A theme seems to be emerging in the PajamaNation. We are concerned with what individuals and small groups can do from there home that used to require institutions (or at least a trip across town). Well, the next great revolution may happen when we start creating, conserving and distributing energy from our homes. Not only can we collectively empower ourselves by playing a role in averting the expected disasters attached to global warming, we can spread the wealth that is generated by a plentiful and decentralized energy supplies. Energy is the engine of development. We no longer need to allow that engine to be monopolized by large institutions that may not have our best interests at heart. And even if the big energy conglomerates are well-intentioned, in the absence of some great technological breakthrough, the resolution to our energy needs is more likely to come from decentralized, distributed, and autonomous sources. Various futurists and environmental/energy activists have already traced an outline of how this might be accomplished. There is – in essence – a Web 2.0 solution to energy.
In last week's column, I quoted Clay Shirkey's description of the Internet as an end-to-end revolution. Now we are also moving into energy smart grids that give end-to-end intelligence to power production and distribution. Slowly but surely, people's homes and offices are becoming micro-generation sites. According to this model of energy production and distribution, you don't put up some enormous solar photovoltaic site that mimics the way energy has been produced by gas, coal and nuclear. Instead, you stick solar panels all over the place. Nanotechnology-based solar energy sheets that look like plastic wrap have already been displayed at various conventions and discussed in business magazines. This product should be on the market in a few years. This form of solar collector is not only unobtrusive and easy to distribute, it is expected to be twice as efficient as current solar power collectors. Here we have a form of solar power that will be cheap and easy to produce. Indeed, it is expected that it will follow the same sort of exponential downward price curve that we've seen with digital technology.
So imagine: you start putting thin sheet-like solar collectors everywhere -- on rooftops, cars, fences, on nearly every available surface. And then, you can do the same thing with wind. In the UK, substantial numbers have taken up home wind micro-turbines that don't take up much more space than a broadcast satellite. These are just two of myriad forms of energy that a home energy generator with minimal skills and minimal cash might be able to deal with in a few years.
Now imagine that millions of homes are micro-generating energy and that it's all being fed into some kind of grid. Futurist Jamais Cascio has suggested that there could be a sort of BitTorrent for energy. People could share their energy with family, friends and neighbors, tapping into the resource when they need to.
Another route towards resolving the energy situation from our homes involves conservation. Cascio wrote that we could support "everyone on the planet — 10 billion people, a bit more than the UN estimate for the end of the century — with Western lifestyles ... and using half the amount of energy we use today. All by paying slightly more attention to efficiency in our designs." One example of inefficiency is the power supplies we use for our electronics. They are only 20% - 40% efficient and the rest of the energy gets wasted. But for a few extra dollars, we can now get high efficiency power supplies.
The least advanced countries have the greatest potential for adopting new technologies, including energy efficient buildings and homes, simply because as development grows, they will be erecting new structures from scratch. Those who do not have to adjust new technologies to massive old structures – and those who do not have to tear down the old structures (imagine trying to create an energy efficient New York City by tearing all the inefficient old buildings down and making new ones) -- can integrate energy efficiency into design right from the start.
This clearly needs to be done immediately on a massive scale. And it's a win-win situation. Energy efficient buildings are environmentally helpful but they also save the occupants a whole lot of money.
As many of you undoubtedly already know, this idea – that developing nations have an advantage in adapting novel technological solutions – has been broadly recognized and labeled "leapfrogging." The popular example that has illustrated this phenomenon has been the adaptation of wireless phone systems as the primary telecommunications network in most developing areas. People have adapted the cell phone because they don't have the old, expensive, wire-based telephone networks from the 20th Century hanging around their necks like an albatross. Similarly, developing countries that don't have an enormous "gas station" and "car repair" infrastructure could more easily develop infrastructures around electric, hydrogen, and biodiesel.
Providing a new infrastructure for distributed energy grids and the tools for individuals and small businesses to be a part of that organism should become a new area for micropreneurship that fits in perfectly with the PajamaNation mission. Networked energy grids can eliminate the middleman, creating energy independence along with job independence. It is time to begin.
