Brudnopis

Geeks contra SOPA

2011-12-23T00:42:00.000-08:00

Today half of the Hacker News first page is about SOPA and in particular about call to boycot GoDaddy which appears to support that act. This seems like a very effective strategy, because lot's of geeks do control websites hosted at GoDaddy and they have the power to push them out of business. What is even more important is that it is such a good story: it is simple, unexpected, concrete and emotional - if reported by a credible source that would cover all the points that make a message stick.

Update: Apparently the geeks won this time: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_internet_wins_godaddy_flip-flops_on_sopa.php

Update: GoDaddy in damage control mode: https://plus.google.com/111996409013825587891/posts/7AMw7gDQ7Bi

Occupy Wall street and the Orange Alternative

2011-10-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

This is an image I found at Matt Stoller: #OccupyWallStreet Is a Church of Dissent, Not a Protest - a report about the OccupyWallStreet.

I was very young at this time, so maybe I did not understand all the politics going on - but for me ever after The Orange Alternative it was obvious that Communism is over.

Last week I finished reading Religion Explained

2010-12-23T00:16:00.000-08:00

Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have to agree that it is a really good explanation. The only deficiency I find in it is the insistence on being the only explanation - the reasoning does not exclude other factors collaborating in the evolutionary process and so does not exclude other explanations adding to this one.

View all my reviews

Flamewars

2010-01-06T04:04:00.000-08:00

There are many analyses trying to explain flamewars by the difference between face to face communication and textual communication via computer networks. What they don't take into account is that mailing lists are public communication - they should not contrast mailing list and face to face private conversations - but rather mailing lists and public speeches.

Off-line public communication is not very common, and when we do it we have a lot of strict cultural rules governing how we do it. Everyone intuitively knows that they are necessary. But on-line there is the utopian view that we can have communication unrestricted by any norms and rules. The best off-line example to show where it leads us is lynch mob. It is dangerously easy that any simple disagreement will lead to a vicious circle of growing frustration between the disputants, with anyone just looking for a way to discharge it in the classic scape goat manoeuvre.

Update:

More and more individuals polarize against fewer and fewer enemies until, in the end, only one is left. Because everyone believes in the guilt of the last victim, they all turn against him — and since that victim is now isolated and helpless, they can do so with no danger of retaliation.

Is Christianity Indistinguishable From Other “Pagan Myths?”

Online conflict in the light of mimetic theory

2009-12-05T02:18:00.000-08:00

At the p2p blog I published an essay analysing why it is so hard to get rid of the plague of flame wars and other conflicts in on-line communities.

The kafkaesque style of Google communication.

2009-10-03T04:14:00.000-07:00

At home I use a linux machine. I have the MTU sytem installed even though I use it only sporadically and nearly never send anything. But today I wanted to send something to my gmail account and I got that in the mail.log file:


Oct  3 13:01:01 zby postfix/smtp[16309]: 2B7905BEE3: host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[209.85.135.114] said: 421-4.7.0 [62.121.70.19] Our system has detected an unusual amount of 421-4.7.0 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our 421-4.7.0 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily 421-4.7.0 blocked. Please visit http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html 421 4.7.0 to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. i5si10046102mue.8 (in reply to end of DATA command)

Even though I did not notice anything suspicious it can be entirely possible that my computer was hacked and that someone is relying spam through it - but this message does not help me with solving that problem. And the linked page about rules for bulk senders only reminds me of the detailed procedures from 'The Trial' that never answered what really was the crime of Joseph K.

The won trial against Pirate Bay is the nail in the coffin of copyright

2009-05-05T02:27:00.000-07:00

This only shows how disconnected from the culture are the film and music industry leaders. I just scratch my head on what they are thinking - haven't they themselves used that romanticism of the anti-establishment fighters in so many works - be it films (about pirates) or music? Jail time - this is the fastest way to create a legend.

2009 - the year of the Pirate Party

2008-12-28T05:07:00.000-08:00

:) - I've never did this before - but now I think I have something to bet. My prediction for the next year is that the elections to the European Parliament will be the tipping point for the Pirate Party. They have two main advantages: the revolutionary brand that would appeal to all the young and rebelious and the politically dissapointed and a ring of very enthusiastic and media-active supporters. With that they can easily become the next 'political fashion' if only they reach the critical mass to become a real option in the minds of the public. And it seems that this is just happening in Sweden - if the Swedish Pirate Party gets into the European Parliament - this will be a big story in all EU countries - and will validate PP as a 'real party'.

Guest blogged at the P2P Foundation blog

2008-12-25T01:06:00.000-08:00

An extended version of my previous blog note here was published by the P2P Foundation.

Flat structure

2008-12-14T14:51:00.000-08:00

Another factor worthy of more research is the role played by ritual in mediating mimetic rivalry within organizational contexts. We might tentatively suggest that in general ritual seems to direct symbolic and actual violence in directions that further the goals of the organization and which prevents the outbreak of acquisitive mimetic rivalry. For example Ackroyd & Crowdy (1990) offer examples to show that the targets for "practical jokes" in the slaughterhouse that formed the basis of their study were usually hose who were slower and less efficient at tasks than the perpetrators. Discussing the general role of insults in organization Gabriel (1998), argues that this is a political process
that establishes a kind of "pecking order", thus restricting rivalry to the next slot available in the hierarchy. These arguments support the view that mimetic behaviour is ever present in
organizational contexts but that this rarely escalates to acquisitive mimetic rivalry.

from: Organization as containment of acquisitive mimetic rivalry: the contribution of Rene Girard

Compare with 'The Tyranny of Structurelessness'
by Jo Freeman.

