Time mismanagement

As promised, a “what has Jay been up to?” update. Where to begin…

A couple of months ago, I took a new job doing Instructional Technology at MUU*. I couldn’t be happier. I’m back firmly on the instructional side of of the U. The faculty I deal with on a daily basis are distressingly behind the times, but almost without exception devoted to learning and excited about teaching, and working with them has so far been a rewarding experience. Part of the fun of of any new job new job, though, is learning new things and (over-)extending your limits. Doing it well, and with any sort of fidelity to your employer and yourself, means sidelining your personal projects until you figure out how to balance everything, and in the case of blogging, or any kind or writing, it’s not not just the time it takes to publish that gets hammered, but the time it takes to read and stay informed. On a more personal note, the move from an isolated cubicle to a collaborative work environment has has also meant I haven’t needed the crutch of online communities as much to feel connected***. Since the job requires a good bit of web development and programming, I haven’t needed the constant tech fix, either. Things are starting to settle down, though, and I’m getting back into old rhythms.

On the blogging side, we closed The Digital Photography Weblog, which is a disappointment, but not really a surprise. The writing’s been on the wall for a while, and that contributed to some of my blogging inertia. It’s a shame, but the blog really never found it’s place and when I took this last hiatus the revolving blogger door stopped revolving and no one stepped in to help Andrew keep up with it. He did a wonderful job on his own, but I think it was the final indication that DPW didn’t fit in the new Weblogsinc ecology, and wasn’t viable for the long-term. For the first time, our calls for writers were ignored by both the WINS blogging community and the readership. In some ways that seems paradoxical: on many counts (traffic, for instance) DPW was more successful than ever. But in some important ways, it had become static, and the inability to evolve is the kiss of death for a for-profit blog. Really, it’s the kiss of death for any blog, but a personal blog can continue undead for as long as the author is interested. Corporations need to reassign resources.

On the plus side, it gives me the opportunity to get on board at Download Squad, which is really more my thing since it’s basically swallowed The Open Source Weblog, and get back into TUAW. At least that’s the theory.

* Medium-sized Unnamed** University.

** Not that a little quick web searching wouldn’t set you straight, but the myth of anonymity is is the name of the game, right?

*** Note to managers: want to increase productivity and keep your employees from wasting company bandwidth? Stop building little beige cubes.

Web Two-Point-Oh-No!

Vacation is a good time to think, and I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship to blogging: why I do it (when I do), why I don’t (when I don’t), and how I can make it a better personal fit and a viable pursuit for the long term and reinvigorate my online presence generally. Part of that has meant thinking about the blogoshpere as a whole, as well as my relatively anonymous place in it. For instance, what exactly does “Web 2.0” mean, and why does the phrase make me cringe? Why does the mere mention of “social networking” make me want to unplug my MacBook from the intertubes and never plug it back in?

A couple of reasons, actually. First, Mob rule is never a good thing. Ever. there’s a difference between democracy and anarchy. And there’s an even more pronounced difference between honest anarchy and groupthink passing itself off as anarchy. “Web 2.0” has given us the definitive answer to that age-old chestnut “what does an anarchist convention look like,” and it isn’t pretty. the inmates are running the asylum folks, right into the ground.

The promise of the world wide web was, from the very beginning, conversation, hopefully intelligent. It hasn’t always worked that way, but social networking for the first time flatly denies the possibility. Trackbacks were the first promising web technology in ten years, and social networking not only killed them, but set up their polar opposite in their stead. Digg, Netscape, and the rest completely remove any hope that the actual authors of web content can be involved in a direct dialog with each other. If someone says something you find interesting, the appropriate response is to go to your space and say something in return. Hopefully, through the mechanism of trackbacks and “linking blogs” links from places like icerocket and technoratti (flawed though they are in their own ways, more on that later maybe), the author finds out what people are saying about her, and a conversation ensues. Other voices can join in at any point, allowing the conversation to live and evolve. Social networking, on the other hand, pushes Andrei’s compliants about comments to the nth degree. The conversation moves entirely to the social networking site, arbitrated and participated in only by registered users, completely devoid of context. And that’s assuming “First!!!!!OMG!!!!!” can even be considered a conversation.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the ranking algorithms aren’t just bad, they’re worse. Stories get pushed to the fore simply on the strength of their popularity. Social networking takes what’s already popular and makes it more popular. To what purpose, nobody knows. It would be different if, like Slashdot, Digg and Netscape fed us a simple stream of information overload, constant pushing the new and the novel down our throats. But they don’t. They push the trite and the clichéd. By the time a story reaches the top of the social networking heap, it is by definition old news. Add to that the complete lack of any attempt at self moderation, and what’s the point. Social networking sites don’t even employ the basic layering approach of places like google and technoratti where all links count, but links for sources that are themselves popular count for more. that approach is flawed, too–think googlebomb–but it at least makes prima facie sense. The same can’t be said for “one account, one vote.”

