The Googleplex Blog

Help! I've been Flickrwhacked!

To googlewhack means to find a search term that returns only one result in Google. To be a true googlewhack, the search term should consist of actual words that can be found in a dictionary. The googlewhack craze has been around a while. It's worth noting that when someone finds a good googlewhack like ambidextrous scallywags, the search term doesn't stay a whack?note the 740 (or so) hits for this term in Google.

Now there's a new game in town: flickrwhacking.

A successful flickrwhack finds a flickr tag that uniquely identifies one Flickr photo.

To back up for a moment, when a Flickr member posts a photo that can mark their image with tags that describe the contents. These tags are a useful way to find photos on Flickr (one's own, or photos relating to the subject of a tag). Flickr tags have come to play an important role in the folksonomic categorization of the web because they provide a high-volume approach to correlating subject-matter with visuals.

Some Flickr tags can be pretty idiosyncratic, hence the game of flickrwhacking.

I tagged a somewhat unusual photo of mine of a holly flower with the tag By Golly. It turns out that By Golly is a flickrwhack, and was added to the Flickr flickrwhack thread.

Flickrwhacking is part of a general Flickr trend of making a game out of everything. Another example: one group is devoted to each member finding their least interesting photo on Flickr. Of course, as with googlewhacking, the moment a photo is labeled as uninteresting-which is an automated Flickr ranking system for photos-it becomes more interesting.

Googlewhacking! Flickrwhacking! The web! Ain't life grand?

Buh-Bye: Ranting and Raving about Voice Response

One of my pet peeves is synthetic-voice driven customer support telephone lines. I find myself shouting into these things: "Operator! Person! Someone! Anyone! I WANT TO TALK TO A HUMAN BEING!"

It is kind of cool knowing I'm talking to a computer, because I can rant, rave, and curse all I like without having to feel remorse at exhibiting inappropriate behavior before a mere human cog in the machine. (Instead, I'm exhibiting it to a machine cog in the machine, who will probably remember me detrimentally the next time I try to do a really tricky bit of programming!)

Somehow all my upset never results in the computer at the other end transferring me to a "customer service" representative. Which is, I suppose, the point of the whole thing.

Voice-response customer service lines were brought to mind by a message flashing on my DirectTV last night advertising that the DirectTV phone lines had "improved" by going down this path. (It's another, minor pet peeve of mine that DirectTV sees fit to signal some stupid message to me by flashing a light in my bedroom on the TV-satellite controller box. What nerve!)

This trend of automating customer service using software that "understands" what you say is probably good for companies in this business like Nuance. But pretty obviously it's not good for consumers. If you've ever been frustrated trying to get through one of these systems, you'll know what I mean. I'm all for self-service help mechanisms where appropriate, but this is the forte of the internet, not a telephone that I've picked up.

So what gives? In his glib bestseller The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman tells us (as if we didn't know) that outsourcing is here to stay. (Where tomorrow's lowest-cost outsource provider will be located is another question.)

Friedman, however, doesn't really pinpoint one of the main thrusts of outsourcing: many companies have come to believe that customer service is a cost center and a drain on their bottom lines. The less their customer service costs, and the more shabby their customer service, the better. These businesses are now marching to the tune of Wall Street's quarterly expectations, and do not realize that in the long term people do remember how they've been treated.

You can see an example of this disturbing trend in a voice-response customer service that places another obstacle in the way of getting through to a human being. It all reminds me of a Saturday Night Live skit I happened to see recently. David Spade and Helen Hunt play flight attendants saying "Buh-Bye" to passengers leaving an airplane. No matter what the passenger wants—for example, information about a connecting flight—the response is always "Buh-Bye." It's hard to convey how funny this gets (I know it sounds like real life, and not particularly funny, but you have to see Spade and Hunt in action) with lines like, "I said Buh-Bye and your mouth is still flapping!"

Finally, when the rude flight attendants have dismissed the last passengers, Spade picks up the intercom and calls for a protective escort to get out of the terminal.

Spade plays—for laughs—a flight attendant so rude he'll need an armed body guard to protect him from his customers. So will all these companies that have relegated customer service to impenetrable automated systems and the back of beyond.

Copyright in the Era of Flickr and Google

I need to make some preliminary explanations before I get to the heart of this story.

(1) This story is about digital photography -- but the general issues it raises apply equally well to almost any kind of intellectual property that can be represented digitally--meaning music, video, software programs, and more.

(2) I am an active and enthusiastic member of the flickr community. I use my flickr photostream to display my photographs to other flickr members, and to power the image management behind my Photoblog 2.0.

Within the flickr application, you can assign different access permissions to your photographs (essentially, available to the public, only to friends, or only to family). But in order for anyone to view your photos, and in order to use them in my own blog, access has to be set to public. This means that anyone can display my photos on the web, whether or not I've given them permission to do so.

(3) I've changed the name and identifying details of the person using photos from flickr without permission (which is what this story is about). For two reasons: it wouldn't be fair to identify the person (they didn't know I'd blog about it) and I'd also like to pursue my flickr addiction without personal acrimony.

(4) A flickr badge is a group of pictures from flickr that can be displayed on your own website. Flickr generates the code for you, using either HTML or Flash. The pictures must be marked for public access, and can be based around the work of everybody on flickr, a single flickr photographer's set, a Flickr group pool, or using tags (to name the most common way badges are generated). Photos can be set to be random or sequential. This page shows a Flash badge using my photos.

Got all that? OK. Here goes.

I am a member of a variety of group pools on flickr. In a group pool, photographers with interests in common all submit their photos, creating a kind of library.

Recently, I noticed on a fairly prominent blog a flickr badge consisting of random photos from one of the group pools I belong to. The blog author is the flickr administrator of this group pool. I will call him X (and the group in question Y).

I wrote X:

I'm writing to express a little concern about the flickr badge from the Y Group that is displayed on your blog. I assume that you are showing a random selection of photos from the group. While most people would be glad and flattered to have you display their photos (I certainly would), some of the photos in the Y Group are "all rights reserved" (mine, for example - which I accompany with a copyright notice).

So I think as a matter of form and respect, you need to ask permission. Perhaps this could be accomplished by starting a discussion thread on the group (and asking if anyone objects) so it wouldn't be a logistical nightmare. Or, as an opt-in mechansim, you could designate a unique tag for people to use if they want to be included in your display - and create your badge using the tag.

I really don't mean to be a pill here, but I think photo rights are quite important...

X responded as follows:

It took me a while to figure out how I was going to respond to your comments. As a professional photographer and designer I make a living selling my work ... [and] I share your concern over proper use and photographers rights. Having been a long time member of Flickr ... (not to mention many personal sites showing my work) I've seen my work stolen and passed off by others as their own work many times. So many times, in fact, that I do not put the majority of my photos ... on the web. If you value your work, and it sounds like you do, then I don't believe Flickr is the place for you to showcase it properly.

Flickr holds no discretion in who is able to view and use photos posted to groups. This is evident through the site flickrlicio.us which routinely republishes copyrighted material on their site without permission. The Flickr Badge which I (and countless others) use allows you to sample photos from a group or from everyone regardless of copyright status.

Out of respect for your wishes I have changed it to show only my photos I have posted on Flickr. I have, on file, permission from all but a few of the members of the Y Group allowing me to use their photos. For this reason I did not perceive there being a problem. For that I apologize. It was not my intent to offend you.

If the situation with the Flickr Badge continues to be a problem for you I urge you, in my official capacity as admin of the Y Group, to pursue this matter with Flickr (Yahoo!). You also might consider marking your photos as "private only available to family and friends" and setting your download permissions similarly so they are not abused.

Have a nice evening.

I wrote back:

Thank you for your email. I, too, have given your email quite a bit of thought. Where I come out is that I think you missed the point of my original email.

I was not asking you to remove the Y group badge from your site. In fact, I think the variety of photos from the group enhances your site, and that group members would be pleased to have their pictures shown in a badge on your site.

I was asking you to get appropriate permissions, which should not be a hard thing to do (you say that you already have these for most members). For one, I would be happy to extend permission for my photos.

My further suggestion was that you add a discussion thread to the group so that members (and potential members) would know the use you were making of the photos.

I also noted that you could use a special tag to generate a badge, which would allow people to opt-in to your badge display. (A private group by invitation would be yet another possibility.)

The fact that others make use of copyrighted materials without getting permission that you mention doesn't seem very relevant to me. As a general principle, if someone else does something wrong, this doesn't make it right for us to do it. The fact that you are a professional photographer (which I did not realize) should make you even more careful about rights issues.

Regarding your more general comments about flickr and the use I make of it, I am a very enthusiastic member of the flickr community, although I understand some of the drawbacks of widespread image dissemination that you mention. I'd be happy to discuss my uses of flickr, why I do so, and my strategies for dealing with these matters in another email if you'd like.

