A Networked World

Elizabeth Farrely gets it spot on

Once in a while you get a glimpse of actual good sense, a small slice of the truth shines through, even the corporate media. Like this: Elizabeth Farrelly

The ridge on the Rhodesian ridgeback is a mild form of spina bifida, but club rules make it "the escutcheon of the breed," instructing, further, "all ridgeless puppies shall be culled." This has softened, since the film was made, to mere prepubescent desexing, but still actively selects for genetic disease, which is no less stupid.

And it was this, I finally figured, that kept recalling the NSW Right.

Our repeated election of politicians we know to be defective similarly selects, over the years, for perfidy, cronyism and prioritisation of tribal ritual over public good.

The war in Afghanistan has made clear that democracy and tribalism don't mix. Yet here in NSW we're becoming more tribal by the moment.

Neo-tribalism, a back-to-nature movement that draws on Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, idealises the tribe as open, egalitarian and classless - much as we see Australia. But tribalism has the opposite effect, constructing from rumour, superstition, xenophobia and big-man culture a fear-based hierarchy in which the few always dominate the many.

The fallacy that tribes formed on ethnic, familial, racial or corporate loyalties can coexist within a functioning democracy is multiculturalism's fatal flaw.

We all belong to tribes. Neighbourhoods, footy teams, churches, Facebook groups, families. But a healthy democracy, as John Rawls noted, requires each of us to think and vote abstractly, as if we had no vested interest in the outcome. Tribes that - like the NSW Right - demand that their members prioritise group values over those of the general populace are deeply, dangerously anti-democratic.

This is how we get John Robertson, who once promised to "put D9s and chainsaws through Currawong if I want to" as Minister for the Environment, as well as Climate Change and Energy. It's how Minister Keneally can approve a massive 188-berth marina (half as big again as the proposed Rose Bay marina) at Lake Macquarie, with five-storey residential units on bushland - proposed by Pitt Town developer Keith Johnson ($438,000 to the NSW ALP) and call it "a lively new foreshore precinct." It's how people like Richo get paid $25,000 a month by property developers for government ''access''.

There's no law against Labor MPs filling their offices and departments with spouses, relatives and friends. It's not illegal for the party to cultivate legions of the biddable who play musical chairs between departments, consultancies and ''independent'' panels - then, when the Libs get in, dive underground like mudskippers awaiting rain.

It's not illegal, but it's cosy, nepotistic and wrong. Wrong because it produces a private clubby atmosphere where party and personal interests coincide so emphatically as to obscure all else. Wrong because it generates tentacles of power that pervade and distort organisations. And wrong because it selects for deformity, so it's those with strong, healthy values, like those ridgeless ridgeback puppies, who get culled.

In 'Collapse', Jared Diamond talks about how whole societies 'choose" to fail, but, while detailing the sequence and the consequences, he doesn't actually suggest the mechanism by which those choices are made.

This is it, the mechanism, selection for deformity. The other factor is the power law, once certain types have reached a sufficient level of penetration in a system, and it doesn't matter what that type is but nothing is more certain than that it will, like Windows or VHS or MP3, once it passes that threshold, power laws guarantee its domination, even if an objective evaluation would demonstrate the catastrophic effects it would produce.

The most important lesson we have to learn is how to break inherently suicidal power structures. I don't see a lot of evidence of that, do you?

A picture telling a thousand words

No economist, except perhaps Steve Keen, will admit that they are in a market for theories and that those with the most money, ie the ones most invested in the current model, make the best customers. So naturally those economic theories that support thsoe vested interests will get the most air, regardless of their validity.

And the SMH's Jessica Irvine makes a little hay on the strength of that, incidentally undermining most of what her business writers are saying.

Heard the one about the physicist, chemist and economist stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat but a tin of baked beans? The physicist suggests forcing it open by hurling the tin against a rock at the correct velocity. The chemist proposes lighting a fire to cause it to explode.

The economist shakes her head and assures them they are going about it the wrong way: ''First we must assume we have a can opener.''

Economists' predictions are only as good as the models and assumptions underpinning them.

The debate raging about the Federal Government's emissions trading scheme shows clearly how ''economic modelling'' can be perverted by vested interests to suit their own purposes.

