Society & economy – Page 12

The microformats-API assembly lines

I was trying to put this point in history into some context and it dawned on me that Ford’s assembly line, which had a great influence on production and essentially precipitated the industrial revolution, is somewhat of a precursor to what we have today with open APIs and the potential proliferation of microformats.

Except that, with this combination of remixable and repurposeable data, the whole web community stands to benefit. The interesting issue — is that we must build tools that can interact with and leverage this technological coupling. Ford was no dummy: he sold cars to the people who made them, and put the cost at a level that his employees could afford.

Now if we could spread tools that can make use of microformats as well as produce them invisibly to the end users, this whole assembly line thing might actually take off. Yeh, just mebbe.

podslam.org — slam poetry 2.0

Brian Oberkirch pinged me about a cool project called Podslam: It’s a month-long online poetry slam: 15 poets celebrating Black History Month. You can watch or download the slams, rate them, set up your own blog & start talking..

RIAA says “EFF You iPod rippers!”

Man oh man oh man.

Man oh man!

Seriously, could the RIAA make it any easier for us?

Listen fellas, yeah, youze guys with the stogies up in your crystal palace puffin away and chucklin’ to each other about how you’re going to ‘crush’ those ‘infringers’… Yeah, seriously, ya know what, we’re sick of being abused by you. We’re sick of being fed your garbage — of the idea that you think that you control everything and can dictate the rules of my use of your “product” long after I’ve bought and paid for it.

Look, I dunno what planet you guys think you’re on and what legal system is going to end up supporting your stilted worldview, but it doesn’t even matter. Because you’re irrelevant. You’re meaningless. What you’re doing is like a slow train wreck euthanasia; we’re all watching you pen your own demise, over months and months of screwing your best customers. I mean — it’s so painfully clear to us! Why is this not obvious to you?

Oh oh, okay, I know — you’re saying “well, we can afford to be the bad guys and get everyone’s hate-ons directed as us because we’ve got players in bed with us that could smite you without even thinking about it.”

And you know what, while that’s true, you’re still not getting it. Because I’m just one paucitous individual. Get rid of me, two will fall in line to replace me. Take them out, four more. And on and on. That’s what you don’t get. And when you start screwing with people who own iPods, holy crap!, you’re unleashing a wrath far more powerful than the DOJ or your own fatcat legal hegemons: the MySpaceXangaLiveJournalOrkut kids and their parents.

So don’t say we didn’t warn you. Since, yeah, it’ll be our eyes that you’ll be staring up into questioningly as you realize that you’ve taken yourself out.

Proof that guns don’t kill people, they only maim

Apparently our Robot-in-Chief, Cheney, shot his friend while he was hunting yesterday.

No, not hunting his friend. He was hunting quail. Geez.

But he still sprayed Mr Whittington with shotgun pellets in the cheek, neck and chest.

This followed an address by Cheney on the importance of shooting your friends while hunting, which pleased his base of NRA-backed Free Hunters. You’ll recall that he tried to shoot his friend, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, this time last year, but failed to hit him.

Ok, so I just made all that up. Except the part about Cheney shooting the dude. That really did happen. I just wanted to promote a cool tshirt design.

USPTO to hold open source meeting

My buddy Steven M. Nipper tipped me off to a meeting being held Feb 16 by the USPTO to further work begun in December, to ensure that patent examiners have improved access to all available prior art relating to software code during the patent examination process.

Unforunately I won’t be able to make it to Virginia in time, but if you’re interested and in the area, it might be good to have some small-time representatives there to vouch for the little guy! They’re limiting attendence to 220, so sign up ASAP.

PovertyBox G4

Google + My Data = Crazy Conspicuous

See? This is what I was talking about. This is the slow steady systematic decline that I was talking about.

Don’t believe me yet, tha’s coo.

Coz see, now that Google can track your email, your search history, your chats, what comes next? Gee, let’s see. Would be nice if you could go back and grab your cell phone convos right? Oh wait, Gtalk and FON will help there… And where you’ve been? Dodgeball’s got that covered. Hell, you can even map that stuff on Gmaps — or one step bigger — Earth.

So what happens when Google rolls out wifi or flips the switch on all that dark fiber it’s got?

Tell you what, yeah, you’ll be able to get movies downloaded hella fast, but Google will also have the most lucrative person-database ever assembled. That Google credit card you just applied for? Ho ho ho. MAN I wish that kind of information about myself.

So look, I’m over it. I said as much before. Privacy is dead. Get over it.

Well ok fine, I’m not really over it, but it sounds more dramatic when I put it that way.

