Sarah Allen's Weblog

new technical trends which have no future

JP Rangaswami (confused of calcutta) writes "Interesting, but of no commercial value”: The problem with emerging social media tools: A Saturday Evening Post (via Cloudy Thinking).

Rangaswami relates how often the bleeding edge technical trends are hard to recognize as significant until they are adopted by the masses. From email to web applications to social networks -- all were considered odd fringe elements at first. I enjoyed reading his whole post.

He also highlights some gems collected by JD Paul. I followed the link and enjoyed reading all of them, but here are my faves:

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
–- Western Union internal memo, 1876.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
--Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" --David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" --H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981

staking a claim in cyberspace

Regular readers have noticed a sudden surge in ultrasaurus blog posting this week. It seems that every year or so I go through some quiet times when I am absorbed in work or other pursuits, as has happened for most of the past six months or so. I knew it had gotten silly when Ron Jeffries posted one of my webOS rants which I sent via email. Gosh, I thought, I should be blogging this stuff myself. In fact, once I got started, it seems that I have backlog of various links and observations that I have been itching to write about. Thanks Ron :)

I find this blogging phenomenon peculiarly compelling, primarily because of its social nature. It connects my odd ideas with other people who share them, disagree with them or find them interesting. When I started this blog in March, 2003, I wrote "It feels a little strange to write words for a potential audience of anonymous strangers. Oddly, I never felt that way about writing software." It's pretty neat that some folk are willing to shed anonymity and are no longer strangers.

In addition to owning my little slice of cyberspace with the blog itself, I've staked a claim via Technorati and BlogShares. I was amused to see how ultrasaurus valuation has recently plummeted. I don't quite understand why the stock price has continued to rise, despite intermittent activity and no significant market traffic, but I'm not quite interested enough to wade through this info on their site and see how these things are measured. Blogshares has provided the graph below, which oddly implies that it displays my personal valuation rather than that of this blog. LOL (Didn't anyone ever teach them to label their axes?)

when you can't search for an answer...

For a few years, I've been trying to remember the name of this restaurant I went to ten years ago or so. It was really fun, with an island theme and there was an actual plane (or part of one) inside the restaurant where you could sit and eat dinner. There are way too many restaurants in San Francisco, and too many matches to whatever search I could come up with about good places to eat near the airport. Fluther solved my dilemma in two days.

I had just checked back into fluther which has grown into quite a nice site. (I got an early peek at it last year, but it officially launched last week with an already thriving community.) I had asked "Why do we use the letter 'g' for a 'j' sound?" The answers were not as authoritative as my research into the history of the letter 'c' where I sought answers from professional linguists; however, if I'm fine with an answer as authoritative as one from a hallway conversation (perfect for my restaurant question), then fluther is a good solution.

The site has some nice features. It tracks my questions and answers and even recommends questions for me to answer. I wonder how it comes up with those (which aren't about linguistics or restaurants with planes). It's also good to see that they've started a blog, which really ought to have an entry about the origin of the name and maybe explain why they are interested in jellyfish photos.

the value of conversation

Mary Hodder (napsterization) proposes an alternate ranking system for blogs. The current ranking systems depend largely on inbound links and has the odd effect of making the popular bloggers even more popular, bringing the blogosphere ever closer to the mass media.

There was a time when the web was a small community. When I started working on web software in 1995, a search on Yahoo! would list a small number of results. I don't know whether the whole web was indexed, but I think they kept up with the majority of it. I could view most of the web pages on a topic that interested me and make my own choices about what was most interesting and credible. When the Shockwave player was released, we could view every Shockwave movie that was created as it came on-line.

As the web grew larger, it became more challenging to keep up. Thanks to the innovations of the search engines, we can do a quick search and find something relevant to our area of interest most of the time. However, with the creation of these search and ranking algorithms certain voices are omitted. I rarely look at more than a few pages of search results. Is it possible that the pages that would be most relevant to me might be later in the list? Or even worse, because of some artifact of gender use patterns could it be that pages more interesting to me will often be toward the end of the list?

I like the idea of tracking conversations instead of purely inbound links. If we had an alternate index that tracked only links from posts (rather than blogrolls and other collections), then we might see where conversations are happening.
Adina Levin describes this as a cloud presentation.

Mary Hodder has collected quotes and links on this topic (here and here).

groups are a run-time effect

I enjoyed Clay Sharky's article, A Group is its Own Worst Enemy. I've often noticed how software influences our actions. User experience is a run-time effect. In non-social software this pattern has been noted in such effects as "ransom note" publishing and verbose word processing.

Social software affects communication patterns, relationships, and identity. Any new communications medium has these effects. Leaving a message through a victorian calling card or modern telephone answering machine has implications to the relationship and the content of the message. As Marshall McLuhuan says "the medium is the message," in social software the medium influences not only the content of the conversation, but also the character of the speaker and the relationship to the audience.

