Topic: Cyborg

This isn't a fully formed thought yet, but I was wondering what the status of discussion and commenting is on the web these days. Clearly microblogging like Twitter and Identi.ca produces a powerful platform for conversations and I think what's coming with xmpp (innovative interfaces for group chats, etc.) furthers the potential for conversation online. At the same time, I'm wondering what the status of conversations are "older" media like blog comments...

Are people still commenting on blogs? A few of you comment here now and then, and websites like making light have vibrant comments threads (that I don't have the attention span for or time to read), and the big sites (slashdot, digg, etc.) have active comments as well, but a lot of sites (including those with moderate readership) don't get many comments, and my sense is that a significant percentage of comments these days are in the "me too" vein, rather than productive themselves (because threads are difficult to read). Here are a few questions:

• Do features (threading? email notification? persistent identities?) make commenting "work better" or flow more productively?
• Are conversations about content moving away from comments into more centralized media like twitter, email lists, and discussion forums?
• Are we more likely to respond to a blog post we read in our own blog, rather than in a comments thread? Has the blogging community reached a saturation point?
• Dose a vibrant community of comment-posers indicate a marker of blog-success, these days? Did it ever? What might replace comments?

I'm pretty convinced that comments are dying, but I'd love to get your feedback. I'm not terribly mournful about this but I'm very interested in thinking about how we (as a community will replace this niche.)

I'm working on laying the seed content for a new wiki that I hope to launch in a few weeks. I want the wiki to be a free text/open source, and I have been giving some thought to the best way to accomplish this. This is, as it turns out, is pretty hard to accomplish: open source software licences are designed (not surprisingly) for software, and while Creative Commons Licences are great, I don't think they support community authorship in a way that matches with my ideals/gaols.

The brilliance of the GPL (to my mind) is the way that it equalizes the relationship between all contributors (big and small) and between the "authors" and the "users." While in a lot of open source projects these groups/interests overlap, they don't sometimes and those cases where those interests might obstruct the freedom of the work, the GPL equalizes it.

There are two mechanisms in the GPL (to my mind) that make this possible: first, the requirement that source code be made available (and reproducible) with any distribution means that you don't get anything extra because you were/are the original author of the code. The second, is the "viral" or "share alike" provisions where you can trust that anything released under the GPL will stay under the GPL.

While these mechanisms increase freedom and equity in situations where there are a select group of contributors and one legal author [1] the freedoms are most powerful when the boundaries between contributor and author and user are blurred.

This is all very basic stuff in the area of software freedom after all. The truth is that, as near as I understand there aren't terms that can be used to get a similar effect with non-code projects (exactly.) There are a couple of copy left licenses, issued by Creative Commons and even the Free Software Foundation, but there are problems with both of these strategies. Here are the issues as I see them:

The GNU FDL is designed, primarily for software manuals and documentation in support of free software, and is strategically designed for this kind of text. It, as a result, lacks a certain... grace and elegance for dealing with other kinds of text, particularly when dealing with derivative and physical reproductions of a work.

In contrast, the Creative Commons Licenses [2] (CC) don't have a concept of "source," so that while they provide the same sorts of rights regarding distribution of work (and thereby equalize some of the rights between distributor/user), they don't facilitate derivative work in the same way that open source licenses do.

I'm mostly worried about the following scenario. Say I release a piece of audio-art in a lossless (high quality; source) format (eg. FLAC/WAV) as well as MP3/OGG file (lower quality; compiled) under a CC license that permits derivative work under a viral/share alike terms. Then you turn around, re-equalize, and mix my audio-art with some other similarly licensed audio, and release it as a derivative work. That's cool. But the derivative work needed be in the higher quality format, because CC doesn't have a concept of source. Not having a concept of source doesn't effect the possibility of derivative works, but it does mean that derivative works are second-class citizens, as it were. CC doesn't equalize this relationship.

If I'm wrong about this interpretation, I'd love to be corrected, for the record.

For works where there's a single author, having derivative works as second-class citizens isn't a bad thing, and I can imagine that it would be seen as a feature in some cases. In cases where a text/work is authored by a community this is a major flaw.

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I hear that there's a project to Simplify the GFDL (or provide a way to use the GPL for documents/texts) that might remedy these problems (haven't dug through it yet). In the mean time, I'm wondering what folks think on the subject.

My inclination is to just use the GPL with the specification that "source" would be some sort of plain text (ASCII/UTF-8/UTF-16) compatible file. That achieves the goal required, without too much fuss or concocting a new license that would prove incompatible down the road. I think mandating a particular format (markdown/org-mode/xhtml/LaTeX) is a bit too strict, but I'd hate to see a document developed in the open, released as a PDF derivative without making (say) LaTeX sources available.

