The Net is the best platform for free enterprise ever created. How do we help get that
built out for everybody? I suggest that we’ve barely started, and that
what Cringely gets from Comcast (and what most of us get from whatever
company provides it) is still just an early prototype.
- Doc Searls in What Net do we want?

Dave Winer on search results lack of relevance:

Now it may have been cute in 2001 or 2002, but by 2007, with search integrated into society at a very deep level, and only getting deeper — it seems like it’s way past time to fix this. And we know how to do it, and it’s not even very hard.

How? Integrate social networking and search and learn what people who I’m connected with, people like me, choose when they search for RSS and adjust the results accordingly. It’s collaborative filtering applied to search. If Google doesn’t do it, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask or a startup should.

I think search is a rather primitive way of navigating in the network of networks that we call the internet. It has served its purpose well and has dramatically changed the way we find, retrieve and use information. But filtering is what I am after and there are many more ways to do that than a simple search box. Some of it won’t be done by machines only. This is where distinguishing between what can only be done by a human brain and what can be done by an artificial one will make the difference.

Hint: Network theory is about a lot more than six degrees of separation.

This is another example of off-line type of thinking.

The reality is though that outside of our little insular world of blogs
and co-presence what we do has no importance. To your average neighbor
Justin is just some weird guy walking around with a camera attached to
his body, blogs are just another confusing computer term and the
cluetrain might just as well be the mid-afternoon commuter train in any
major metropolitan city.

The impact of the blogosphere and other online -spheres begins with the people who create them. The internet has changed the way those people can do things. Some have tapped right into it, some are yet to do so and some may never care. It is not about creating big organisations and processes to change the existing order. The internet is about ‘ends’ i.e. the users, distributed networks and distributed sovereignty.

The truth of the matter is that for the person worrying about making
next month’s rent or being able to pay their child’s doctor bill
without bankrupting themselves none of this has or ever will matter. If
anything the poli-sphere for all it’s partisanship and bloodied
knuckles is far more relevant to our daily lives than any post of
thoughtful consideration from the tech-sphere.

People have always worried about the mundane stuff and always will. But once their ability to take control over more of those activities increases, you won’t be able to put the genie back in the bottle. Innovation is real, change happens and individuals involved in it have nothing to lose by pushing at the boundaries.

It just seems to take bloody ages.

This sounds wrist-slashingly excruciating.

The campaign features the humorous use of
fictional foes – aliens, ninjas and zombies – to illustrate that
defending against online security threats is easier than fending off
these comically rough customers.

By using humor in a relevant fashion, we can engage and inform IT professionals at the same time. Feedback from focus-group customers supported the decision to use
IT-geek humor as a jumping-off point into a serious topic like security.

Oh yes, IT-geek humour is something that blends so well with an ‘interacting flash video’. Groan.

The aforementioned creative Web experience
features an interactive flash video that leads customers through a
visually striking experience that delivers more in-depth product
information as they move through the site.

What is a ‘creative Web experience’ in advertising? I mean, do I get to create anything? What do I experience except a sense of loss (time and wear & tear on the eyeballs) topped with embarrassment at watching it in the first place. Where’s my ROI on watching such ‘creative interactive ads’?! Btw, I searched the ads as well as the "Easy, easier" campaign, but no luck.

Let’s not dwell on detail, let’s get more substantial – Steve Brown, director of product management for
security and access product management at Microsoft:

We’ve heard loud and clear from business customers that security
products not only need to provide the greatest level of protection but
also must be easy to manage and integrate with existing infrastructure. This ease- of-use is one of the key competitive
differentiators that Microsoft brings to the market with its Forefront
security products.

From what I understand the holy grail of greatest level of protection and ease of use is not one that Microsoft can claim to have found. But what the hell… Alec, would you care to have a go?

