One less voice of the filth and the fury. Damn. We could have used him around these days.
“The new groups are not concerned
With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits,
ha you think it’s funny
Turning rebellion into money”
» BBC News: Clash star Strummer dies
» BBC News: Joe Strummer: Tribute board
Tanya Pixelcharmer has a great linkful post about power-laws, the web, citation-analysis and, ascending-meme-of-the month: “the trouble with Google”:
“So, ultimately the thing that makes Google so great, is also it’s major flaw — weighting pages in favor of highly trafficked sites, or weighting in favor of sites that are pointed to by highly trafficked sites. Therefore a search on the word �Dao� will give you the article “The Dao of Web Design” at A List Apart before those that discuss it�s original meaning. So, Google suffers from the power law distribution that links obey when looked at over the entire web.”
Blogs maybe rendering Google bankrupt, but perhaps the problem is not with Google and pagerank, but with who blogs at the moment. Can’t find that much on a blogger demographic or blogging demographic other than pollyanna-ish ‘everyone’s a blogger’ puff-pieces in old media. My guess is that Chris Gulker’s piece in The Independent is rather closer to the sub-demographic, who instead of deadjournalling about Slipknot are gaming Google with their linkmachines.
“‘We’ are nerds, geeks, dweebs, technorati and, in this case, bloggers, a group of about 50, mostly male, mostly middle-aged and largely under-employed or unemployed inhabitants of Silicon Valley”
Nothing wrong with this of course… and I love reading that stuff, but while the googlebot is learning from such a limited set of time-rich, high-link-worth individuals, then you’re going to run into the problems Tanya describes. I also don’t think it’s that much of a showstopper of a problem. In the blogging, tech and digital design community we may tend to ask more tech, design or abstract questions which are not answered outside of the blogosphere, and therefore there is little surprise that the mirror of pagerank is held up against us. “Real-world” queries are still answered happily and with heterogeneity by Google. For example, this morning a friend asked me if there were puffins on Skomer Island and google helped me answer with one click (the answer is “yes”)
I’m not suggesting we immediately drop B52-fulls of free simputers all over the world in order to make the GoogleTruth more inclusive, but what about channelling some Vannevar Bush, and making like the Memex. I’m sure we all have this committed to memory by now:
” Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”
And of course his notion of many memex linked by ‘trails’:
“There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.”
As I perhaps naively see it [and if there was one post destined to get me flames it might be this one], there is a current skew of those who are creating their own Memex and, particularly those who are blazing trails between them. I’ve talked before about lowering barriers to entry being one of the most important factors for me in creating social software – and re-reading Bush’s 1945 tubthumper makes me think of one key area that might get us a high blogbang-for-buck.
What about a flavour of blog creation software aimed at academics, professors, researchers – specialised templates, tailored language and interface, easy-to-intergrate with college intranets, easier to publish to the web from within an internal net, tied to citation management software, directories and search tools.
Alongside this, pioneer blogging-academics to come up with a best-practice approach for those wanting to start out, a creative-commons style license for academic bloggers which builds an ‘everyone-wins’ academic-commons and also an approach for colleges to map blogging to traditional measures of academic success such as publishing and citation.
If we could find ways for the collected, collegiate building and crucially linking of the global academic memex to the quality of the blogosphere, where the link-loam gets deeper by the day, then pretty soon if you searched for Dao you’d get something by the chair of comparative religion and philosophy rather than a webdesigner in an aeron chair.
© (I imagine) Warren Ellis, Steve Dillon, DC Comics and Comics Continuum
Warren Ellis has just posted links to a preview of Global Frequency #3.
Fantastic. Warren Ellis is really “on-it” with Global Frequency. It’s a great book, and along with Patrick Farley’s Spiders joins a few other pop culture artifacts than are hitting the haeccceity, nailing the thisness-of-now.
It’s a favourite OtherMatt word: Haecceity: the “thisness” of something. Both the phrases “the-thisness-of-now” and “the-nowness-of-this” have pinged around our conversations this year about fashion-trends, fiction-suits, e-prime, semiotics, noophysics, magick and mythpolitik, comicbooks and culture; and the way the web has won.
But, as per usual, this Matt has been winging it. Biting on the wordsnorkel and diving into french philosophy has never been my idea of fun. All that Dellllooooze and Guitarry stuff was not really for me, but I liked the idea.
So when I found this trying to get a friend a swift googleplanation of the word, I was knocked out:
“It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf, itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be subjects to become events.
You will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and nothing else. … You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of non-subjectified affects.”
