Jorn Barger has compiled a fairly exhaustive and chronological page of resources, quotes, interviews, etc on the bard of Oxford.
“We are all stupid, and we are all intelligent. The line dividing the stupid from the intelligent goes right down the middle of our heads.”
» Philip Pullman resources
[via the ever awesome Linkmachinego]
Awesome:
“The Web isn’t hypertext, it’s DECORATED DIRECTORIES!
What we have instead is the vacuous victory of typesetters over authors, and the most trivial form of hypertext that could have been imagined.”
Aww, Ted, mate. That’s a’changing… that’s a’changing.
» Ted Nelson: I DON’T BUY IN
* apologies to Rakim.
I’m going to run out of A-Life puns soon, honest.
Last week at ETCON, Tim O’Reilly asked whether bloggers were building a city or ghettos…
Now Mark Bernstein has proved that at least his artificial People’s Republic of Blogistan tends towards the ghetto model.
Maybe no big suprise there, but more remarkable that the outcome in the light of what was being discussed last week, are the Seldon-esque methods he arrives at it… We can be simulated so easily…
» Mark Bernstein: ALife and Loyalty
[thanks PAUL!]
larry lessig – the creative commons
writes books to figure out what he thinks
“code” – a dark story to be told, because the world didn’t recorgnise how computer
architecture and code embeds values into the world, and also how by not undertanding that
lawyers can screw that up and destroy it’s promise.
what are the values in the arhcietcture?
built into the core of the end-to-end interent was an archiectures, an essence that
guarantees a certain type of competition and freedom of creativity.
what wins what people choose, not what the content owners decide.
what the edge wants, not what the centre controls.
“future of ideas” – a dpressing story to be told again. threats to the structure of
particiaption from vested interests. war against the potential for innovation the internet
represents. they are winning the war. defenders of last century’s way of doing business..
suceeding in the popular mind and press… a story is being sold of “property vs. anarchy”
where property ownership = freedom, and the rest represented by communists, thieves and
anarchists.
between the extremes, there should be a “creative commons”.
freedom in the USA was architected…
the vested interested don;t want the competition that these structures engender.
Jack Valenti “they are waging a terrorist war against the most important industry in
america”
# etcon oreilly books under founders copyright. wild applause.
panel discussion –
including: David Reed, http://www.reed.com/dprframeweb/dprframe.asp?section=biography
talking about the historical lessons that allocation of radio spectrum can teach us.
carl malamud – http://www.media.org/carl.html
“copyright is dying” – david henkel wallace
“property is the sort of thing you pay taxes on -when is the last time that disney paid
taxes on their interlecttual property” – lessig.
the distinction of consumer and producer is broken down… (“the former audience” cf dan
gillmor via Doctorow). Producers WANT to control use in reaction to this break-down of the
status-quo.
questions from the floor:
going to steal the coverage from the conf. IRC channel
from #etcon:
can you be anonymous and still put something into the public domain?
the unknown comic
from Cory’s book: concept from high school whoopie, your reputation.
Reptuation becomes a key driver of choice. Reputation economy.
cory: how do we get the tech companies to do the right thing.
david keen – we have to give the people particpating in the policy creation the “right
words” – they won;t repeat a religion.
lessig – compaines aren;t paid to “do the right thing” their job is to make money…
apporach companies not as individuals that will do the right thing but as organisms that
want to make money… other wise we will fail. stop getting congress to get companies t tell
them to how to make poilcy. let;s recognise that they are very powerful entities that want
to make money, and address that.
from #etcon:
grr. that attitude winds me up. companies *can* be more responsible
we can’t just says about companies: “oh, we know they’re evil but they can’t help
it”.
make them accountable.
yes
and at some point if the standard position of companies *was* to be responsible,
then an irresponsible company would be rightly attacked
These guys make the gear. They make the content. They own the transport.
lessig – “there is no evidence that patents spur innovation… but there is evidence that it
costs millions of dollars to avoid them… patent searches, liability etc, etc” “stops small
groups of innovators from ‘stepping into the pool’ “policy makers don;t get how this
structure is destroy oppotunities for innovation”
clay
wb services aren;t really that webby
EDI+
smenatics are A HARD PORBLEM
we need a new defn of local in a network world
differnt kinds of context horzion are created by webservicezs…
iversions of scope… appication can contain mullitple machines, instead of multiple appilcations on one machine
no longer bounded by the firwall
all our defn of bundles, quanta of IT are gone
context horzions
trust horizons (lberty alliance, MSpassport etc.)