Industry groups have jumped on the economic modelling bandwagon with increasing enthusiasm, attempting to hijack a range of public debates, and drive threatening policies off the nearest cliff.

Yep, exactly.

But there's another message built into this story. Its about why corporate media really don't get what they are supposed to be doing.

Have alook at the graphic that is supposed to illustrate the story. Its one thing to ping someone's theories, but you do need to make sure your own house is in order.

Wasting their time

The thing I like about the net is that everyone gets to have a say, even pontificating jerks like me, Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. Given the underlying mischievousness of so many net based stuff, I'm betting this is a have. But if it isn't, the StupidFilter is a cool way to waste their time.

The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise.

HAH! The net has ALWAYS been littered with drivel, egos, flame wars, cods, gags and stupidity. Get over it guys.

The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.

Diddums. What we USED to have was a filter called the media but it too has largely joined the baying, as distinct from Bayesian, pack of  pavlovian droolers

It's time to fight back.

The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

Yep, this is a send up.

Eventually, once the research is completed, we plan to release core engine source code for incorporation into content management systems, blogs, wikis and the like. Additionally, we plan to develop a fully implemented Firefox plugin and a Wordpress plugin.

Wot? No Twitter filter?

Seriously, they should read Shirky, the net IS the filter.

In other news, Michael Jackson, having been dead for a number of years, has finally decided to lie down. The media is full of, even more than usual.

Back to the garden.

Update: I fed this page into the filter and it picked not one as stupid.

Fail.           

terry H buys a bucket of snow job

From  Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog - AP clarifies copyright threat

Thanks to Ars Technica for probing AP news editor Ted Bridis on what the cooperative plans to do to stop theft of its copyrights. Technology soon to be deployed will search for entire stories that thieves have lifted and presented without a license.

[...] “What I’m talking about, and what has really riled up our internal copyright folks, are the bloggers who take, just paste an entire 800 word story into their blog. They don’t even comment on it. And it happens way more than most people realize.”

Sorry Terry, I don't buy.

These guys are walking back their dumbness.

The clue is in the "And it happens way more than most people realize.” line.

If they have been tracking this use they know how often it happens and they could just say so instead of this "way more than we realise" bullshit. Nobody much has actually bothered to realise it at all until they brought it up, mostly because its not happening to any significant extent, even the automated trackbackers only lift a few words and the subject line.

But they don't know how much it happens and they wont until they actually get their search tool working, and when they do they'll find the problem is trivial and most importantly, it wont make any difference to their cashflowm, their bottom line or their business model.

These people are just dead between the ears and they think that using the muckspreader will solve that; it wont.

Now this sales pitch GETS the web

It turned up over the weekend on Trademe which is the NZ version of eBay and practically anyone online in NZ has bought or sold something on the site. I sold my old coffee maker the other day and bought a pile of timber for my raised beds recently. Great place.

Anyway, my wife sent me this today, Scary washing machine. No really, its terrifying!

It's the loudest most violent sounding washing machine I have ever encountered.
It makes guests scared and children cry. I've lived with it like that for almost a year and it still scares me.

Once while washing a load of towells it got a bit out of balance and it got so out of control for a minute that I swear I actually saw a porthole to another dimension open above it just for a second, there were dinosaurs on the otherside and they looked scared too, it almost sucked me in but I held onto for my life to the deepfreeze.

It sucked my shoes and pants off though and it got the iron as well which pissed me off because it was quite a good one. Luckily it sucked it's own power cord out of the wall and stopped before the whole house went in.

I drew a picture of the dinosaurs i saw incase people didn't believe me, they are partly red because my green felt ran out half way through.

I think it would be good to paint it matt black and put steel spikes all over it and draw demons on the front, however I have added an image of another possible customization option for people who like horses.

OK, so it looks like someone is having fun, but does it work?

At time of writing the bid stands at $2610. Someone is either getting paid nearly $3 for a bit of fantasy writing, or that thing better rock and roll as described.

Playing with banners

Rob Capper does interesting blog stuff, including his Red Light thoughts. but I hadn't realised that he also produces a new banner each month (I read his RSS feed so don't often see the actual site. Its a cool idea. More of us should do it. RobiNZ Personal Blog: North from Muriwai

Ths is the image for this months banner. Why take your camera to the beach on a cloudy day? I was so glad I did!

