, or spend.

In fact, to lead the younger members on, the ads are written in "kids-speak." One such posting starts off by telling the victim, "Hey dude, check it out! You ain't gunna believe this!"

[...]

"It is an epidemic on MySpace," PC Magazine Executive Editor Jeremy Kaplan tells wcbstv.com. "It is a big problem particularly because of the pervasiveness of MySpace. If you're in junior high, high school, college -- half the world seems to have MySpace pages -- so the younger you are, the more frequently you use it and the more likely you are to encounter this thing. It is a huge problem."

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, spoke at Stanford last June:

Entertainment promises us a predictable pleasure--humor, thrills, emotional titillation, or even the odd delight of being vicariously terrified. It exploits and manipulates who we are rather than challenges us with a vision of who we might become. A child who spends a month mastering Halo or NBA Live on Xbox has not been awakened and transformed the way that child would be spending the time rehearsing a play or learning to draw.

If you don't believe me, you should read the statistical studies that are now coming out about American civic participation. Our country is dividing into two distinct behavioral groups. One group spends most of its free time sitting at home as passive consumers of electronic entertainment. Even family communication is breaking down as members increasingly spend their time alone, staring at their individual screens.

The other group also uses and enjoys the new technology, but these individuals balance it with a broader range of activities. They go out--to exercise, play sports, volunteer and do charity work at about three times the level of the first group. By every measure they are vastly more active and socially engaged than the first group.

Hmm... multiplayer online games do involve social skills, teamwork, leadership, and many other things that I would consider a social activity, rather than passive entertainment.  The culture of gaming is a spectrum, like all cultures.  It includes those who sit slack-jawed before the screen for hours, mesmerized by bits; but it also includes those who trade tips and write reviews online, and those who write fan fiction, remix videos, or teach themselves 3D design so that they can build their own game levels. The child who, inspired by an encounter with a computer game, spends a month learning how to draw with a 3D design tool can be awakened and transformed as much as a child who spends a month drawing with pen and pencil. 

But I do share Gioia's humanistic assumption that technology is best understood and most welcome as one element of a rich and diverse society, rather than a replacement for human interaction.

Thanks, Mike, for the e-mail.

There's not a whole lot more to this short article from the Press Gazette, but it's another sign of Google's power:

Google is "hugely dangerous" and is one of the major preoccupations of News Corp, according to the editor-in-chief of Times Online.

Anne Spackman, speaking as part of a panel about the future of newspapers at the Society of Editors conference, said "the number one topic of conversation at News Corp is Google."

"Its move into DNA is a massive threat and I wonder whether we will all start feeling that they are behaving a bit too much like big brother," she said.

Cringely

Google Personalized Search now uses the terms from previous searches to help fine-tune the next search, which seems good in principle, but if someone searches first on "childcare" then later on "insurance" they are likely to be served ads for insurance for children, which might not interest them at all.

There are other issues like problems with Google Analytics, and the blogosphere, if you know where to look, is full of this stuff (check my links to the right, please). But what's worst is that this is all taking place in the context of a Google customer support system that is effectively broken. They say it isn't broken, but if it takes weeks to get an answer, customer service is broken.

Google's defense, of course, is that the company will make everything right once you prove to them that they made a mistake. But Google is defendant, judge, and jury. And even if they face reality and do the right thing, it may already be too late for smaller advertisers. An algorithmic change by Google can result in AdWords budgets that worked well for years becoming suddenly depleted. All of the advertiser's money is gone, often with little to show for it. Worse still, there is no money left for ads that might generate revenue. Google says it will do the right thing, but doing that six months later has no effect for a merchant five months out of business.

Google appears to simply not understand this. Maybe with so many big jets parked at Moffett Field they've forgotten what it is like to run a business on little capital. Maybe they don't care.

From Inside Higher Ed:

• An Enthusiast's View of Academic Blogs
• A Skeptic's Take on Academic Blogs

Spit & Polish:

When this game was first released in 1880 it was so hugely popular in taverns and inns that the bank of England was forced to mint more threepenny bits to keep up with demand.

Gotta love the mustaches and bowler hats.

Anthony Grafton, in The New Yorker

The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats. But magazines and books still sell a lot of copies. The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

Jessica Mintz writes of University of Washington-Bothell professor Martha Groom's Wikipedia assignment:

"I would find these things on Wikipedia," she said, and would think, "Gosh, this is awfully thin here. I wonder if my students could fill this in?"

Wikipedia has been vilified as a petri dish for misinformation, and the variable accuracy of its articles is a point Groom readily concedes. Since the advent of the Web, she said, the quality of sources students cite has deteriorated.

For her students, the Wikipedia experiment was "transformative," and students' writing online proved better than the average undergrad research paper.

Knowing their work was headed for the Web, not just one harried professor's eyes, helped students reach higher - as did the standards set by the volunteer "Wikipedians" who police entries for accuracy and neutral tone, Groom said.

The exercise also gave students a taste of working in the real world of peer-reviewed research.