It's important to me that our discussion not turn acrimonious. As I indicated, I am a reader and fan of your Y blog (and have sent traffic to it via links on my sites). I also like the Y group on flickr. So I think you took my comments the wrong way -- I was suggesting a minor procedural fix to what you were doing, not scrapping the whole thing.

All this raises alot of interesting issues--and they don't have very much to do with flickr. The truth is that it is easy to find images on the web, for example using Google Images.

One way or the other anything you can find and view on the web, you can also copy and use for your own purposes. The only real limitation is that photos displayed on the web are not suitable for high quality reproduction.

Of course, having the ability to do something neither confers the legal right to do so nor makes it OK to do it. I own the rights to my photos, and nobody should be displaying them without my permission (which, by the way, I'm usually pretty happy to give).

Ultimately, there is an inherent conflict between intellectual property lockdown--which means no one gets to see your work--and the desire for dissemination that all intellectual property owners have for practical and emotional reasons. Your intellectal property is only safe if no one sees it, but photos that no one sees do not get appreciated in the marketplace (or otherwise).

By the way, the flickrlicio.us site that X mentions features the "Babes of Flickr"--and is a great deal of fun if you are into this kind of thing.

Updates: DV Press, world's longest domain name, and a raccoon

DV Press
In DV Press: A Publisher that Cheats and Response from Eric Rockenbach I detailed the story of my tribulations with Eric, mostly using his own emails. The update is that Eric followed through on his threat to stop payment on my royalty check as retribution for my story.

I don't suppose I can expect anymore of the pittance of money that this deadbeat publisher owes me, but I do have the satisfaction of knowing that anyone who googles DV Press will find my story - and understand that they are at risk if they do business with Eric and DV Press.

World's longest domain name
In the Googleplex Blog and on O'Reilly I wrote about the world's longest domain name. Here's a correction and comment from a reader:

Hi

Your website is wrong !

The longest valid domain name in the world is :

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf.com/

and not

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com/ as stated !

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch-uchaf is a real place - I used to live near there.

Keith
(Thanks, Keith!)

Raccoon
Check out the raccoon caught in the act of browsing our trash can!

Black Bush Humor

Q: What is President George W. Bush's position on Roe versus Wade?
A: He really doesn't care how people get out of New Orleans.

Response from Eric Rockenbach

I previously posted about DV Press, a publisher who has been slow to pay me royalties (and personally insulting, as well). Here's the back story.

And here's Eric's response to my post (the asterisks are mine, the original contained the expletive):

"I have not cheated you out of anything and YES your f**king check was sent. If you ever want to receive your royalties and if you don’t want me to stop payment on the check that was sent remove your post immediately."

Note: As of today's mail I have not received this check, and I am not holding my breath. If it does show up, I will add the fact to this entry - and also whether it clears.

Update (September 9): To my surprise, a check and statement were in today's mail. I'm depositing the check, and will see whether payment was stopped and it clears.

DV Press: A Publisher That Cheats

Over the years I've had many sub-optimal interactions with publishers having to do with editorial direction and the strength of marketing plans. But none of this has stooped to the level of DV Press, a small producer of instructional DVDs whose business model appears at least partially to be based on cheating its authors. (I am not supplying a link because the DV Press site is currently not responding.)

I'm spurred to go public with this because I recently received a mass email from Eric Rockenbach, who owns DV Press, calling for new authors to produce material relating to the 2005 release of Visual Studio. If you are considering working with this company, you should definitely regard my story as cautionary.

In part, the email states:

"DV Press is signing author trainers for their VS.NET 2005 titles. DV Press has 16 available titles on Amazon, most of which hold extremely high customer ratings. ... DV Press is quickly growing into the number one leader in video related courseware...DV Press DOES NOT pay advancements [sic]. We have found that in the past authors who require advancements do not put the required effort towards the title and give no support in marketing and self promotion. These titles typically perform the worst. We guarantee that if you are confident about your abilities both on camera and your immediate marketing abilities your title will do extremely well."

Almost two years ago I authored two DVDs for Eric (one about C# programming, the other about Javascript programming). I've never claimed to be a telegenic personality, and these DVDs are certainly the victim of poor direction and production values, but you can (if you want) judge this for yourself. In fairness, it is also true that my discs have not sold particularly well.

Since authoring the discs, my relationship with Eric has been one of dealing with his bounced checks and prodding him for my past-due payments. He's generally had some "dog ate my homework" excuse, although up until recently he has also eventually paid.

I think the most recent dialog speaks for itself:

Harold: "I am really upset to get this email in light of the lack of statements, royalties, and responsiveness from you. As I've said before, I am really disappointed personally. I do think it is in your best interests to keep your commitments to me if you plan to continue publishing in this area."

Eric: "We have moved into a new space and things are starting to settle. This is a business and of course it will honor the royalties. Right now we are 30 days late on your royalties payment… last quarter for instance Baker Taylor was over 120 days late on their Pos. This is the nature of the business from what I have learned Harold. Your titles aren’t exactly hot sellers either ranking at the bottom of our list, yet I seem to get the most amount of negative energy from you.

I would like to try to keep this as professional as possible, neither of us had an ideal experience with the other party but we still must continue doing business with each other."

Harold: "Your assertion that being late with royalties is comparable to payment terms on a merchant account is, of course, false. Every major publisher I have worked with have been prompt with their royalty payments. If you want to keep our relationship professional, then it is incumbent upon you to honor the terms of your contract.

BTW - obviously I am disappointed in the sales of my DVDs (although the Amazon comments haven't been bad). However, the sales rankings on Amazon of my two titles are 16, 837 and 20, 260 (as of today), not very significantly less than the Neal Ford Java title you tout as one of your good performers at 11, 532.

Eric, with a bounced check from you, a check for taxi fare that the cab driver wouldn't honor, and consistently late statements (that only show up after prodding), I don't see how you can blame me for being somewhat negative. As far as I know, I've lived up to all my commitments to you, including promoting your titles (for example, see my web sites).

So get off it, and honor your contract. In my opinion, until you can do this basic thing (and, yes, you always do have a good excuse) you have a heck of a nerve soliciting new authors."

Eric: "I guess we threw professional out the window with this last message. I will be more then happy to show you Neal’s rankings. Amazon numbers flucate daily and for a long stretch Neal’s titles were in the 700-900 rank below the 1000 mark. I would really enjoy a more professional tone with you. This is one of six businesses I own and for me to spend this wasted time bickering with you is pointless. I have honored the contract to date and I will continue to do so.

I never wanted to indicate this in previous emails, but you have driven me to it. Your tongue is hanging out of your mouth for the majority of the video giving a “fruity” appearance to most viewers. Everyone who has actually ranked your DVDs besides you, your wife and myself have given them 1 star. I know you are a very talented author and I’m not denying this fact, but some things don’t translate well into video.

Your royalties will be paid within thirty days after the quarter has ended. I will stop responding to your emails if you continue in this tone."

Eric (in a separate email): "Your royalty check for $172.80 has just been sent out. This includes 43 sales of the JavaScript title and 53 copies of the C#.NET title."

In light of my past experience with Eric, I'm not surprised that this check has not, in fact, shown up. I have no idea what his six businesses might be (or why someone who claims to have so many business interests can't honor his commitments). I do not believe his assertion about all the positive Amazon reviews for my DV Press titles, but find it interesting that he admits to having written false reviews.

Unfortunately, the economics of the matter ($800 per year of dwindling royalties) do not permit me to sue him in Texas. However, I am posting this so that other potential authors who research Eric and his outfit will be warned.

Hasta la Vista, Baby!

So, Microsoft's new operating system, code-named Longhorn, has finally been named. And the new name is...Vista!

Which marketing moron thought this name up? All I can say is, "Hasta la, baby, hasta la!"

According to a recent review of Vista beta build 5098 in eWeek, data will be easier to organize, there's a piece of eye-candy called Aero Glass that has a cool transparent look (and takes a beefy video card to run) -- it's not clear what this resource hog actually does from the review -- and Internet Explorer 7 has, drum roll please, tabbed dialogs (like Firefox now). I can't wait. Really. A tabbed dialog in a browser just makes me so excited.

Clearly media flacks would like to make Vista seem something momentous. But even so, as another eWeek columnist opined, Microsoft has an "uphill battle to convince enterprises that Vista is compelling enough to justify the cost and effort..." So, maybe the name does fit.

If you are interested, here's a slide show of the Vista UI.

Editor? What Editor?

Consider the following sentence in John Twelve Hawks's The Traveler (on page 59): "The tension in his shoulders and the quick way he moved his hands showed he was worried, but Gabriel knew that his brother would never show it."

I think I know what this author meant to write (that the brother would never show worry to an outsider), but the way it appears in print is blatantly and unintentionally self-contradictory. (You can't both "showed" and "never show.")

This is a hardcover title published by the prestigous Doubleday division of Random House. The novel essentially has the appeal of a cable sci-fi action movie: not much depth or characterization, but quick moving and diverting. It has received a fair amount of attention (including a starred review in Publishers Weekly) and sales (it is currently #71 in sales on Amazon).