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Our New Nation
The idea that there could be a global medium where anyone can send data to anyone else, and only the two ends know what to do with the data, has been the source of wave after wave of cultural freakout, from mailing lists to the web to Napster.
The end-to-end principle is one of a very few ideas in human history that are permanently radical — ideas that always provide leverage in the fight of the interesting versus the dull. Competitive markets are permanently radical, literacy is permanently radical, the First Amendment is permanently radical, and now we can add end-to-end to that list.
Clay Shirkey, 2002
Let's put aside labels like employer, employee, entrepreneur, worker, job-maker and job-taker for just a moment. Let's even put aside all monetary considerations for just a moment. In its rawest form, what PajamaNation does is act as an end-to-end conduit that helps people organize projects. It's an engine of creation, a real wealth (actual value as opposed to symbolic monetary value) generator.
It has also been conjectured by Walter de Brouwer and others that PN could be an agent of identity and community. People doing projects that do not need to take place on location in a "bricks-and-mortar institution" (this can include the neighborhood flower shop) -- and that are outside the realm of corporations and states – form a new and growing cohort group whose interests are still not frequently represented by organized society. When you go to a doctor's office and fill out a form, when the neighborhood cleanup crew starts making mind-wrecking noise outside your house at 9 am, it often becomes clear that the operative assumption is that all busy, productive people have left their homes to "go to work." And, indeed, it's still scary to walk down a suburban street on a weekday mid-afternoon and experience the place as a kind of privileged ghost town. Hasn't anybody gotten the message yet? 9-to-5 downtown is supposed to be dead.
Clearly, the micropreneurial work-at-home evolution is still only just emerging. But it's not too early to meditate on the implications of a "PajamaNation" as a nation -- and, in fact, as a global nation with more potential citizens right here and now than any other nation in the world.
If we emphasize the nation aspect of a PajamaNation, a whole new discourse -- and a whole new and exciting set of possibilities -- appears on the horizon. This aspect of the PajamaNation doesn't require that all its members have to be trying to hook up for projects. This conception of a PajamaNation has the potential to function as a sort-of people's decentralized "United Nations." By situating all of us participants in a cyberspace nation – by calling to us as people who – through mediated space -- are as close to one another as we are to our physical neighbors (or maybe closer), we may be on the new edge of the most important socio-political phenomenon of the 21st Century.
Think about it. Many idealists have tried to impact – with limited success – intractable social conflicts (Israel v. Palestine comes immediately to mind) through person-to-person diplomacy. The results have frequently been emotionally satisfying but the inability to get enough people together and talking to each other in physical space severely limits any real political impact that this strategy might produce.
By combining networked communication technology with an emergent new identity as a member of a global nation who is immediately connected to everybody else (they are all one click away), we could find ourselves at the forefront of a movement that replaces ideology and the interests of various elites with actual human needs and desires, as expressed by individuals, one signal at a time.
I had an epiphany the other day as I reviewed some angry comments left on a site in one of those endless, hostile political discussions that permeate the web. As I thought about it, I put aside some qualms and decided I was very much in favor of radically increasing Direct Democracy.
Most of the comments on this site (from all perspectives) were frankly objectively ignorant and illiterate. Some were semi-literate but fundamentally irrational – ideas didn't really follow one from the other, even though the commenters assumed that they did. Even the few comments from sophisticates –- the Marxist deconstructionist or the Ayn Randian free market advocate – seemed to me fundamentally incoherent, in content if not in style. As I thought about this, I was struck by the thought: We are all either part of an elite or we are yahoos. (Webster's defines yahoo as "a boorish, crass or stupid person, but that doesn't quite cover the implications that the word has taken on. It also means somebody who is clueless; someone who is unsophisticated because he or she is outside the zone where the sophisticates are privileged to be.) Don't be insulted by this. I'm a yahoo myself.
So why would I conclude that we should give these ordinary folks – yahoos like you and me and the several billion others -- more power over political policy decisions? Because this is the only way that we will grow up.
