Sapere Aude
Tag: internet
One of the reasons some alert readers noticed the change and were able to prove it – was that Google had archived the pages before the change occurred. Now that all of the White House pages about Iraq are no longer archived by Google, such historical revisionism will be harder to catch.
Integrity-preserving services like archive.org become more important all the time. Ideally distributed, anonymous and secure, to make it impossible to purge anything from the record.
john cox made me aware of the most excellent alexa traffic analyzer. because alexa runs as spyware in the browser, they are able to collect lots of interesting data. and they make it available for analysis too, which i hadn’t expected.
interestingly, they fold subdomains into the top domain. i take 85% of all traffic going to *.abstrakt.ch. they currently only collect data from internet explorer users, so they may be misrepresenting sites with a large geek audience. also, they state that statistical significance is an issue for sites not in the top 100k.
i ran into ed cone and lance knobel last night.
i talked with ed about tara sue, and how she was the pioneer for political weblogs. mentioned that something interesting may soon happen with political weblogs in switzerland. lance used to run the davos meetings of the WEF, and has had a weblog for years. in years past, he used to provide very good inside coverage, something that is now sorely missed. he made me aware of some MP in the UK that really understand political weblogs, and consequently write them themselves.
I am in a session at Berkman Center listening to Chris Lydon explaining how he, with the help of internet technologies, plans to be the next NPR. NPR, one of the standard-bearers of the american intelligentsia, has fallen to commercial pressures. One thing I miss with recorded voice is the ability to search through the voice stream. Clearly, speech is still much closer to the stream of consciousness than all the writing you can get done in a day. Capturing more of the worlds great thoughts though audio, and making it accessible to search strikes me as killer.
i am toying around with my new webcam. the quality of the pictures is nothing to write home about, and the tripod of the cam broke the second day. then again i got it for $50. i look forward to explore the combination of wifi and webcams, should add another dimension to the moblogging theme.
tiny yapper
Ill tempered and aggressive, Tiny Yapper is always right out at the end of his leash and barks furiously at the slightest provocation. Though his constant high pitched yips can be very annoying, his diminutive stature and limited strength pose no real threat to other Warriors..
a great cast of characters drawn from social interactions on the net. this would have come in handy last time scott kindley was at it.
Popularized and raised to a fine art by now-defunct website Adequacy, the Adequacy Style Troll, or AST, brings a blender to the ordinary practice of shit-stirring. The AST achieves its goal by a combination of proven techniques:
- A tone of calmness and rationalism is maintained. This creates an enhanced contrast between the AST itself and the responses, which are likely to be emotional and less thoroughly considered.
- The initial starting position for argument is unassailably sensible.
- Each step of the argument is completely reasonable.
- Substantial, even excessive, documentation is provided.
- The final conclusion is outrageous and completely unacceptable to the target victim group.
in the fine tradition of sokal, trolling is being elevated to an art form. interesting.
elke remarked yesterday that the meta trend underlying all the (mo)blog, social software, PIM, geodata pushes is the desire of people to rebuild their existence online, piece by piece. digital immortality? breeders becoming feeders of their digital selves?
i hope she will pick up this line of thought in her thesis.
Emoji are characters invented by NTT DoCoMo for people to use in text messages. The most obvious example is the well-known smiley face, often encoded in ASCII as 🙂 and called an emoticon. Thus, emotion + ji gives emoji.
NTT DoCoMo invents new characters while we are stuck with 26. the wonders of language.
Charlie Nesson’s ideas always seem crazy until about a year later. So Charlie walks into the office yesterday and says he has an idea that is crazy even for him..(but once we hear it, we like the idea)
Charlie’s idea is to run a candidate for President of the United States who is supported by the worldwide community of web-enabled activists. Essentially this person would be a second superpower candidate for the key power role in the first superpower.
Charlie is suggesting John Perry Barlow as the candidate, because John is excellent at debating and discussing controversial issues, and the role of the candidate will be to change minds–not simply to win votes.
a new try at establishing a net culture, seemingly:
The power sphere of the second superpower is in a different dimension from nations, and as such, the second superpower can and does work to influence the behavior and balance the power of nations. As individuals we are all members of one nation or another, and we may choose to be members of the second superpower. We can be both. Second superpower people identify themselves as citizens of the world, and care about social development, collaboration, innovation, open societies, and commons. They believe that at heart all people are precious and are one. Second superpower people need not be conventionally liberal or conservative, because there is political and social innovation yet to be done, and current political categories are certainly outmoded.
i am ready to shed my nationality (which i don’t care about), and adopt better principles.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 