Google's Larry Page bids us Welcome to Google Island (as related by Wired's Mat Honan):

"I hope my nudity doesn't bother you. We're completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It's something I learned at Burning Man," he said. "Here, drink this. You're slightly dehydrated, and your blood sugar is low. This is a blend of water, electrolytes, and glucose."

I was taken aback. "How did you…" I began, but he was already answering me before I could finish my question.

"As soon as you hit Google's territorial waters, you came under our jurisdiction, our terms of service. Our laws – or lack thereof – apply here. By boarding our self-driving boat you granted us the right to all feedback you provide during your journey. This includes the chemical composition of your sweat. Remember when I said at I/O that maybe we should set aside some small part of the world where people could experiment freely and examine the effects? I wasn't speaking theoretically. This place exists. We built it." [...]

[Via Marco.org]

The Luck of the Listserve:

The Listserve is a mailing list lottery. Sign up for the Listserve, and you're joining a massive e-mail list. Every day, one person from the list is randomly selected to write one e-mail to everyone else. That's it. As of this writing, the Listserve has 21,399 subscribers. There has been one email per day since April 16th, 2012.

[Via The Morning News]

Nitsu Abebe has written a thoughtful piece on The Amanda Palmer Problem. By which he means not so much the various issues some people have with Palmer's own actions¹ but the wider problem of how artists seeking support from fans can bring down such vitriol upon themselves online:

I think there's a lesson to be learned from Palmer, and it's not the falling-into-the-crowd lesson she offers. Yes, she's correct: The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren't available before. Here's the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one's fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. And you are still asking them to, because another thing the web has done is erode the ability to put something into the world that is directed only at interested parties.

This sort of furore is only going to get bigger and noisier as the example of the The Veronica Mars Movie Project is followed by the likes of Zach Braff and more and more recognisable names show up on the front page of Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

[Via Waxy.org links]

1. i.e. using Kickstarter to raise more than US$1 million to fund an album, then inviting fans to donate their services as musicians on her tour. Then defending herself against criticism of both moves in part by emphasising that fans being given the chance to play with her were gaining non-monetary benefits from the exchange, i.e. the chance to accompany their idol. ↩

A telling vignette from Businessweek's article about Eve Online:

[A number of prominent Eve Online players...] were in Iceland's capital to meet with executives from CCP Games, the company that created Eve. The seven make up the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), a group elected by other Eve players and flown by CCP to Iceland every six months or so to discuss how the game should evolve. It's a kind of super-user focus group, but also a channel for players' complaints. In 2011, when CCP rolled out some controversial changes, the company summoned the CSM members to Reykjavík for an emergency meeting in an effort to stem a user backlash. "At the time, I had been dating a girl for only three weeks and was terrified," says Joshua Goldshlag (Eve name: Two Step), a 35-year-old CSM member and computer programmer from Massachusetts. "I certainly did not want to mention that I had been elected as an Internet space politician."

[Via Longform]

The Internet: A Warning From History…

[Via The Risks Digest Volume 27: Issue 25]

Three remembrances of Aaron Swartz:

• Cory Doctorow
• Lawrence Lessig
• Philip Greenspun

Phil Gyford on setting out for another decade-long stint of publishing the Diary of Samuel Pepys online:

As I wrote last week the Diary of Samuel Pepys project has kicked off again for another almost-decade of daily publishing. What's wrong with me? Or, more practically, what did I think about when starting a ten-year project all over again?

[As the process of adding all the hyperlinks was complete from the project's first run...] there wasn't much reason not to restart the diary from the beginning. Restarting only involves having the site's front page and RSS feed automatically update daily with "today's" diary entry.

Of course, I couldn't let it be that easy. [...]

The Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud:

Can you explain it in PR-speak?

In 2012, Internet thought leader Maciej Cegłowski rocked the startup community with his provocative slogan 'Barely Succeed', challenging prospective entrepreneurs to reject the lottery culture of Silicon Valley in favor of small, sustainable projects that could give them a more realistic shot at financial independence.