Though I'll be the first to acknowledge the irony that for non-software works, the "source" isn't "human readable source code" but rather "machine readable data source."

The only real practical concern is that if the FSF releases a 2.0 of the FDL (or a SFDL) that becomes the a standard for free/open source non-software/text projects then going with the GPL might make that a difficult/bothersome transition on that. So the question, seems to be would providing the option to upgrade to the GNU FDL make sense (eg. this work is licensed under the GPL [with an understanding of what the source is] version 3 or (at your choice) a later version [or a later version of the GFDL]).

Anyway, back to writing.

[1]

Copyleft and the GPL doesn't to be fair, eliminate copyrights, as all code released under the GPL will (theoretically, eventually, should a public domain ever be reinstated in the US) revert to the public domain as described in the constitution. GPL is, in many ways an extension of copyright, albeit one designed to destabilize the copyright system.

[2]	There are many flavors of Creative Commons' licenses, which provide various freedoms. The Attribution-Share Alike License is most analogous to the GFDL/GPL.

I have a confession. I last week (briefly) considered getting a Nokia N810 so that I could sync and use org-mode when I was away from my computer/laptop. The N800/810 is a small tablet that runs a Debian based operating system, which means it could run emacs, and I could write little clickable scripts that could do all of the syncing and awesomeness that I've grown accustomed to.

Then I realized how absurd this is, and cast it aside. My laptop is really mobile, and if I needed it to be lighter or more mobile, I could buy a new battery for it. And it has a full sized keyboard.

This is a sickness right?

In my post about my fact file I said that I was going to "try things out and see how it goes" before I posted code to see how things work in the system. Well, I think things are pretty stable (I haven't tweaked much), so I'm going to post my remember template, for the system described in that post.

(setq org-remember-templates
   '(("data" ?d "* %^{Title} %^g \n :PROPERTIES:\n :date:
       %^t\n :cit e-key: %^{cite-key}\n :link: %^{link}\n
       :END:\n\n %x %?"  "~/org/data.org")))`

If you want to tweak further, check out the relevant section of the org manual.

Enjoy and collect facts with abandon!

I've been writing a great deal in the past few days: blog posts, the seed content for a wiki, fiction at a somewhat impressive pace (for me). While (at press time) there are still lots of things on my plate and storms on the horizon it's very true that doing creative things, getting work done makes it considerably easier to do more creative things, and to get more work done. The stuff on my plate and the storms on the horizon in another seem less threatening. It's not logical, but I'm not going to argue with that.

Of note: I posted another story to Critical Futures from Chapter 6 of Knowing Mars, this is the last scene in this chapter, and I'll post it in three chapters. After that, we're going to get PDFs of Chapters 4-6, and I'll be posting more about that in time. Thanks to everyone's replies to my post about my emacs process, both on the thread and on identi.ca. I'm much impressed with all of your wisdom, and assistance. I didn't know about wdired-mode which I shall explore, and while I did know about magit, I hadn't gotten around to trying it yet. Here I come.

One last thing, if there are any perl, ikiwiki, CGI::FormBuilder, Dreamhost wizards out there, I would be very flattered and indebted if you'd take a look at this bug report I filed on ikiwiki, I'm having some sort of minor problem with CGI form generation, which is such a minor bug that I'm highly annoyed at the concept. On the one hand, it's a lot of effort to get ikiwiki working under these conditions, on the other hand it doesn't make a lot of sense to pay for a really robust server (with root access) for what will really be a minimal amount of content. Anyway, your help would be much appreciated.

ps. sorry for the late content.

pps. if you record a podcast over a skype (or other VoIP service) with Audacity and you're running Ubuntu/Debian/Linux... I'd love to hear from you.

I talk to people from time to time about working in cyberspace and successful new media participation. If I were a hipster, I might even say, "I do SEO," but I'm not, and I don't, really. The truth is that I don't have a good, simple, answer to the question, "How do I succeed on-line with social media." I do have a lot of ideas on the subject, as you might expect (many of which I've already written about here before.) The core of my approach revolves around a conviction that word of mouth--like offline--is the most effective way to promote events and products in cyber-space, with the corollary that "meatspace" connections are among the most powerful and valuable "cyberspace" resources.