Black swan

2008-10-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

"Made to Stick" mentions 6 features that make a message viral - it needs to be: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and tell a story. Web 2.0 and Black Swan show that there is one more point to it - ambiguity.

Market for Lemons

2008-10-05T14:17:00.000-07:00

Just a quick thought - or maybe my interpretation of what Umair Haque writes. Market for Lemons - this is the underlying mechanism of current crisis.

Attention Economy and Mimetic Desire

2008-07-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

The comment spam filter consequently refuses me from commenting at Michael H. Goldhaber's blog so I am posting my musing here: I wonder if the "Attention Economy" axioms could be based in the "Mimetic Desire" theory by Rene Girard. I would be grateful if someone copied that to the blog.

Online science

2008-07-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

The results of the explosion of easily available articles, according to Evans, is that "researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles."

Online articles lead to rapid scientific consensus

Hmm - interesting - but what would be even more interesting is how online availability of scientific articles influences not science by itself but how it is applied. I would expect there much more dramatic changes.

Barter

2008-07-17T08:01:00.000-07:00

Thinking of hosting a 'creating passionate users' 3-day workshop/retreat with a catch--the fee: help build a perimeter fence. Get fit, too!

- Kathy Sierra

Another sign of post-money economy. Physical exercise in a good company - rather an additional benefit then a cost.

There is no email overload

2008-07-10T10:31:00.000-07:00

- there is just less and less other work to do. Machines do more and more of our work - but there is one thing that they still cannot do - it is contact with other people. Computers can check the spelling of an email, compute some coefficients from a complicated formula but still suck at understanding humans and would not read or write that email for us.

Email is our work - communication with other humans is the task that still cannot be automated. That's why I am rather sceptical about the productivity boost of "no email days" introduced in some corporations. I suspect they just don't measure the right things.

All this does not mean that we should do all this human communication work in email - only that currently this is the tool most people use. Perhaps we could do this work in a bit more efficient way if we had a more complete toolbox.

Capitalism, Communism and the mimetic theory by Rene Girard

2008-07-06T05:51:00.000-07:00

What Rene Girard shows in his works is that rivalry between human beings and conflicts being the result of it are an inherent part of our nature, independent of any external circumstances, and cannot be eliminated. Adam Smith and other free market thinkers show that some simple rules can make this competition socially beneficial. Communism grew out of the sentiment of injustice of any competition, where there must be losers and winners, and tried to eliminate it but failed to acknowledge the true nature of that rivalry.

ACTA - secret pacts contra blogs and wikis

2008-07-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

Does open and honest beat secret and sneaky?. This is a case for Umair, but I would bet that it does.

Flamewars

2008-06-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

In a universe both deprived of any transcendental code of justice and exposed to violence, everybody has reason to fear the worst. The difference between a projection of one's own paranoia and an objective evaluation of circumstances has been worn away.

Rene Girard Violence and the Sacred

When there are no rules, no authority but violence thinking twice is deadly, preemptive strike as response to the slightest signal of hostility is prudent, there is no time for deliberation. It is either you kill our you are killed.

It is striking how some of our online behaviour repeats this basic pattern. It is not, as it is often explained, that people exagerate emotion in text, it is rather that in some circumstances people start to act as if in the middle of a violent conflict. They don't exaggerate negative opinions, they actively seek anything that can be interpreted as hostile and don't wait for any explanation but retaliate. Of course the other side does the same - this is the nature of a flamewar.

The circumstances change - but human nature stays the same and we still carry in our psyche the most primitive programs. They only need a trigger.

Product leaks

2008-06-21T05:12:00.000-07:00

Product leaks just lead to trouble & headaches for all - how different from Don't Go Dark.

TechMeme and 'bike-shedding'

2008-05-29T04:03:00.000-07:00

The problem with TechMeme is that even though the name suggests it is about Tech - it is really about politics (in Tech). Politics is important, even in Tech, sure - but this only amplifies the importance - while the ideal TechMeme would rely more on meritocracy. This is another example of "bike-shedding" - everyone can talk about the politics - but only a few know the technology and you'll always get more links to political articles then to technical ones.

Something with an anti-bike-shedding algorithm would be the real Magic Meme Machine.

Micro-shares

2008-05-25T00:23:00.000-07:00

When I was thinking about starting a business I had the idea of giving away some micro-shares to my online frieds - just to maintain good will from their side. Anyone tried something like that? If done en masse - this could become some kind of 'socialism' - interesting when the negative politics would kick in. Sounds like a cool experiment - the question is how much of bureaucracy this would involve?

Worse is Better and Disruptive Technologies

2008-04-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

A quick one: Worse is better and Disruptive technology.

