July 14th, 2008
Amanda Chapel, aka “Strumpette,” needs some tough love
I had a strange Twitter back-and-forth with “Amanda Chapel,” the pseudonymous authors of a PR blog called “Strumpette,” about the nature of the hacker ethic. I personally don’t think the hacker ethic is very effective as a counterpoint to the system of intellectual property it decries, because hackers seem intent on getting rich one way or the other. “Amanda” apparently agrees, because she/he/they wrote that it was “bankrupt.” Nevertheless, Amanda had to find a disagreement in order to continue her/his/their snarky schtick. I asked “Amanda” why she/he/they thought the hacker ethic, which is characterized by an often over-simplified Hayekian-libertarian approach to markets, exists outside the current economic and philosophical system and ended up being confronted with a number of epithets and was told “[Amanda doesn’t] entertain opinions, period.”
You can watch the unwinding of the dialog here and here.
Amanda’s is small mind(s) in action (and yes, that is grammatically as close to correct as I can get without more gratuitous use of forward slashes). I try to understand where disagreements arise, because that’s how we can all improve our thinking. I tried with “Amanda” to point out that we don’t really disagree about the value of the hacker ethic. The phony distinctions between liberals and conservatives, for example, have prevented real engagement with precisely the same ideas stated in different terms for the past 28 years, when Ronald Reagan abandoned the traditional Republican commitment to liberal principles, at least in word, as the deeds of the Republican administrations have only magnified the power of government vis-a-vis the individual.
The thing is, I have often thought “Amanda” made some constructive interventions in the mindless chatter of Web 2.0 with her/his/their contrarian posting and tweets. It’s as though Godwin’s Law kicked in, in a different form, this time proving that as the length of time a person tweets increases the more likely they are to accuse someone of “blowing arrogant bullshit.” Call it Ratcliffe’s Corollary and think of me well when I am gone.
Our discussion of an unpublished academic article that Amanda said supported her/his/their position that the hacker ethic is a bankrupt extra-capitalist (specifically, she/he/the wrote “anti-property”) movement quickly devolved into Amanda resorting to name-calling. This is the kind of self-important amateurish blowhardism she/he/they generally decries, but it appears “Amanda” is merely playing at controversy Read the rest of this entry »
July 9th, 2008
Check out the bionic neck
I’ve told you about my disc replacement surgery, but I’ve never shown you. Here’s an X-ray from my most recent follow-up appointment with the doctor who did the surgery. As a trial patient, I have agreed to go back after three weeks, six weeks, three months, six months, a year and 18 months after the operation to fill out a questionnaire about my pain, the progress since surgery and my ability to work, exercise and so forth. It’s the price of my surgery.
Today, they asked me about how soon after the surgery I had sex… and some other things, like how long it was before I could exercise. I won’t tell you how long it was, but when it came to sex I was only one day behind the leader among the 10 people in the trial! Yeah, sex!!
This is something that you won’t be seeing from most doctors for as long as half a decade. I’m incredibly fortunate to have been in this trial.
I’ve begun a blog about spine research and medicine, since this is going to be a life-long concern for me. If you are interested, please check out SpineScienceBlog.com/drupal. I’ll be happy to answer questions and, more importantly, use whatever paltry cred I have as a blogger to ask questions of docs and companies for you, at that blog.
July 7th, 2008
Demographics forging a new Net market: It’s not your kids’ Web
It’s easy and fashionable to talk about “digital natives” that have grown up online, but the demographics of the United States are shifting radically to the grey and Web services developers should heed that news and make changes in their products and plans as a result. Old coots, like me, may hold the key to your future.
Advertising Age offers a fine summary of the demographic changes ahead in an article posted today (sorry, it’s a subscription site). The key figure is that the average head-of-household in the U.S. today is 49.5 years old and that 80 percent of the growth in number of households during the next half-decade will be “among those headed by people 55 and older.” These are also the people with the most money to spend in coming years.
The number of households headed by 35- to 44-year-olds and 45 to 54 year-olds will actually decrease by one percent in the next five years.
What does it mean for developers? Well, first off, you’d better start thinking about the size of type and detail in graphical components used in your designs. I know many older people who cannot read anything on a mobile phone. The iPhone appeals to older people I talk to because they can zoom in on the type. One of the winning features of the Amazon Kindle, based on my talking with people about mine, is that the text size can be adjusted to accommodate poor eyesight.
