“web”
143 posts under this tag.
As much as I truly hate domain hoarding when I’m out there looking for a spiffy domain to my latest webapp, I confess compulsive domain buying is one of my guilty pleasures1. I’m hoarding, I know, but perhaps my scale will redeem me. Those bastards—you know who you are—who hoard (“park”) thousands of domains, financing the whole murky enterprise by filling their spoils with semantically-related ads disguised as directories… well, may they be strangled to a slow, painful death by his noodly appendage.
My two most recent acquisitions are ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com.
The first domain is a phrase that has haunted me since I first read it at a local exposition2 (thanks to Andrea for telling me about it) of the work of Cultural-Revolution China’s Li ZhenshengWP. A photoreporter of the main newspaper in China’s far Northeast during China’s Mao mire, Li kept negatives of his work against orders and they may be the best remaining record of the horror. Andrew Stuttaford wrote a harrowing review of Li’s Red-Color News SoldierAM and he didn’t escape the phrase either:
More typical, and more tragic, was Wu Bingyuan, a technician accused of counterrevolutionary activities (a pamphlet). Li recalls that when Wu heard his sentence, death, “he looked into the sky and murmured, “this world is too dark”; then he closed his eyes and never in this life reopened them.” The photographs show Wu being paraded through the streets of the city. Later, shackled and bound, he’s pictured at his place of execution. His eyes are still shut. We see him kneeling, back turned to the firing squad. His eyes are still shut. The final image is of Wu’s corpse. His eyes are still shut.
I want to do something at thisworldistoodark.com that honors Wu’s memory but I still don’t know what. What I do know is that the phrase is forever carved into my memory.
 The other domain, nellodee.com, is thankfully from the opposite end of human possibilites. Nellodee is the full version of Nell, the name of the protagonist of Neal Stephenson’s excellent Diamond AgeAM, a toddler from the future slums that chances on a state-of-the-art learning machine. This book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the book-within-the-book, is every self-learner’s wet dream: endlessly interactive, infinitely patient, all-knowing, self-adapting, story-driven, fractal (the basic outline of the book’s story is presented at the very beginning, from then on you advance the story by zooming in on any particular fragment of it, the fragment develops into a full-fledged story, and on it goes). It has left me so deeply impressed that I have to do my share to bring it eventually to life. Toki Pona seems like the perfect subject to try my clumsy hand at the Primer concept with a simple web-app—it’s a small, simple, and enjoyable subject, and I’m already sort of an expert in it. We’ll see.
So why am I telling you all this? To assuage my conscience. You see, perhaps I dawdle for years before actually implementing any of the above ideas and so I’ve configured both ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com to redirect here, to this very post, in the meantime. If you are doing (really doing, not pie-in-the-sky woulda doing) something really cool, are missing a good domain, and either of those two would be a great choice for your project, I’d be glad to give them to you. Gratis. Full-ownership. With my best wishes.
I kept this pile of sketches in an envelope in a file cabinet and came across them while moving. I decided to reproduce the series here in this homemade book for several reasons. One, why not? The drawings were lonely and bored, and doing little good stuffed in darkness and kept from view. They are inconsequential doodles, but I’ve learned late in life that whatever marginal value they have can only be gathered by being shared. Two, the exercise of drawing photos is a good one to try and to disseminate. And Three, maybe others in the audience can tell me what these images mean. What don’t I see? Four, and most importantly, I really enjoyed these and maybe others would enjoy seeing them too. I hope so.
(↑ One of Kelly’s sketches ↑)
As far as blog-intros go, Rondam Ramblings’s is one of my favorites—both because I happen to agree with much of it (and thus, of course, think highly of such a sound writer) and because it honors the blog’s name from digressive paragraph 1. Here four clips:
From the better late than never department…
I have finally gotten around to creating a blog. Where to begin? I bounce back and forth between feeling like I have so much to say, and feeling like everything worth saying has been said a million times already.
The central tenet of science in which I choose to place my faith is that experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth. Any idea that is not consistent with experimental evidence must be wrong.