So my rhetorical question is really this: if a frontlist title like this gets the kind of skimpy editorial review that the sentence I cite indicates, what kind of editorial support is given to most books these days. Better we shouldn't ask.

Harry Potter Comes of Age

I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the most recent book in the Harry Potter series.

The book is a very pleasant change from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

In this penultimate volume in the series, Harry has lost his whiny, teenaged angst -- and calmly and efficiently begins to assert his manifest destiny. Way to go, Harry!

It's also good to see the complex details of the plot in this series under control and beginning to come together.

The ending is a bit of a let-down, but it's probably necessary as a platform for the last book in the series.

Now if only I had some of that felix felicis!

My Life Is on Hold!

The Googleplex Blog is on temporary hold for the month of July while I finish up Building Advertising Tools with Google (O'Reilly). Please check back, and in the meantime have a look at my Photoblog 2.0. Sorry for the silence and thanks!

Harold

Folksonomic Discovery

In a previous entry, I wrote about 43 Things and Flickr. These are two interesting, trendy, and (in least in the case of Flickr) extremely useful applications. (I think that 43 Things may be powerful in its own way, too.)

Both applications are well worth a look if you don't know them. You use 43 Things to create a list of personal goals (here are some of mine, and a further discussion of the application). Flickr, in contrast, is used to share photos with a global community of photographers - and also for off-site image management, as in my Photoblog 2.0 and Digital Field Guide.

Flickr and 43 Things have in common that they provide a self-tagging mechanism. In 43 Things, you can apply tags you create to goals. In Flickr, you tag photos. A context in which everyone can freely tag (and categorize things) has come to be called a "folksonomy". Put differently, a folksonomy is a bottoms-up taxonomy created by the people for the people rather than a top-down hierarchy constructed by experts - the usual model for a taxonomy.

These folksonomies are very useful for sorting, searching, categorizing, and making relevance determinations within an application. Both 43 Things, on its home page, and Flickr, on the Flickr Tags page, make use of a common visual metaphor in which the larger the font size of the tag, the more people have applied it (and the more important it is).

"Social bookmark" manager del.icio.us lets you tag and categorize web links, creating a web folksonomy competitive with web taxonomies like that of the ODP. (Technorati provides a somewhat reverse service which allows you to track usage by tag in weblogs.) So del.icio.us and Technorati have created folksonomy-related services that distribute across the myriad sites in the web.

But what about aggregating folksonomic discovery across applications (as opposed to sites)? Why shouldn't I be able to cross-correlate 43 Things tags with Flickr tags?

A beta application named Gataga uses a frankly Google-esque user interface to aggregate social bookmark tags from del.icio.us, blogmarks, blinklist, jots, spurl, furl, simpy and connotea.

Gataga will display its folksonomic search results as an RSS feed (just as Technorati does), which is very useful: you can subscribe to stay updated. But there are big missing pieces in this application. For one thing, it doesn't include 43 Things and Flickr, off the beaten track of social bookmarking spanning web content, but far and away my favorites for fun and utility as self-tagging folksonomies.

There's also the issue of what you do with the folksonomic information to make it easy to grasp and genuinely useful. There has to be more than the font size = number of instances visual metaphor. I'd like to see graphic representations of similarity, relevance, occurence, and connection using dynamic link maps. This stuff has ways to go.

Still, it is a big mistake to underestimate the power of bottoms-up technology movements (witness Linux and open source). An apparently humble concept, self-tagging and the folksonomy, has the potential for toppling the hegmony of indexed search as the predominant way we find information on the web.

My 15 (out of 43) Things

If you haven't visited 43 Things, you are missing one of the great current phenomons on the web.

Visitors to the 43 Things site are asked to list 43 things they want to do today, tomorrow, or in general in their life. It's best to establish an account before you start doing this. This sounds like an amusement, or at best an exercise in personal improvement, and this is a fair characterization.

43 Things is also an exercise in using lightweight web development technologies that are often called by the loose term Ajax. In some respects, 43 Things is not the best advertisement for this set of development tools: the UI is irritating and the database connectivity flakey at best.

Where 43 Things does better is as a genuine community site. Who else near you has the same goals? What advice can other members give about the goals? What goals have others found related to your goals, and so on? From this viewpoint, 43 Things is a great social experiment.

43 Things is also interesting as a site that provides a tagging mechanism. You can tag things as you like, and in the aggregate 43 Things is becoming an interesting collection of searchable tags, tag cross-references: a genuine folksonomy (although perhaps not as useful as my favorite folksonomy site, Flickr which lets you add tags to photos).

I'd suspect that 43 Things is also a great host for Google AdSense ads, because when contextual ads come up they are relevant to one's goals.

So now I've done a pretty good start on 43 Thing's 43 Things, but what about mine? I've got up to 15 so far. Here they are:

1 Watch my children grow

2 spend more time in the mountains

3 be financially solvent

4 live passionately

5 write a novel

6 have great sex

7 visit New Zealand

8 Lose a bit of weight

9 Write a neat program

10 be more thoughtful

11 Watch the sunrise from the top of Mt. Whitney (again!)

12 Scuba dive (again!)

13 Spend more time gardening

14 Teach my kids to garden

15 Show my kids Pompei and Delphi

P.S. It's also somewhat satisfying to see all the goals other people have that I *have* already done!

Continuing Developments on the Pornstar Dinner with POTUS Story

In a previous story, I detailed the plans for pornstar Mary Cary and porn impressario Mark Kulkis (CEO of Kick Ass Pictures) to dine with President Bush at a dinner arranged by a Republican business group. Now it appears that the dinner is still on, although the White House declines to comment.

World Longest Domain Name

http://www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com/ claims to be the world's longest domain name. But is it? It turns out that this is a matter of definition. According to the domain registrars, the longest legal domain name is 63 characters starting with a letter or number.

If you included subdomains (which precede the primary domain name and are followed by a period) you can get longer, probably up to some limit supported by individual browser software.

If you include domain suffixes in your character count you also can get longer (+4 for .com and +6 for .co.uk, for example).

I don't think either subdomains or suffixes should be included in the search fro the world's largest domain name, meaning the best you can do is tie for first with 63 characters.

As Esther Dyson notes, nobody will type in these long names - they are opened by clicking links or selecting from a list.

Some other fun long domain names:

http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/: the 3 is a subdomain, I like the photo of Dr. Evil

http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/: a free email service

http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.com/: named after a Welsh Village, claims to be the world's longest domain name (of course, by my definition, it is at best tied) and in Guinness records as the world'd longest domain name (turns out the title is for world's longest domain named after a real place)

Here are more longest domain names according to the Internet Book of Records (a strange name for a web site). Thanks to comments on Google Blogoscoped for getting me started on this trivia.

Porn Star at Bush Bash

Do porn and family values mix? Apparently, at least if the porn's producer contributes to the Republican party. (Warning: links in this story may lead to X-rated material.)

Kick Ass Pictures CEO Mark Kulkis plans to attend a dinner with President and Mrs Bush. Kulkis will bring his contract porn star Mary Carey ("most people like my boobs") to the bash, which is hosted by the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Kick Ass Pictures claim to fame: hardcore adult videos with a guarantee of “No Fake Boobs and No Condoms.”

Funny, I haven't seen mainstream media coverage of this upcoming crossover event!

Separated at Birth?

Been Gone So Long It Looks Like Up to Me

Here's an entry on my PhotoBlog 2.0 that explains where I've been...

Playing with Flickr

Here's a Flickr Badge made from some of my photos. (For some reason, the badge code doesn't work within these MovableType pages, so I had to link to it on an external page.)

Grafedia - Combining Graffiti, Photography, and the Web

Grafedia is neat because it's essentially a vehicle for artistic expression that combines the online and "real" worlds.

Here's how Grafedia works. Someone with a camera cell phone takes a picture and uploads the image to the Grafedia server, associated with an email address, for example, myflower@grafedia.net. From a cell phone, this upload is accomplished simply by emailing the picture to the address @ grafedia.net you choose.

By its very nature, Grafedia is largely a mobile, cell phone kind of thing -- but you can also upload a photo or sound from your computer to Grafedia, and associate it with a Grafedia email address.

Bear with me, there are three more steps to this before the point of Grafedia beginds to emerge.

First, once your image or sound (but they are mostly photos) has been uploaded, anyone on either a computer or cell phone (or any other image/sound capable device) can download your image simply by sending an email to the designated address at Grafedia. The email should have no subject line. For example, I uploaded a photograph to myflower@grafedia.net; you can retrieve it by sending an email to that address.

Next, the point of Grafedia is to combine the world there with the world in here. People put "grafedia" up in the real world to tell others they can download the relevant picture. The grafedia address, e.g., myflower@grafedia.com, is by convention underlined in blue. Since myflower, my picture of a flower, is of my garden, I put a blue underlined sign for myflower@grafedia.net near the entrance to my garden. When the weather is better (it is raining here in Berkeley), I'll take a picture of the grafedia for the Sightings Gallery, explained below.

