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?

THIS is a goldmine

Just read the whole thing Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

I get so fed up with people trying desperately to demean and undemrine the greatest invention in human communication. All the bogus crap about how it undermines "real" relationships, make us all sad loners with no social skills yadda yadda.

And instead it may be creating the most literate, most communicative, most effective generation yet. No wonder it scares the bejesus out of those who have lived by controlling the message and its distribution.

Sod 'em all.

And Jon turns up with the rest of the motivation for us old farts.

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!

Doc Searls still on the cutting edge

With the 10th anniversary edition of  Cluetrain coming out, Doc is trying to keep up with postings that mention it. Trainfeed spotting

But the meat of the post is this bit.

... my son Allen came up with the “Live Web” line way back in 2003, and correctly observed that the Web of sites was essentially a static one, and that the World Live Web would branch off of it.

The language alone is a give-away. The Static Web is full of real estate language: sites, domains and locations that you architect, design and build. While the Live Web is one with feeds where you write, post, update, syndicate and now also tweet and re-tweet. To me the differences between static and live are much clearer than those between ______ (find a word) and real time.

Here's a word, history. Ossified, fixed, outdated are pretty good too.

But I love the idea of the World Live Web which, I think we'll see, is a function of bandwidth. In dialup days web p[ages needed to be relatively fixed because the constant chatter between server and client would be too much for the bandwidth to manage.

Grow that bandwidth and suddenly the conversation becomes possible and whenever we can converse, we will.

And the control freaks, freak.

Good

Is Social Media Diluting the Message?

Paul Chin is another beautiful example of competely misunderstanding the internet. Get this Is Social Media Diluting the Message?

Is the prevalence and abundance of social media -- especially micro-blogs such as the ubiquitous Twitter -- devaluing the message? Are important business-oriented messages being diluted by all the vacuous ramblings around it? Has the focus shifted away from a desire to transmit an important message through an effective medium to conjuring up any message as an excuse for using the medium?

Paul, Paul, wake up, smell the coffee.

The internet does NOT exist to promote and support business activity, it really really doesn't. eCommerce, business development, sales pitches, all that stuff is just a nuisance except for those few, VERY few occasions when we want those interactions. It was ever thus. In the words of Doc searls, "there is no demand for messages", none. And those who think the net should exist for the benefit of business are totally out of touch.

Although social media tools hold a lot of potential and have many useful professional applications when used properly, I’m seeing more and more business users jump on board for the novelty of it. They have no clear, professional goal for tweeting; they just know they want to do it.

"when used properly" ack, give me a break. Read my piece yesterday, you have said the truth, "they just know they want to do it", you just aren't listening to what you are saying.

As a result, many so-called professional tweets end up having as much relevance to the owner’s business and industry as a thirteen-year-old girl’s “C U @ recess” SMS during history class. I’ve seen business owners post their lunch and dinner plans on Twitter, brag about their weekend itinerary, or raise a question as to how the television show Lost is going to end.

Yes, exactly. Its what makes these people human, it is part of showing that they shqare the same psychological and emotional space as their hoped-for customers. THAT's marketing on the net.

The End Run Around the Gatekeeper

I get the Telecoms Newsletter which handily links me to their site and this story about increasing the zing of WiFi in the UK. UK watchdog wants to beef up wifi

   

Britain's telecom regulator, Ofcom, is looking at ways to increase the legal range of high-powered wifi equipment to 6.2 miles.  If successful, the boost in range could have profound effects for both the consumer and the industry.

   

Ofcom intends to up the power limits for 2.4Ghz band equipment which could be used to good effect .....

The dots are the bad news, to read the rest of the story, I have to pony up the paid sub. Errmm. Let's see; this is a tale about a report released by a Government regulator. What's the betting nobody has an exclusive on this one? Select text, right click, search in Google. Bingo!

Ofcom's proposal to raise Wi-Fi power limits has met with approval from a major hotzone operator, who says it could help the business case for rural broadband Wireless broadband provider The Cloud has backed a proposal from Ofcom to allow higher-powered Wi-Fi transmitters in the UK.

Niall Murphy, co-founder of The Cloud, told ZDNet UK that the regulator's plan means rural areas would have a better chance of getting coverage from wireless access providers.

   

"It means that the economics of deploying in lower density areas are improved, because with certain outdoor coverage scenarios it increases the range per kit ratio,"

And so on, including a link to the original document at OfCom, wow! Now if you really want to be anal retentive, you might want to put your exclusive content behind a paywall, but to do it with a report on a public document? Somebody is stuck in hard copy mode where you can get the money on the strength of the headline.

As Dave Weinberger points out, you have to shift your paradigm sometime.

   

A cool whiff of reality has apparently blown through the Washington Post offices. They announced yesterday that they're going to start including links to other sources in their online articles, even to competitors. That's great. It brings real value to their pages, value that users otherwise will seek elsewhere.

To paraphrase the treacly new age greeting card, "if you respect your site visitor, don't just let them go, send them somewhere interesting, its the only chance you have that they will come back."

The coda: the harder you try to hang on to them, the more you drive them away.

Update. The Post has also tried to be cute by offering Netizens the chance to be interviewed as politicians by their journo Dana Millbank. Here's the pitch.

   

Welcome to the washingtonpost.com Video Mash-Up, where our readers have the opportunity to create their own interview clips opposite Post political reporter Dana Milbank. We provide the questions, you provide the answers!

   

First, download the MPEG2 video clip you see playing at the top of this page, using the "Download Clip" button below. Using your own editing software, cut it up any way you like and splice in your own video, according to the rules below. Then attach your finished mash-up clip to an e-mail and send it to the address below.

   

In a few weeks washingtonpost.com will post all videos submitted that meet the requirements below and will give viewers the opportunity to comment and rate the videos. That's not a deadline, though -- we'll keep posting new videos if we keep getting them from you.

Umm. Probably not. In fact Millbank just looks embarrassed and sounds flat as a pancake. Its abuse of a journalist to expect them to play this silly game.

Putting up the raw material from his interviews, and providing the tools for users to edit their own pieces, then enabling them to host the results on their own sites, and paying them for any versions that the WaPo itself uses; that might have a future.

Encouraging people to upload their own interviews, especially now that Skype has a video option as well, and making those available too, and paying for corporate use of any material (like Current TV) will have an even bigger future.

Still, its 2 toes in the water, the only real question is whether the Post is doing the dipping, or is that foot Canute's?

Powered by Qumana