Today, the elites who make real policy decisions – whether they are elected representatives or hold power through other methods – are the sole possession of a certain kind of wisdom (although clearly, by their actions, it's a very limited wisdom.) They know, at a very fundamental level, that their thoughts and political positions have consequences because they will be acted upon. They may not be operating in the interests of all people (probably not), and they may frequently do stupid and dangerous things (obviously), but they know that the consequences of their actions will eventually be measured. This engenders a sort of sophistication that – while it does produce its own kind of blinding arrogance –- tends towards something like coherence. (I'm obviously not talking here about the nonsense that politicians feed to the yahoos, or even necessarily about political office holders. I'm talking about the policy elites who actually administer nation states, and who also tend to work with and for corporate and other moneyed elites.)
As outsiders, "yahoos", we rant and rave freely because there is very little consequence. In fact, under the current dispensation, it may be sort of healthy that some of us take extreme and angry and possibly even crazy positions within the mediated net-world because it functions as a shout from the edges that might just work its way into a larger sort-of meta-dialectic (for example, anti-globalization riots play a role in bringing about debt forgiveness, etc.). However, if we were to actually emerge into a situation where – through direct, mediated democracy -- we actually had power over policy, a more considered and sophisticated discourse would likely emerge, as people begin to actually consider and then even experience the consequences of their ideas. A sophisticated and flexible politic that combined common interests with flexible, personal autonomy and agency would hopefully emerge, eventually
A PajamaNation -- a global person-to-person nation mediated by cyberspace – might be at first a practice space for gaming the consequences of direct democratic decision making. Later, it might prove to be an emergent phenomenon that gets credit for making peace between conflicting groups as the result of direct contact and person-to-person negotiation. Ultimately, it may be an emergent structure for real world democracy during a century where we no longer need to send representatives to a far away place to make our decisions for us. We are -- all of us – now close enough at hand to govern ourselves, both alone and together.
The end-to-end principle is one of a very few ideas in human history that are permanently radical — ideas that always provide leverage in the fight of the interesting versus the dull. Competitive markets are permanently radical, literacy is permanently radical, the First Amendment is permanently radical, and now we can add end-to-end to that list.
Clay Shirkey, 2002
Let's put aside labels like employer, employee, entrepreneur, worker, job-maker and job-taker for just a moment. Let's even put aside all monetary considerations for just a moment. In its rawest form, what PajamaNation does is act as an end-to-end conduit that helps people organize projects. It's an engine of creation, a real wealth (actual value as opposed to symbolic monetary value) generator.
It has also been conjectured by Walter de Brouwer and others that PN could be an agent of identity and community. People doing projects that do not need to take place on location in a "bricks-and-mortar institution" (this can include the neighborhood flower shop) -- and that are outside the realm of corporations and states – form a new and growing cohort group whose interests are still not frequently represented by organized society. When you go to a doctor's office and fill out a form, when the neighborhood cleanup crew starts making mind-wrecking noise outside your house at 9 am, it often becomes clear that the operative assumption is that all busy, productive people have left their homes to "go to work." And, indeed, it's still scary to walk down a suburban street on a weekday mid-afternoon and experience the place as a kind of privileged ghost town. Hasn't anybody gotten the message yet? 9-to-5 downtown is supposed to be dead.
Clearly, the micropreneurial work-at-home evolution is still only just emerging. But it's not too early to meditate on the implications of a "PajamaNation" as a nation -- and, in fact, as a global nation with more potential citizens right here and now than any other nation in the world.
If we emphasize the nation aspect of a PajamaNation, a whole new discourse -- and a whole new and exciting set of possibilities -- appears on the horizon. This aspect of the PajamaNation doesn't require that all its members have to be trying to hook up for projects. This conception of a PajamaNation has the potential to function as a sort-of people's decentralized "United Nations." By situating all of us participants in a cyberspace nation – by calling to us as people who – through mediated space -- are as close to one another as we are to our physical neighbors (or maybe closer), we may be on the new edge of the most important socio-political phenomenon of the 21st Century.
Think about it. Many idealists have tried to impact – with limited success – intractable social conflicts (Israel v. Palestine comes immediately to mind) through person-to-person diplomacy. The results have frequently been emotionally satisfying but the inability to get enough people together and talking to each other in physical space severely limits any real political impact that this strategy might produce.