Finally, if you see a grafedia graffiti, you can take a picture of it. (Once again, probably using your cell phone camera, although there's nothing stopping you from using a "real" digital camera connected to your computer.) Download the relevant grafedia - by sending your email to myflower@grafedia.com, for example, if you see my sign outside my garden. You can now upload your picture of grafedia graffiti back to the Grafedia Sightings Gallery by replying to the download email and attaching your photo of the graffiti itself.

I'm not sure that Grafedia is actually useful for anything at this point, but it is certainly fun, cool, and creative - and an example of technologies and environments coming together on the Web. This one is special because it brings the outer world into the technology stew.

Tautologies: Logical, Linguistic, and George W. Bush

A logical tautology is a statement that is true by definition, or, as the dictionary puts it, "a statement true by virtue of its logical form alone." For example, in the tautologous cliche department:

Wherever you go, there you are.
What will be, will be.

The dictionary has another definition for tautology, sometimes called a linguistic tautology: "Needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word." This kind of tautology can be used rhetorically as a figure of speech to emphasize a concept (it is related to a pleonasm). More often, linguistic tautologies are basically pathetic and silly (or at least unconcise and poor use of language). For example:

Past history
Planning ahead
Main crux
True fact
HTML Language
Sierra Nevada Mountains (snowy mountains mountains)

Here are some of President George W. Bush's tautologic utterances:

"It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce." —George W. Bush, at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, April 21, 2001

"If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm for it." —George W. Bush, during the third presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., October 18, 2000

". . . the past is over." —George W. Bush, after making up with John McCain, Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000

(Thanks to Language Log for the Bush tautologies.)

Pope Benedict Rewrites History

Joseph Ratzinger, the new Pope Benedict XVI, recalls (according to the New York Times) that the Roman Catholic Church was his bulwark against the Nazi regime, "a citadel of truth and righteousness against the realm of atheism and deceit."

Huh!?! In fact, the Roman Catholic Church, with its ancient tradition of anti-semitism, was more than a little collaborative with the Nazis, and did less than nothing to save the Jews.

For a good book on this topic, see the National Book Award winning Constantine's Sword (by James Carroll, a devout Catholic, at least before he wrote the book).

If there is a God up there concerned with us mortals, God must be looking down, bemused by the hypocrisy of Pope Benedict's recasting of history.

When I Am Brain Dead...

... my dearest, do not weep for me! Instead:

Hang my witless body in a cage in the town square for birds to peck and gnaw.

Coat it with honey, and bury the technically alive cadaver that was the palace of my soul in a red ants' nest, and let the ants do the rest.

Warehouse my empty body in nursing homes and worse for fifteen years. Start me starving to death, then stop the process, the start it again. Let my awful parents and my slightly creepy spouse fight publicly over me. Let my empty husk of a body become a poster for the worst impulses in pseudo-moral American politics, the embodiment of hypocrisy. Finally, let me die slowly.

Hey, instead of the Terri Schiavo affair, why can't we have - after a decent interval and with due safeguards - a quiet journey to sleep, with drugs to help: death in peace and dignity? It would be the civilized thing.

Old Jewish Guys

James Guckert a/k/a Jeff Gannon in a disingenuous but revealing recent interview in the New York Times Magazine attributed the famous Freud quotation "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" to Einstein and casually dismissed his confusion: "I got my old Jewish men confused."

Leaving aside the dumb and dumber aspect of confusing two of the most important thinkers of the last two centuries, I'm struck by this as an example of the creeping anti-semitism that is little spoken of but pervades portions of the "moral" hard right that controls our country.

Related links:
The Jeff Gannon Affair
Jeff Gannon scandal finally covered in the New York Times

The Eggregious Defensiveness of a Technology Columnist

In my blog entry yesterday, I discussed the controversial new Google Autolinks feature (part of the "Beta" of version 3 of the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer).

I wrote about this interesting issue in part because it was featured in Walter S. Mossberg's Personal Technology column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (03/10/2005) (no link provided because the WSJ is a subscription only site). Mossberg got his facts slightly wrong. In his column he wrote that the "browser actually adds links right into the body of any Web page."

It doesn't do this, it only appears to add the links into the page in the version displayed to the user in their browser. This is an important distinction for a couple of reasons: Most importantly, Google couldn't modify an actual page without violating copyright and ownership in that page (so they would never be able to implement Autolinks if they were actually modifying pages). It's also the case that the mechanism of on-the-fly modification can be blocked by savvy Webmasters (see the links in yesterday's entry for details).

Apart from these pragmatic considerations, I'm a believer in being accurate in communications with end-users, so that the curious among them have a reasonable chance at understanding how things actually work.

I emailed Mossberg as follows:

You state in your rather thoughtful column today about the Autolink feature in the Google Tool bar v.3 that the Tool bar "actually adds links right into the body of any Web Page."

Of course, this isn't quite right: Autolink cannot modify a Web page sitting on my server. The Autolink modifies on the fly so that the version of the page that appears in the IE browser apparently has the links added (this may seem to the average user as the same thing, but it is an important distinction). One could look at it this way: as a Web publisher my original pages are intact. It's just that some viewers (with a little help from Google) have decided to modify (enhance?) my pages when they are viewing them from the privacy of their own homes.
...
He responded:

It's actually a distinction without a difference -- technically correct, but practically irrelevant to users.
Walt

I replied:

Well, I don't agree. One difference is that if Google actually really modified a page, it would clearly violate my copyright ownership in the page as a publisher -- however obnoxious the Toolbar is, it doesn't violate copyright because it is not making an actual modification except on the users system.
Harold

Mossberg got defensive:

When did I ever say it violated copyright, or make any other legal claim or argument?
Walt

I had the last word (at least for now):

Jeez, of course you didn't but you just wrote me that it made no difference to users. It does, because with the copyright/ownership issue Google simply couldn't have done it the way you suggest. Curious readers would have to wonder.
Harold

Now, generally I think that Walter Mossberg does a good job of educating the public about technology issues. But this stuff with Google is incredibly important to the future of the Internet, and I'd like to see better understanding of the issues involved, not worse.

formerly Rosie

I've added the free association ramblings of Rosie O'Donnell to the Syndication Viewer.

The Super-Size Mega-Store Robinhood

Daniel Akst, a usually intelligent columnist, suggests in an opinion piece in the business section of today's New York Times that Wal-Mart investors are today's Robin Hoods. The argument is that these investors (of whom the Walton family is the largest with almost 40% of Wal-Mart and Barclays Global with 14% is second) have accepted subpar performance, effectively subsidizing Wal-Mart's low prices and benefiting the poor.

Personally, I'd place Wal-Mart more in the category of the evil Prince John or the Sheriff of Nottingham than Robin of Locksley. But, according to Akst, the shabbily treated Wal-Mart workers don't matter: they couldn't find work elsewhere, and would be "in real trouble" if Wal-Mart didn't employ them. (Akst doesn't mention Wal-Mart's role in driving local business employers under, or the human and environmental consequences of its role in China.)

I say, as long as we're going down this road assuming that investors are implicitly subsidizing when they lose money, why only think of a piker like Wal-Mart? Let's go for the real mega superstores of investor subsidizers, all those poor schmoes who lost their shirts in Enron, Global Crossing, and Worldcom to enrich sumbags like Bernie Ebbers, Kenneth Lay, and Jeff Skilling!

A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe: Not

I found myself a bit irritated by a review of Roger Penrose's most recent book, The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe in this Sunday's New York Times Book Review (2/27/2005) . Now, right off the bat, I have not read the book, and may not read it for a while (if ever). My sense is that the title is overly grandiose, even if there are some interesting discussions in the book.

Here's my beef with the review, by George Johnson. Mr. Johnson notes that the book is "very tough going," that on a scale of one to four of preparedness for dealing with math and physics he is maybe a 1.7, and that he "absorbed what [he] could osmotically."

This review is science, but vaguely, for the dumb and dumber set. I wish the editors at the New York Times had assigned a reviewer with either a background in physics or the perseverance to follow the technical arguments in the book (or both). I'd like to know more about the book's theses and ideas, in a more rigorous way, and less about "Aha!" moments and the reviewer's befuddlement.

Origins of Cyberspace Sold

I discussed the Origins of Cyberspace Christies auction in two previous posts: The Origins of Cyberspace and The real origins of cyberspace.

Here's an update: the auction actually took place last week, with sales amounting to a little over $700,000 before auction house fees, and 133 out of 254 lots selling. Here's the MSNBC News account of the auction.

My first reaction was that this is not a triumph, considering that the pre-sale price for the entire collection was $1,300,000, and considering how many lots did not sell. But on further reflection, I think that this is a landmark auction establishing that there is a market in this area of collectibles. After all, some of the more important lots went for in the 70 thousands. Establishing this as an area of collecting with a market was probably the point of the affair for Jeremy Norman, and he is probably quite happy with the results.

