Internet

Andrew Sullivan posts a copy of this compilation of AT&T ads from 1993 predicting the future. They did a great job predicting what is today available to many. And remember, 1993 was the year when the first Windows-based browser was released helping along wide public access to the Web. But at that point little of this was obvious.

I wanted to find the video on YouTube directly. I didn’t realize you could just get to the specific YouTube page by clicking on the video window anywhere but the play button so I proceeded by searching for it on YouTube. I got one result (not the right one) for at&t 1993. A search for at&t ads didn’t give me this hit either.

At that point, I decided to just click on Share in the YouTube player (which annoyingly resizes my entire browser window) and tweak the URL from share to view to get to the page. That’s one way to do it (but again, clicking anywhere but the play button is probably the easiest if you already have the video of interest:). If you don’t have the specific video then it seems best to do a site-specific search for the video on Google as such: site:youtube.com at&t 1993. I wonder when YouTube search will be powered by Google given the acquisition.

UPDATE: I’m told by someone who seems to be a reliable source (but who wishes to remain anonymous) that this is something that they are, indeed, working on and it will be one of the first integrations as part of the acquisition.

This week I’m blogging only work-related things and from deep inside a hotel (which I’ve not left for days) on the outskirts of Sao Paulo. Sounds fun, eh?

ICANN staff are generally held to be defensive, secretive and to have a bunker mentality. So in a bid to be more open, or just to arouse some sympathy, we’re making an effort to blog our AGM. (Anyone can actually blog it, it’s just that staff are being encouraged to.) If you’re interested in how the meeting is going, e.g. issues, meeting reports, web references and local colour, please come to a site that lets people not in Sao Paulo to participate in the meeting. There are web chats, links to video, audio and real time transcription, and a blog. It’s called the ICANN Sao Paulo Participation Website.

It’s all been set up by journalist Kieren McCarthy, and the idea is for us to use this whole Internet thing a bit more to let people be part of how it’s actually run.

As we know from recent CT discussions if not from our own inboxes, many people are not very good at communicating requests to strangers. My frustrations over this – being the recipient of such messages several times a week – have led me to write a piece on how best to approach a stranger with a request over email published today at Inside Higher Ed.

Often enough we are faced with a question that can best be answered by someone else, possibly a complete stranger. The upside of the Internet is that we can quickly contact folks without much effort. The downside of the Internet is that people can contact us without much effort. [..]

Given people’s limited amount of time, how can we ensure that our inquiring e-mail is not simply relegated to the recipient’s trash folder?

Summary:
Descriptive subject line
Polite point-of-contact
Succinct statement of the message’s purpose
Brief introduction of yourself
Acknowledging other attempts at finding an answer or solution
Restatement of question
Gratitude for assistance

.. all done briefly.

See the piece for details. Of course, one problem is that the people who are most likely to write pathetic notes are the least likely to read an article of this sort. But at least for those who care, perhaps this can offer some helpful pointers.

Here are some interesting video finds:

• Blind teenager “sees” thanks to clicking sound (amazing)
• Drums & piano compilation.. by someone who doesn’t play either instrument (that may not sound appealing, but it’s worth the click)
• A new way to multiply (not necessarily faster than one’s old way, but I still found it interesting)

Also, as proof that YouTube has grown up, I am now receiving spam through it:

Since the sender’s ID wasn’t created until five days before sending this note and the account has no bookmarked or submitted videos, it’s a safe bet (beyond the content of the message) that its sole function is to generate spam. (I have purposefully removed the URL the user is trying to advertise from the above image.)

.. or how to figure out whether you are hallucinating.

In the past few weeks I have come across more and more commentary about the site MyBlogLog, a service that is responsible for the list of pictures of other recent site visitors on the sidebar of some blogs (example).