Social Filtering versus Social Routing

2008-03-29T00:18:00.000-07:00

And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one.

from: NYT

Filtering is passive - the use of that particular metaphor shows that the old way of thinking is still there. But the text clearly shows that what the 'friends and online connections' do is an active participation in disseminating the news - it is in fact 'routing' of the information.
My old time 'social routing' metaphor seems more adequate here. But my original vision for it was something even more - it was about building software directly aimed at augmenting the social activity of passing the news. It was about sharing, in a true P2P way, of your information filters and sources and helping others to use them efficiently. It was about personal aggregating and filtering nodes connected to each other outputs that would help us, but not replace us, in directing the news into the outputs. Like interconnected but autonomous personal Diggs.

Flamewars and rationalisation (vi versus emacs anyone?)

2008-03-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

Arguments of proponents of some particular technology are often rationalisations. People choose one by chance, because they encounter it first or at the right moment or because some other superficial reason. Then they need to invest a lot of their time to learn it and that makes them to feel connected to the it. No one would accept that that deep connection was an effect of pure chance - so they start rationalise, to think up reasons why. And because deeply inside they know how untrue those arguments are - they seek a 'social proof' and start online flamewars to convince others.

A free implementation of Amazon SimpleDB

2008-01-12T14:27:00.001-08:00

Here is a tip to Amazon - there should be a free implementation of SimpleDB. I am now considering using SimpleDB for a web application - but I would like to develop it on my desktop computer - without paying Amazon, without even connecting to Amazon. This might be a minor issue - the fee you would pay for developing the application on Amazon web services seem to be very small. But it would be so much more convenient: no fiddling with credit cards, no problems for developers with shaky internet connection and more compatibility with Free Software/Open Source development models where money is always a difficult subject.

For Amazon it would not mean much less income - since as I've said the fee for the development use of the services is rather small - but it would mean many more customers. Perhaps it would also mean some competition - but this would only validate the whole model and make it more suitable for big business which does not like so much dependence on one provider.

Update: Open Source EC2: EUCALYPTUS.

Good beats evil

2007-12-17T17:13:00.000-08:00

I think Umair is right with his 'Good beats evil' meme - and Microsoft will learn it or die.

Why the hack people suddenly started to care about that whole sexiness of enterprise software?

2007-12-15T14:27:00.000-08:00

There is an avalanche of a debate all over the blogosphere about why the enterprise software is not sexy. There is much to say about it, but I would rather see answers to the question above. There is a deep change coming.

People I Know

2007-11-28T02:35:00.000-08:00

There is a very sad film about the "high spheres" life in New York. It is about the politics, the games people play, the artificial and the indifference. It is very sad - but so true. It is so sad because of the contrast between our imaginations based on the artificial glitter and the exalted words and the true life. And it is important because it reminds us how much of our social communication is just conventions and games.

We should remember this when designing social applications and not call the people one know as his friends.

Don't be evil Google!

2007-11-22T03:06:00.000-08:00

Google becomes more and more scary - add to that the Android and all the other initiatives - and the picture becomes quite paranoid. It's not a new thought that power corrupts (and absolute power corrupts absolutely). If Google does not want to make farsa out oftheir 'Don't be evil' motto they need to change. Drop the secrecy! Engage into the public discourse!

Don't love algorithms more than people!

Scale Free, Zipf Law and Christopher Alexander living structures

2007-11-13T04:19:00.000-08:00

OK - so this is just a brain dump. Some analysis from Software Libraries and Their Reuse: Entropy, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Zipf’s Law suggests that the reuse of software components follow the Zipf law (that is the nth most popular component is reused in c*n^(-1) other places). My intuition is that this is not just a law about software - but about just any system - the economy in the program length would have a direct analogy in the economy of physical system parts. And I would guess that Christopher Alexander patterns and structure preserving transformations are result of the same entropy maximizing principles.

Myspace or Facebook? I put my bet on Couchsurfing.

2007-11-06T03:05:00.000-08:00

Why? This is the social networking site that creates real trust. It is a bit specialized now - but this will change.

Spam in comments - reposting

2007-11-02T03:05:00.000-07:00

I was spammed and I had to delete the whole post (as there is no way to delete just the spam comment), I repost it here with all the comments. Now comments are moderated.

Online Debate

When there are more than a few participants or the subject is highly political the free form face to face conversation is normally replaced by a more structured form of communication like a debate. The rules of this more structured form can be implicite, coming from common culture, or explicite like 'The Roberts Rules of Order', but there needs to be some rules to govern the discussion that otherwise would turn to chaos. In current online settings, and especially in asynchronous communication like email lists all the immediate cultural feedback - like seeing the angry faces of other participants, that would in face to face situations push the participants to obey the rules, is lost. This leads to the question - how can we compensate for that loss? My first answer was by setting explicite rules coded in the list server algorithm, for example restricting the amount of emails to one per day, but perhaps there are other possibilities?

Update: I need to add that after a face to face meeting, even when it involved only a few participants from the mailing list, the list much become much more productive.

At 8:53 AM, Kaunda said...

Various online discussion forums seem to have different implicit understandings about the the tenor of conversations there.

Perhaps not directly relevant to your question posed in this post, but consider the differences between Usenet and Chat. In Usenet "Prove it!" and a very rough and tumble discourse is the norm. Chat developed in the opposite direction: how many stories of love on the Internet. The extremes of both forms of online communication are in part a result of lacking immediate feedback of face to face interactions. But these features are also reinforced because they're "fun" for lack of a better word.