Dead People Don't Validate

In some kind of mordant fit, I decided to add the Dead People Server RSS feed to the Lifestyle section of my free RSS Web Viewer application. This RSS feed displays news about celebrities and other "interesting people" that have recently died. (You can use the links to navigate to the Dead People Server to go back further in time and discover whether that minor celebrity of yore is alive or dead, so it really covers more than recent deaths)

When I opened my RSS Viewer with the new (dead) feed added and clicked the HTML link next to the feed, the feed was displayed but with an erroneous second date (December 31, 1969) for posting next to every entry. In Unix-speak and PHP, the language I wrote the page in, December 31, 1969 is the last day in the previous epoch to ours, and on Jan 1, 1970 a new epoch was born. (We are still in it.)

Running the Dead People Server RSS feed through the feed validator at FeedValidator.org, I found several validation issues involved the dates associated with entries in the feed. So I guess that's the moral: Dead men don't have to wear plaid or validate. The feed is still funny (IMHO) even if it does print this strange, pre-epochal date along with each entry (so I left the feed on my RSS Viewer)!

P.S. I emailed the Dead People Server, and they fixed their feed so that it validates, and it now displays right on my site. A happy ending, not a dead end!

The kids on Phyllis's blog

Here is a link to some neat pictures of the kids that Phyllis posted.

I'm feeling lazy today (due to recovery from a nasty cold), and I'm working under a deadline, and picking up Nicky from school soon, so I'll leave it like that for now.

But since I've mentioned Nicky, I also ought to say that the response to Nicky's Duplo Gates on eBay has been astounding and worldwide. Answering the listing questions has been great fun!

Poor Mister Tumnus

According to a recent story in the New York Times, Disney is creating a movie version of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", the first volume in C.S. Lewis's classic for children Chronicles of Narnia. The film will feature animtronics and live actors, will be filmed like Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, and features some of the technical expertise of the Weta Workshop. Disney plans to do the whole merchandising shuck and jive, with theme park exhibits, merchandise, dolls, and more all based on Narnia. The movie is due out in early December 2005 (just in time for Christmas and Xmas merchandising, get it?)

While the advance of movie CGI technology in combination with live-action footage means that Tumnus the Faun is unlikely to be turned into Bambi (because Tumnus will not be a cartoon), it is hard for me to imagine that Disney won't do more violence to the spirit of Tumnus than did the White Witch. Tumnus the Faun is the first creature that Lucy, one of the Pevensie children, meets in Narnia, which she enters through a magical wardrobe. Tumnus invites Lucy for a cup of tea in his cave, which sports an extensive library with titles like "Is Man a Myth?" The gentle Tumnus is later turned into a stone statue by the White Witch for failing to betray Lucy. Although Aslan the lion eventually rescues Tumnus, it is pretty teary-eyed going for the five-year-old set until it is clear that Tumnus (and all the other victims of the witch's repression) will be converted back to flesh and blood from stone. (The flesh and blood to stone thing happens at more or less the same time as Narnia's "100 years of winter without Christmas" melts away.)

The real problem for Disney is not that they will convert the wonderful book to a cross between icky-sweet (which they've done to other classics, such as Pooh) and some over-loud sword-play aimed at thirteen year-olds. It is a foregone conclusion that they will do this, and ruin the thing. (So read the books to your kids before you let them watch the movie!) The deeper problem is a "honeypot" conundrum in the Narnia books themselves: the deep religiousity and Christianity (with a big C) that pervades these books. This stands in stark contrast to the Lord of the Rings, which may have deep spiritual values at its core, and certainly chronicles a deistic struggle with absolute evil, but explicitly endorses no clear religious or sectarian values.

The Christianity in the Chronicles of Narnia, in combination with the wonderful and magical fantasy of the non-religious material in the book, is frankly bizarre. The whole business of the great lion Aslan, "the only son of the Emperor beyond the sea," sacrificing himself for the traitor Edmund's sake, and then being ressurected, made no sense to me as a kid, but I loved the book anyway. I read the entire series twice to my son Julian when he was between four and six years old (we've since moved on to the Lord of the Rings). Baffled doesn't begin to describe his reaction to this stuff, and I found it very difficult to explain to him, particularly since to the extent that he has any religious education, it is Jewish. But the underlying message of the religious parts of the book is ultimately not one of tolerance. For example, in the end, Susan (the eldest of the Pevensie sisters, and one of the "four Kings and Queens of Narnia who ruled in Cair Paravel") doesn't get to go to what seems to be heaven because she has stopped believing in Narnia and is spending too much time focused on things like lipstick.

It would be a mistake to forget that this rather blatant and odd religious content is part of the Narnia books, although I think most children ignore it in favor of the wonderful fantasy of the books. (There have been some recent and ill-fated moves to secularize the books.) But because of the Christian religious content, the books are favorites (and have been for several generations) of the US Christian fundamentalist movement. Therein lies Disney's double-bind: they can secularize the books, and risk the wrath of the zealot consituents, or they can include religious content (which would be truer to the books) and be accused of intolerance (and lose the audience of secular parents and their kids like me). This one Disney can't win. I don't feel bad for them, though: they will certainly mess up some of my favorite children's books even without the religious dilemma.

The real origins of cyberspace

For an interesting and somewhat rigorous take on the intellectual (meaning: real) origins of the computer and cyberspace as opposed to a collection of ephemera and artifacts that may have something to with this topic, see Martin Davis's Engines of Logic: Mathematicans and the Origins of the Computer. (Full disclosure: Martin Davis is my father.) Within the Jeremy Norman Origins of Cyberspace collection (see my previous blog entry) there are reprints of scholarly articles that don't apparently have much to do with computers or cyberspace. For example, Lot # 86 in the auction is a reprint of a 1936 article from the Journal of Symbolic Logic by Princeton logician Alonzo Church with an estimate of $5000 - $7000. This article is in the auction because the circuits inside computers embody the insights of generations of logicians including Church, as my father explains in his book (incidentally, my father was a PhD student of Alonzo Church).

The Origins of Cyberspace

Christie's is holding an auction called The Origins of Cyberspace in New York on Wednesday Feb 23, 2005. The auction is of material put together by collector extraordinaire Jeremy Norman. Here's Jeremy Norman's History of Science site, and the Feb 17 NY Times article discussing the auction.

The auction is interesting for several reasons. First, will the estimates be met or even exceeded? To some degree these are rather large sums for papers that only a fairly short while ago would not have been worth anything. Case in point: Lot 340 with an estimate of $3000 - $4000, described as 'ECKERT-MAUCHLY COMPUTER CORPORATION. "Employment agreement." ' (Googlers, should you keep those employment agreements in a safe place?)

The auction is structured so that it is first offered as a single lot for $1.3 Million. If nobody purchases the entire Origins of Cyberspace collection for the $1.3 Million, then the individual lots will be auctioned. Norman has a reputation as a dealer and collector of being shrewd about purchasing items for much less than he sells them for (this is a good reputation to have as a dealer, otherwise you can't stay in business), so undoubtedly his cost basis in the collection is a fraction of the $1.3 Million.

Mr. Norman has pulled off quite a brilliant coup. His collection consists of over 1,000 books, papers, and so on, and at least attempts to intellectually describe one of the most important development in human scientific history. Perhaps this could also be done in relationship to genetic research, DNA, and so on, but it is hard to imagine many other fields in which the conceptual importance would be understood so quickly. (And in which it would be possible to put together this kind of broad conceptual collection of epigraphic material rather than the real thing. Query: What is the real thing? Hardware? Software? Computer programs? Will source code ever become a collectible?)

As an arena of collecting, the origins of computers, or as Norman likes to call it, cyberspace, falls somewhere between my collecting interest in pre-digital era mechanisms, and people who collect "old" computers. (Old computers means things like Altairs, and anything that is "over ten years old, and not Windows.") "Between" chronologically, not as an expression of value, because old computers that post-date the Norman era are not particularly valuable yet.

Here's an item by reporter Evan Koblentz from news.computercollector.com about Jeremy Norman and pricing the items in this auction.

Anyhow, things are getting interesting in this collecting niche. I'll be watching the auction results with attention.

Duplo Gates on eBay

Installation documention of the authentic Duplo Gates by Nicky is now available on eBay!

The Duplo Gates

Inspired by Christo's Central Park Gates, 3-year-old Nicky contructs and demolishes Duplo Gates.

The Anti-Gates

No, I'm not talking about Steve Jobs, Firefox, Google, or Linux. Although three of the four should make Microsoft sweat: Firefox, a better browser than Internet Explorer with 25,000,000 downloads and increasing momentum; Google, the clear leader as information portal to the Internet; and Linux, which is eating Microsoft's lunch in the server operating system arena. I am talking about those ugly $21,000,000 "Gates" by Christo and company in Central Park, New York.