The music industry has been one of the single most shortsighted,
foolishly run, lawyer fed industries in this country, and I am a member
of it, being a professional musician for the last 30 years. Perhaps if
the industry wasn’t so interested in the ONE demographic they think
will spend money, and catered even just a little bit to the REST of the
music interested world, they wouldn’t be in this situation. If you are
over 25, they don’t give a flying rat’s butt about what you want to
hear, or even what you will pay for. They just don’t care if you aren’t
in the 13-25 year old demographic. And so, when the kids who grew up
with computers can outsmart the old idiots running the RIAA without
even trying, I can only laugh. Too bad they insist on destroying not
only everyone trying to actually get MUSIC out to people, but their
audience, too.

Yeah. Note the role of advertising in all this.

Last Thursday I got up unusually early for my now permanently jet-lagged body and mind to go to an event at the Royal Society of Arts called The Social Impact of the Web on society, government and politics. The main worthy was George Osborne, MP who talked about open source politics. I will blog my opinions on his speech* later but most people present were gushing about it. I wasn’t that enthusiastic but that’s only to be expected with my Samizdata credentials.
 

It was good to see familiar faces, Mick Fealty and Ewan McIntosh on the stage and Lloyd Davis, Suw Charman and Guido Fawkes in the audience. Guido as always puts his boot in:

By comparison, my talk was positively tame. I decided to sum up the impact of the web in three levels, touching on democracy, authority, the individual, technology.

Much has been made out of the ‘democratic nature of the web’. Democracy has two meanings – open access and in that sense the web is democratic as anyone can access, publish and distribute information on the web. Then there is democracy as the rule of majority and this is where it does not apply to the web. What I do on the web is not ‘democratic’ in a sense that it is dictated by the majority. Nobody tells me what to put on my blog, there is no vote with results imposed on me.
   
First level of impact is the individual. We have heard about the power of the individual to do this or that online, all true. Individuals often have more control over the online environment than off-line. Paradoxically, many commentators bemoan the fact that people online are self-obsessed, they talk about the echo chamber. At the same time, they also complain about the lack of awareness, sophistication and professionalism of online interactions. Both may be (and are) true but this points to something else that is going on – people are learning something. They are learning self-determination and unlearning decades of one-way communication and mass broadcasting. The ability to express and respond to things on their own terms and their own way is what this is about. And in some senses, autonomy is a more meaningful definition of freedom as it entail my freedom to do many things essential to my identity.

The second level is what is happening to authority and institutions. Authority based on information asymmetry is shifting as information is freely accessible. I could talk for hours on the meaning of authority in distributed networks and emergence of credibility and reputation but to tie it back to politics – parties are like TV channels. If the party politics doesn’t offer me a forum for debate, the web is more than a viable alternative. On the web I can easily bypass someone else’s platform and debate on my own terms. When we blog on Samizdata.net, we do it with the explicit intention to write about things in a way that we don’t find anywhere in MSM. So to address George Osborne’s invitation – why would we want to ‘rejoin’ a political debate in somebody else’s controlled space..?
   
Technology has been mentioned today, in the context of the web it has shown how to line up resources behind individuals not just institutions.

The web has made mockery of mass communication that is vainly groping for a better form of communication using terms like personalisation. The bottom-line, as they say, is that an institution cannot communicate with individuals as a collective entity. It must do so as a collection of individuals with their own voices. The emergent ‘collectivity’ is predicated on the ability of individual within it to communicated autonomously and freely. This means that on the second level, the web goes some way to redressing the balance between the system and the individual.

The third level and the one that interests me most is looking to the web for new model of organisation/structure/system. The internet can be seen as a Petri dish, with cultures growing free from the existing political and social pressures (at least initially), transplanting and creating its own protocols, rules and etiquette. Some of it is re-discovery of pre-industrial age stuff, some of it is new. For example, in commerce, new business models are emerging, open source, the long tail, VRM, demand side supplying itself, networks and power laws driving more. In communications, we have multi-tasking, attention-span and focus shifting and other behaviours facilitated by technology.

The pre-internet age was the age of mass production that was based on the age of engineering. This was a time when complex problems called for complex solutions. To build a bridge is a feat of complexity. Computing and the internet have brought about another type of complexity, which is based on the realisation that a few simple rules can lead to complexity. For example, the internet is a ’stupid network’ with one simple rule – move packets from one end to another and then some. What we see today was built on one of the simplest architectures around, but with inbuilt flexibility and rules to allow complexity. The same applies to the social aspects of the web.
 