There are two important limitations to science: it doesn’t tell us which ideas are right, only which ones are wrong. Therefore all knowledge is tentative, all ideas subject to being overturned at any time by new experimental evidence. And it is limited in scope. It applies only to ideas that are testable by experiment. So it can provide no guidance on the question of, say, whether modern art is or isn’t art..
There is a third problem, which is that many different ideas are consistent with our current suite of experimental data. To choose among them I choose to believe in Occam’s razor: all else being equal, a simple idea is more likely to be true than a complicated one. This principle is strictly subservient to the first principle. If experiment rules out all the simple ideas, then the remaining complicated idea must be true. But if experiment is silent, then simpler ideas are preferable to complicated ones.
It is actually very easy to “do experiments” that validate the scientific worldview because we are absolutely surrounded by technology. In fact, it is barely possible to exist in this world without doing so dozens of times a day. Every time we turn on a light switch or start a car or use a computer we personally experience the validity of a huge number of scientific claims. No technology has ever been created by prayer.
Very few people really take seriously the idea that morals come from God. Many people think they take it seriously, but I think they are lying to themselves. To see this, ask yourself: if God said that raping children was OK, would that make it OK? Only the most radical fundamentalist would answer yes. Most people get quite upset if you actually ask them this question because it forces to confront the cognitive dissonance between what they think they believe—that morals come from God—and what they actually believe—that they “just know” what is right and wrong, like that raping children is wrong, even if God says otherwise.
Whoa, just discovered SongMeanings an hour ago. Excellent idea (add criticism to lyrics), clean interface (several ads notwithstanding), massive execution (Artists: 25,245 | Lyrics: 295,933 | Albums: 11,073 | Members: 228,392 | Comments: 723,538). Can’t believe never heard of it before.
Perhaps most intriguing is how clearly it shows the possibilities (instant participation, individuality, the work is the history, evolution is visible, filtering by time is easy, contributions are isolated) and limitations (signal-to-noise ratio, self-healing’s hard or impossible, the work is the history, lack of structure, lack of pruning, parallelism, unnecessary repetition, digressiveness) of criticism based on sequential comments. Reddit’s comment pages are good examples of how simple voting can advance the medium (because though we lack a name for it, “sequential comments/notes” is a medium, just like comics is the medium of sequential images), but, fuck, for the purposes of criticism my bets for medium still go to collaborative-writing, wiki, (my) WikiCriticism. (If only I could fork myself into better, harder-working, single-minded mes…)
The weird thing about fetishy picsELZR like the one below is they’re so beyond-words good if you were actually on the look for them you wouldn’t find any. This one, for instance, I found yesterday (here) while looking for pictures of sakuraWP, cherry blossoms, on Imagery.
2006’s neologism is finally here: Googleseeding (also googletrapping or futuresearching or reversesearching), a beautiful idea by Jon Aquino: after an unsuccesful search, you post what you wanted to find and couldn’t in the hope of someone later finding the post and contacting you with the answer—or her simpathy.
Go read his introductory post (and its comments) to grokEEM what this is all about (and for an actual example, read Ada’s beautiful Google seed for a lost friend).
From the surprise interview of Sergey BrinWP, Google’s cofounder, at the 2005 Web 2.0 Conference. The notes ↓ here are just to guide you, you have to hear either the clip or the full interview at ITConversations to get how wittyEEM this is.
John Battelle: There’s been a dialogue throughout the conference, Google’s come up once or twice, and I wanted to sort of pin some of the highlights of that dialogue and ask you to respond to them.
One of the first that comes to mind is a conversation I had with Terry SemelWP, where he—I asked him about Google—and he said, very respectfully, how much he thinks the technology is extraordinary, and of course how Yahoo! build their search technology, and so on. But, then he pulled back and said: “Let’s judge Google as what it is. Google is now a portal and by my estimation,”—and I may quote him not exactly word for word—”Google is number four.” How do you respond to that framing?
Sergey Brin: Yeah, and I just wasn’t here to see him, but I read a couple of news stories on points like that, but based on my reading of that, that also’d make us the underdog.