If you are anti-Gates and sick of the Christo hype (or simply a bit of a puritan and turned off by the profligate waste in a world where people die of hunger), here are some alternatives:

• The Somerville Gates (cost $3.50, pussy cat not included)


• The Crackers (a gift to the city, is it Art or for the birds, a public happening and a tasty snack at a cost of $2.50)


• Our Very Own Duplo Gates (Cost zero, because we already had the Legos, Nicky not included!)

Power to the Blogosphere!

Power to the Blogosphere! Power to the People!

There are a raft of letters today to the editor to the Wall Street Journal about the Eason Jordan flap. (I'm not including a link because you need a paid subscription to access the WSJ.) A typical comment: "Thank God for Bloggers."

These comments are continued evidence of the huge impact the blogosphere is having, which cuts across the political spectrum. My recent posts about Jeff Gannon, 99 Zeros, and Eason Jordan are each a commentary on this phenomenon: White House sleaze operative exposed thanks to bloggers, Googler fired for publishing a blog, and news executive sacked thanks to blog reports of off-the-record (and dubious) remarks.

Is the power of the blogosphere good or bad? No doubt both. It is true democracy, which means it can reflect the actions of an unreasoning mob. On the otherhand, no one will keep secrets for long in the world of the blogosphere and syndication feeds. Everyone can publish their own op-ed pieces, and yes, they do get read. On the whole, I think it is a great thing, but bloggers are subject to no discipline, editors, or any kind of checks and balances -- which means reader beware!

Since the blogosphere (the world-wide community of bloggers) has become so significant, it is important to understand the blogosphere taxonomy. How many bloggers are there? What is the average rate of blogger activity? How do blogs get noticed and read? What are the blogging communities? How does blogging and syndication fit together? How do bloggers communicate with each other? What are blogger demographics? Geographic dispersion? What are the major blog hosting communities? How many independently hosted blogs are there (like this one) as opposed to blogs hosted by an organized blog community (such as Google's Blogger.com)? What constraints are there on publishing a blog within an organized blogging community?

Taxonomic, organizational, demographic, and functional information about the blogosphere is hard to come by -- but we need to have an understanding of these things to know how our world works. I'll try to shed some light on these topics in furture postings.

The Jeff Gannon Affair

You couldn't make this one up if you tried. James D. Guckert a/k/a Jeff Gannon gained access to many White House briefings and was one of the few reporters allowed to lob a question (of course it was friendly) at President Bush recently. He used the name Jeff Gannon, and no one knew that it was phony until the details of this affair began to emerge.

Guckert's press credentials turn out to be an affiliation with Talon News Service, a two-bit conservative Texan Web site set up as a side-show for GOPUSA ("Bringing the conservative message to America") and conservative Bobby Eberle, apparently for the primary purpose of providing non-partisan credentials for Guckert. Here’s a link to Talon, Talon’s statement about Guckert's resignation, and a link with information about the allegation that Talon was set up just to credential Guckert/Gannon.

Amazingly, that’s just the beginning of the level of sleaze involved. Guckert/Gannon's journalism education consisted of a $50 two-day seminar at The Leadership Institute. The man was also involved in a venture to register domain names that, according to a story reported in the Washington Post and elsewhere, included HotMilitaryStud.com, MilitaryEscorts.com, and so on. According to a story published in Salon, there is even some evidence that the man was himself an "escort." Here's a site with a pretty good round-up of the allegations.

OK. This is a gentleman with less than no journalism credentials who was used by the White House for propaganda purposes.

From my viewpoint, the story is really about the power of the blogosphere, and a continuation of the Eason Jordan story. Right-wing bloggers brought about Jordan's fall from grace over some ill-advised (but technically off-the-record) remarks about the US military targeting journalists in Iraq. In the Gannon affair, left-wing bloggers brought about the exposure of a phony who was helping to manufacture propaganda for the administration. (Admission to White House press events without real credentials or a back ground check? I guess they knew who he was...)

Here is one blog that has been covering the story:

• AmericaBlog


• A Man called Jeff Beware: this one has X-rated pictures involving the Guckert/Gannon man

A fake pornographer touting Bush's right-wing family values administration as a White House corps reporter? And it takes bloggers to expose this widely? What are we coming to?

A world in which a new power for information dissemination has arisen: the blogosphere.

Haruki Murakami

"A revelation leaps over the borders of the everyday. A life without revelation is no life at all. What you need to do is move from reason that observes to reason that acts. That's what's critical. Do you have any idea what I'm talking about, you gold-plated whale of a dunce?"

-- Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

How Murakami became a novelist: In 1978 he was watching a baseball game at Jingu Stadium in Japan. As an American player, Dave Hilton, hit a double, a voice spoke to Murakami, telling him to go home and starting writing, that he could do it. He started work on his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, right away. Some good Murakami links:

• Salon interview


• Haruki Murakami (Unofficial)


• Official Murakami Site (Random House)


• Exorcising Ghosts

My Valentine!

Courtesy of Nikon D70 and Photoshop and Phyllis!

Open-Source Journalism

Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, was apparently forced to resign on Friday over remarks he made at an off-the-record session at the Davos summit in January. Jordan seems to have said the the US military intentionally killed 12 journalists, although his precise language is not available. Here's a link to the New York Times account of the affair. The Times headlined it in the following somewhat odd way: "Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters."

First, has the US military intentionally targeted journalists? This seems unlikely per se. I think any kind of official policy of targeting journalists is almost out of the question, although I'd be perfectly prepared to believe in carelessness, indifference, negligence, and even (although I am not asserting this actually happened) perfidy on the part of some individual line officers. But an official policy of this sort is almost certainly too difficult to carry out, and impossible to cloak in secrecy.

Next, what did Eason Jordan really say, and what were his intentions? We don't know exactly what he said. It was taped, but the conference organizers have refused to release the tape because of the off-the-record nature of the session. My best guess is that Jordan felt bad about about sending journalists to their deaths, and said something off-the-cuff which has increasingly been viewed out of context.

Jordan's remarks were first reported in a blog entry by Rony Abovitz, who is not a reporter. Abovitz says that Jordan's remarks bothered him, but won favor from the "anti-US crowd" in the audience, and that Jordan backpedaled, wavered, seemed to realize that his statements had created a public mess. Abovitz was left confused, and called for an official investigation of Jordan's allegations about the 12 journalists being killed on purpose: "If it is true, we need to know if it was official or if it was just some random disgruntled soldiers." Abovitz concluded his blog entry with the following statement: "I think that this article is a good pointer to the future of the news: average people, freely saying what they want, as they saw it, for anyone to see. To me, that is freedom of the press."

The Jordan affair leads to a whole raft of issues surrounding what has been called "open-source journalism" (the NY Times article uses the term, but it is hardly the first, see the Slashdot thread about open source journalism): the ability of anyone to publish anything they deem newsworthy in their own blogs, which are often picked up as sources far and wide. (I started writing about this in an entry yesterday.) On the one side, there is the allegation that the official news media were "protecting their own" by not reporting the story of Jordan's remarks. On the other side, there is the sentiment that with news being reported (and made) by bloggers, "the salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail." The quote is from Steve Lovelady and reported in the NY Times article; for more on Lovelady's take and role in this controversy see PressThink.

Watchdogs who are avatars of individual freedom? Lynch mobs using sound bites to zap a conflicted news executive who sent reporters to their death? Obviously the elephant in the room amid these cross-currents is the political one: is this form of "outing" a political weapon used by the right against the left, or the left against the right, or both? Jordan does seem to have fallen to this sort of political rancour because he spoke out, and was caught in an unsupportable position. But what about all the untrue things said by the Bush administration (for example, the WMD in Iraq) that do not get effectively challenged.

From a blogging viewpoint, the most interest aspect of the affair is the recognition of the power of blogging. Looked at negatively, this is indeed "mob" power -- because there are no checks and balances, no editorial review, and no code of journalist ethics involved. The quality of the "news" reported is thus inherently more suspect, so the argument goes, than the items that appear in the mainstream media. This is the same charge that is leveled at writers who self-publish their books, and it can be true: it depends (of course) upon the writer, or blogger. (Mainstream media can intentionally (or unintentionally) publish glaring lies, for that matter, particularly given interlocking corporate and political agendas, or with direct state control.) Blogging does give power to the people, and gives everyone the ability to report what they observe and believe. Observations within blogs need to be treated as primary source material: valuable, but subject to evaluation. Blogging is powerful. Blogging makes it very hard to keep information hidden. Blogging can be used in ugly ways by those with an agenda.

What I do feel is overstated is the comparison with open-source software development. The people who use this metaphor do not really understand the open-source software development process, involving meticulous steps, code review by peers, and so on. The fact that I can "publish" this blog entry without getting anyone's permission does not really confer any open-source status upon my blog, or shouldn't if people were thinking straight.