Corporate media hexes MySpace

I was a late comer to MySpace so I never knew it in its early go-go days. But when Rupert Murdoch bought it along with sports publisher Scout Media and online video gaming company IGN Entertainment in 2005 I quoted him thus

"There's
no panic, and there was certainly no overpayment," he says. "It was a
very careful strategy to go for the two biggest community sites for
people under 30. If you take the number of page views in the US, we are
the third biggest presence on the Internet already.

"Now we're not the most profitable, or anything like it;
we have a huge amount of work ahead to get that whole thing right. And
we're working very hard to keep improving."

Whistling
in the graveyard. When eBay buys Skype I think, "OK, someone who has
built an Internet fortune buys a new property, they probably know what
they are doing". When someone who has admitted his failure to get the
net blows billions to "buy" audience, I think, "panic".

Its taken 4 years but with a 31% shrinkage in the latest survey, its not surprising that we get this. Murdoch poised to axe jobs at MySpace

RUPERT MURDOCH'S News Corp plans significant job cuts at its Fox Interactive Media unit, which houses the popular MySpace networking site, and has ditched plans to move the division into massive new headquarters in western Los Angeles, according to US media reports.

The savings push comes after the 78-year-old media mogul in April hired the former AOL boss Jonathan Miller to overhaul the internet unit, whose growth has stalled in the advertising downturn. Weeks later, he also replaced the two MySpace founders to revive the waning appeal of the site which has lost market share to its rival Facebook.

Apparently there was some overpayment after all.

About the same time as he bought these expensive trophies, the SMH ran this little puff.

Global media baron Rupert Murdoch is steaming ahead with plans
to dominate the internet, telling investors to expect his strategy
for conquest to be unveiled within weeks.

So much for domination; wrong thinking Rup. Murdoch doesn't get the net, AOL isn't the net, put 'em together and what have you got? More sackings to come. It'll take a year, but the deathwatch for MySpace is on.

Scribefire is the biz

I was just bemoaning the difficulty of posting similar or identical content to multiple blogs, and the lack of a tool like Hootsuite that lets me post to multiple twitter accounts at the same time. Fortunately I was moaning to Stephen Blyth who is connected to various of my NFP activities and he pointed me to Scribefire which does exactly what I want.

It works like this.

The first time you open ScribeFire, an account wizard will appear to help you connect ScribeFire to your blog. Simply fill in the information it asks for, and when you finish, your blog will be listed in the right-hand pane:

To post to your blog, simply type some text in the main editor panel of ScribeFire, give it a title and click the Publish button:

ScribeFire will post the entry to your blog, and it will appear in the list of entries in the right sidebar so that you can edit or delete it later if you want.

Scribe fire also lets you:

• select and drag content from the webpage into the workspace
• edit existing entries
• keep the content in the workspace and then publish to another blog
• save as a draft
• schedule publication

Other Features

Other features of ScribeFire allow you to categorize and tag your blog posts, upload images, set the timestamp of your posts, save works-in-progress as notes, post an entry as a draft, share your posts on social websites, and upload files via FTP. 

Not to mention embed Youtube video and images from your hard drive, Flickr, a web page and find related images with Zemanta. It also allows multiple category selection and trackback URLs by default (which is better than my TypePad or Wordpress bookmarklets). These guys are GOOD.

I'm still figuring out how to automatically import page titles and URL's but since I've only had it 15 minutes, I can't really complain.

Best of all, its a Firefox PLUGIN. Brilliant

Video on demand creeps closer

Jennifer LeClaire at NewsFactor Network looks at the latest name to sidel up to video on demand. Disney's Hulu Investment Could Be a Milestone for TV.