But I was confused. I was quite sure that I had signed up for a free MyBlogLog account over a year ago, and this was not at all the service it had offered back then. I started searching and most recent commentary focuses on the above-mentioned social aspect of the service. So how to figure out if I am just utterly confused and mixing this up with another service?

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Three weeks ago I started a project: take at least one photo a day and post these online. Of course, anyone who’s been following my various posts about Flickr knows that this is not exactly a hardship. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to make a conscious effort every day to stop for a moment and notice something in my surroundings worthy of photography for one reason or another. Part of the point is to have a visual reminder of the various things I’m up to during the span of a year. It’s called Project 365 and I got the idea from Photojojo.

I let my contacts in Flickr know about this and several have joined in on the undertaking. I set up a Flickr Group where everyone can post their additions. (It does have some rules though so don’t just start dumping photos into the pool.) Some of us are also using tags that allow an easy look at how any one day is represented by different people.

Needless to say this is definitely in the realm of personal diary blogging, which is not something I had engaged in much before. But it’s fun with photos. Intrigued? Join us. Grab a free Flickr account or just post to your un-Flickred blog if you’re so inclined. Let me know, I have a Project 365 section on my personal blog‘s sidebar and would be happy to expand it. It is not a requirement to post a photo each day, that can be done in clusters of a few. The requirement is to take at least one photo each day and before midnight strikes, decide which photo represents something about the day.

I’m collecting examples of interesting ways in which people use various online services for their benefit. Of course, I can come up with lots of hypotheticals and examples from my own life, but it’s helpful to have concrete cases from the world at large.

Here, for example, is an interesting case of IT being put to use for the potential benefit of folks in a realm having little to do with IT. It’s about the use of Google Earth to back up claims about the value of some land that the government in India wants to acquire from farmers for limited compensation. The piece doesn’t say whether the use of these images ultimately led to a different outcome, but the potential is there.

Another relevant example is how people exploit spelling errors on ebay listings to get good deals. Because most people searching for those items don’t find them, there is much less of a bidding war and the final price is lower than would be otherwise. There are now even Web sites that help you exploit this, for example, eBooBoos does the guessing on your behalf. The results of a search on “turtle” yield items such as a turle neck sweater or a trutle box. (One wonders why ebay hasn’t worked on this issue in-house, but that’s another matter.)

I am looking for other examples concerning the beneficial uses of IT by average folks in particular, although interesting uses by super techies are welcomed as well. I’m not so much interested in (this time around) cases of xyz Web site helping to deal with other realms of IT uses (e.g. a handy tool for following blog posts), but uses that have a relatively direct impact on other realms of life as well. If you can share pointers to articles like the one above regarding the farmers in India that would be great. I also welcome stories from personal experiences. This is all related to some talks and papers I’m working on. Thanks!

For the first time in its history, Wikipedia is #10 in Alexa’s daily Traffic Rank though not in the official top 10.

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Most humorous wikivandalism ever. (via Dave Moles.)

Perhaps one shouldn’t laugh at such things. It encourages bad behavior. For example, here’s vandalism more genuinely annoying and not creative or delightful in the least. Will Baude emails to inform that somehow Crescat Sententia lost their domain to some search engine optimization outfit. Which then offered to sell it back at an extravagant mark-up. Crescat Sententia has declined their offer and moved here. From org to net. Update bookmarks accordingly, and do not favor the old address with your custom, if possible. Apparently for a while the lovely SEO people were hosting a cache of an old page in the hopes of disguising what had happened. Naughty, naughty.

UPDATE: In defense of wikipedia be it noted that the vandalism only lived for 38 minutes before being reverted. Hmmm, there’s a good idea for a story. An eccentric treasure-hunter is sent off on a months-long quest for a lost tribe in South America, on the unfortunate evidential basis of a vandalized wikipedia page he read in the 12 minutes between when it was posted and reverted by the ever-watchful editors. Of course it turns out that, quite by coincidence, everything the vandalized page said was true. The vandal himself is somehow ensnared in the plot and ends up sacrificed to a giant snake.