Today he has unleashed the second part of his business philosophy, 'Barely Invest', which shatters the myth that financing is the main obstacle to creating a small technology business. In a world where social capital has become the bottleneck to success, Cegłowski intends to seize the commanding heights of the New Economy as the Internet's premier social capitalist.

[Via marco.org]

Back in April 1976, ARPANET staged the fourth in a series of online dialogues between significant cultural figures. This one featured Yoko Ono, Ayn Rand, Sidney Nolan and Jim Henson. It's fair to say that Henson and Rand didn't see eye to eye:

JIM HENSON

I think Ms. Rand and my character Oscar the Grouch would have a lot to talk about actually. I am laughing out loud at this idea.

AYN RAND

Why would I want to talk to him. What has he achieved or trying to achieve.

JIM HENSON

He has achieved what I think is the ultimate goal of your way of thinking.

[...]

JIM HENSON

Isolation. Contempt for others. A hard heart. Yet even he can muster a bit of empathy every now and then.

[...]

AYN RAND

I am not isolated. I have no contempt for others. Millions of people read my books and find my thoughts inspirational. I hardly spend my time on the sidelines in a trash can grumping.

JIM HENSON

Not yet anyway.

[Via The Null Device]

Massively Multiplayer online games that close down tend to do so in a highly unsatisfactory manner, with a date being announced for the servers to be turned off and little fanfare beyond that created by the players themselves. Tiny Speck, the company behind Glitch (official site | Wikipedia article) took a much classier approach:

Tiny Speck resurrected favorite rare in-game items, such as the Stoot Barfield Pullstring Doll and the 2010 Glitchmas Yeti, as rewards for participation in the last feats. The company also continued to release new content, from feats to recipes to new areas, until a few days before the closure. Players raced to earn new achievement badges and take screenshots in the just-opened areas. [...]

Players enjoyed the fresh content, and developers enjoyed creating it. [Glitch designer Stewart Butterfield...] said that much of that content was almost completed when the staff was notified of the game shutdown – and the jobs that would go with it. Letting staffers complete their own pet projects was a way to recognize their work.

[Via rc3.org]

Craig Mod is excited by the possibilities of Subcompact Publishing:

In 1967 Honda unveiled the N360.

The N360 was a kei, or light style car; a subcompact.

I like to imagine the engineers at Honda huddled together, dumping the sum total of all car design and production technology on our worn, wooden table. Around they gathered and together they asked, "What's the simplest thing we can build with this?"

[...]

The N360 was something an American car company would never dream of producing. You can't blame them though: they had no incentive by which to dream such dreams. Unlike the American automotive industry, the Japanese automotive industry wasn't beholden to industry momentum or legacy. And when you're not beholden to legacy, you can be excessively brazen.

In the software industry we talk about MVPs, or Minimum Viable Products. The N360 was a Minimum Viable Car.

The N360 didn't make it to the States, but the followup – and near equally cute – N600 did. Next came the Honda Civic, then soon after, the oil crisis. We all know how the story goes from there.

[...]

Honda was a nobody in the car industry. But they gained foothold and marketshare by building a car that was more appropriate for many consumers. They had built a subcompact.

So I ask: where are our digital publishing subcompacts?

Mod spends a fair bit of time extolling the virtues of Marco Arment's The Magazine, which I wrote about back when it launched. I've maintained my subscription through the first four issues, but I have to admit that I'm wavering over whether to retain it. The application's virtues remain – it's a beautifully polished application, even if I'd like more control over the presentation of the content that it permits,¹ but the content isn't that interesting to me.

In principle, an article extolling the virtues of a wet shave, or the proper way to make a cup of tea could be engaging and fun to read, even to a hirsute guy like me who would quench his thirst with a Diet Coke rather than brew a cup of tea every time; in practice I haven't found them to be so. I'm finding that on average there's one article per issue that I find moderately engaging. It doesn't help that some of the writers, whose work I've read on their own weblogs, are covering very familiar ground. Marco did say early on that he hoped to expand the pool of writers after the first few issues, so I'll probably give it another couple of issues to see if things improve.