Battelle: Um-ha-ha! Very wise! You knew my next question…
Brin: And… I think that’s where we are. Further I’d add to that if you’ve… you’ve had the pleasure of being at the Google cafe…
Battelle: Yeah…
Brin: I think our food is pretty good, we continuously try to improve it, but in terms of… [laughs] kind of the volume…
Battelle: Was that a non sequitur?
Brin: Well the volume and the quantity we try to deliver if we were to rank among cafes and restaurant chains, I mean, I don’t know, we’re not in the top 100 or 1000 even, probably.
Silence. Laughing uproar.
danah boyd’s new essay on digital privacy and intimacy seems to be everywhere right now and yet (or because of that?) I had been studiously avoiding it. It was negligent of me, because it really is that good (and that unsettling).
If gossip is too delicious to turn your back on and Flickr, Bloglines, Xanga, Facebook, etc. provide you with an infinite stream of gossip, you’ll tune in. Yet, the reason that gossip is in your genes is because it’s the human equivalent to grooming. By sharing and receiving gossip, you build a social bond between another human. Yet, what happens when the computer is providing you that gossip asynchronously? I doubt i’m building a meaningful relationship with you when i read your MySpace CuteKitten78. You don’t even know that i’m watching your life. Are you really going to be there when i need you?
Sure, strangers are one thing but what about people you sorta know? I have no doubt that strong ties can be maintained through these systems, provided that other forms of synchronous engagement complement the gossip feed. But i also believe that it gives you a fake sense of intimacy for people you don’t really know that well. And that fake sense of intimacy is both misleading and dreadfully disappointing.
At Blogher, i moderated a panel on “Sensitive Topics” and one of the things that the panelists said over and over again was how hard it was to handle the strangers who contacted them wanting their help. The thing is that to those public bloggers, these are strangers… but those strangers have been following that blogger’s life for quite some time, drawing parallels, finding common ground, feeling connected. It’s a devastating blow to realize that the blogger doesn’t feel the same way. Without that connection, why should they get involved? Often, they do out of a desire to be helpful, a desire to not see someone in pain. This is manageable the first few times. But what happens when there are new people every day? What happens when there are hundreds of people every day?
[...]
Being faced with information overload can be a curse. You want to react, you want to notice. But it can make you exhausted. Worse, it can devastate you.
Facebook is giving me the “gift” of infinite gossip. But i don’t want it. I can’t handle it. And i’m not sure anyone’s really ready to receive the One Ring. But it sure sounds precious upfront.
So again it all comes down to “celebrity”, doesn’t it? I for one didn’t notice that weird, contorted word creeping in but it has become the talisman. It’s what danah is talking about in the above paragraphs: celebrity, painfully confused with intimacy. You can now obsess and lurk Jane Blog as you did Jennifer Aniston through the tabloids—and it will be just as fun and just as empty.
Unless you interact, that is. (And that’s the digital promise and perhaps one possible counter-measure for sanity: to limit your feed to those people you engage meaningfully with.)
In the post-scarcity society of Cory Doctorow’s fun Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom (which you can read for free), money has been replaced by whuffieWP: a reputation-based currency, an ubiquitous measure of how much other people like you. Now, of course, PageRankWP comes immediately to mind, no? (And here’s a good post linking both.) But the main difference till now was that whuffie was instantly viewable by anyone (through brain implants!) and PageRank is just a behind-the-scenes measure (though of course tremendously important).
No more. I installed Firefox Extension Search Status in a flight of fancy but it has become second nature to me to look down and right at the status bar icon where PageRank (and AlexaWP Traffic) is displayed. We are social animals after all.
Remember those classic time-lapseWP videos of fluid cloudscapes and opening flowers? (Or, to be more uptodate, of girls taking a pic of themselves every three years?YT.) Well, this is something similar: Justin FrankelWP, ELZR, Winamp creator and one of this generation’s software virtuosos, spent the better part of a year creating an audio-editing program called Reaper, took pictures as the developement months went by and mashed them together into a webpage. Amazing. (via Justin’s blog: c[a,o]s[a,o][s] de justin)
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