Being “on it” is about tracking these flows, locking on this latitude of longitude of the now. Sometimes you can feel it, sometimes you are lucky enough to ride it, more often than not it rides you. Like I say, Warren Ellis is “on it”.
Good evening, you’re on the Global Frequency.
has accounted for a major dip in productivity in our office. Unlike previous social network building apps like sixdegrees or ryse there is something about it which is incredibly compelling.
Is it:
Or all of the above. Go and explore it, using the beta code: “coke”. I’d be very interested in anyone’s views/criticisms.
Whatever beefs I may have with the BBC, it’s pretty cool for that I work for an organisation that can use an Italo Calvino quotation on it’s “Danger: Men At Work” signage.
Warchalking and SmartMobs make it into the New York Times review of the “Year in Ideas” for good or for ill.
» New York Times magazine: The year in ideas [requires registration]
FWIW*, I just stamped my stuff with a Creative-Commons license. You can do it to your stuff too!!!
Well done all involved.
* For What It’s Worth: Why put a licence on my personal ramblings? Ideas above my station? Maybe – but more because they are ‘out-there’ and I might as well as not. The ease of use and clarity of language employed by the Creative Commons license generator means it is a neglible amount of effort for an individual producing their own works to protect them with a licence. Imagine if sites or services that encouraged user-generation of content: i.e. Amazon, AOL or even a major British public-service broadcaster were to allow contributors to self-licence. In tandem with the mass-amateurisation of publishing, this could be profound.
While finding links for the last entry I found this place. Awesome! [CTRL-D!!!]
Also it has links to “Second-Life”
Man that was terrible, I must have my phaser set to pun. Anyway, Chris Heathcote wants to encode psychogeography in RDF, with a lazyweb idea he calls FOAP: Feel Of A Place.
Full-circle then, from SBJ’s “Cities are great at answering search queries” analogies for the evolution of the web that he suggests in “Emergence”.
So are our cities to be rendered obvious through technology – reduced to digital mappings of the nearest McDonalds pushed to our 3g phones? Yes and no I think is my nonanswer.
Most current visions of ubiquitous computing within the urban real are nothing more than: Cities + Technology + Ease-of-Use. FOAP starts to point to a more complex, advanced mix: Cities + Technology + People + History + Ease-Of-Abuse. This sufficiently advanced technology in the city could be magic.
There are times all of us want to get from A to B, and sometimes we want to get from A to Beowulf: to get lost in the sagas of the city.
I spent a day in the City of London last summer at the height of all the warchalking tizz with artist Heath Bunting, and Kate Rich from Mute where we followed the line of the 2000 year old London Wall. Heath dowsing for water with a twig he cut hastily from a hedge at the start of our walk, and me dowsing for wireless with a TiBook and MacStumbler. Here’s an exchange between the three of us:
“HB: Have you thought of doing a tour? Like the history of cyber or internet or electronic London. Just offer people the stories?
KR: In LA you can do tours of architecture that isnt there any more. Norman Klein. [The History of Forgetting: LosAngeles and the Erasure of Memory http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/buch/3169/1.html & http://ucmedia1.ucxonline.berkeley.edu/sales/artshum02/ahmain1.html#movie38460]
HB: This is Finsbury Circus, the Circle Line goes underneath this. It also runs under a significant portion of the city wall. It was always interesting to me why it did that – like people said, where shall we put the Circle Line? and 2000 years later the wall has affected the route of it. This was a roundabout question to you Matt: have you any recognition that this mapping that youre doing is influenced by more ancient networks or nodes like wells, or meeting places, or routes?
MJ: Not apart from the obvious one: IT is concentrated in the city of London for the same reason as the powerbrokers, that is for very historical reasons. Other than that Ive not really divined a corridor.
HB: Would they be in the same places as the first cellphone base-stations then?
MJ: No. If you think about the network engineers, they are looking for the most coverage for the most profitable groups of customers. The thing about wireless is its bottom up, grassroots up, no-one really plans how it emerges. So you sort of get this ad hoc collection of nodes around where people are activists.HB: So you think that an archaeological dig of wireless networking will reveal no ancestry?
MJ: I think it would be twice removed if there at all.
HB: I remember ten years ago, one of the first mobile phone networks only operated in the tube.
MJ: Rabbit.
HB: Rabbit, yeah. It was a really good idea: you have a phone in the office, a phone at home, in the tube you dont have anything. Now you cant even make a phone call from the tube. I always think its good to look back in history to find your ancestors. It gives you legitimacy or understanding.”
Building on other recent thoughts and efforts, FOAP’s a great idea, that could encode and encourage the understanding of cities, not just their easy negotiation.
Petafloptimism 