Worse still, social networking is subject to a vicious cycle of diminishing returns I like to think of a the “digg paradox.” See a digg that catches your attention? Wouldn’t you like to see more writing by that person, or similar writing by others? Of course you would. So you keep digging. But the author and others like her aren’t on Digg, they’re off self publishing in their own space. And the more time you spend digging, the less time you spend off somewhere (please, anywhere) else. If something is good, it’ll turn up on digg, right? How? The whole premise of social networking is that people will spend time, well, networking, feeding on the rotten carcass of digg or Netscape. Rehashing and rating what’s already there, reading the ads. And the more time they spend doing that, the less time they spend bringing new material into the network. As the neworks expand, they become increasingly insular and disconnected from precisely the resources they pretend to filter. They create wikiality run amok, and that’s saying something.

And that’s just the technical problem, saying nothing about the diggers themselves or the psychological state of millions of people who think they need to tell the rest of their peers what’s cool, or, worse yet, who think they need to be told what’s new, or cool, or good. It’s like high school all over again. Only this time the adults aren’t helping people out and trying to build their self-esteem; they’re pushing everyone farther into the groupthink.

Worse, the minds behind digg and Netscape–people who ought to know better–seem to have forgotten exactly what it is that makes the internet such a powerful social force and, probably more importantly when we’re talking about business ventures, such a powerful economic force. There is no long tail in digging. Posts get pushed to the top based on their popularity today, and in some cases there are algorithms to weight posts based on new links. So if you get 100 links today and tomorrow you keep those 100 links and get one more, you’ll go up a little. If you get a 100 more links you’ll go up more. But if today you get 50 links and then tomorrow you get 100, you’ll skyrocket, because not only is your popularity increasing, the rate of your popularity increase is increasing.

But again, where’s the practical use in a service whose sole purpose is to tell you only how popular a website is (with the narrow cross section of your fellow diggscapers), and how quickly it’s becoming even more popular? Information as fashion; the ultimate accessory. That may be a legitimate model for World of Warcraft honor points, but it’s no model for page ranking. If you want to make a useful ranking engine, give me some tail. Don’t show me pages that have dugg 10,000 times today, show me pages that have been dugg steadily for years. The ones that never make it to the top of the pile because 30,000 people don’t suddenly latch onto them, but that people have found interesting for a long time.

So what would the ideal social networking site look like? So glad you asked. Let’s name it “tastyscape” in honor of the two sites that have come closest to getting it “right.” It would take Netscape’s insight of hiring talented bloggers to review submissions as they come in, comment on them, and feature pages that they feel are being wrongfully neglected through sheer sheepidity or the gathering entropy of the digg paradox. Users would vote; That’s it. One click of the “digg this” button (although we’d obviously have to call it the “taste this’ button) and that’s all you get. Links with the most overall votes get featured on the front page for as long as they’re the overall leaders. Since each user can only vote once, diminishing returns will keep a slow but steady rotation. And we’ll give people the option to view the slashdot-like stream of new submissions as they come in, and the stream of recent “tastes,” to keep interest.

Of course that won’t really fly, because people who can’t be bothered to get their own blogs or myspace account can’t, apparently, be bothered to use a social bookmarking site unless they can…use it like myspace, so we’ll have to make some accommodation. Here’s what we’ll do: everyone will space to comment, but their comments will go to their homepage, like a blog of sorts. The vote page for any link will only have a summary of the site linked to and a list of users who have voted on that link. To find out why a person voted in a certain way, you’ll have to click on their name. If you want to play the attention game, you can, but the noise is filtered by default.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Remember what I said about the need for weighting? We’ll also let bloggers ping us when they post, and we’ll automatically enter them into the stream. One free taste per post if you can be bothered to put us in your list of sites to ping. that seems fair. But it doesn’t stop there. We’ll run the links in your post content against against the taste database, and count each trackback as a “taste.” You vote with your post, not by visiting some external site as well as posting. And here’s the fun part” the more good tastes you have, the more a trackback from you is worth. This way we’ll constantly inject new and wide-ranging information into the system, and maintain a balance between readers and writers, something that has yet to be achieved. Think of it as bicameral site ranking.

So. Who’s got the VC and wants to build this for me?