coroodination horizons – when do the members of the group go beyond that i can grasp or be comfortbale with
semantic horzioons
whre do standards come from
the powerful human desire to join together in a spirit of cooperation and collaboration (is this local to tech indystry? = “you dont get an oscar for sharing”)
stock ticker examples prevalent… no sematic problems with the problem, yet still out of 5 exmaples, none are interoperable..!
where do standards come from?:
standards bodies
800lb gorrillas (google… unilaterqally does somthing and is big enough to drag everyone with them)
results of standards wars
microsfot (ubiquiotos enough, and high renough up the stack to effect standards)
or
no standards
near-term predicitons (1-2 years)
-two thread
EDI++ (XML + internet instead of proprietary) -big win to b2b but booo-ring…
RPC++ – slower, harder
more standards wars – xml makes it easier to right a standard..
people think they can own stanards… and can build them easier.. so go for stanards landgrab.
therfore stanbrds wars are
-started faster
ended faster, limited domains (fought mainly on just the semantics)
easier on the losers (cos not heaviy investment… just semantics)
rap[id deployment in controlled environments
-intrantes, supply chains, extranets
– in-company standards wars!!!
-everyone is a software publisher (first level of web, everyone was a publisher.. had to take on new responsiblity… now next level rises to level of reposobiluty and support of that of a software house)
slow deployment in large heterogenous environments
-e.g the internet.
q from audience – what about on devices, arfe they controlled envinements?
clay – prediciton still applies “higher in stack these things are towards the suer.. the more semantic coordination problems”
q- will webservices be viewd as us-cenytric standards seting?
clay – like EDI, the UN has created a web services standard – but yes… still tensions, pressures to create counterstandards along trade-bloc/national/linguistic lines.
clay – “remember that it took us twenty years to get to TCP/IP”
creative commons
once – islands of interllectual property protection in a “sea of freedom”
now the opposite is true.
it’s actually worse, because the islands of public domain, but it’s impossible to know where they are!
copyright is broad, growing and applies automatically
this default protection doesn;t always match creators intentions
transactions costs make it difficult to change the default
cretaive commons wants to cultiavte and clarify the public domain.
restoring the balance between te public and the proprietary
help people dedicate their works to the pu blic domain or disclaim some rights
help them communciate those intentions clearly to others
make it easy to identify and locate workls and the ways they may be used
increase the store of works online that people can share clearly
launching web-based application to do this.
why would someone do this
who – scolars, artists, musicians filmakaers
why – fame fortune freedom
how – public domain dedication / custom licensing
overall goal – increase the store of works online that people can share clearly
it’s very very cool.
lisa rein is demonstrating the web app – clear and easy to follow… fricitonless… y’know… it could take off. let’s hope so. so good to see the good guys doing something amazingly well in cooperation…
Bruce Scheiner is talked about the difficulties of securing the “most complex machine we’ve ever built” – The Internet. His thesis is that security is a social/human and business culture problem, not a technology problem.
Sounds a lot like this Neal Stephenson riff:
“I think that security measures of a purely technological nature, such as guns and crypto, are of real value, but that the great bulk of our security, at least in modern industrialized nations, derives from intangible factors having to do with the social fabric, which are poorly understood by just about everyone. If that is true, then those who wish to use the Internet as a tool for enhancing security, freedom, and other good things might wish to turn their efforts away from purely technical fixes and try to develop some understanding of just what the social fabric is, how it works, and how the Internet could enhance it. However this may conflict with the (absolutely reasonable and understandable) desire for privacy.”
» PDF FILE: Counterpane Security: “Fixing Network Security by Hacking the Business Climate”
“fell in love with a girl” by the white stripes sounds great played on an accordion.
jc herz
gaming is where 21c tech meets stone-age anthropology
“grooming gossip”
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/DUNGRO.html
verbally grooming each other by having conversation.
there are some basic archectypes of players of social games.