UPDATE 2: It’s coming to me, as in a dream. It turns out wikipedia itself is an elaborate plot concocted by the Knights Templar, together with the greatest of their hashhashim enemies, one al-Whikid (!). To ‘hide their greatest treasures in plain sight’, they conspire to create wikipedia. During the Middle Ages it was maintained by monks on scrolls. A specific pattern of reversion edits constitutes … a map! So there is an esoteric as well as an exoteric wiki. Fortunately, Nicholas Cage stumbles on the aforementioned vandalized page. It contains a jpeg of a map to a tribe. The map is part of the true map, but the vandal was just using it as likely mash-up material. So the film will be like National Treasure meets Hackers meets The Da Vinci Code (‘don’t I know you?’). There will be a scene in which the true wiki is surreptitiously handed off in a USB thumb-drive shaped like Quark‘s head.

UPDATE 3: The vandal is played by Steve Buscemi. (Because he and Cage had chemistry in Con Air.)

UPDATE 4: And Ed Harris plays an earnest wikipedia command editor, thus reprising his stern, steady role in Apollo 13. When the Knights realize their plan has failed they attempt to sabotage the entire wiki, reverted every single page to stuff about Buffy the Vampire Slayer Firefly. In the wikipedia command room all the editors (buzz cuts, thin black ties, pocket protectors) are frantically scribbling their corrections to the erroneous Buffy Firefly posts on paper. Harris: “with all due respect, sir, I believe this will be our finest edit.”

UPDATE 5: Who do you think would win in a fight between Wikipedia and Aquaman?

Earlier this year, Brad DeLong suggested that he should get rich and then give a large grant to me to do a study. I’m all for Brad getting rich and I happily await the day including the check he’ll send my way as a result. However, in the meantime, it’s good to know that there are some other sources of potential funding for work on information technologies.

Yesterday, the MacArthur Foundation announced a new initiative in Digital Media and Learning. They have committed $50 million dollars over five years to this. I was fortunate to be one of the recipients of a research grant. My project will be a look at young people’s uses of the Internet with particular focus on their skills and participation. I will also be conducting a training intervention (on participants randomly assigned to the control versus the experimental group) to see if we can create a program that helps people improve their online abilities (in such domains as efficiency in content navigation and evaluating the credibility of information).

Generally speaking, the goal of this initiative is to gain a better understanding of how young people are using digital media in their everyday lives and how various types of learning are taking place outside of the classroom through the use of such media. MacArthur has also launched a blog to discuss related projects.

The press conference was simulcast in Second Life and some participants captured a few screenshots, including ones from Teen Second Life.

As you can imagine, I’m super excited about all this and so will likely be blogging about related issues in the future (hah, not that I haven’t already).

I doubt very much that I’m the only person in the CT community who has found themselves for some reason unbeknownst to them signed up to the Comnet Communitarian Letter (which I find to be rather trite and platitudinous; but then, I’m not a communitarian nor do I ever want to be). Nor am I the only person who’s found that it’s impossible to get off the mailing list; I know this for a fact as one of my mates was bitching about this very problem to me the other day. There’s an email address at the bottom of the Letter that you’re supposed to write to if you want to get off the listserv, but the way that they’ve configured their software, the only result you get is an error message . This is not an acceptable way to configure an email list that you then sign people up to without their permission. I believe that communitarians are big into collective shaming mechanisms, where you call people out for bad behavior in front of the community, so that they will mend their ways and do better in future. Here goes.

In mean-spirited response to the executive summary of a report I haven’t read, here is a bad-minded slap down. Pew,the people who write generally solid reports on US Internet usage, ‘surveyed 742 top technology thinkers and stakeholders and gave them a series of “future scenarios” involving the internet and digital technologies to comment on in order to get a consensus on the future’.