Blogs which allow comments are different from Usenet, Chat, mailing lists, and other online forums; all forums develop certain implicit norms even without explicit rules. Implicit norms, the tone of the setting can be influenced informally.

Some bloggers have explicit rules for comments. Here's the law Will Bunch lays down:

PLEASE COMMENT WITH PASSION...
...but not with racial slurs, potentially libelous allegations, obscenities or other juvenile noise. Such comments will, at our discretion, be deleted in their entirety, and repeat offenders will be blocked from commenting. ALSO: Any commenter advocating killing any government official will be immediately banned. Thanks.

Recently in the blogosphere Juan Cole reacted to a piece by Christopher Hitchens at Slate. At issue was that Hitchens had excerpted--out of context Cole avers--quotations from work Cole posted in a private mailing list. That list serve had the rule:
"It has a strict rule that messages appearing there will not be forwarded off the list."

Your algorithm to restrict to one email a day is clever. Certainly there may be other "technical" fixes to the problem of feedback present in face time not present in Internet discussion. But technical fixes seem less important to me than agreements between participants.

It seems to me that in online discussion forums a space for discussing the rules overtime will be more effective in promoting useful debate.

Kids around the age of 10 learn to play differently. When they play "baseball" at that age it's as much about arguing about the rules of the game as playing ball. There's a similar phase in the development of various online forums. The "rules" are determined both explicitly and implicitly.

At 9:58 AM, zby said...

Thanks for the comment. The subject matter is really complex and there are many solutions. What I wanted to propose is to develope some 'technical' features aimed directly at improving some concrete problem with a communication forum. Perhaps the 'One email per day' rule is too strict - perhaps what would be enough is for example a visible counter (in the email subject?) of the number of emails a participant send in last 24 hours? I do agree that the legitimacy of all of those changes can be reached only via a democratic process - and since our organisation is democratic there is no question that we would introduce them using democratic methods.

At 1:57 PM, phil jones said...

Well, my proposed "solution" was a dead loss :-)

http://www.nooranch.com/synaesmedia/wiki/wiki.cgi?TypedThreadedDiscussion

I still think that it's worth experimenting with the idea of requiring (or encouraging) contributers to a discussion to explicitly add some kind of tagging or type metadata to their posts. And then allowing the reader to sort and filter according to tag. But the technical and UI details need some rethinking.

Aside : it *is* a very remarkable thing that in an age of a dozen different Ajaxian / web 2.0 to-do lists etc there still doesn't seem to be the web 2.0 version of Slashcode or similar threaded discussion system.

At 3:15 AM, zby said...

Hi Phil, recently I am thinking that there are two kinds of discussion - one that I would characterise as the exchange of ideas and the other which is about deciding about some collective action. When there are only few participants those two can work without any additional rules - but when 'scaling' those two need different techniques. What you propose is more about the 'filtering of ideas' side what I was talking about in 'One email per day' was more about the political deliberation.

At 4:42 PM, phil jones said...

good point zby.

Yep. TTD is definitely to support argument for generating knowledge rather than as a decision-making process.

I wonder what the differences you need to support are. Is it that you need to formally make explicit what everyone's current preference is (a central count of votes for each proposition).

Or are you just worried about taking the heat out of disagreement?

What about combining this with the "thinking hats" thing? For example what about a discussion board that allowed each person to post one message of each hat-colour per hour?

At 5:12 AM, zby said...

I think the first goal would be to concentrate on the things that are common for the participants instead of discussing over and over the differences and trying to convice everyone to one view.

It really seems that there is some deeper subject in that. Currently it is not clear for me when the discussion starts to be political. I believe there are some hidden interest conflicts that start the vicious circle. For example if I am an vi user I would like more people to use vi so that the vi culture thrives, so that there are many new vi developments etc. And also there is the feeling of being right - I chose vi - so when you choose vi too it shows I am a smart person. I am not sure what is the interplay between those two ingredients.

Finally when we go to our personal relation - I know you are a Python programmer, I chose Perl - how come we don't try to convice each other to choose the right programming language?

At 1:33 AM, zby said...

Some related link: http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2006/05/20/herding-cats-domesticating-rats/

At 4:29 PM, phil jones said...

Well. I'd argue that everything is political. You can't take politics out of human-life.

I don't really think it's a *problem* when politics gets in the way of decision-making, I think it's a *warning* that there are issues that haven't been addressed properly.

Your vi example illustrates this perfectly. What could be more stupid than a paralyzing argument between intelligent people about which editor is best?

But people argue.

Not, I say, because they're stupid, but exactly because of all those *externalities* that you mention. The appearance is that the decision between editors is arbitrary. But the reality is that, due to social *context*, it does matter.

So I'm a bit suspicious that we want social software which tries to "fix" the problem of political argument by excluding it. I think we need social software to help resolve the political arguments by helping people make more of their contextual assumptions *explicit*.

At 4:33 PM, phil jones said...

