2012

Death of the open web?

Scoble thinks the Open Web is dead. The battles needed to be fought 4 years ago. No one blogs, everyone shares on Facebook, twitter etc.

I think "who cares?"-- if someone's entire presence is on Facebook, I won't be reading them.

If I can't get a feed, I'm not interested.

I've never seen anything serious on Facebok. Lots of social contact, which is ok, and lots of great links, finds, which I might prefer be on tumblr or posterous would be preferable, but ok.

But if you're wanting to do something real, are you going to choose Facebook?

Tags: internet

Date created: 2012-04-01

E-books in the Academy

I was moved to comment on E-books in the Academy — A Story of Limitations and Affordances

There's some good thinking by Ted Nelson (known for coining the word 'hypertext'), online and in his book Literary Machines on the required affordances for intellectual work. Doug Englebarts ideas for augmenting human intellect are relevant. Both hark back to an Atlantic article by Vannevar Bush called "As We May Think". All of this work is decades old– but well worth looking at before setting off to reinvent the flat tyre.

ePub, used by a most ebook readers (but not the kindle, unfortunately), is an open standard based on web standards. There's really not a large number of competing formats. DRM is more of an issue in preventing the reading of epubs on multiple devices.

Using the floor for piles of paper is just an interface problem– getting a useable map for what you want to keep in mind, suited to the size of displays you're using. The notion that computers should recreate paper (word processors, PDF, wysiwyg), with all it's limitations, has held these developments back.

You're correct that so far annotation support is relatively poor. Bush and Nelson's ideas are much richer. Keeping annotations with the file, as when marking up PDFs is a mistake– I require a searchable web of my own annotations and those of others with whom I've agreed to share. The annotations need to point back to a permantly available version of the text I annotated– but subsequent revisions of that text should also be available. My annotations should be first class citizens of this textual web– able to be read and annotated again in turn. And so on. much of this flies against the notion of the fixed book, and some is hampered by the unbrilliant design of the web itself (we can't afford links to things we care about to change).

I don't see the interests of publishers as at all important. The whole issue of who pays who for what set of limited rights just gets in the way of sharing ideas. Nelson has some ideas about micropayments here, rewarding authors based on usage. Publishers are destined to be service providers, not owners of the rights to texts created by other people.

Tags: htext

Date created: 2012-04-06

Sharing work

I was working on a word list app for my kids.

It strikes me that I'm doing what my parents did when they wrote out some words on about 6 pieces of cardboard. It's taking me longer, but the results are generalisable, and shareable.

My first memory of reading is of some flash cards my parents had made. They were quite big, made of thick corrogated cardboard, but white, not brown. On each my parents had written a word in brown marker. There were probably six or so, but I only remember "teddy bear". I think I always got this one right, because it was the biggest. Maybe it having two words helped, but I don't remember knowing about spaces.

Cut to this weekend. I'm making flash cards for my daughter, who is learning to read. I'm not very good with scissors and pens, but I can program, so I'm writing a web page with some javascript to populate it. The words can go into categories, and can have associated images and audio files. The set can be expanded or changed relatively easily. It's taken a lot longer for me to make this that it would have taken my parents to make their set. But, anyone who wants it can grab a copy of what I've done and customise it themselves. So rather than making some flashcards, I've made a way for anyone to make (and share) flashcards. And it's available to any one of the billion people with internet access.

This change in reach is a benefit of the Internet. Another benefit of the internet is that I didn't even need to do this, no doubt somebody somewhere has already done it better. But I like programming, like my daughter likes scissors, and markers, and glue.

Tags: internet

Date created: 2012-04-14

I hate Facebook

I thought it was great initially, a way of connecting with people i'd lost contact with, a way of feeling in contact with friends overseas. She poked me, so she thought of me, even if just for an instant. And then it grew, and grew, and grew.

It turned out that if I'd wanted to maintain contact, I would have. If I wanted to regain contact with someone, I'd defintely use Facebook, initially. It's great for organising school reunions. But commenting on someone's facebook post is not all that rewarding.

If I'm looking at people's posts on facebook, it's because I feel a bit lonely, and I want to feel some frisson of social contact. Seeing the proof of my friend's independent inner lives, even on facebook, is good. I can believe in my friends, believe in the world, and get my head to shrink down to normal size.

There was a Star Trek TNG episode, a quite stupid one, about Beverley Crusher being trapped inside her own head, and her friends ceasing to exist. Some quantum thing, sure.... But the basic notion is right-- my imagination can't contain you. Facebook gives a channel to let you in. A thin, kind of nasty channel, but a channel nonetheless. It would be good if my friends had blogs, or wrote long emails, but they don't. So facebook is all I have.

Facebook makes it easy to not have a blog, to not upload photos, to not write long emails. It's the Xmas letter form of contact; occasional status posts, blasted out to hundreds of people. Not personal.

Facebook controls all that stuff, of course, though perhaps the details change. AFAIK, facebook can do whatever it wants, make your posts visible outside, or not, make old ones dissappear, or not, keep them around after you've deleted your account, or have died. It's their house, you just play in it.