By combining networked communication technology with an emergent new identity as a member of a global nation who is immediately connected to everybody else (they are all one click away), we could find ourselves at the forefront of a movement that replaces ideology and the interests of various elites with actual human needs and desires, as expressed by individuals, one signal at a time.
I had an epiphany the other day as I reviewed some angry comments left on a site in one of those endless, hostile political discussions that permeate the web. As I thought about it, I put aside some qualms and decided I was very much in favor of radically increasing Direct Democracy.
Most of the comments on this site (from all perspectives) were frankly objectively ignorant and illiterate. Some were semi-literate but fundamentally irrational – ideas didn't really follow one from the other, even though the commenters assumed that they did. Even the few comments from sophisticates –- the Marxist deconstructionist or the Ayn Randian free market advocate – seemed to me fundamentally incoherent, in content if not in style. As I thought about this, I was struck by the thought: We are all either part of an elite or we are yahoos. (Webster's defines yahoo as "a boorish, crass or stupid person, but that doesn't quite cover the implications that the word has taken on. It also means somebody who is clueless; someone who is unsophisticated because he or she is outside the zone where the sophisticates are privileged to be.) Don't be insulted by this. I'm a yahoo myself.
So why would I conclude that we should give these ordinary folks – yahoos like you and me and the several billion others -- more power over political policy decisions? Because this is the only way that we will grow up.
Today, the elites who make real policy decisions – whether they are elected representatives or hold power through other methods – are the sole possession of a certain kind of wisdom (although clearly, by their actions, it's a very limited wisdom.) They know, at a very fundamental level, that their thoughts and political positions have consequences because they will be acted upon. They may not be operating in the interests of all people (probably not), and they may frequently do stupid and dangerous things (obviously), but they know that the consequences of their actions will eventually be measured. This engenders a sort of sophistication that – while it does produce its own kind of blinding arrogance –- tends towards something like coherence. (I'm obviously not talking here about the nonsense that politicians feed to the yahoos, or even necessarily about political office holders. I'm talking about the policy elites who actually administer nation states, and who also tend to work with and for corporate and other moneyed elites.)
As outsiders, "yahoos", we rant and rave freely because there is very little consequence. In fact, under the current dispensation, it may be sort of healthy that some of us take extreme and angry and possibly even crazy positions within the mediated net-world because it functions as a shout from the edges that might just work its way into a larger sort-of meta-dialectic (for example, anti-globalization riots play a role in bringing about debt forgiveness, etc.). However, if we were to actually emerge into a situation where – through direct, mediated democracy -- we actually had power over policy, a more considered and sophisticated discourse would likely emerge, as people begin to actually consider and then even experience the consequences of their ideas. A sophisticated and flexible politic that combined common interests with flexible, personal autonomy and agency would hopefully emerge, eventually
A PajamaNation -- a global person-to-person nation mediated by cyberspace – might be at first a practice space for gaming the consequences of direct democratic decision making. Later, it might prove to be an emergent phenomenon that gets credit for making peace between conflicting groups as the result of direct contact and person-to-person negotiation. Ultimately, it may be an emergent structure for real world democracy during a century where we no longer need to send representatives to a far away place to make our decisions for us. We are -- all of us – now close enough at hand to govern ourselves, both alone and together.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Living "A La Carte" or "I'll Have What My Friends Are Having"?
It's this years' "Long Tail" – the new book about how the Internet is shifting boundaries and distributing power. The book is called "Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder." David Weinberger, who touted the takeover of the geeks in an earlier book he co-authored with Christopher Locke, The Cluetrain Manifesto", has definitely hit the sweet spot this time.
Weinberger posits that we have entered into a third order, in terms of how we deal with ordering information. The first order is simply the physical organization of stuff – you have a bunch of books and you organize them according to theme. The second order brings in taxonomy. You start to develop classifications – meta-information about what is organized. So you have a bunch of books and you have a card catalogue. In the third order, the information has escaped all limits. The books at Amazon.com are more or less miscellaneous in their location. They don't need to be stacked in any section. The end user provides the taxonomy (or categorization) and hunts the books out. This is what's happening with all of our information. One of the tech guys at Wikipedia told Weinberger that he couldn't explain where a topic is located on his site. It isn't located. No matter how popular or obscure the topic, it is equally miscellaneously out there in wikipedian cyberspace along with everything else.