In real life we have different modes of identity. Each of us has many facets of our personality, as we get to know each other better we experience a multi-faceted human being. The setting of an interaction influences who we are at that moment. If you read a transcript of three conversations: on the phone with my best friend, in the middle of a software debugging session, or in the park, would you know that any of them were me? You know my identity as seen through my weblog. Perhaps if I keep writing and you keep reading for years you would notice if my Moveable Type editor were suddenly taken over by a like minded yet different individual, but if you found yourself conversing with a nameless woman at a party, would you know it was me?

I like Clay Shirky's notion of a "handle" and being difference from "identity." I even looked in the Thesaurus, but I couldn't find a better word for this indentification that is not your complete identity, but is who you become known to be with a particular group. This kind of identification becomes exagerated through social software.

The article listed guidelines for designing social software whcih resonated with me:

Things to accept:

1. "you cannot completely separate technical and social issues...the group is real. It will exhibit emergent effects. It can't be ignored, and it can't be programmed"
   
2. "Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole."
   
3. "The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations"
   

Things to design for:

1. identification (rather than identity): "design for is handles the user can invest in" ... when people communicate they need a sense of history, "who said what when."
   
2. authority: "design a way for there to be members in good standing"
   
3. cost of membership: not about dollars, but about making having an investment that is tied to identity. In Shirky's words: "you need barriers to participation...The user of social software is the group, not the individual."
   
4. protect conversations by limiting scale or by providing an effective outlet when it gets crowded.
   
   
   Posted by Sarah at 7:37 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

cyberspace impersonation

Peldi has enountered an impersonator. I had wondered whether the addition of video communication with Flash would reduce this kind of on-line mischief. By the way, I don't think it is off-topic at all.

I suppose that if you don't know what Peldi looks like or don't know his personality, you might be taken in. Viswanath Gondi notes: "We all will soon evolve into learning not to believe every thing we see and hear. We will learn to fit what we hear by comparing it to their personalities."

Nobody knows you're a dog observes JD, linking also to a wonderful article that he wrote with some sage advice on debugging net rumors.

Reading these articles this morning reminded me of Julian Dibbell's article, A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database Into a Society. I believe there is a significant difference between manipulating psudeonyms in virtual worlds and impersonating real life identity; however, I enjoyed re-reading this thought-provoking tale.

imperfection is the price of admission

"In the real world, perfection is held as an ideal we humans always disappoint; on the web, perfection just gets in the way." -- Small Pieces Loosely Joined

David Weinberger devotes a whole chapter to perfection: how people pursue it in the real world, but must leave it behind on the web. As my friend Max Carlson noted, giving up perfection is the price the admission. With software incompatibilities, inconsistent bandwidth and connection time, and the ubiquitous 404 error, you quickly learn that sometimes things just don�t work. Weinberger asserts that we tolerate imperfection on the web �because it�s our web, made by and for humans, it shares the characteristic that distinguishes us from the gods: fallibility.�

Paradoxically I find the more obviously human parts of the web to be more reliable, not in terms of up-time, but in finding the information that I�m looking for. One of the reasons I enjoy the recent rise in weblogs is that once I find some people who are passionate about a subject, the information on those sites is deeper, more detailed, and usually more interesting. I don�t know these people. They may not be recognized authorities on the subject, but they develop a voice of authority in a few paragraphs or a few pages. Blogging software has made it easy for these folks to update their sites more frequently and creates a simple format for writing about timely information.

blogging is social

Spending a few months as a blogger has fundamentally altered my initial opinion of the nature of the web log. Blogging is social. Bloggers read and reflect and write. Bloggers establish an identity.

Blogging is a conversation. An individual weblog typically has a single author; however, a typical blog entry will contain one or more links. It is through these links and their associated commentary that the conversation takes place. A few standard elements of a blog contribute to this social nature:
- Comments: The comment form enables direct feedback. Any reader can comment on a blog entry, participating in the conversation without necessarily being a fellow blogger.
- Trackback: This allows readers to follow links to other blogs that mention a particular entry on this one. Not all blogs have this. It may even be specific to Moveable Type blogs (which is the software behind this particular blog).
- Links: Most web logs have a list of links on the right or left margin. These links often point to other web logs.
- Web Stats: more a standard part of a site, than a standard part of a blog. Some hosted blog sites don�t provide stats, but the fine folks at Media Temple who host this site provide a nice graphs and charts.

Web stats let me see when the readership of this site grew beyond a few colleagues. I could not have guessed this turning point from the comments. As is typical with community sites, people who participate are a small minority of visitors. Does the presence of an audience change my behavior as an author? Probably, but I couldn't tell you exactly how. "Anatomy of a Meme" and the Microdocs article (below) track the influence of traffic. I suppose one effect of an increase in readership is that people write about it.