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
a successful game has to support all 4 archetypes to create a robust and healthy ecology
multiple ways to win.
ecologies have niches – there have to be multiple niches for an ecosystem to be robust
“different strokes”
games have to build value for the diff role in a persistent way.
pulled up the learning curve by the accretion of skills in a structured way. levl 1 -> levl
2 -> levl 3… power-ups…
we have to be able to display our status, our skills the things we have acrrued… it
happens in a story, a narrative. that skills-accretion curve in its self is a satisfying
narrative in succesful games (RPGS are self-actualising) [singing yourself into being]
human beings live in time, we like to see things grow over time, or imporve over time,
that’s the feedback that enourages our investment.
“artifacts of experience”
– boy/girl scout merit badges.
– stamps on your passport – badges of experience.
– skaters’ scars.. a narrative about how you got them
– tattoos.
how do you build an engaging system that feels like something is being built over time?
(cf. mattwebb http://interconnected.org/home/2001_01_14_archive.shtml#2023411)
how transparent to the player is the system that the player is building a persona within…
personalisation on the web… building of profile… they want to spend time refining the
persona.
pokemon – gotta catch ’em all. acquistion and transaction.
we’re wired to be hunter/gatherers.
streetbeam in NYC – infrared palm http://www.streetbeam.com/website/index.asp
after acquisition, comes trading… “trading is huge locus of value in game itself”
social currency – you make something that is valuable to other people. ways to groom each
other…. blogging links…
acknowledge/nodding/recognition – smallest quanta of human interaction. blogrolling =
grooming.
when you used to share music – it was a social interaction… making a mixtape for a girl…
napster stripped this away??? where was the articfact, the interaction?
uplister – the sleevenotes, not the music… the layer of context that you provide around
the object of experience.
group experience – the fact that people have a shared expeirnence… the fact that a lot of
people are having te same experience as you adds value to the experience… social
metadata… how do you represnet the social metadata??? sometimes more important than the
obect of experience.
web 1.0: indivdual whole wide world
multiplayer games: individual (player) group (clan, guild) whole wide world
why people like to expose the “to:” header of their funny/interesting email… so the group
can recognise itself.
stangers don;t matter that much…
two types that strangers that matter
1) celebrity
2) stangers in aggregate – the mob… (those who created yahoo’s 50 most popular stories)
tech always changes – the monkeys don;t… human nature persists, [but reacts diff to new
tech]
JC tells companies to do global search and replace -> replace “user” with “player” becuase
it will change what you build.
eric bonabeau: swarm intelligence
swarm intelligence is a mindset
how to you connect the dumb parts to get useful results.
kevin kelly quote from out of control.
[seems to paraphrase baran]
social insects can do it (ants, bees, termites and wasps)
social insect colony is:
-flexoible: colony can respond to internal petrbuation and external challenges
-robust tasks are completed even if some indivudals fail.
-dencentralised the is no central controller
-self organised the solutions are emegent rather than predefnid.
eric is an enginerr, not a bio-purist… a feature doen;t have to be biologically plausible
for it to work… what works works… but when he was exploring it purely fro the exotic and
exciting and novel apporach it WORKED!
how do we shape emergence – ow do we define indivdual behavior and interactions to produce
emergent patterns?
no indivdual ant knows the shortest route to the food source, just that they recognise the
trail scent that is strongest, which is statiscally emergent from the ant that got to the
food and back first getting back quickest… [my bad summation of experiement…]
efficient systems = ratio of explotation vs. exploration
if we are pure to biological models, then our systems are not efficient…
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/ncontextsummary/346645/0 [from peterme]
“NO ANTS WERE HARMED IN THE SOLVING OF THIS ALGORITHM”
coverage will continue with matt webb as it’s too clever for me.
http://interconnected.org/home/more/etcon/swarm.txt
steven johnson
ants brain cities software – self-organising system … not necessarly having command and control system.. .collective inteeligence from simple elements interacting
cities and blogs
cities – small pieces loosely joined… massively parallel decision
james wolcott quote – business 2.0
“our emerging superbrain could use a little work”
emergence doesn’t just happen? push towards the point where this happens… there is some design involved….