But maybe an open-source development process for blogging is not a bad idea. A set of standards and a methodology for "open source" blogging could be developed. This could include internal code standards (for example, the requirements that all items should be sourced, marked as first-hand observations, or marked as opinions) and a peer-review process conducted by fellow bloggers (randomly selected and not necessarily friends). Blog entries that followed the open-source methodology and review process could be labeled -- and would carry, for me, more credibility than the mainstream media.

Springtime for Gardening in Berkeley

It's springtime here in Berkeley, which means for me (among other things) time to have fun and garden! I'm sprinkling some pictures I took today of our garden in this entry, so that I can show off some of what I've done!
So Nicky and I went over to Berkeley Hort. Nicky rode in the cart, I pulled it, and Nicky pointed out plants to me he liked. We took our plants home, and I planted them yesterday.
Now we're gearing up to plant our vegetable bins for spring. It's great having all this fresh stuff right out there to pick and eat in our salads!


I mostly buy our plants at Berkeley Hort and a few other local nurseries because it makes sense to use local suppliers. Plants at a local nursery are probably somewhat used to the climate. The people at the nursery know about local conditions and growing problems. Successful gardening at least around here is a very local issue. You have to understand the microclimates.

But when does it make sense to buy plants, or gardening supplies using the Web?



I've used catalogs and the Web as sources in some cases (I'll get to some suggestions in a moment). But first a tangent: so many things (services and products) one might want to buy have been effectively hijacked on Google and the other search listings. To some degree this is a problem with the ranking algorithms, and to some degree it is a result of an arms battle being fought with advertorial content created to jazz up "natural" search listing results. (As one SEO executive explained to me recently, "natural" results are results that are not explictly sponsored.) I promise a longer essay on this topic coming soon. In the meantime, be sceptical about top results for things like "garden plants" and "corporate party planning." The site that is putting out all this content out of the apparent goodness of its heart may in fact being doing so to lure customers and fool the search engines. Is the wrong? Maybe, maybe not. I'll discuss the issues in greater detail when I tackle the general topic later on. And remember, a natural listing ain't necessarily so...

I recommend Peaceful Valley Farms as an online source of organic gardening supplies. Olallie in Vermont is a great specialty supplier of Day Lillies. White Flower Farms in Connecticut is a great quality supplier, although they know nothing about conditions on the West coast and are kind of expensive. Jackson & Perkins is a great supplier of roses, although I wouldn't buy anything else from them.
Happy gardening!

Happy Chinese New Year!

Euphemism Du Jour

I am bemused by the current euphemism du jour Intelligent Design, which is the radical Christian right code word for creationism. Intelligent design with a small "i" and a small "d" makes a certain amount of sense: who knows, maybe there was some intelligent intervention in the process of evolving life on this planet. It's at least as plausible to believe the interventionist was an alien life form as to belive it was a diety, but that's a subject for another day.

Getting back to the euphemism du jour, what makes no sense to me is that the hard right, who would ban evolution and science from our schools in the name of "Intelligent Design," practices none of the Christian virtues. This is a fanatic movement that is leading our country into state-sponsored torture, neglect of our poor and elderly, and enrichment of war profiteers. I know evil when I see it, whatever euphemisms it hides behind.

Caching the Lingerie: Catastrophic Decline and Fall

I have been obsessing about what to get Phyllis for Valentine's day. My thinking is sexy lingerie. Is it OK to still be in love with your wife, and find her hot, after all these years, and three kids later?

Moving on. A few weeks back I wrote about Jared Diamond's book Collapse. I've now finished Collapse, and I find myself distressed by it. Certainly, the specter of our society succumbing to Malthusian and/or ecological disaster is frightening. But I think Collapse is disingenuous: it extrapolates from tiny, fringe societies (Viking Greenland, Henderson Island, Easter Island, and so on) to ours. It is completely clear why these societies catastrophically collapsed. For example, the Vikings in Greenland were dealing with an inhospitable climate without sufficient growing season, and then the climate got even worse. Yeah, maybe if they'd made like the Inuit they might have survived, but then again they might not have.

The much more interesting question to me is why do strong societies and institutions decline? What was the real cause of the fall of the Roman empire? Why do some companies create a culture that thrives, while others go through the motions, become hollow hulks that are "former glories," and eventually hit a catastrophic decline? What makes the Googles of the world Googles, and how long will they go on being Googles? At the opposite end of the spectrum, I used to work for Informix, a company that arguably had the best enterprise database technology. It has long since been swallowed by IBM, and is another tech wreck on the Ozmandius seas of time. What makes the difference?

I don't know the answers, but I want to go on thinking about the harder questions, not the easy questions (like why did a few thousand Norse in Greenland die after the winters got even colder and the ships stopped coming from Europe).

Generally, in a technology context, catastrophic failure results from a concatenation of unintended consequences rather than having a single cause. Most likely, technology failure means that a Wesbite is down, or that your site is generating HTTP 404 errors, not buildings and bridges falling down, or walls of water.

But the consquences are serious enough for the businesses involved, and it is worth thinking about a mindset that avoids problems. If cascading unintended consquences are the proximate causes of most system meltdowns, then the answer is to isolate, and to use mechanisms that provide elegant economy. Make sure that the wave of destruction can't spread too far, and keep things simple and not wasteful, even if it seems like there are resources to burn. (If this seems parallel to the right way to manage a society's ecosystem, that's the idea!)

Caching is a simple mechanism that fits the bill. If you've looked into how Google works, you'll know that the Google document servers make extensive use of caching. This is a straightforward mechanism: it takes less resources to grab a file from the file system than to generate the file. So the first time something(such as a list of search results) is requested, it is cached. Subsequent requests for the same information can use the (cheaper) cached version, provided nothing has changed.

Of course, nothing is ever free, so you have to worry about out of date (but cached) information, and you should think about the cost of caching (admittedly small) if no one ever requests the information again.

To bring this entry back to its beginning, I did a little bit of programming for Phyllis yesterday. She wanted a graphic on her High Risk pregnancy site displaying an estimate of the number of preemies born year-to-date in the US. (You can see what I came up with on the High Risk site.) This is something we care about, because our oldest son, Julian, was a 28-week preemie. Anything we can do to help parents who are in high-risk situations manage their pregnancies, we'd like to do.

The logic behind the numbers on the graphic is dirt simple: Roughly one a minute, time it from the beginning of the year. What I ended up doing was created a PHP program that "reads" the background graphic, and uses a value passed to it as a HTTP GET for display. You could actually call it with arbitrary text, for example, like this.

On the client-side, the Javascript code that generates the URL to the PHP program refreshes every 3 seconds. Off loading the time processing to the client-side takes away burden from our server, but I really wanted to cache the generated graphics. It's hard to see how to do so, since the numerical part of the graphic is constantly changing. This doesn't seem to cause a problem with only a few hits to HighRisk.org, but if there are thousands of hits, or someone malicious, you can see a potential vulnerability that might cause a cascading reaction.

I'll be thinking more in the days to come about how to avoid catastrophic declines. I'll also be thinking about Valentine's Day...

Dadiaries

If a Mom who blogs about her kids and family writes a momoir, what does a blogging Dad write? It seems clear to me that Dads who write about their kids and families write dadiaries!

Blogging the Family

Blogs can be (and often are) so very personal. It's a natural to use one's blog to write about your kids and family. Particularly if you have young kids, they are likely the focus of your life, and the generators of much stress and joy!

Perhaps this explains why there are an estimated 8,500 Web logs people are writing about their children. Some high profile weblogs written about kids by their parents:

• Her own woman: Same sex parents in Australia


• Heather B. Armstrong's "This is my Website" Unleashing the inner monologue: "...there were kids, in my living room, EATING ICE CREAM ON MY PERSIAN RUG WITH THEIR HANDS — that Jon and I made it through the day without experiencing cardiac arrest or any ruptured blood vessels, well, people, this TOTALLY means that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is nigh unto us."


• Mimi Smartypants: "I don't care if you are the Dark Lord of the Sith, young man, you are still getting a time out!"


• Bad Mother: Something to distract my neighbor here in Berkeley, Ayelet Waldman, from her presumably already too-busy life as novelist, mother to four, and wife of Michael Chabon (bless him!)


• Hot Moms: "Writing our momoirs" (links to more than 600 mom and dad blogs)


• finslippy: Alice Bradley writes about two-year-old Henry

Now, to state the obvious, my blog is not about parenting and kids or is only obliquely about it: since in some fundamental way my life is about my family and kids, they do seem to creep into this thing even when I am writing about Google. But my preference is to not to blog Julian, Nicholas, and Mathew. Rather, I keep a kind of photo album on our personal Website. As someone observed to me, this in itself constitutes a kind of extended blog. It is this (not surprising) characteristic that pictures never get removed, only added. And the pictures of Julian, our oldest, are the most extensive. (But then, since Julian was a 28 week preemie, we had our reasons. That's a whole other story.)