And this is what the cheerleading tech crowd believes will happen by 2020:
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The “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ea2a206c-51e4-11db-bce6-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=e676331a-4bb0-11da-997b-0000779e2340.html writes about a ‘meltdown’ in the online gambling sector, thanks to new US legislation.

The online gambling sector was in meltdown in the UK on Monday morning, as the fallout from last week’s moves in the US to tighten anti-gambling laws sent shockwaves through the sector. Legislation passed in Washington on Friday would outlaw the processing of bets taken on-line by banks and credit card companies. The act now only requires the signature of the US president to bring it into effect, a move which is expected in the next two weeks. The bill prohibits US gamblers from using credit cards, cheques and electronic fund transfers to make online wagers, and throws the high-risk industry – already damaged by the impact of arrests of executives on US soil – into turmoil. One person in the industry said the bill was an attempt to “strangle the industry through the banks”. Companies based in the UK, Gibraltar and elsewhere are losing billions of dollars in their stock market valuations, because of their exposure to the US market.

People like “Christopher Caldwell”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/457bddcc-1363-11db-9d6e-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=e676331a-4bb0-11da-997b-0000779e2340.html take these kinds of measures as evidence that governments can indeed regulate the Internet, protect their citizens from nasty content etc etc. I used to more or less agree with them, but after thinking it through and doing some further research, I’m nowhere near as sure as I was. States are indeed able to use third party private actors as proxy regulators as they’re doing here, by pressing credit card companies and companies like Paypal into service as enforcers. They’ve been doing this for years on the state level (Eliot Spitzer pioneered this). But this kind of regulation-by-proxy really seems only to work well when the proxy regulators have real incentives to do what states want them to do, or when the ultimate targets of the regulation are big multinational companies tht don’t want to get caught breaking the law. But according to this “GAO report”:http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0389.pdf (PDF) it isn’t that difficult for offshore gambling companies to mask their transactions as ‘legitimate’ credit card transactions if they want to. Credit card companies don’t have either the means or the incentives to prevent this, as long as they _look_ as though they are trying to comply. So if I was to lay a bet,I’d lay substantial amounts of money that the new government legislation won’t put much of a dent in the willingness of US citizens to gamble on the Internet, or in the eagerness of offshore companies to make easy money by catering to this willingness. What _will_ happen is that the currently dominant multibillion dollar companies will lose control of the market to a congeries of small, shadier companies that are much more willing to cut legal corners than large, publicly quoted companies, because they have much less to fear from prosecution (few fixed assets, no corporate reputation to maintain etc).

Taking advantage of my Silicon Valley location this year, I decided to go check out Yahoo! Hack Day (it’s actually a two-day event so I’ll be back for more today). I doubt that there are too many CT readers who would participate in something of this sort, but if you happen to be there today, do let me know.

Hundreds of people showed up for the opportunity to spend a day adding functionality to various Yahoo! products such as Flickr, Upcoming.org and now even Yahoo! Mail. The demos of these creations will be this afternoon (Saturday) where we’ll get to hear 90-second descriptions of the hacks. It sounds fun and exciting especially to someone like me who’s such a fan of some of Yahoo!’s products.

The event organization so far has been impressive with clear directions, plenty of parking, fast registration and some fun swag. Yesterday was filled with various presentations culminating in a pizza dinner and then a live concert. I finally met Lifehacker Gina Trapani in person and hung out for a while. This was fun since despite having written for Lifehacker in the past, we’ve never met in person.

The surprise of the evening was the Beck concert (see a recent interview in Wired as to why he was an especially appropriate selection for this event). The performance included puppet versions of all the artists projected onto the screen behind the stage. It was great. You can find photos of the concert on Flickr (mine, others’) and there’s also a Yahoo! video not of the concert, but of the Beck puppet’s visit to Sunnyvale. Google gets most of the attention for being a fun place to work, but Yahoo!’s campus seems quite fun as well, something I already noted when giving a talk there two years ago.