What isn’t finished, however, is how much control over that information you should be able to exert. You know how much you hate it when you walk into a party and all of a sudden everyone starts whispering, looking sidewards at you, raising eyebrows. Wouldn’t it just be so great if you could turn up the volume of what everyone’s saying and hear just what they think about you — and better yet, see which Dicks Jane is sharing that information with?

That’s the problem here. Once Google rolls out GoogleNet, we’re effed. It’s that simple. There’ll be a “personal information tax” that they’ll charge you just to take a look at your information (alright alright, I hear you snicker, maybe they won’t, but they sure could!).

So there’s got to be competition — and I don’t mean from the other biggies. I mean from us. I mean from the people who’s data they’re harvesting and already claim dominion over. I mean that we need to build our own economy and our own means of leveraging this data — and of course building the means to syphon it back out of the biggies. You think they’re going to give up this information easily, willfully? Sorry Toto, we’re not in Germany, here (can’t count on the government anyway when it’s just as eager to have this kind of information about its citizenry anyway).

So yeah. Just keep it in the back of your head. As Google grows, becomes more powerful, more all-knowing, whatchoo gunna do about? What can you do about it once they know everything about you — and all of your transactions pass through the Google network? I’m not scared of this — and I’m not raising the paranoia flag. Fuck that, it’s too late for paranoia. This is the future and the present; so the only question now is, what do we make of it now that we’re here? And, moreover, how do we put all this data to work for us?

The power of 1000 monkeys

When discussing my conceptual framework for leveraging multi-disciplinary work for the benefit of open source projects (um, aka “CivicForge”), I’ve made the point that we will achieve world domination because our thousand one-pound monkeys who build open source tools will be able to outwit, outhink and out-heart any 800 lb. proprietary gorilla.

Whether true or not, it’s a fairly accurate image of the open source community, given its neurotic and somewhat anarchic inner workings. Primarily owing to its quasi-egalitarian social structure, decision-making is often controversial, contested and often downright perplexing. Nevertheless, good tools are produced that stand the test of time, are oftentimes less fragile than their proprietary counterparts and hell, give a wide swath of folks with all kinds of disparate ideas and experiences the chance to get involved in building tools that affect (and potentially improve) their lives (this is why DRM makes no sense in open source tools: why would you handicap your own tools? — it’d be like building the QWERTY keyboard all over again!).

So let’s cut to the chase: 1000 one-pound monkeys acting by autonomously self-organizing provides an answer to the dilemma that Noah Brier raises about the attention issue (Via Alex Barnett):

“But here’s my widespread adoption issue: the general public don’t think they have an ‘attention problem.’ If you ask people how much television they watch, they’ll tell you less than they actually do. Most individuals have no clue what they actually spend their time doing … yeah new technologies will force people to split their time more and more, but will they notice/care? I think it’s really important to remember that the average person has no desire to sit around and read all these RSS feeds then blog about them. In fact, if you showed someone how I spend my attention online, they’d probably think I was an idiot who was wasting time.”

While in isolation and over a short enough time horizon, Noah’s point may prove true, I think this misses the historical significance that the experience of a thousands of monkeys can offer to a culture. I’m sure at some point some wise fella claimed that no one would ever walk around carrying a “portable phone”, but clearly after the monkeys got a hold of them, culture soon changed so that now that’s now the common reality (at least in developed countries).

So I wouldn’t poo-poo the notion just coz us geeks need to better attenuate our attention streams. We’re on the vanguard here, and what we need today will surely eventually be needed by nongeeks, especially those kids growing up on MySpace and LiveJournal today.

So think about it this way. The drains on our personal attention are getter greater and more promiscuous. We will need to manage it. The kids in school tomorrow will need more and more tools to manage it — and will be looking for tools. What happens next? The cult of a thousand teenage monkeys will go about the incremental effort of virally spreading those tools to their friends, and will ultimately install it on mom and dad and grandma’s computer… and say stuff like, “Oh no! You’re still using that silly [insert obsolete app here]?? Here, try this!”

And poof. One thousand elder monkeys will get the trickle up benefit of having their attention stream whipped, chopped, sliced and diced without ever knowing what RSS, blogging or the attention trust concept is all about owing to the tenacity and technological prowess of a generation of a thousand younger monkeys. Don’t underestimate the network, Noah. It might seem like all this stuff is just for geeks now, and that may be true for the next couple years. But as software improves and gets easier to use — we’re all going to be experiencing personal attention deficits like we’ve never witnessed — and then, yes then, just like the intarweb of today, the domain of attention attenuators will become the commonplace hangout of the jocks and divas, our moms and dads — and yes, we’ll still be there too, grappling with 3800 unread items.