But take it a step further—the CAPTCHA challenges used by many commerce and comment systems are virtually impossible to read without being able to zoom in to see the letters more clearly. CAPTCHA phrases that frustrate older people who cannot see as well as a 20-year-old could be costing you 20 percent of your conversions, based on the number of people over 50 using the Web today, and it will only get worse.
Another feature of this older Web, according to Ad Age, is the potential for a significant change in the risk tolerance Read the rest of this entry »
July 2nd, 2008
Seven Tech ways to make America better this July 4
Something about getting a new neck earlier this spring made me start thinking about how to change my life to make America a better place. Here a few that you can try to make the country better over the Fourth of July weekend:
1.) Turn off your computer at night. I’ve always left my computers on until they need to be restarted. I found that by turning off my three desktop computers, I lowered my power bill by almost $30 a month. While I live in a hydro-electric power region, if you get your electricity from coal, this will also reduce the particulate pollution by pounds a day.
2.) Swear off your car. Not everyone can afford a Tesla electric car, but most of us can afford a scooter. Both my wife and I have abandoned our cars for the summer when making in-town trips. Instead, we ride scooters (we got our scooters here, if you are in the Seattle area). Vespas, the venerable Italian scooters, have always been interesting, but too expensive for me. There are a whole slew of Asian-made scooters that compete favorably on price while providing the quality of a Vespa. At 80 m.p.g. to 90 m.p.g., respectively, we’re cutting down our gas bill by at least $100 each month. Get a four-stroke engine to reduce pollution.
3.) Dig up and give away every cell phone in the house. Give them to U.S. troops serving overseas. Visit Cell Phones for Soldiers to learn how to do it. The group, founded by a couple of kids from Massachussets, has delivers thousands of cell phones with pre-paid minutes to troops each month.
4.) Give away your old PC. I’ve given old PCs with new education software to a couple kids I know whose families couldn’t afford them. There are organizations in every city that can use PC donations. Check here for a good primer from Microsoft on donating PCs. Or consider volunteering with GeekCorps, which provides information technology assistance in the developing world. If you don’t want to go overseas, just follow this link to Amazon and shop—part of the sale goes to GeekCorps. Everything we do for the world redounds to the credit of our nation.
5.) Start tracking your Congressional representatives’ votes. It’s not that hard to do and can help the people representing you do a better job, because you’ll find you pick up the phone or write about bills that interest you. GovTrack.us makes it Read the rest of this entry »
July 1st, 2008
McCain’s campaign team has no Facebook chops
You have to admire the chutzpah of the idea of convincing voters that they should vote for a candidate through an arcade game rip-off of Space Invaders, because it’s simply ludicrous coming from a candidate who has declared he doesn’t even know how to “use a computer.” Aaron Jacobs-Smith of The New Politics Institute wrote up his encounter with John McCain’s “Pork Invaders” game, which fervent McCainiacs can embed in their Facebook pages:
I just blasted away close to $2.8 billion in pork-barrel spending in three minutes using veto lasers and I’m only on level 2 with 4 McCains left. Not too shabby, right?
Scintillating. They must be congratulating themselves at McCain HQ for this! I particularly like the red vetos the McCains shoot skyward. Not to mention that there are both pigs and barrels labeled “pork,” which leaves me wondering what government spending is okay with McCain. He’s certainly been pro-spending on something, such as the economic stimulus package. Imagine, if we stockpile enough McCains we can tackle the Social Security actuarial quandary! Oh, yeah, this is real life, and not the 1980s.
Let’s think about this game from a user design perspective. Seriously, shouldn’t there be something positive about voting for him, not just a rain of pigs and barrels to shoot? The guy’s not going to be just a veto machine. A little more depth of game play is required to represent the presidential race.
Not to judge McCain’s policies. I’m really just saying it’s badly designed game experience if you want to create a positive impression of a political candidate. But what’s the point of distributing a Facebook app that reduces the whole election to one hackneyed issue? Shouldn’t there be levels? If I beat the budget, how about I get a shot at Osama bin Laden? I want to get to the level where Barack Obama struggles with the question of faith-based initiatives (They could use PacMan for that one).
Wait till Level 23: Homelessness. Wow, that’s a virtual showdown the kids are going to love. Maybe the McCain campaign will come up an old Doom level for the homeless Read the rest of this entry »
June 30th, 2008
What is a company blogger good for?
I often hear from companies that want to “be social” or “hire a blogger.” Usually, there hasn’t been any effort put into the question of what they’d like to accomplish from the effort, so I send out the following. Now, you can call me to talk when you have an answer to this critical question in mind….