tainted history of all digital communities allied to urban theor (too literal… apple eWorld… not a visual metahphor) more about flows and layout and interactions.
what cities are good at:
clusters – legibilty, collective memory (cf. samina quershi http://voice.aiga.org/transcripts/presentations/samina_quraeshi.pdf)
public spaces diversity
optimal density (just enough activity to keep a street lively – but not too overcrowded)
CLUSTERING
great cities are good at answering “search requests” – you can find the areas devoted to your goals/tasks – clustering…
there is a danger that the web becomes a city with know neighbourhoods… how is clustering created?
combination of top-down and bottom-up structure. washington sq. plan on some level to make space open… but people come and populate it, and infect it with their partcipation, and their agendas. busy, bustling… people playing “freebird” on gutair.
optimal denisty – how does this happen. (cf. jane jacobs, chris alexander)
look at the road patterns in chelsea area of NYC… foot traffic channel to the large avenues. large avenues feel vital, have lots of big chain stores. but overcrowded but at night the croos-streets feel pretty deserted.
compare to west village – diversity of routes that anyone can take through the space – flow of foot traffic is spread. every street has something going on at any given time, but no street has too much… optimal density… no chain stores!
feels intuitively human – human scale of size and acitivty.
how do cities do it
bottom-up interactions (every time it’s planned heavily it seems to fail – sucks out the self-organisation)
the strollers create as much of the structure as the shopkeeps (flaneur theory – cf. Lucy Kimball)
passive organisation
the swerve – when you walk from x -> y and stumble across Z…. serendiptous reactions. e ngineer (people who like this book like this one – amazonian)
to paraphrase Lennon: “cities are what happen when you buzy makin’ other plans”
this a problem in car centric cities – you can;t swerve at 50 miles a hour…
THE BLOG PREDICAMENT
problems forming higher-levl groups
– how to visualise neighbourhoods of blogs??
manangin overpopulation
the tyranny of time
little passive organisation
readers lack input
-in structuring the blogsphere
catastrophic success
-great explosion of tols, and a crticial mass… but need to hit next level (more is different)
great citites are not just great towns – jane jacobs.
“the pedestrian centric model”
bloggers come to you – surf engine model
search requerst based on current documents – paragraphs you;ve written
search limited on chosen bloggers
key words categories created passivley by usage
no need to ask users or creators to create keywords actively (cf. cory – metacrap)
grows more organised with se
suers can creat permanent searches
clusters of like-minded blogs form around shared keywords
Panel Discussion:
clay – brings the POWER LAW!!!! how do power law relationships relate to cities – the way you travel around the web is not the way you travel around the city.
question – stores are next to each other to maximse exposure to prime audience…. there is no economic cost to travel to disparate points on te web? so how will clustering emerge
clay – mental transaction cost – of keeping track paying attention to diff sites… that is what is creating clustering in the web – link-organisation (daypop, blogdex were curiousities, now daily necessitiy)
geoff cohen – go there (to the cluster) gets you exposed to so much more other info in the cluster: mental outlay – cost/benefit. (the swerve) get the incidental association, the useful link organisation, clustering around you in your cluster.
johnson – big sites resisting what the web was good at – trying to keep you on their sites. surfing happens cos you are interested, not cos you are bored. not like zapiing channels on the tv.
non-player chracters – real – lots of people don;t know tey can particapte yet… blogs make it easier for ordinary people to participate
Geoff Cohen
the problem of metaphor -a bridge is a good metaphor for a bridge.
technology better at extremes of performance – SR71s fly faster than balckbirds
technology moves quickly
nature evolves slowly
nature adapts well to complexity
a few simple rules
– embrace legacy (because you don’t have a choice)
– try everything (diversity works)
scan the large, multidimensional solution space (genetic alogrithms – don’t get infatuated with specific techniques – sometimes you just need to be smart about searching and make big leaps) some times if you ape biolgy you can ape the wqrong model, or we make the wrong biological observations.
– Pay attention
look to the outside world. software tofday is basically dead – the walking undead – zombies not demons… make software like a living organism – that know whatis going on around it. what is changing it’s circumstances. part of this is metrics… fitness (cf. google methodology of good click/bad click)
– Reflection.
self-examination, self-diagnosis. all most no systems have good reflection at this point.
necessary for software to see what it is doing and change. code needs to become more plastic.