Oh yeah, and we don't have problems about Perl vs. Python because we trust that Parrot will solve our interop problems :-)

Social Sites Evaluation Team

2007-10-14T00:31:00.000-07:00

There are lots of social networking sites and there are new launched every day. Some people just stick to one of them and never try anything new - but I, at least from time to time, I would like to evaluate some of the new sites and see what functionality they provide. The problem is it is really hard to do it in one person - after all it is all about social interaction and not about some lonely web surfing - and it is socially a bit awkward now to ask your friends to join a new and shiny social networking site after so many others. Hence the idea of a web team of people who would declare themselves interested in trying out new social networking sites and joining the new sites by the whole team together to evaluate it.

Facebook and conversations

2007-10-12T08:14:00.000-07:00

I am a bit disapointed about Facebook - it notifies me about all kinds of events involving my friends - but somehow I can't find a way to monitor for new posts in groups I have joined. For me having meaningful conversations is the absolute number one feature of social web sites and I don't see much point in using Facebook when it does not make it easy for me. It provides me all the context needed to engage my friends into a conversation - but somehow does not create a convenient place for a group exchange of ideas.

And perhaps I am not alone in that sentiment?

Ideograms and SMS

2007-10-11T03:43:00.000-07:00

There is much evidence that SMSes are more used in the Far East then they are in other parts of the world. It's no surprise mobile is generally more widespread there, but somehow I cannot imagine reading a book on the screen of a mobile phone. Is it just lack of imagination - or perhaps the text in ideograms just takes less screen estate to convene the same meaning? I don't know. I've tried to look at some web pages (like www.un.org) in English and in Japanese or Chinese - frankly I don't see any difference - but there must be some. Does any one have some real data here?

“Message is the medium”

2007-09-27T04:07:00.000-07:00

This is a quote that I’ve seen somewhere that sums the whole twitter thing so much commented in the blogosphere. By exchanging the perhaps less obviously valuable information you keep the information channel open. This is how our minds work.

Internet controlled agent

2007-09-06T04:31:00.000-07:00

Musing about the things you can do at the edge of the network reminded me about my old idea. With Internet you can easily get info about remote places - but by now it is still passive - you just get what the remote host lets you see, and if you want to see what is just around the corner that that internet cam shows, you are out of luck. So here comes my business idea - remotely controlled web cam. A robot carrying a camera might be too expensive by now - but with no problem you can instruct via internet in real time a camera operator.

Is there anyone interested how London looks like today?

Facebook applications

2007-08-15T23:30:00.000-07:00

There is much talk in the blogosphere about third party facebook applications. In the strategic perspective it has already been analyzed in much detail - here I'd like to post just two obserwations.

The applications seem to be not integrated with the underlying platform at all. I have not yet tried myself to write anything there - so I don't know how much it is the fault of the programmer and how much it is the platform itself, but when an application asks me to create a new user id and password for it then it is kind of missing the whole point (this was one of the instant messaging apps).

The model where at the registration of the new application you invite your frieds is faulty. At that time I don't know what is the utility of the application, I have no information to deduce who of my friends would like it and who would not. Please Facebook change that.

The web is more meta and meta

2007-08-10T08:50:00.001-07:00

Today I've
googled for "database table name plural singular" and what I see as the first result?

Yes - the first result was 'Googled "database table name singular plural", I find this issue has been discussed many times. I feel the only compromise of plural school, ...'.

Unfortunately I cannot find that phrase on the linked page.

Wikis and fora - other ideas

2007-08-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

I am really fan of the idea of integrating wikis and fora. Fora are good for conversations - wikis are good for storing knowledge. For a good theory building system you need both. The question, of course, is how they should be integrated. It is not easy. Ideas start with conversations - then they can crystallize to some semi stable state - but it never ends there - the crystallized ideas produce more discussions and eventually can be completely changed. There are users who addictive follow the whole process - and those who come at some later stage, the former have the whole history of the conversation in their head, the letter need some introduction that would inform them about the summary facts without reading the whole history. There are also occasions where you would like to refer to the exact words of someone for political reasons.
It's all very complex - and I guess we shall never have some ideal solution that will work for all purposes - but I believe we should experiment with different settings.

The integration solutions that I've seen thus far are mostly about adding some forum functionality to wikis: a discussion page paired to a 'main' page (on wikipedia), a 'attach to page' method that adds a comment to the wiki page with some special visual style that makes it different from the other content. But there can be many more ways of doing that integration. In particular I see many ways of doing it the other way around - by adding wiki functionality to forum sites and letting it's users:

edit the list of subjects just like they would edit a wiki page
'overwrite' a part of the conversation with a summary that would be a wiki page, editable by all the participants in the overwritten part of the conversation with the expectation that it will contain a consensus between them on what was written, the overwritten text could be available behind a link
edit some small 'pagelets', or menus used for navigation (with more and more screen realestate we can add more of them)

Niagara 2 - the first Open Source main stream processor?

2007-08-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

This sounds like news:

the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, "Niagara 2" - named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community - whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.

Jonathan Schwartz in his blog

I wander how will it be vexed by the Free Software community.

And by the way - will this amount of parallelism help Hurd.

Return of Fora?

2007-08-02T03:58:00.000-07:00

The most interesting presentation at the yesterdays London Wiki Wednesday was a talk by Alan Wood and it was not about a wiki - but something more like an interenet forum (or biulettin board system or ... whatever).