Resultantly, the end user supplies the taxonomy, makes the connections, and supplies the meaning. You might say that he or she strolls up to an infinite buffet of potential information, and chooses her "a la carte" combination plate in each and every circumstance.
But when I recently interviewed Weinberger for my NeoFiles podcast, he wasn't completely satisfied with the "a la carte" notion. For Weinberger, a la carte is only about an individual's selections. He related the metaphor to Negroponte's '90s concept that net dwellers would order up personalized news/information packages that could be called "The Daily Me." But Weinberger thinks that we are also – and more profoundly – gathering from the miscellaneous chaos of information through conversation and connection. We are engaged through social networks, blogs, del.icio.us lists, ad infinitum. We lead each other towards the stuff we want or need, and we start to notice and make meaning together.
It's also a six degrees of Kevin Bacon Virtual world in which everything links to everything else within six clicks. Location, to the extent that there is a location – a branded website perhaps – doesn't much interest us either. It is only the stuff that we can pull out of the miscellany that gets our attention. The only trusted "brand" is our circle of virtual friends – those with similar interests (or maybe , Boing Boing)
Everything is Miscellaneous
Everything is Miscellaneous Blog
My Interview with David Weinberger (sorry for the Skype fuzziness)
Weinberger posits that we have entered into a third order, in terms of how we deal with ordering information. The first order is simply the physical organization of stuff – you have a bunch of books and you organize them according to theme. The second order brings in taxonomy. You start to develop classifications – meta-information about what is organized. So you have a bunch of books and you have a card catalogue. In the third order, the information has escaped all limits. The books at Amazon.com are more or less miscellaneous in their location. They don't need to be stacked in any section. The end user provides the taxonomy (or categorization) and hunts the books out. This is what's happening with all of our information. One of the tech guys at Wikipedia told Weinberger that he couldn't explain where a topic is located on his site. It isn't located. No matter how popular or obscure the topic, it is equally miscellaneously out there in wikipedian cyberspace along with everything else.
Resultantly, the end user supplies the taxonomy, makes the connections, and supplies the meaning. You might say that he or she strolls up to an infinite buffet of potential information, and chooses her "a la carte" combination plate in each and every circumstance.
But when I recently interviewed Weinberger for my NeoFiles podcast, he wasn't completely satisfied with the "a la carte" notion. For Weinberger, a la carte is only about an individual's selections. He related the metaphor to Negroponte's '90s concept that net dwellers would order up personalized news/information packages that could be called "The Daily Me." But Weinberger thinks that we are also – and more profoundly – gathering from the miscellaneous chaos of information through conversation and connection. We are engaged through social networks, blogs, del.icio.us lists, ad infinitum. We lead each other towards the stuff we want or need, and we start to notice and make meaning together.
It's also a six degrees of Kevin Bacon Virtual world in which everything links to everything else within six clicks. Location, to the extent that there is a location – a branded website perhaps – doesn't much interest us either. It is only the stuff that we can pull out of the miscellany that gets our attention. The only trusted "brand" is our circle of virtual friends – those with similar interests (or maybe , Boing Boing)
Everything is Miscellaneous
Everything is Miscellaneous Blog
My Interview with David Weinberger (sorry for the Skype fuzziness)
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Is Work Play? Can It Be?
One of the stated goals of Pajama Nation is that small entrepreneurs and freelancers enjoy an a la carte lifestyle working for themselves. An ideal has apparently been developing over the past decade or so – the ideal is that work can be play. In the industrial age, most of us worked in non-creative and rather mechanistic -- if not downright oppressive -- jobs. (Nobody would claim that coal mining is fun). Today, an increasing number of people work at gigs that involve some thought and creativity – design, participating in the invention of new tools, creating and being part of media; whether it's big media or decentralized net media.