Back to democracy – as Churchill pointed out, it is the least bad system of government we know, perhaps the internet holds a key to an organisation that establishes the balance between the individual, the society and its institutions. This is essential as for me the knowledge, creativity, innovation, morality and all things social start with the individual.

*text courtesy of Ewan McInstosh who got it from Osborne’s parliamentary aide.

An industry that treats its markets as enemies and abuses customers is in trouble.

hattip: Head Lemur

People often say that YouTube and other video platforms would not survive without all that stolen content that was produced elsewhere at great cost. This always sounded strange to me because I usually go to YouTube and Google Video to watch films individuals produce – the horribly-termed user generated content or the more dire consumer generated content. I do occasionally watch ‘big media content’ but it’s the vloggers who keep me coming back. It appears this is the case for most of the YouTube audience…

…YouTube, which some have suggested would
be in trouble if more media companies followed Viacom’s lead and
demanded for videos to be taken down, may actually not be as dependent
on mainstream media as previously thought.

"One thing that is
quite remarkable is that people tend to be looking for consumer
generated content more than actual TV content on YouTube" (Bill
Tancer, general manager of global research for Hitwise.)

The rest of the article sounds like a kind talking to a terminally ill patient – don’t worry Mr Media Industry, it’s not all that bad, you have survived this far, just hang on, you’ll get there in the end…

Reading Alec’s blog, I saw a comment on his sweetly-titled post Snap.COM is EVIL and must DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE!!! from Eric Wingren, the head of Snap.com UX Research linking to their use case. I blogged about it here and was interested in what their rationale for the widget was. The blog is well written, the tone is fine but I still can’t find out why snap.com preview anywhere has been created. Perhaps I am slow of thinking but I cannot for the life of me work out why this is so essential/useful as to create a potentially major disruption for your readers!

• SPA can effectively establish the category of page you are linking to — a wiki looks very different than a product page.
• SPA is effective when you link to different articles
  from the same source — differences (i.e. headlines and pictures) are
  easier to perceive once within a repeating pattern (i.e page design).
• SPA can be used effectively on blog rolls and text-heavy directory or results pages.
• SPA can tell the user if he/she has already read the linked content.
• SPA can tell the user if the link points to a trusted source.
• SPA can tell the user if the destination page requires registration.
• SPA can warn the user if the linked content is NSFW
• SPA can help fight link rot and reduce the number of trips to such pages.

My problem has been two fold then.

• Is the usefulness (that I can’t notice for myself but perhaps others can) sufficient to outweigh or justify adding something that users can’t control (at least initially) and is a major addition to look and functionality of the site.
• The difference between site/blog owners installing the widget thinking it’s a cool idea and the readers coming to the same conclusion. So the number of installs is not really a measure of usability and the widget’s success, but a measure of how many people like bells & whistles on their sites and/or feel experimental enough to install it.

After some mighty raving against pop-up ads for the last few years by techies, bloggers and other ‘netizens’, with some degree of success, it is now the Web 2.0 crowd that’s committing a similar crime.

>

Alec has a deliciously snarky post about the Snap plugin that embeds a screenshot preview under every link in your site, so you can ’see’ the site without actually clicking through it.

What *is* the point? Really?

• I don’t care what the webpage under the link looks like,
  
• I don’t need a popup with a search box (?) when I hover over a link,
  
• When I hover and click to go to a link you recommend then it
  flashes something up which obscures what I am doing and makes me think
  I clicked the wrong thing,
  
• It’s unclear why I should believe what "SNAPS" is telling me
  rather than the activity bar of my browser,
  
• The popup is ugly and does not fit in with my theme,
  
• and did I mention that I don’t care what a thumbnail sketch of
  the target webpage as seen from 15 feet away, looks like?

Sounds like one of those cool Web 2.0 ideas it’s got AJAX in it, so it’s got to be good for you. But after the initial few times, it becomes just another annoying little box that pops up every time you run over a link. Chris Schultz of Voodoo Ventures sums up it well:

My feeling is that installing things that start to control and take
over the readers experience can be annoying, and unless the reader has
the ability to control these and turn them off, they are not worth
violating the “browsing experience” with the reader.