During college I spent a long time reading and rereading an essay by Samuel R. Delany, called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue about the process of gentrification in Times Square and it's affect on cross-class/cross-race social/sexual contact. The argument was that environments and geographies that promoted situations were individuals would come into contact (randomly, casually) promoted opportunity, satisfying social interaction, and interesting conversations in a way that "networking" opportunities (conferences, workshops, cocktail parties, etc.) couldn't. In illustration of this, Delany describes situations from talking about philosophy in the pornographic theatres of the old Time Square to finding a vacuum cleaner repair service in the checkout line of the grocery store. Furthermore, "contact" between people of different classes (as was present in the pornographic theaters of the old time square,) promotes the destabilization of class-based injustices. [1]

Contact has been an incredibly powerful and useful concept for me in a number of different contexts, because it provides an method for affecting social change in "every day life" and in creates a notion of "politics" that's closer to "people interacting" and further from something tied to institutions of power ("government," etc.,) which suits my disposition. I think, largely the internet is most powerful when it promotes something closer to "contact" and further from something that resembles "networking." And by powerful, I mean a number of things: most likely to positively affect people's work, provide meaningful opportunities for commerce and social relationships, to develop unique cultural environments.

While there are opportunities for contact on contemporary social networking websites, they mostly specialize at helping you find people who are actually quite like you, like people you know in real life, people who are interested in the same things you're interested in, and people who are friends with people you know in real life. That's not contact, in the sense provided by Delany. [2]

There is still, I think, contact. I think microblogging (twitter/identi.ca) particularly with "track" features, [3] represents (or did) a move away from "networking" to contact. The communities that form around open source projects, promote contact, as they are often interest specific, and contain members with disparate skills and backgrounds. Once upon a time, general population/topic (ie. non-project specific) IRC channels (chat rooms) were an immense source of contact for their users. [4]

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I'm not sure what this means. I remain convinced that contact is a useful and important way of looking at social interactions. I also think it says a lot about my interests in open source. I also think that as technologies and memes in cyberspace (eg. blogs, social networking, microblogging) develop in ways that promote "contact," and eventually become "networking" opportunities not that the latter is bad, but it is an important conceptual shift. It's also quite likely that we'd be able to see what ideas are going to be the next big thing based on the degree to which they promote contact. There are other implications I'm sure, but I'll leave those for another time.

[1]	I suppose this isn't a wholly radical concept, but in any case, I think the "we need to talk to each other," and live in integrated/diverse situations is definitely a step in the right direction. Delany's articulation is quite useful and complete.

[2]

Indeed I've strayed from Delany in a couple of key directions. First his essay(s) described contact as being a uniquely urban phenomena (which I've totally abandoned), and secondly something that resonates with sub-cultural groups (queers, poor, etc.) In the case of the Internet, I think this works but I recognize that it's a stretch.

[3]	Once upon a time, you could receive (via IM) twitter updates for any keyword, even if you didn't follow the people who sent the tweets. This means that all of a microblogging can have a conversation with each other, and circumvent the isolating aspects of "social networking" constructs.

[4]

By general population/topic I mean non-technical (largely) channels, such as rooms for fandom (fans of science fiction; and pop culture) rather than "working" or customer support channels. Though people would be drawn for a host of reasons, discussions seemed fairly random, and my sense is that (if my experience can be generalized from) that some pretty powerful friendships/connections were developed in these contexts.

Data, information, in the digital context is really important. Perhaps the most important thing. It's a shame then, I think, that we're, on the whole, so bad at managing data and organizing information so that it is useful to us in the future. I keep starting to write posts on the topic with clever lead-ins, and within a hundred words I realize that I've bitten off more than I can chew. So I'll spare the introduction and get on with the story.

A couple of weeks ago, I copied all of my music off of my backups (from iTunes and my days as a mac user), and onto my Linux machine. I'd never really looked at the files in years, becuase of course, iTunes abstracts all the files away, so when you play "digital music," you just play "tracks" rather than having to interact with the realities of the files themselves. This is incredibly user friendly, and I think there's something in the iTunes model that is pretty useful. That is, creating user interfaces that let users interact with intelligibly bounded data units rather than with file units makes a lot of sense.

Having said that, what ends up happening is that the abstraction of the data often means that we're less in touch with what's being stored, and we rely on (often proprietary) tools to keep track of the meta-data associated with our libraries.

As I was going through my Music Library, which I'm using with mocp and Rhythm box (minimally, for syncing, eventually.) I realized that my music was organized in an incredibly ass backwards way. Many "artists" had a number of folders given various alternate spellings of their names (with and with out "the" or with various ampersand forms), which is a trifle frustrating. And as I was looking over the files I realized that there were things that I thought I had deleted, but in fact hung around in my directory (this is a specific flaw with the "are you sure" dialogue in iTunes, but it's still an issue).