I was always of the opinion that there is much unrealized potential in this old software genre.
It is message based - like email or RSS - so in fact it fits better the conversational nature of most communication then document based wikis. But it is also centralized - and that means you can do many things you cannot with a decentralized system (like version control of attachments, uniform visualisation of the conversations - i.e. less need for quoting, moderation, statistics etc.). All the talk now is about Social Networking Sites - but in fact the networking part is so insignificant in all of them - and most of the interaction that happens there is exactly the same as you had on internet fora and BBSes.

Instant Messaging and Social Networking - Snimmer

2007-07-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

Snimmer is a web based service with chat (supporting all the major networks - and even Jabber) and Social Networking features. Looks like great idea - I wander when the major SN sites will catch on with IM widgets on their pages.

See your name in hyerogliphs

2007-07-20T02:37:00.000-07:00

Egyptian Name Translator

I've read in wikipedia that the alphabet was discovered when Egiptians needed to record names of foreign labourers - they had no hieroglyphs for their names so they invented assigning hieroglyphs to phonemes and then composing the names from them.

Pirates of the Internet

2007-06-01T01:57:00.000-07:00

In a brilliant move the notorious Pirate Bay - a Swedish bittorrent tracker - reappriopriated the romanticism and disruptive potential of the pirate mythology in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie series:

Why Vote?

2007-03-19T05:39:00.000-07:00

This freakonomics article is not new - but I have read it just recently. A nice economic analysis of voting - but the authors don't take into account the fact that the payoff of a vote is a dependent variable related to the number of voters. The fewer people vote the more important are they votes - so even in this pure economic model the number of voters would never drop to 0.

Reading Shah of Shahs

2007-02-11T15:41:00.000-08:00

In the nineties, after the communism collapsed in Poland and shortly before her death my grandmother used to attentively watch at least 6 news programs on TV every day. She was not involved politically - she was just used to a different information diet. I myself do remember days when Radio Free Europe was jammed by the communistic government of Poland. It is hard to imagine now how different the world was back then.

"The Inner Ring" and "The Fight Club"

2006-12-22T00:27:00.000-08:00

This short post is juxtaposition of two links: The Inner Ring and The Fight Club. Isn't "The Fight Club" really about how being in the "Inner Ring" has more 'meaning' and is more psychologically rewarding than material success?

"Democratizing Innovation" and web sites

2006-11-24T02:51:00.000-08:00

Can web sites use the 'Lead Users' idea from the von Hippel oeuvre? For sure, all his ideas are applicable here. What I would like to see are some more practical methods on finding the 'Lead Users'.

Individualism as a Socio-Economic Phenomenon

2006-11-18T06:13:00.000-08:00

Individualism lets the society test new ways of doing practically everything. The costs are beared by the individual - while his success can be easily copied by others and become beneficial for everyone. Those statements are true in our current socio-economic reality but they are not universal (imagine an nomadic tribe - at least some individualism for example in choosing the direction of the wandering cannot be copied by others after it proves successfully) - so individualism is not universal either. This might also explain the success of the western societies with very individualistic culture - this was a good adaptation for the changes or recent history.

Reading "Democratizing Innovation" by Eric von Hippel

2006-10-29T03:18:00.000-08:00

The tile is about innovation, but the subject seems to be a bit broader and include also design. Of course innovation involves design - but design not always involves innovation. The example of user designing his pizza by choosing toppings shows this quite well.

Watermarks instead of DRM

2006-09-18T05:14:00.000-07:00

A german music website sells MP3 music with watermarks.

Teams and interfaces and disintermediation

2006-09-14T04:11:00.000-07:00

At my current job there are repeatable tasks that require coordination between teams. For the beginning no one knows what information the other teams need to complete the task. We talk to each other, we send emails and the understanding what the counterpart expects from us is gradually building. Then we don't need to talk any more - we gather the needed information in advance and email it to them. The information exchange is less frequent but richer, the process is smoother. Then we create Excel templates - so that we have a list of all the needed info and we make less mistakes. We send the Excel attached to the emails, the other side receives it and relying on their experience semi automatically fulfills their part, usually this comes to entering the information that we gathered into the required computer systems. It fast, semiautomatic, smooth and everyone is satisfied, but what if it did not stop there? What if the information from the email was not cut and paste to the appropriate system by humans - but by a special input program? What if the whole process was not just enabled by email and Excel, but rather the communication software really supported and facilitated it?

Mailing Lists and WWW

2006-08-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

Long after email announced dead mailing lists still constitute for me the main source of information in the most important for me topics.
Their publish-subscribe nature and the universal availability makes them an ideal tool for many communities of practice. The archives of many mailing lists represent major source of information on many topics - but the exposition of this information is far from being perfect. I can see one small improvement that would help a bit - the mailing list servers should put in the footer of the letter a link to the archived version of it. This would spare a bit of work for anyone wanting to publish a link to some interesting email conversation and in effect would improve the flow of ideas between www and email.

Why Scaffolding? Validation and learning.

2006-08-19T02:56:00.000-07:00

The text below was first posted on the Catalyst mailing list. It is an analyzis of value of the code generation technique that was popularized as 'scaffolding' by Ruby on Rails. It describes what makes the scaffolding so efficient in converting newcommers into avid users of the framework.