– change
paying attention to what works, and amplify that… evolution is the process of amplifying success through feedback.
– be fruitful and multiply
distributed software seems to have a better chance of evolving??
group at MIT – amorphous computing research.
Don’t need the biological side… we should be able to aply biological princioes today to build better software.
clez virus… the bad guys are already doing this (viruses infecting viruses)
– stay loose
emit and accept (cf. POstel/tim’oreilly talk)
– work bottom up
termites build termite mounds… make termites poster-child of emergence, not ants!
– plan top-down.
don’t be bio-purist. humans do things that lots of nature can’t.
– rest in piece.
let things die. we can;t handle software death. how can we account for what happens when software should or does die. plan beyond a year?
10 principles – probably wnrg, evolve over time with feed back.
what is roadmap?
accept complexity. software is emergnet already – we call them bugs! it’s how complex things work.
reform the guild – major changes in how we teach software, may mean major changes in what “software” means. we inside the guild care, but real people don’t. “software artifact”? (cf. wombling, see further) need more people to be able to create sftware. to the extent that people who cannot read cannot read software… doesn;t mean everyone has to be a programmer. (turn of the centruy people assuming everyone had to behave like phone operators to use a phone… we just changed how phones were used) specifying goals, rather than speicifying procedure.
– abandon computATION
alan turing is the father of computing – maybe it’s time to move out of the house. how much further would we have got to if he was still alive (cf. morthogenesis)
– do we need a new language?
maybe not… (cf. benjamin l. whorf: whorf hypothesis – “the language you use changes the way that you think” – very true in computer science) address problems in the way your languiage pref makes you analysis and procedurally think. (cf. milton glaser)
– what we mst give up
“in all revolutions there must be terms of surrender” – things we hold close to our hearts…
-have to give up that performance is what we are aiming for
-that software is predictable and repeatable.
– will human readility go away (cf. cory) – how do you debug a natural system
– entering scary world of change – where computers say “maybe” get comfortable with “maybe”
– people are biological too… study our interactions…
cory doctorow
* ban the words “high quality content”
in the 50’s movie studios would let films be shown on tv. they were afraid of lsing their “revenue streams” walt disney broke the cartel by broadcasting his movies on NBC, to rasie money to build his thempark
al gore – information superhighway – hollywood invited to hearings they said “we are here to tell you there will be no-one there unless we put our content there”
10 years of innovation because hollwood didn;t want to put it’s movies online… people are the fundatmenal component of content on the ent, not movies…
digital tv take up in USA, FTC has been convinced by hollywood that high quality content is going to drive this.. . therefore no tamper-friendly devices (firewire, video cards, dvd burners) can be connected to US digital TV standards
* ban words “mission critical”
mission-critical mindset would have prevented email from being invented.
napster died yesterday – napster wasn’t reliable, wasn;t mission critical. 70 million subscribers in 18months… fasted adopted tech in the world. at ltigation point forced to go legal… get relaiable… reliable naspter sucked. no one wanted it. zombienapster.
the natural order of things as seen by business and legal is not the natural human order of things.
lots of great exmaples of grown-up “high quality content / mission critical”apporaches have been foiled by kids plaing with unrealiable stuff.
humna appraoch to catalogoing internet – if net keeps growing then every human would have to be indexing for 18 hours a day every day to supply metainfo.
google sidestpd this… distributed bottoom up, and as a result has killed all other searchengines and directories… even powers yahoo.
CNN vs. the distributed republic of Blogistan.
9/11 bloggers were sometimes faster and more reliable than trad. news orgs. (car bomb outside state dept.)
ban the word “optimal”
optimal for what? for who? usually for those who like reliability. optimsied. innovation is not optimal. the things that take us into the future are not optimal… by contraining the system to only foster that which is optimal, we hamstring our ability to go further.
turing machines are not optimal. universal machines not optimsed by defn. suboptimal, primordial goo tat we can make anything for.
legislative mindset based on optimisation means that Turing machines constrained.
TIVO is a great example…strapping a PVR and collab filter to TV was never envisioned by broadcasters… when you are reliable and optimised you close the door to innovation…
Petafloptimism 