I'm not done, but I know that the next step: going through the files by hand will mean that my music files will be much more well organized. Problems like this arise, largely, when we just rely on the computer to organize the files itself without input from us. While I like the "iTunes" way of accessing my music, I expect that my collection of music files is the kind of thing that I'm going to have around for the rest of my computer-using/music-listening life, and after only 5 years my iTunes has stooped being a part of my life. For sure.

I guess the lesson from this is, interfaces for accessing your files aren't always the best for organizing the files, and don't entrust your organizing responsibility to a script.

Another story: PDF files.

When I'm doing research stuff, I have this way of collecting PDF files of articles. When I was in school I would make a folder for each class I took and then throw PDFs into one folder, title them productively (author[s] - title.pdf). This worked until I wanted to start reusing material, or drawing connections between various projects/class. And then--being a geek--I had projects that weren't quite class related, where did they go? Never mind the fact that the file names were absurdly long.

So I switched to a new system where I keep a BibTeX database of all my files and name PDFs with their cite keys (which are: authorlastYEAR.pdf; if there are more than one paper by an author in a year I append alphabetical characters (eg. a, b, c) to the end in the order that they come into the database. If there are more than one author I take the first author/PI).

It took a few weeks of sporadic work get the files into shape, but the end result of that transformation is the fact that my PDFs are incredibly useful to me, and I never have to look very hard for any piece of data.

The lesson is to use your data no matter what the system is and make sure it's still working, and then, when needed don't be afraid to change strategies. On this level, organization really ought to be empirical.

In light of these two experiences I have come to the conclusion that it's important to really get your hands dirty in the files. While the abstractions are nice, they allow us to be complacent. Touching your data, looking at the files, and deploying a system that is simple and both useful in the present and relevant looking forward is incredibly important. The particulars beyond that are more vague, still but we'll get there in future posts.

Thanks for reading.

I wrote in "The Advertising Bubble" that one of the ways to more effectively monetize content and "do better on the Internet," was to combine efforts with other content producers. The key thought here is that, people only have so much time, and cooperation can allow you and your fellow content producers to pool resources, readers' attention, and business strategies.

I've also thought of this post as the "just because Wordpress, can be installed in a handful of minutes doesn't mean you should," post. The tools (and skills) required to build websites are fast, easy, and non-technical (by now) so that anyone can have a blog, or a website, or (hell, with enough time/money) a full fledged social networking site to rival digg or facebook. Just because sites are easy to build, it doesn't mean that we need to build new sites. Just because independence is possible, it's not always called for.

There are a lot of readers on the Internet, but there are only so many hours in the day. And having a dynamic site with new content, is something that requires a lot of work. Lots of people can pull it off, but a lot of people (with really good things to say) can't. This is sort of the dirty underbelly of the fact that the Internet (and open source) is a great democratizing force: because everyone speaks easily and freely, the challenge to being heard isn't opportunity, it's shear volume.

I talk with a lot of people about working with the Internet, about using the internet to promote and build various kinds of projects, about blagging, and about strategies for success. There are things that I can help people do better like having good designs, writing top heavy content (I'm bad at this), ideas for more content, strategies for posting regularly, places to network with the communities that you hope to speak to, and among other tactics. All of these things should help lead to success; but beyond persistence, creativity, good timing, and a little entropy I have no good way of beating the "volume problem," given current conventions.

The solution of encouraging group blogs rather that individual blogs is a good start. Each bloggers' responsibility to any given site is much lower than a single blogger's responsibility to their personal site. There would be fewer (new) blogs as a result of the increase in collaboration, and possibly a consolidation of existing blogs. We would also expect to see blogs more tightly focused on niches rather than individuals: niche focuses tend to do really well on the web with regards to targeting audiences, so this is a good thing indeed.

Before anyone cries that I'm trying to suppress individuality (or expression, or identity), this is very much not the case. I think static websites are really important, my suggestion isn't that people shouldn't have websites it's that they shouldn't blog on them (by default). Given the state of syndication and aggregation content, it's even possible for folks to have personal websites that aggregate their content from a number of different sources, [1] we get individuality and dynamic content without dividing efforts or audiences.

There are other solutions (curation springs instantly to mind) to the "volume problem," and I'll get to those soon. In the mean time, remember: group blogs are the future.

Onward and Outward!

[1]	Think of the aggregated personal website as being the inverse of services like ping.fm, which blast your content to a host of different websites, the personal website should rather aggregate content and conversations from other websites into one location.