I would like you to imagine you in the position of a developer that has some idea for a web project, thinking about trying a new web programming framework. There are many to choose from, or you can also go the simple way and use CGI.pm or develop something for his own - how would you decide? Every framework is lots of code, lots of documentation so it's not an easy task. After reading those mountains of manuals you can discover that some limitations make the framework not really fitting to your project (some related thoughts in http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=8826). This is that risk that scaffolding mitigates - you generate your application with minimal effort and you have a working example tailored to your database schema. You don't need to think if a example from the manual can be adopted to your data structures - you have it adopted automatically. This is the first advantage of scaffolding - easy evaluation.

The other important advantage is that it helps in the learning process. You get a non trivial working example. And again this example is based on your database schema - from the starting point you at once know much about the program. You don't need to internalize the arbitrary business rules of some unfamiliar application - the business rules are yours - so at once you can start and play with it. And a good scaffolding will give you much space for simple but meaningful modifications to tweak and play with.

Of course there are also disadvantages to code generation. It is impossible to come with a good schema to update the generated code when you release a new version of the generator and we don't want the programmers who use the scaffolding to be stuck forever to the version that they used the first time. One solution can be to limit the code generator to really most trivial part and move all other logic into traditional libraries that just happen to cooperate with the generated code - and this is what I try to do with InstantCRUD.

Spread the meme

2006-08-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

Ievan Polkka. More internet-famouns songs.

'Vacations with stars'

2006-07-14T01:14:00.000-07:00

'Vacations with Stars' is a concept that for now I have seen only in Polish info space. It is about tourist agencies offering holidays with some polish 'stars'. Of course the stars get the vacations for free or even are being paid for having a good time.

It seems like exploiting popularity is more and more simple - is it really a harbinger of the 'attention economy'?

The one red paper clip project suceeded

2006-07-10T00:05:00.000-07:00

One red paperclip traded in a chain of barter transactions into a house (via Ming the Mechanic: Paper Clip to House)

What does this mean?

Perhaps it has got no meaningfull meaning at all - but maybe, I say maybe, just like The other project it shows a trend?

The magic experience of VOIP in the background

2006-06-26T05:09:00.000-07:00

This weekend I finally got all the needed prerequisites for a Skype connection with my fiancee with whom I am currently separated by the distance of 1000km. We talked for hours but what was really magical was when we finally stopped the direct conversation and left to do our daily chores but did not switch the communication link off. This way I heard her as if she was in a room just behind a wall, talking to a friend, using the vacuum cleaner, watching TV, I even heard her shouting to me from the kitchen where she prepared some food. This was as if some magic connected our, thousand kilometers away, rooms.

When I left the flat I forgot to switch the connection off. There was a thunderstorm and I received a SMS reminding me that I left the window opened as well.

A quote

2006-06-09T06:10:00.000-07:00

"Well, one day I was at the Institute of Advanced Study, and I went to Gödel's office, and there was Gödel," the professor recalled. "I said, 'Professor Gödel, what connection do you see between your incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?' And Gödel got angry and threw me out of his office."

from: STEPHEN BUDIANSKY On "Gödel in a Nutshell " By Verena Huber-Dyson

The failures of the online collective mind

2006-05-31T23:28:00.000-07:00

There is a nice rant at: On "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" By Jaron Lanier. I do agree with it in many points - but I don't agree with the overall diagnosis rejecting the online hive mind as 'too collective'. I would rather talk about particular systems and their failures than rejecting all of them in one sweep. It is not that digital communication forces us for more collectivism or less collectivism - digital communication is the most malleable form of communication there ever existed and we can change it and amend to fit any model we think of. There are more collective trends in it with wikis, aggregators etc. - but blogs composite a completely opposite trend of total autonomy of the individual.

In this vein I created following list of digital media failures:

averaging everything to the mediocre, homogenized pulp - this is the sin of aggregators and very big wikis
Skewing the process of averaging towards people who have too much time or some freaky motivation (this is what I was analysing in One email per day - a moderation scheme and Online Debate (continuing 'One email per day'))
Accrection of information without the balancing force of forgetting it - this is the primary problem with wikis (adding new comments is easy, refactoring is hard), blogs and email lists solve that by 'forgetting' the older content and letting it resurface if it is really important

For sure there are many more of them - but I believe by splitting them into more concrete and better described chunks we can analyze them and then try to fix them in our online communication tools.

Links:

Digital Maoism on Community Wiki

Founding Myth and reality

2006-05-26T02:16:00.000-07:00

Nick Carr attacked the feasibility of the founding myth of wikipedia others treat it as if it was an attack on wikipedia itself

Can we every have a massive collaborative movement without basing it on a myth? Could wikipedia be successful if it started with a thoroughly thought over policy of balance between openness and closedness instead of the myth of 'encyclopedia that everyone edits'? Would we have The French Revolution if people knew all the consequences that became evident after Thermidor the 9th?

Update: Re: [ox-en] Re: Business opportuities based on Free Software - another critisism of wikipedia.
Update: The Law of Focus - marketing says that you need to craft your message to fit as few words as possible

The value of nice graphics for software libraries and frameworks

2006-05-17T06:14:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I had an idea for a web site and some spare time. I chose the Maypole Perl framework and coded the whole thing. It took me just 2 weeks and I had something to show to my friends. It was not perfect and the framework was a bit constraining, it made some things easy but it was hard to extend it in directions that were not previewed by the authors of the framework, but in two weeks I really had something to show to non programmers. It was so liberating that I did not need to ask some graphic designers to create some skins for the web site or struggle with the graphics myself but I had a nice look out of the box. I am now moving the code from Maypole to the more powerful Catalyst/DBIC frameworks but still I reuse the page design my Maypole app had. I am a programmer, I know how to program but graphic design is alien land to me so to build a nice looking site I need to get the design from someone else.