The following goals for blogging are for your consideration in making a resource and time decision about how to use the tools available to achieve the impact your company desires. They may be combined or phased in over time, but it is essential that the company understand what it wants out of a blog or a community grown around its site. Simply “hiring a blogger” does not lead to success, because the blog must be an expression not just of the company’s marketing message but, in order to reach any of the higher levels of engagement possible, of its people and their personalities. Readers or, better, customers, don’t want to interact with a scripted person, they want to feel like they are conversing with people.
As your company aims higher in this hierarchy of engagement, you will find the investment rises. You can do the least possible and get picked up by blog search engines. Building a must-visit site for your industry is exponentially more expensive. Making your corporate blogger a star whose wide-ranging interests become somehow interesting to people who otherwise would not encounter your company’s Web presence is exponentially more expensive than launching a blog to republish your press releases.
Here goes: Read the rest of this entry »
June 19th, 2008
Wiretapping: This was no time for a compromise
Democrats in Congress have arrived at a compromise on legislation that will allow warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens’ telephone lines. In March, I covered the threats to privacy from this bill, which was pushed hard by the White House as essential to national security. Today, the Democrats caved in big time, handing the White House a victory at precisely the time when a lame-duck president, especially one this unpopular, should be having his hat handed to him as he leaves office.
“It is the result of compromise, and like any compromise is not perfect, but I believe it strikes a sound balance,” Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer told The New York Times.
Unfortunately, there is never a good time for a compromise on civil rights. We continue to buy the argument that terrorists are a threat so imminent that we must sacrifice basic privacy, when there is no evidence in the almost seven years since 9/11 that telephone taps have prevented attacks on U.S. soil.
The Democrats’ position, that compromise was necessary, is unfounded. This bill opens the door wider to government intrusion into Americans’ lives. It was an unnecessary and inappropriate compromise at a time when the country should be recovering its wits, instead of caving in to fearmongering arguments by an Administration that has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to lie to the public to achieve political goals.
Everyone involved in this “compromise” should be ashamed.
June 9th, 2008
Scribes, professionals and the decline of mass media
Clay Shirky, in his Here Comes Everybody, devotes a chapter, “Everyone is a media outlet”, to a comparison of the decline of scribal production to the decline of “professional” journalism. He sets up this analogy on faulty legs that leave the argument that “what was once a chasm is now a mere slope [between “professional” journalism and committing acts of journalism or journalistic-like writing or photopublication]” completely unsupported.
The problem is that the scribe’s production of books, which was, for the most part, merely rote copying (with mistakes sometimes adding very interesting flavor to the resulting books), is not analogous to the acts of research and authorship that a journalist does. And I don’t mean a “professional” journalist, just the act of researching and writing a thorough report of an event or events.
Clay mixes in photojournalism and stock photography, two very different functions in the scheme of things, as one is concerned with immediacy and the other with illustration of events with handy and cheap symbolic images, to make his point that it is in organizing data that most value is created:
“Who is a professional photographer? Like ‘journalist,’ that category seems at first to be coherent and internally cohesive, but it turns out to be tied to scarcity as well….. Much of the price for professional stock photos came from the difficulty of finding the right photo rather than from the difference in quality between photos….”
Photojournalism was and still is expensive, because someone has to take the bet that they can be in the right place at the right time. As a result, one photo can be worth months’ or, even, a year’s pay, because it took a year to be in the right place. Likewise, the reason stock photos exist is that they have been composed in the past from false realities (models posed in “natural” settings) or captured during the long effort to make a valuable image, and were ready for the future need as a result. In both cases, production rather than distribution is the essential cost.
Widespread amateurization doesn’t make it cheaper to produce a staged photo, it simply increases the likelihood that you can find a “real” image of something at a lower cost than the composed image of the photojournalist or stock photographer.
Shirky also cites the music and film industry, which engages in “distributing music and moving images” that is being undermined because “laypeople can now move move music and video easily.” Without getting into the distinctions between artists who can produce themselves and those that need packaging by a marketer before their music doesn’t suck too much for human consumption, the real value in these industries is production, not just distribution. Try to make The Lord of the Rings trilogy on less than $500,000 and you will see what I mean. Production includes the financing of risk, too.
Additionally, Clay dwells on “professionalism” as the essence of journalism. I’d like to see his take on the evolution of journalism, which is characterized by amateur writers becoming paid writers as they try to fill their own or a friend’s press with content. Over the long run, most great journalists never had a journalism degree. Professionalism actually rose with the proliferation of media outlets as a way of credentialing people, mostly to the detriment of the dedication to reporting the perceived truth that drove the rise of mass journalism.