Indeed, some of the biggest industries in the world are dedicated to fun and games… literally games. They're making fun out there, but they may or may not be having fun. One hopes that they are.
During the boom of the late 1990s, a certain percentage of young folk in the advanced nations lived, ate and slept at their dot com businesses and they enjoyed the hell out of doing it. Maybe you remember the media write-ups about young men with nose rings skateboarding to work; the in-house massages; the midnight raves and the all day hacking sessions. Work and leisure were no longer in nice little compartments – work being something you do from 9 am – 5 pm on weekdays, and leisure being something you do the rest of the time. Life was 24/7 and people worked hard and played hard. (It's fine if you're 25, of course. The rest of us may want to work easy and play easy, but we're still seeking that same internal state – life as undivided continuum.)
Social critics have noted that the very idea of a "work day" is an artifact of the 17th Century. One of the features of a Pajama Nation is that we no longer "punch the clock." The integration of work, life and play is one of the greatest hopes for human happiness.
One great place to start thinking about all this is by reading "The Play Ethic", a book and a website by England's Pat Kane.
Indeed, some of the biggest industries in the world are dedicated to fun and games… literally games. They're making fun out there, but they may or may not be having fun. One hopes that they are.
During the boom of the late 1990s, a certain percentage of young folk in the advanced nations lived, ate and slept at their dot com businesses and they enjoyed the hell out of doing it. Maybe you remember the media write-ups about young men with nose rings skateboarding to work; the in-house massages; the midnight raves and the all day hacking sessions. Work and leisure were no longer in nice little compartments – work being something you do from 9 am – 5 pm on weekdays, and leisure being something you do the rest of the time. Life was 24/7 and people worked hard and played hard. (It's fine if you're 25, of course. The rest of us may want to work easy and play easy, but we're still seeking that same internal state – life as undivided continuum.)
Social critics have noted that the very idea of a "work day" is an artifact of the 17th Century. One of the features of a Pajama Nation is that we no longer "punch the clock." The integration of work, life and play is one of the greatest hopes for human happiness.
One great place to start thinking about all this is by reading "The Play Ethic", a book and a website by England's Pat Kane.
What Are We SEARCHing For?
John Battelle of FM Media recently pointed out an academic paper that explores what people value in search engines, and what the creators of search engines try to achieve. The piece is titled, "Is Relevance Relevant?" -- which seems to be a great general question for the age of blurred focus. The piece points out that search engines have been criticized for providing too much and too little information and shows the conundrum faced by businesses due to the fact that users hate heavily monetized, busy search engines, but of course, the ads and the other monetary schemes basically ARE the business.
The piece also references the good old days when Alta Vista -- with its academic orientation – was the leading search engine and implies that relevance as an objective idea has perhaps been abandoned in favor of "satisfying users."
I sometimes wonder why it's so hard to find really intelligent interesting content on the web that was so easy to find back in the mid-90s. This might be the answer. Google has replaced real intelligence with a mixture of business interests and the "wisdom of crowds." Thus, when I ego surf – let's be honest here, who doesn't? -- I no longer seem to find fascinating complicated criticisms of my work. Rather, I find an endless circle jerk of sites pointing out that some piece that I've written exists – the posts point at the article and point at each other. There are no thoughts, just fingers pointing in various directions. (I think this idea was expressed in a scene in The Beatles' Yellow Submarine) In some ways, this is the way the net looks today.
Not that I want to bring back Alta Vista. But here's an interesting thought from an interview I did with Cory Doctorow a few years back:
"It's pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called 'Wooing the muse of the odd' that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. I think that every single one of us is an edge case. There's this amazing Bill Gates quote from Davos last week where he was talking about how Microsoft was going to get back into search and compete with Google and someone said, 'You know you guys did a pretty crappy job with search the first time around.' And he said, [paraphrasing] 'Yeah. You know what we did? We focused on the 20% of the queries that represented 80% of what people were looking for instead of the 20% that were really odd. But what we found out is that the whole perception of value lives in whether or not it meets those little queries.'"
So the answer my friend is further down the long tail, not back toward an academic elite.