I think one of the most important advantages of frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django etc is that they let the programmer program and not worry about the graphic design.

One note on using Internet for public discourse

2006-05-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

Internet does have many desirable qualities as a medium for public discourse, but nonetheless there are also some less attractive features. One of them is the total control the publisher exercises over his message, and that means he can change it over time without any notice of the change or manipulate it to fit a particular audience or even exclude some audience from receiving the message. To make the point more clear I created an example - a simple web page that publishes three distinct messages to readers according to their IP address. One is praising Microsoft the other dissing it and the third I won't disclose here.

This total control was not available for print or wireless media. TV and radio stations emit the same signal to all receivers, the same with printed papers. In the print case the printed paper was additionally a proof of what was really published.

Update: Detecting Cloaking in Web Pages

Notes on online news business models

2006-05-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

In "The Wealth of Networks" Benkler two times mentions that newspapers don't rely on exclusive copyrights in their business models. Copying would delay the news too much and readers would not buy it. Online this does not hold anymore - articles can be copied in no time, but still 50 years of exclusive copyrights seems excessive to me.
There should be a Creative Commons license crafted specially for online news - with exclusive copyrights for a much shorter period, let's say 24 hours. This should be long enough to destroy the business of blatant copy-cats but short enough that it has value to those that really want to add something to the articles.
A business model that charges for real time news but opens the archives for commenting and weaving the articles into the public discourse seems a lot more compatible with the Internet economy than publishing current editions of newspapers and charging for the archives that some journals do.

Update: http://openbusiness.cc/

Peer Production and Market

2006-05-03T13:33:00.000-07:00

After "The Wealth of Networks" the question if peer production is desirable and viable is answered. What remains is how to mix it with the market economy. If peer production is going to play that revolutionary role that Yochai Benkler predicts it will this shall be a crucial question for all kinds of businesses. And it is not trivial - as psychology shows (see for example: "Effort for Payment - a tale of two markets") monetary reward crowds out other incentives. We need to divide the work very carefully so that the market part does not destroy the peer production. And to make this precise division we need to know more about the psychological mechanism of incentives crowding out and also about the economic feasibility of provisioning a particular work by peer production. Even a nonprofit organisation needs pay some bills - and what are for profit business models compatible with peer production? Some first answers were worked out by the Open Source and Free Software movements (for example
Open Source Case for Business), but I have not found any more systematic treatment of that subject - a framework guiding us when evaluating not yet discovered business models.

One email per day - a moderation scheme

2006-04-28T04:27:00.000-07:00

I am a participant to a few online mailing lists and I am worrying about the flame-wars that from time to time burst on them. I am pretty much against moderation as it always brings some political issues so I thought that perhaps setting a limit of one email per day for each participant would break the pattern.

Here is some analysis supporting my point.

The mechanism of flame wars:
1. People interpret textual communication to be more emotional than it
was really written, so one more emotional letter can lead to a vicious
circle of more and more emotional answers (see DampenEmotions, Flames: Emotional Amplification of Text)
2. Emotions crowd out deliberation so anything that is below the
emotional level of the flame war is not even noticed by anyone

The negative effects:
1. Avalanche of automatic, not thoughtful responses that clutter mailboxes
2. Reasonable opinions are not noticed
3. Those that can post more than others can use this as a political power - this benefits those who work less on their posts at expense of the readers, it also undermines the democrating notion of everyone having equal votes

I would expect that the one day wait time would
cool down the emotions and also give people more time to think about
what they want to say. The participants would value the chance to be
heard publicly more and put more work into crafting their message,
that work would be not lost in the noise of the mass posters. It
would also give everyone more equal standing.

The delay of one day is of course something that can be adjusted to
the circumstances – but what I propose is that it was something
substantial not like the seconds used in Slashdot.

Update: It's all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood

Reading: "The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom "

2006-04-26T01:55:00.000-07:00

Yochai Benkler did it again: "The Wealth of Networks" . After reading the first 200 pages my verdict is - 'a must read', for anyone wanting to understand our world and our civilisation at the beginning of the 21 century. Impressively broad and systematic analysis, not only of the economic mechanism, originally covered in "Coases Penguin", but also all the political, cultural and sociological consequences of Peer Production.

The chapter on individual autonomy was really resonating with my feelings as an Open Source author. Yes - this is the feeling of freedom, the feeling that you really choose by yourself, that you don't need to ask anyone what to do but really weight all the input data by yourself - this is what attracts programmers to Open Source. I found the approach of analysing the autonomy of individuals much closer to me than the dogmatic discourse of Stallman.

Brudnopis reloaded

2006-04-26T01:49:00.000-07:00

I think the Brudnopis wiki lacked the narrative that attracts people to blogs - so I hereby restart the blog version of my notebook (and yes Reloaded was the best, least trivial part).