Having said all that (and to get back to the ostensible topic of this post), there's no doubt in my mind that the basic model of Subcompact Publishing could well develop in all sorts of interesting ways, freeing up writers to write instead of having to code an application and submit it to someone's app store. It's just a shame that whatever tools people come up with will most likely end up being tied to a specific operating system/hardware type/payment mechanism.

Isn't this a problem the web was supposed to have solved by now?

[Via Marco.org]

1. In particular, I like pagination in my reading apps, dammit! Marco has explained in one of his podcasts that flexible, high-quality pagination is really complicated to do well so for now he's going with a scrolling view. ↩

The best MeFi post title I've seen in ages, courtesy of thewalrus: Per SMTP spec, valid email addresses cannot contain a colon.

Usenet at 32:

Usenet is 32 years old. You'd be forgiven for thinking that it's a near-dead, cobweb-covered discussion forum platform, but actually it's more popular today than ever before, and it's thriving as an alternative to Bittorrent. [...]

It's interesting to read about some of the clever ways people are using Usenet to distribute other people's content nowadays, but it's a damned shame that Usenet as a discussion forum stagnated.

Web-based discussions are all very well, but as far as I can see even now there's nothing out there that comes close to the flexibility of a good Usenet client that allowed you to follow a series of discussion groups and use scoring and filtering to show you the threads you'd most likely be interested in and block content from known trolls and idiots.

Radio Killed The Podcasting Star, according to Richard McManus:

Podcasters are to radio what bloggers are to newspapers: independent voices taking attention away from mainstream media. At least that was the theory, when professional podcasts and blogs were getting started in the 2000s. But unlike blogs, podcasts by indie voices have not gone on to seriously challenge the mainstream media incumbents. Where is the Ariana Huffington of podcasting? Can you name a political podcaster who's had the same impact as Josh Marshall and his Talking Points Memo blog? Sadly, there are no podcasting stars – and it's all radio's fault. [...]

His thesis is that because so many of the most popular podcasts are derived from public radio shows or semi-celebrities who brought an audience with them to podcasting, this demonstrates that podcasting has somehow failed to break through the way blogging has. I think there's a parallel with blogging, but it's not the one McManus is thinking of.

To my mind, the point of blogging (or of podcasting) was never to displace established media, but to provide a publishing platform that meant that you didn't have to have a wide audience to survive. It's true that a fair chunk of my podcast listening is of BBC radio shows that produce a podcast version, but there are also plenty of shows produced by enthusiastic amateurs¹ that I'd never find on my radio dial.² The point, as Dave Winder notes in the post that led me to the ReadWriteWeb post, "was to get access to the distribution channel for anyone who wanted it, and that certainly has been accomplished." If you want to use podcasts as a way to listen to your favourite BBC radio programs on your schedule then go for it. If you want to hear from people who'll never have a BBC radio show in a million years, that's out there too. The success of the one doesn't deprive me of access to the other, any more that the existence of the Huffington Post prevents me from reading Feeling Listless. They share a distribution medium, but not much else.

[Via Scripting News]

1. I mean that term in the old-fashioned sense of people who are primarily enthusiasts for their chosen subject and who are happy to share their thoughts with anyone who's inclined to listen. ↩
2. OK, that's an outdated metaphor. I think you know what I mean. ↩

Technology Review publisher Jason Pontin learned the hard way that Apps weren't the future of publishing after all:

[...] Tablets and smart phones seemed to promise a return to simpler days. Digital replicas of print newspapers and magazines (which could be read inside Web browsers or proprietary software like Adobe PDF readers) had never been popular with readers; but publishers reasoned that replicas were unpleasant to read on desktop computers and laptops.