Read "Is Relevance Relevant"
The piece also references the good old days when Alta Vista -- with its academic orientation – was the leading search engine and implies that relevance as an objective idea has perhaps been abandoned in favor of "satisfying users."
I sometimes wonder why it's so hard to find really intelligent interesting content on the web that was so easy to find back in the mid-90s. This might be the answer. Google has replaced real intelligence with a mixture of business interests and the "wisdom of crowds." Thus, when I ego surf – let's be honest here, who doesn't? -- I no longer seem to find fascinating complicated criticisms of my work. Rather, I find an endless circle jerk of sites pointing out that some piece that I've written exists – the posts point at the article and point at each other. There are no thoughts, just fingers pointing in various directions. (I think this idea was expressed in a scene in The Beatles' Yellow Submarine) In some ways, this is the way the net looks today.
Not that I want to bring back Alta Vista. But here's an interesting thought from an interview I did with Cory Doctorow a few years back:
"It's pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called 'Wooing the muse of the odd' that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. I think that every single one of us is an edge case. There's this amazing Bill Gates quote from Davos last week where he was talking about how Microsoft was going to get back into search and compete with Google and someone said, 'You know you guys did a pretty crappy job with search the first time around.' And he said, [paraphrasing] 'Yeah. You know what we did? We focused on the 20% of the queries that represented 80% of what people were looking for instead of the 20% that were really odd. But what we found out is that the whole perception of value lives in whether or not it meets those little queries.'"
So the answer my friend is further down the long tail, not back toward an academic elite.
Read "Is Relevance Relevant"
What are we SEARCHing For?
John Battelle of FM Media recently pointed out an academic paper that explores what people value in search engines, and what the creators of search engines try to achieve. The piece is titled, "Is Relevance Relevant?" -- which seems to be a great general question for the age of blurred focus. The piece points out that search engines have been criticized for proving too much and too little information and shows the conundrum faced by businesses due to the fact that users hate heavily monetized, busy search engines, but of course, the ads and the other monetary schemes basically ARE the business.
The piece also references the good old days when Alta Vista -- with its academic orientation – was the leading search engine and claims that relevance as an objective idea has been attended in favor of "satisfying users."
I sometimes wonder why it's so hard to find really intelligent interesting content on the web that was so easy to find back in the mid-90s. This might be the answer. Google has replaced real intelligence with a mixture of business interests and the "wisdom of crowds." Thus, when I ego surf – let's be honest here -- I no longer seem to find fascinating complicated criticism of my work. Rather I find an endless circle jerk of sites pointing out that some piece that I've written exists – one after another. No thoughts, just fingers pointing in various directions. In some ways, this is the way the net looks today.
Not that I want to bring back Alta Vista. But here's an interesting thought from an interview I did with Cory Doctorow a few years back:
"It's pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called 'Wooing the muse of the odd' that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. I think that every single one of us is an edge case. There's this amazing Bill Gates quote from Davos last week where he was talking about how Microsoft was going to get back into search and compete with Google and someone said, 'You know you guys did a pretty crappy job with search the first time around.' And he said, [paraphrasing] 'Yeah. You know what we did? We focused on the 20% of the queries that represented 80% of what people were looking for instead of the 20% that were really odd. But what we found out is that the whole perception of value lives in whether or not it meets those little queries.'"
So the answer my friend is further down the long tail, not back toward an academic elite.
Read "Is Relevance Relevant"
Read the RU Sirius Interview with Cory Doctorow
The piece also references the good old days when Alta Vista -- with its academic orientation – was the leading search engine and claims that relevance as an objective idea has been attended in favor of "satisfying users."
I sometimes wonder why it's so hard to find really intelligent interesting content on the web that was so easy to find back in the mid-90s. This might be the answer. Google has replaced real intelligence with a mixture of business interests and the "wisdom of crowds." Thus, when I ego surf – let's be honest here -- I no longer seem to find fascinating complicated criticism of my work. Rather I find an endless circle jerk of sites pointing out that some piece that I've written exists – one after another. No thoughts, just fingers pointing in various directions. In some ways, this is the way the net looks today.