Gah. (for lack of a better title)

On the road this week, and not looking forward to heading home. I’ve tried to ignore as much of the news as I can–the little bit I get in the gym in the morning is perennially the Fox experience, complete with Ads to send money to support Israel in its “time of need”. The first time I saw one, I thought it was a sick joke, or that it might turn into a commercial for the Colbert Report or the Daily Show. But no, they’re real. Horribly, terrifyingly real. I swear, every time I watch Fox, I feel like a worse human being. I’ll give them credit, though, even they have been questioning the current police state, which is scary. If even the White House’s unofficial press office is wondering out loud if our civil liberties are being trampled, it’s even worse than I thought. At this point, I think I’ve moved past anger to sadness. Sadness that we have an administration this desperate to make our lives less safe and secure, this desperate to create a crisis mentality in everyone that will aloow them to grab a few more scraps of useless power. It’s difficult anymore to even blame it on greediness or personal gain. What’s to be gained from dehydrating travelers? At this point it seems to be pure pathology. What’s even sadder is that they are willing to endanger people’s lives to feed their mania. In order for this latest ploy to work, they needed the big news story, so the whole time there was a real danger to travelers, they did nothing. They waited until the arrests were made and the danger past to use the publicity.

The only hope here is that this time the shrub may have gone too far. Take away basic rights and no one seems to care–the only people illegally wiretapped are the ones that deserve it anyway, right?–but start making suburban families stand in line with four kids and no orange juice for six hours in Orlando on the way home from Disney Land, and maybe something happens. Maybe. We’ll see when I go though MCO on Sunday.

Happy Birthday to…all of us!

As Ryan over at 27B/6 reminds us, it’s the World Wide Web’s birthday! 15 years ago yesterday Tim Berners-Lee posted a message to the alt.hypertext newsgroup announcing CERN’s W3 project and offering “a prototype hypertext editor for the NeXT, and a browser for line mode terminals which runs on almost anything” to anyone who was interested. Ryan sums up the past 15 years beautifully:

And on a more serious note — thanks Mr. Berners-Lee. Thanks.

Your gift to the world turned out to be more than just a world of data — WWW is the most thriving democratic and anarchic human artifact ever created.

WWW is the commons without the scarcity.

WWW is beautiful and boring and ugly and life-altering and mundane, dangerous in places and as banal as a strip mall in others.

WWW strikes fear into the hearts of dictators, prudes, law enforcement agencies, media conglomerates, fundamentalists, and self-appointed protectors and censors of children.

WWW made possible Wikipedia, online dating, Craigslist, the United States Geological Survey’s earthquake site, political satire, 500,000 bad blogs and 5,000 great ones, Mahir Cagri’s homepage, online maps, a million YouTube videos, Woot.com’s bargain of the day and TechMeme’s ever updating internet newspaper, among thousands of other innovations and flowerings of personal expression and political action.

He also gives us all a challenge. It’s not a difficult challenge. In fact most people reading this are already doing it. But if you stumbled in here (god knows how) from MySpace or another pay-to-play site with Terms of Service and a url you don’t own yourself, then I pass this along. You use the ‘net everyday. It’s time to give back a little. It’s time to feed the web:

Post a photo on your homepage, write in your blog, link to a friend or a good website or if you are a MySpace user without your own url (all your webcontent are belong to Rupert), go spend a few bucks at a place like Laughing Squid, and build yourself a homepage or install a blog that you own — where no one can censor what you say or what you post (at least, that is until you libel someone or your ISP gets served with a DMCA takedown notice).

And then email your friends and tell them to go look at your new stuff and this time, don’t forget to stick in that WWW after that http://.

[link]

To set David’s mind at ease

And everyone else who’s inquired. I’m still alive. I hadn’t realized quite how long it had been since I updated this space until I went to log in today and couldn’t remember the password. To my own blog.

It’s not that I haven’t felt like blogging, but with a new job, a move, and the rest of life that insists on getting in the way, it’s slipped to the bottom of the to do list. I’ve also reached that state of information overload where, but the time I get through my blogroll and news sources, most of the time I feel like 1) everything is old news and I’ve missed the opportunity to say anything even mildly interesting to myself, let alone other people, and 2) I’m sick of staring at the computer screen. The funny part is, part of the appeal of the new job was that I thought the hours and generally less stressful environment would give me more time and energy for side projects. Ha.

It’s time for that to change, though. I’m declaring August “Blog Month,” and my goal is to get up at least three posts a day. Most of them will be over at The Digital Photography Weblog, but I want to keep this space alive, too.

Edit: and of course there was that WoW obsession…

Testing WP upgrade

We now return you to your regularly scheduled silence…for the moment.