The forms of tablets and smart phones were a little like a magazine or newspaper. Couldn't publishers delight readers by delivering something similar to existing digital replicas, suitably enhanced with interactive features, which would run in applications on tablets and smart phones? [...]

Here's hoping that the magazine's solution – transitioning to an enhanced web site built to accommodate all sorts of screen sizes, complete with an RSS feed to let users keep track of all the content they publish – ends up netting them enough income to keep publishing.

[Via Scripting News]

Jon Snow sets Rupert Murdoch straight about 'social decay'.

[Via Extenuating Circumstances]

Michael Mace on Twitter the telegraph at Gettysburg:

With our obsession for newness, those of us who work in the tech industry often fail to understand the historical roots of our technologies. Case in point: telegraph operators more than 150 years ago were sending short messages called "graphs" that were surprisingly similar in form and content to Twitter tweets.

One remarkable example was recently discovered in the Museum of Telegraphy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It is the transcript of a telegraph operator's comments during Abraham Lincoln's famed Gettysburg Address in 1863. The transcript was shared with me by a friend on the museum staff, and I'm pleased to reproduce it here:

---

Still waiting for the Pres. to commence his speech. #gettysburg

Good heavens, I should have foresworn that fifth corn dodger for lunch. #gas #dontask #gettysburg

Starting now. Pres. waves to crowd. #gettysburg

Four score and… WTF is a score? 25? #pleasespeakenglish #gettysburg

Okay, it's twenty. So "87 years ago the country was founded." Why not just say that? Duh. #gettysburg

[...]

Following on from the flurry of comment on the Curator's Code the other week¹, the Code's creator Maria Popova has responded. In a manner of speaking.

Unfortunately, Popova has responded not so much by addressing the points people have made – be they about why the term 'curation' is inappropriate or about how unsuitable obscure Unicode symbols are as substitutes for the phrases 'Hat Tip' or 'Via' at the end of a post – but by spending three quarters of her post quoting paragraph-long passages from the essays of Albert Einstein on 'the ties of sympathy', 'public opinion', 'our interconnectedness, interdependency, and shared existence', 'good and evil, creative bravery, and human value', and 'life's highest ideals' before alluding to the way that some commenters have responded to her suggestion with 'venom and mean-spirited derision' before pivoting away from the substance of the arguments being made about her project and talking instead about how unacceptable cruelty is and how disappointed she is in many of those who have criticised her suggestion.

To be clear: Maria Popova is perfectly entitled to be offended and upset at criticism she feels to be other than 'constructive' and to call out the community accordingly.² For what it's worth, I don't think that most of the commentary she linked to (or that I've seen for myself elsewhere) was particularly aggressive or derogatory or bullying. Sceptical as to the benefits of her suggested approach? For sure. Put off by what they saw as the misapplication of the term 'curation'? Absolutely. But with one exception³ they weren't particularly personal or bullying, let alone 'sinister'. But I also recognise that I've almost certainly seen only a small portion of the total response, and in any case it's not my call to make; if Popova felt attacked then of course it's for her to respond as she sees fit. I'm just finding it really hard to square the discussion that I saw going on in various corners of the web with the vicious debate Popova is describing.

It's a shame that she devotes so much space in her post to inspirational quotations and so little to addressing the arguments people made in response to her suggestion, given that she's making a post on the same site where she announced the launch of the Code? Why accuse critics of factual inaccuracies but not address them right there?

To be fair, Popova does mention and link to one site where there's some discussion of the pros and cons of her idea, but it's mostly commentary from third parties and the comments from her that they cite only addresses the issues to the extent that she argues that the Curator's Code site (which, remember, offers bookmarklets for download, all set for users to install so that bloggers content curators can easily insert appropriately-formatted links including her chosen Unicode symbols to their posts) wasn't really about the Unicode symbols or even about her site, it was about 'the bigger point' of why 'curation' matters. If you make specific proposals with accompanying blocks of Javascript code, I think it's incumbent upon you to address issues people raise in detail, not just lament the incivility of those who raise questions about your proposal and airily refer to notions about how now the details aren't important.