Not that I want to bring back Alta Vista. But here's an interesting thought from an interview I did with Cory Doctorow a few years back:
"It's pursuing the deviance, what Bruce Sterling called 'Wooing the muse of the odd' that actually creates a system that has a lot of perceived value. I think that every single one of us is an edge case. There's this amazing Bill Gates quote from Davos last week where he was talking about how Microsoft was going to get back into search and compete with Google and someone said, 'You know you guys did a pretty crappy job with search the first time around.' And he said, [paraphrasing] 'Yeah. You know what we did? We focused on the 20% of the queries that represented 80% of what people were looking for instead of the 20% that were really odd. But what we found out is that the whole perception of value lives in whether or not it meets those little queries.'"
So the answer my friend is further down the long tail, not back toward an academic elite.
Read "Is Relevance Relevant"
Read the RU Sirius Interview with Cory Doctorow
Monday, April 30, 2007
One Laptop Per Child Project in Trouble?
Many people who want to see the connectivity of the net more broadly distributed have been enthusiastically following Nicholas Negroponte's project "One Laptop Per Child." (OLPC) The idea was to get a laptop called "Children's Machine XO" out on the market at $100 per laptop, using open source software. From there, the long term ideal of the project would be to get one each into the hands of all the world's children. But on April 26, Negroponte announced a new deal. The OLPC machine is going to run on Windows and now the price is going to be $175. He also backed off their goal of an initial 5 million unit production run, and has instituted several other policy changes.
The politics behind it: It's generally understood that Microsoft had enough power in many nations across the globe to pressure them – indeed blackmail them -- from buying the open source versions of OLPC. OLPC enthusiasts feel that another "change the world" project has been turned into just another mass marketing opportunity for the Evil Empire.
On the independent "One Laptop Per Child News" site, Lee Felsentein – the computer revolutionary who – with Efrem Lipkin, started the Homebrew Computer Club that basically started Personal Computing, suggests that those who worked on the open source version of OLPC will now be excluded from participation and that they should take their work and run – try to do this as an independent project.
Felsenstein writes: "What is the status of the code base currently developed for OLPC? Is it accessible and freely available to be used by others? Someone closer to the project should make sure that this code base cannot be appropriated and kept from use by others.
"If the XO machine becomes unavailable to those who develop external software for it, then a replacement platform should be designed. This isn’t the hard part – the foundation of the project will be the software, especially the application software. I would recommend that a substitute platform for software development be specified and made available."
No doubt, if and when the OLPC machine starts getting distributed, it will be better than nothing (but not much better, considering Windows' famous vulnerabilities). And Bill Gates will be all over the media getting and taking credit for this idealistic project to bring computing to the world's poor. And the initial impetus behind the project will get no media coverage and will never penetrate the mainstream discourse. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, "And so it goes."
Read the entire Lee Felsenstein piece
The politics behind it: It's generally understood that Microsoft had enough power in many nations across the globe to pressure them – indeed blackmail them -- from buying the open source versions of OLPC. OLPC enthusiasts feel that another "change the world" project has been turned into just another mass marketing opportunity for the Evil Empire.
On the independent "One Laptop Per Child News" site, Lee Felsentein – the computer revolutionary who – with Efrem Lipkin, started the Homebrew Computer Club that basically started Personal Computing, suggests that those who worked on the open source version of OLPC will now be excluded from participation and that they should take their work and run – try to do this as an independent project.
Felsenstein writes: "What is the status of the code base currently developed for OLPC? Is it accessible and freely available to be used by others? Someone closer to the project should make sure that this code base cannot be appropriated and kept from use by others.
"If the XO machine becomes unavailable to those who develop external software for it, then a replacement platform should be designed. This isn’t the hard part – the foundation of the project will be the software, especially the application software. I would recommend that a substitute platform for software development be specified and made available."
No doubt, if and when the OLPC machine starts getting distributed, it will be better than nothing (but not much better, considering Windows' famous vulnerabilities). And Bill Gates will be all over the media getting and taking credit for this idealistic project to bring computing to the world's poor. And the initial impetus behind the project will get no media coverage and will never penetrate the mainstream discourse. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, "And so it goes."
Read the entire Lee Felsenstein piece
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