Disney's decision to take a 30 percent stake in online video aggregator Hulu could be a significant milestone in the evolution of television. That's because Disney is adding its premium content to an already robust lineup from other Hulu stakeholders, including NBC Universal, News Corp., Sony Pictures, MTV Networks, Paramount and more than 100 others. "Hulu is creating significant value for users, advertisers and content owners," said Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Providence, one of Hulu's joint-venture partners. "This balance, together with aggregated professional content and an expanding base of over 200 brand advertisers, is establishing Hulu as a compelling online video monetization platform. Hulu is a bright spot in the new media landscape." What About CBS? Disney adds full-length episodes viewers can't find on YouTube, such as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, Private Practice, Scrubs, Lost and Grey's Anatomy, as well as classics from ABC's library and movies from Walt Disney Studios. "It's all about content people want to watch. The more content you get, the more people are going to watch," said Michael Gartenberg, a vice present at Interpret. "Getting Disney/ABC on board is huge because it increases the amount of tier-one content on Hulu that people want to watch. It also leaves CBC out there by itself and makes you wonder how long it's going to be before CBS gets on board as well." CBS may still be keeping an eye on what Gartenberg calls an "experiment." This experiment introduces plenty of questions to the broadcasting marketplace and Hulu's role. What is the future of Hulu? Will Hulu go mainstream and eventually get integrated into traditional TV sets? Or will Hulu be constrained to PCs and perhaps cell phones only? What does this mean ultimately to the content business?

What it means is that these guys are getting FINALLY and at last and after everyone with two brain cells to rub together is that we are OVER scheduled programming.

We have bedcome the random access users of information and entertainment, we want this stuff when it suits us, not whern it suits the TV company. And no, we wont pay for the content any more than we would have paid for it on TV, but we will pay for control.

Meanwhile, out here in the boonies, TVNZ regularly informs me that if I missed a programme I can always watch it via their website, And they are not just messing with news, weather and the odd sports clip. Llast night's Greys Anatomy is already up, along with Gossip Girl, Ugly Betty and, god help me, location location location.

My cable costs me $46 a month for basic service which feeds me zillions of hours of stuff I never watch and never will (Fox propaganda networkk for example) but buried in that stream are programmes and series that I would be more than happy to watch if I could just hold them still for a moment.

Of couse, if I want to pay another $15 a month and buy some more hardware I can do that for cable now, but I'm still stuck in front of the TV, not good enough. That is why YouTube and now Hulu are getting traction, they have the right answer to the questions about what, when, where, how often and who is in control.

You can have $50 a month from me if I can have access to specific programmes of my own choosing to watch when and as often as I want.

Not only will that ease your network load, it will give you a much better idea of my interests so you can better target your ads, and it will also tell you which programmes to ditch - do you really think Dancing with the Stairs would be half as 'popular' if we had the choice of watching anything we wanted from the world of video material?

Ha

Ha

Hahahahahaha

Look who leaked U2's new album.

Full CD-quality copies of every song on U2's upcoming album, No Line On The Horizon, have been leaked on to the web after Universal Music Australia accidentally put it up for sale on its online music store two weeks early.

The album - U2's 12th - goes on sale on March 3 but it was available to download for a brief period this week on getmusic.com.au, run by Universal Music Australia.

The U2 fan blog, U2log.com, published a screenshot showing it had bought the album for $19.80. Now, No Line On The Horizon is widely available on BitTorrent and other file sharing websites.

Universal Music Australia did not respond to calls asking how the track went up for sale early. It is not clear if the leak to illegal download sites was a result of this error, however, it is the likely explanation as U2 has kept the album under wraps and reportedly sent no preview copies to the press, instead organising private hearings.

Scores of fans - both in Australia and overseas - have posted on unofficial U2 message boards saying they bought the album from getmusic.com.au during the period it was available.
[...]

But the album, U2's first in five years, will not be completely new to hardcore U2 fans as poor quality recordings of four tracks were published on the web in August last year after frontman Bono played them too loudly on his stereo at his villa in the south of France.

A U2 fanatic from the Netherlands who was holidaying in the village of Eze, on the French riviera, heard the new tracks being blared from Bono's window and decided to record them using his mobile phone.

The quality was poor and the beach could be heard in the background but that didn't deter U2 fans keen for a teaser.

Can we just quit with the attempts to manipulate the market and pretend that a new U2 album, or anything else in the creative world needs a veil of secrecy and a big reveal to mean anything?

U2 fans buy, and will buy their stuff because the music is good. U2 could put their whole recording session online and their fans would soak up every note, every fluff, every take on every song and then they would buy the album anyway.

For crying out loud, lets just get into the 21sty century, please.