Blogs as collective journalism:
�blogs cannot be read in isolation from each other. Blog stories are understood and appreciated in aggregate and not in isolation. On the other hand, mainstream media stories tend to be read in isolation rather than read and compared.� � a recent Microdocs news story

Another blogger's thoughts on blogging:
�what I get out of it is clearly informed by the larger coummunity of webloggers. I steal links from them, to be sure, but I also respond to their comments, learn from them, and get ideas from this interplay.� � Dan Hartung�s manifestito

Social Translucence

A new paper by Tom Erickson, et. al, introduces several examples of a "social proxy," a user interface element that helps people to visualize collective interactions.

"...many of the things our users report "seeing" are inferences. For example, the social proxy does not show that people are "paying attention," only that someone has clicked or typed. Someone might be paying attention, or they might be pretending to pay attention; we believe that it is crucial to maintain such socially useful ambiguities, and it is one of the reasons we emphasize social translucence."

Social Translucence: Designing Social Infrastructures that Make Collective Activity Visible

Japanese Emoticons

I've enjoyed Japanese cartoons for as long as I can remember. It is unsurprising that Japanese style and creativity along with a significantly larger choice of characters has led to a very different visual language for emotions:
http://club.pep.ne.jp/~hiroette/en/facemarks/index.html
http://www2.tokai.or.jp/yuki/kaomoji/

(^_^)

wikis are cool

I must have been living under a rock... Ward Cunningham is my newest hero. He developed WikiWikiWeb in 1995. It has clearly evolved a lot over the years and now has some nice spin-off open source efforts. "Wiki Wiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian and it sure is a quick way to make a site. Anyone can edit and add links, and even delete. Order is kept through social contract rather than by rules enforced through the software.

It took me only a few minutes to install UseModWiki this morning -- it will take me quite a bit longer to learn about Wiki culture and how to successfully cultivate a Wiki.

btw: I think that the rock I've been living under might be called "living in the world of proprietary software" or "search engines don't index dynamic content." Of course, maybe the internet is just a really big place with a lot of people doing neat stuff.

web page presence

I just posted a new header graphic on this site: the artist's interpretation of an ultrasaurus. Actually, it is a SWF. It will tell you if someone is also viewing the site. Try it with your friends (or you can cheat and open two browser windows).

It's a work in progress. It's not so much fun knowing someone is there if you can't talk to them. As is, it seems spooky, or maybe just frustrating.

behavioral demographics

I was intrigued by the discussions of Microsoft's new 3° project, and in particular by Michael Gartenberg's observation that this software targets "a behavioral demographic not just an age demographic."

I never thought of it that way. I used to think that if we create compelling experiences for people on the internet -- virtual places that give back more than people put into them, then this real-time online stuff would finally prove useful to the general population. Over time I've recognized that a lot of change needs to happen before any sufficiently new technology catches on. Email was around for decades, but it was the web which drove most people to hook up their PCs to the Internet.

Instant Messaging has emerged as the killer app in this category of connected applications. The buddy list and its expression of presence fundamentally changed the nature of chat. I find it interesting to think in terms of a behavioral demographic. If you don't spend much of your time sitting in front of a connected PC, then Instant Messaging certainly loses its appeal.

With my archaic Win2K system, I can�t try 3° myself, but I checked out the online feature tour. The musicmix reminded me of the Shockwave musicjam by SS7X7. I love this stuff. I don�t know why �- I just think it is fun. However, for me it is a rare experience, rather than regular activity. Will the easy creation of personal on-line spaces complete with �winks� and desktop icons popularize this kind of experience? I�m not sure. Maybe I�m not NetGen-enough, but I still believe we need to work on a more diverse set of compelling applications.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the MSN people icons look like little ducks?

Are blogs the vanity press of the Internet?

Indeed. Their heritage is, of course, HTML. The original vanity press of the Internet. However, this style of self-publishing arrives with different connotations than self-publishing in the world of books of paper. It is inexpensive and easy. If your uncle's dog has a website, why not you?

Web sites and, lately, blogs provide indices to the vast world wide web. Find a like-minded individual, sift through their personal musing and selected links, and you enter the web through a friendly portal. When I can find 'em, I prefer an individual's quirky view of the web to search-engine-generated lists of sites.

After lurking in the land of blogs for quite a while, I've decided to create one of my own. It feels a little strange to write words for a potential audience of anonymous strangers. Oddly, I never felt that way about writing software.

I imagine in my mind's ear that this story is for my friends and colleagues, but I'm posting it on the public Internet. Since I have benefited from the blogs of others, perhaps there are those in this sprawling 'net community that may be interested in mine.