[Via swissmiss. Given the context, I can't believe that I forgot to add a 'Via' block to my first draft of this post!]

1. See my post on the subject here, and a trio of posts at Pop Loser including links to some of the commentary elsewhere here, here and here. ↩
2. And, to clarify still further, I'm not writing this because I feel that she's directly, or even implicitly, criticising what I wrote about her proposal. First because I'm approximately 99.753% certain that she'll never have noticed what I wrote, and second because I don't think I was in any way venomous or mean-spirited in my post. If you think otherwise, please tell me so. ↩
3. A tweet linking to an extremely juvenile animated .GIF. Which is at best an impolite but snarky comment on the amount of intellectual masturbation going on over this topic – to which I plead guilty to adding my portion right here in this post! – and is not anyone's idea of a civil contribution to the debate. But it's also atypical of the level of commentary out there. ↩

Margaret Atwood has posted another¹ tribute to the Twungle:

[On Twitter...] you find yourself doing all sorts of things you wouldn't otherwise do. And once you've entered the Enchanted E-Forest, lured in there by cute bunnies and playful kittens, you can find yourself wandering around in it for quite some time. You might even find yourself climbing the odd tree – the very odd tree – or taking refuge in the odd hollow log – the very odd hollow log – because cute bunnies and playful kittens are not the only things alive in the mirkwoods of the Web. Or the webs of the mirkwoods. Paths can get tangled there. Plots can get thickened. Games are afoot.

1. Previously. ↩

I've read Introducing The Curator's Code: A Standard for Honoring Attribution of Discovery Across the Web three times now and I still don't see what it accomplishes.

Part of the problem, I'll admit, is that I just don't like the use of the word "curation" to describe the process of writing a linklog. I've been posting links and adding a 'Via' link showing where I got the main link from for twelve years now,¹ but I'd never dream of suggesting that I've been 'curating' a collection. It seems to me that the term 'curation' implies a distinctly strategic approach, putting together collections of objects that are somehow related to one another, or which comment on one another in some respect. The only conscious strategy I've applied is that of posting links to the things I've found interesting/amusing online. I don't doubt that looking at my 'body of work' will reveal some clues as to what sort of subject matter I'm interested in, and probably also some shifts over time in what I post about, but I'm under no illusions that my interests are different to those of dozens hundreds thousands millions of ageing English-speaking geeks out there. I do this not because I'm trying to build up a coherent collection, but because sharing links is, at some level, what the World Wide Web was made for. I don't want to just be reading the web without giving something back, and both writing a weblog and attributing my sources are part of that.

Anyway, setting aside my doubts about the use of the term 'curation', I don't see what the use of a special Unicode symbol to mark a 'Via' or a 'Hat Tip' link adds to the web. Those Unicode symbols presumably have other uses, so you can't rely on them a semantic indicators: they're just a text decoration that will mean absolutely nothing to anyone unfamiliar with the concept of the Curator's Code. It'd be immensely helpful if there was a <via> HTML tag that denoted the source of an item and could be used both to style the text on a web page and to allow web tools to latch onto 'Via' links and make some use of them, but really all this is it's a side issue.

The important principle is the question of a weblog author's willingness to attribute the source of a post. Most people who write linklogs (or post to Tumblr, or maintain publicly accessible lists of links at Pinboard or Delicious or wherever) decided a long time ago whether they wanted to go to the trouble of attributing the source of the items they found. I suspect that their decision had very little to do with whether there was a universally recognised Unicode character to use to tag their 'Via' links.

[Via Pop Loser]

1. Whatever you do, don't be surprised if some of the internal links on those pages don't work. I really should have put thebeard.org to some other use once I migrated the weblog to soreeyes.org years ago now, but somehow I've repeatedly got to the stage of installing a new CMS but then not knowing what I want to use it to publish. ↩