Anyhow, I think this use of blogging to rend a hole in the isolation that the joys and terrors of parenting imposes upon us is a great thing! Keep it up, mom and pop bloggers!

Slurpware

Add a new one to the dictionary: slurpware.

Slurpware describes a multi-faceted, nefarious, and probably illegal, attack on an asset-rich Web property such as Amazon, eBay, PayPal, or the Web affiliate of a financial institution such as Wells Fargo.

The best slurpware targets have large communities of users (eBay, PayPal). Only large (and criminal) organizations have the assets to deploy slurpware. Slurpware elements almost always include spoofing (also called "phishing," spamming email with fake origins), software that can track keyboard entries in wireless online contexts to determine passwords, in some cases stolen hardware security devices, massive computing power, and sponsorship of extensive criminal organizations -- such as the Russian mafia.

There's a great deal of creativity involved in a successful slurpware campaign, although we might wish the creativity were deployed to a better purpose.

Dr. Dobson never said that SpongeBob Squarepants is gay!

Dr James C. Dobson, founder of the Focus on the Family ministry, says that he never said that Spongepants Squarebob (well, you know who I mean) is gay. More precisely, he says that he never said that the sponge-like square fellow has homesexual characteristics. To quote him: "I said no such thing."

The problem, it turns out, is not with the spongy critter but rather with a video featuring a whole host of children's characters, including Big Bird, Barney, and others as well as that gay sponge. This "We are family" video attempts to send the somewhat bland message of practicing unity while respecting diversity.

I'm not a fan of Squarepants, and I don't let my kids watch the show. (Julian and Nicholas are active enough without the frenetics in this particular cartoon.)

That said, Dobson's critique of Squarepants and other kids characters as encouraging homosexuality would be funny (actually, it is funny!) if Dr. Dobson weren't a close spiritual adviser to President Bush and quite influential on public policy matters. There's been quite a bit of commentary about this, see for example this Slate article and the book James Dobson's War on America. According to one estimate, he controls 7,000,000 votes.

Dobson got his start as a pediatrician and author of Dare to Discipline with the agenda of rehabiliting spanking as a parental tool.

As I said, his fruitcake comments would be grimly amusing if only those in power in America didn't take him so seriously. The extension of the kind of "blunt power counts" ideology you see in "Dare to Discipline" justifies first-strike displays of brute force such as the Iraq invasion and the potential bombing of Iran.

In his book for parents about spanking, he recounts many of the beatings he received as a kid, including with his mom's corset, buckles, stays, and all. My diagnosis is permanent psychological damage. But you gotta wonder what we are doing as a country taking this man seriously. Something has gone badly wrong, someone should be spanked -- and the someone isn't the cartoon character with a rectangular rear-end.

Wondering about eBay

You gotta wonder about eBay. The stock was down about 20% last week amid concerns about slowing growth. Still a hugely profitable and growing company, but also still very richly valued. But the financials are not what makes me wonder.

What I think is odd are the listing that have started to appear on eBay for what can only kindly be called intangibles. Examples range from toasted cheese sandwiches to a cane with a ghost of a grandfather in it to a "happy midwest childhood."

Taking the last of these as an example, the "Happy Midwest Childhood Age 5 to 18 Teddy Bear Included" went for $267 with 44 bids. This kind of success leads to me-too listings for more bogus stuff. Are some or all the bids the result of shilling? Who can say.

But there's a fundamental problem with eBay's hands-off business model. If their growth metrics are based on statistics that include this kind of thing, then the metrics are themselves bogus. Ultimately eBay will need to do a better job of policing their listings, because a listing service per se doesn't add that much value.

Make Lay Pay

Kenneth Lay says that he didn't know about any of that hinky stuff going on at Enron, that he is the target of an over-zealous prosecutor, and that he is a thoroughly admirable pillar (or ex-pillar) of his community. Lay wants you to hear what he has to say so badly he is willing to pay.

According to Houston's Channel 7 KLTV, he is buying sponsored links on Google, Yahoo, and AOL search engines. This means that when someone searchs for Kenneth Lay on any of these engines, an ad in the sponsored link area for Ken Lay's web site appears. According to the report, Kenneth Lay pays between 5 and 12 cents per click everytime someone clicks the sponsorer Kenmneth Lay link.

What I say is lets make Kenneth Lay pay. So go ahead, search for Kenneth Lay. And click away on the sponsored link to make him pay!

Click Detective

In my dreams about click fraud, I'm lying on a tropical island drinking, well drinking one of those drinks with an umbrella, and psychically encouraging all my friends to click multiple times on the ads on my site, particularly the high yield ones for expensive keywords. Or even more devlishly, I've created a bot that does automated click-throughs for me and cannot be detected by those oh-so-smart search engine managers.

This is not the kind of "click fraud" that Click Detective has in mind. Click Detective wants you to worry about the ads you've purchased with Pay for Click programs such as Google AdWords. Are they being clicked by foul, villainous competitors with the goal of driving up your cost of advertising? (Or even of driving your ads off the Internet if your costs per keyword exceed your maximums...) Have those nasty competitors started a spamming campaign, or are they using technology? The search engine companies are pretty good at catching this kind of fraud, but they don't get everything, so...be paranoid.

There's nothing very complicated about the way Click Detective sets up. Once you sign up (they have a free trial), you register your "landing pages," add a small script to each landing page that calls a program on the Click Detetective server, and modify the destination URLs (but not the URLs that users see) in your Pay for Click program. The modification to the URL adds a token that the script added to your landing page picks up, so that only traffic coming from the Pay for Click ad is monitored by Click Detective.

Two questions arise: what kind of analysis does Click Detective do with the information, and what can you do with it? Good questions. The first, of course, is proprietary, but no doubt involves analytic tweaks on IP logging. (You know the IP the click came from, if you get a lot from the same IP it looks funny.) Does Click Detective add a cookies for tracking purposes? I don't know, ask them. (If they tell me, I will post the info.) You could do this stuff yourself without having to pay a monthly fee for the service, and without executing an offsite black-box program.

Suppose Click Detective comes back with the goods, there's this user that's been clicking many times on a Google ad to get to your site. What then? Well, you can pursue the panoply of legal resources, notifying Google, ISPs, etc. Google does take this kind of thing very seriously.

If you want to deal with the spamming user who is visitng your site yourself, using the tools that Click Detective provides (once again, there's nothing here you couldn't do on your own), you can send them a message telling them you know they've been here before and asking them to bookmark the site. Messages increase in severity until they can't open the page without actually typing in its direct URL. But suppose I don't want to bookmark your site, I just want to visit it via the ad I know about? Well, if you are a Web merchant, that's your call -- it is kind of like people hanging around a candy store to read the magazines. Eventually, they'll buy something.

You can't blame this concept on Silicon Valley, it is based in the United Kingdom, but I sure wish I could: there's got to be a better place to put all this effort.

Collapse

I've been reading Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond who also wrote the best-selling Pulitzer prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Collapse is fascinating reading, but a touch on the didactic side. It also seems a bit arbitrary. Why did Diamond chose to focus on the problems of the Bitterroots in Montana (where he vacations and fly fishes) rather than those (much more overwhelming) ecological problems of Los Angeles (where he lives)?

The didactic tone is a touch off-putting, but the conundrums and tragedy are very real. Easter Island was lushly forested when it was first settled by Polynesian peoples; civilization went from populous to almost gone, and the island became totally bereft of trees. This was an ecological nightmare that took place in isolation, pre recorded history. The causality was the very success of the society. Could the Easter Islanders have avoided their dark destiny? Can we?

Martin Luther King

"All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality."--Martin Luther King Jr.

I work with fools

Of course, I watch the Google AdSense ads that show up on Braintique with interest. What kind of content will the Google engines think is aligned with our site using keyword analysis? Much of the time, the ads seem very targeted and appropriate.

Other times you get some really weird stuff. For example, on our blogging pages, iworkwithfools seems to turn up a great deal. Now, the URL of this site may speak to you, beause many people do indeed work with fools. (Since I work basically with myself, if I work with fools I have only myself to blame, but that's a different story.)

Seriously, folks, what is iworkwithfools after? What is the business model here, assuming there is one? (Unless you want to say that iworkwithfools is foolish, a distinct possibility.)

The mission statement isn't a whole lot of help providing such generalities as #2 ( of ten points): "To rant since we all love to rip someone a new one."

It seems that iworkwithfools is a genuine example of an AdWords/AdSense model: drive traffic to a site by paying for targeted keywords with AdWords, monetize the traffic by displaying AdSenses ads. When I looked into this kind of scheme, it made no sense: the cost of the AdWords was more than I'd make in revenue. (If you think of Google's model in the aggregate, this would have to be true: otherwise Google gets no piece of the pie.)

In fairness, iworkwithfools also tries to capture revenues through displaying non-Google ads, and maybe they have a business model in mind that isn't yet apparent. Or maybe they've put the site up for the pure love of the thing, which is a great motivation and an antidote to working with fools!