Thank God that in the spirit of empowerment there is an option to disable the Snap preview on the site you are reading or on all sites. So this is interruption a la Web 2.0.

I let rip on Samizdata.net… again.

When I got an email from Flickr this morning telling me that by March 15th I will have to use Yahoo ID to login to my Flickr account, I wasn’t happy. But I thought, oh well, what can I do? My dislike of the whole notion and unease about switching to Yahoo was real but I felt irrational so I just left it at that. I didn’t want to think about the issues of.. will my Yahoo ID have the pro account, how is that going to transfer etc. I thought it was just the idea of switching usernames and accounts. This didn’t make sense as I do this all the time – the moment I see an interesting application I sign up, test and either migrate to it, file it or trash it.

What I didn’t realise until I saw the Wired Monkey Bites was that other old skool users aren’t happy either…

This isn’t the first time a company has tried to pass off an artificial
limitation as a “feature,” but it’s the first time Flickr has and it’s drawing fire
from users. I sympathize with those that say, “who cares, those limits
are plenty high enough,” but the change is still a bad move on Flickr’s
part.

Then I saw Ben Metcalfe’s Skype tagline – "Flickr just took the jam out of my donut", read his and Suw Charman’s posts on the topic and felt validated. I started to wonder what made me feel so negative about the announcement. After all, Flickr is owned by Yahoo, I used to have Yahoo mail account and two login systems don’t really make sense technically. So why on this occasion did I prefer to be ‘old skool’?!

Let’s have a look at the ‘rational’ reasons. To me, it’s not about the limits – I don’t expect to need more than 75 tags per photo or ever reach more than 3000 contacts (although you never know ). The fire Flickr is drawing from its users has to do with the nature of community. A lot has been written and powerpointed about the social and the communal on the internet, most of it missing the point. By a wide margin. Community is not a ‘collective’, it is a voluntary association of individuals drawn to something that motivates them to sustain the connection over time. It is a web of such connections between autonomous individuals who are happy to congregate because they feel understood, captivated and derive value from the association.

For me, autonomy is the operational term here… and Flickr made me feel deprived of it as I read that email. I liked being ‘old skool’, proud of the fact that I signed up before they become the poster child for Web 2.0 buy-out. But Flickr is just another company and owned by Yahoo!. Everybody knows that! I hear you say. Maybe, but the reason I liked Flickr was the feeling that despite Yahoo’s ownership, this was a place on which I had an impact, in my small way. I ‘owned’ a corner of it, with my pictures, my friends’ photostreams, comments and a world to explore if I wanted.

And then there is Yahoo! ID that sticks in my throat. My first web based email was Yahoo! Mail and I used it until Gmail came along. Then I checked it only occasionally until one day, I logged on to a completely empty inbox. All my mail was wiped clean! I am sure for good storage reasons but I felt a sense of loss as I had no idea this could happen. So I don’t trust Yahoo any more with any of my ‘content’. Would you? Suw sums up my attitude towards Yahoo just perfectly (and I like the idea of OpenID):

You know, I like Flickr. There are some astonishingly good people
working there. There are also some astonishingly good people working at
Yahoo, but yet I don’t like the Yahoo brand at all. It’s unpleasant. It
says ‘ignorant false-hearted redneck who always hangs on other people’s
coat-tails’ to me. They are a brand that started off ‘pretty cool’ in
the mid-90s, sank to ‘horrible’ in 2001 and have now rebounded to
‘icky’ (in no small part to some absolutely awful TV adverts), with a
hint of ‘cool’ because of the services they’ve bought.

As for two login systems, I understand for some technical reasons it may be more convenient for Yahoo/Flickr, but isn’t Web 2.0 also about making technology secondary to the needs of the individual and bending it to our twisted ways?

So as irrational as it may be, I am not happy about having to switch to Yahoo ID to use Flickr. Dave Winer reckons that Flickr people are smart and all this will come to pass. I really do hope so.