If I have anything to say of any significance, I want my own house to say it in. I want control over it.

Blogs and feeds are brilliant for this. Thanks to @davewiner there are great meechanisms for tracking what you want to track, ordering it and reviewing it the way you want. Of course, you can't do that with stuff on facebook. Facebook decides what to show you.

Journals are giving up their online presence for a presence in facebook. People are publishing links to facebook in the form of like buttons. I hate like buttons. If you care about something enough, write about it, tweet about it, in a way i can find out on the real internet. In a way that lasts. In a way that doesn't mix your like with thousands of others I don't care about.

Google's circles seems better this way. If you trust google more than facebook. Which I don't, really.

Sure it's nice to see what the mass of people are thinking, if you're marketing a product. I'm not.

Inauthenticity. Likes mean you clicked a button. if you've only clicked that button once, is your like worth more than someone who clicks it a hundred times every day? No.

I worry that people are throwing away the free printing press they control, for the free one they don't control, but that everyone else is using.

Back before the Internet, there was the Source, and CompuServe, and later, AOL. AOL had lot of people, companies had a presence on AOL. It was a classic walled garden, until they attached it to the internet. AOL users considered harmful. Now it seems that everyone is flocking back into the garden. Seeing the rush, companies are too. Probably some are Facebook only.

It's just too depressing.

Tags: internet

Date created: 2012-06-16

Imagination

Some weeks back, J. said she thought many people had no imagination. I think it's one of her world-dissing reactions, like my "everyone's stupid!". But what does it mean?

It's kind of like a version of asperger's, a blindness of sorts. Blind to possibility. Blind to reality because of focusing on the finger.

No idea if it's true, of course.

Date created: 2012-07-29

My best programming story

When I was 16 (in 1980), I got a ZX-80 for christmas. It was my first computer. I'd been reading about computers for years, from the Popular Science accounts of the Altair and MITS8080, and the Apple I and II. I'd seen an Apple II at a science fair once, part of someone's project -- I remember wondering where his parents had got the $1700 they cost. It wasn't even jealousy-- that sort of money was just unattainable. The TRS-80 was coming out, my best friend would later get an Atari 400, and in second semester that year I was part of the first computer class at our high school.

It was a year 11 enriched math class (I was in year 12). We got a Commodore PET for a month. It was being shared among a number of schools. After that, we used FORTRAN on coding sheets that got sent in to the education office, where keypunchers would turn them into punch cards and run them through their mainframe. It would take about three days from submitting sheets to get the program run and the result (or, just as often, the error report) back, on those old large format printer sheets.

Anyway, I was very keen, and I got a ZX-80 for christmas. We attached it to an old black and white TV screen, and although something was on the screen, it wasn't working properly. I remember that peak of excitement, and that feeling of it all about to be dashed. We persevered, and with some mucking about with the horizontal and vertical controls got the screen mostly readable. I would later get a newer small B&W TV which worked much better. I was glued to the machine over the Xmas holidays and taught myself to program in ZX-80 Basic. Time passed.

I'd subscribed to Sync the ZX-80 magazine, and learned about peeking and poking to screen memory.

The ZX-80 had but 1K of RAM-- this held the program you typed in using it's clever membrane keyboard, as well as the memory needed to drive the screen. When calculations were taking place, the screen would flicker, and fuzz out for the length of time it took to get a response.

Much fun was had.

I had ambitions of making a little racing car game. The magazines had showed me a trick, where when you saved the program (onto cassette tape, of course) it saved the state of it's memory as part of that. So it was possible to write a program to dray a racetrack to the screen (peeking and poking to screen memory), and save that state to cassette, then restore it to change the program to add the racing car bit, given the existing race track -- because I couldn't have both in my 1K.

The track itself was just made of the block characters the ZX-80 had above the low ASCII. The magazines had also explained how screen memory worked-- and demystified peeking and poking directly to memory, enabling an image to stay on the screen while the program was running.

So that worked. I'd drawn this roughly oval track with walls 3 blocks thick, and I had this little block representing the car which would drive around. You could tap different keys to get the car to turn and accelerate up to 4 squares/tick, and I was poking the car into its new position in screen memory. I had some routine to test to make sure you didn't hit the wall-- I forget what was supposed to happen.

Anyway, I'd typed all this in, and was testing it. Sure enough, I could drive my little car around, the screen wasn't flickering because I wasn't doing any output, just changing it directly by pokeing into screen memory. Then I made my mistake. I moved to maximum acceleration-- 4 squares and jumped through my 3 square thick wall.

To simplify things, the car was just jumping from square to square, without passing through the intermediate squares. So the wall might as well not have been there. The screen memory and my program memory were contiguous, so after jumping the wall the car proceeded to drive through my program, until the program, and with it, the car, crashed.

I was briefly able to look at my listing; lodged in a line was the block representing the car, but I couldn't edit it, couldn't really do anything.

I never got around to trying it again.

Tags: computing

Date created: 2012-08-19