In many ways, Shirky treats anything flowing over a network as an undifferentiated mass of content on which his economic and social rules operate.
“The entire basis on which scribes earned their keep vanished not when reading and writing vanished but when reading and writing became ubiquitous,” Clay writes. Indeed, it is so, but that is also when those scribes began to write their own works, as he points out with regard the Abbot of Sponheim’s 1492 defense of the scribal life, which he chose to print and distribute through movable type. Rather than a chaos during that 100 to 150 year period when scribes and printing presses competed with one another, there was a long process of change that was largely comprehensible to everyone involved. For an excellent history of this period, see Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Social Change.
What changed for the scribes was that the church would no longer pay for their work, because it no longer had a monopoly on readers, so they had to evolve different skills or, rather, focus on improving existing skills for the new channels of distribution. In other words, they had to become authors.
Scribes were copyists whose errors did introduce some of the most interesting elements of the books they reproduced (and, so, were failing as “copyists”). At best, they were masterful annotators and commentators on those works that passed beneath their quills, but not authors in the modern sense. Both authoring and annotation/commentary survived and thrived because of the enlarged markets for printed work. The scribes didn’t die off, they evolved into, among other things, academics, scientists and historians.
May 8th, 2008
Data Portability: Social Infrastructure still very much wanting
In a penetrating analysis of the Facebook developers forum, 20bits shows that the participation of programmers in the discussion about the Facebook platform is rapidly dwindling, which suggests the platform itself is incompatible with the needs of the market. The fewer programmers writing for the Facebook platform, the less relevant that platform will be. There’s a simple reason for this: Facebook and the other walled garden approaches, even when it is personal walled gardens hosted by a company like Ning, contribute to the fragmentation of personal experience.
What this market needs is a true mash-up platform that engages the many parts of people’s lives selectively, through the user’s decision-making (which can be helped along by editorial participation), rather than trying to corral different parts of those lives into defined “communities.” Community isn’t only a place, it is also a set of relationships, many of which are different than the one or two relationship factors that is the putative “reason” for a community. And those relationships are not the same for everyone in any community, but must be mixed and matched within and across different communities.
Social networking to date has focused on very small problems, and has fragmented online user experience into a mirrored madhouse as a result. In the case of Facebook, which has done damage to itself with the ham-handed introduction of Beacon, its monetization strategy for engaging brands, the essential problem remains that the “public” person presented by members of the site is not the real person behind the site, and for many users, they are simply uncomfortable with treating their lives as essentially an open book that can be passed around among developers that happen to offer Facebook apps.
Data portability, a current hot issue in the industry, is a misnomer: What we’re talking about is how to make it easy to flip through user’s lives by standardizing the expression of personal information to a public setting—almost always a fledgling market—rather than contemplating how people really share information about themselves. People are selective and attentive to how their data is used. Everyone knows they won’t tell a story they wish to keep closely held to the local gossip, but for the social networker today the only way to tell a story is to publish it to the network.
Some will probably say I am over-generalizing. But the plain fact of the matter is that, wherever you go today on the social network, the first thing that happens is someone asks you for your personal data so that it can be loaded into their database and used to “personalize” your experience on their site. The Data Portability standards are simply ways to expedite that process.
We need computers to serve people in all their contradictions, secrets and predilections, as well as simply as a system for sorting them into common bins that can be addressed by mass marketers.
May 5th, 2008
Two product quickies: Mophie Juice Pack good; Simple Tech stranded
I’ve been using the Mophie Juice Pack, an external battery that slips onto the Apple iPhone, for the past week and recommend it highly. The battery is about half the weight of the phone itself and fits neatly and securely onto the iPhone to provide a full day’s charge for almost any usage scenario.
The $99.95 Juice Pack’s power management is what stands out for me. The battery drains first (you can track the charge by pressing a button on the back that shows a remaining power indicator), keeping a charge on the phone until the external battery is no longer needed. So, when you’ve exhausted the battery, just pull it off and put it in your bag. The iPhone remains charged and ready for another few hours heavy duty.
A couple downsides. While the power passes through, the Juice Pack doesn’t seem to pass through synching data. I had to connect my iPhone separately to synch calendars and video. The other problem is the non-slip coating on the black exterior of the battery: it wears off. After just a couple days in my pocket, the corners and edges of the Juice Pack were worn looking. I suspect the anti-slip coating peels off completely.
These minor shortcomings aside, the Juice Pack a must-have for Read the rest of this entry »
Mitch Ratcliffe is a veteran journalist, media executive and entrepreneur. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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