stare decisive

Chief Justice John Roberts

lessons from lessig

from “Free Culture – Creative Commons”

“If you don’t do something now, then in another two years they’ll say to you ‘nothing has changed, except your freedom, which has increasingly been taken away by those who recognize that the future is against them and they have the power in DC to protect themselves against that future — free society be damned.’ “

Larry, you’re in the wrong business. This EFF thing is a sideshow. You need to get into the New Hampshire primary.

lessons from lessig

from CODE 2.0

1.) Harold Reeves, one of Lessig’s best research assistants, left the law to become a priest. Talk about intellectual property: now the company he works for owns Heaven (which may be larger even than cyberspace).

2.) “the power to regulate access to and use of copyrighted material is about to be perfected.” There is a vast difference between regulation by law… and control of access. The law may redefine artists as hackers and criminals, but it won’t stop art or culture.

3.) there is no such thing as a trusted system, Larry, relax.

4.) Andrew Jackson’s mother told him: “Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault and battery. Always settle them cases yourself.” Did she happen to say HOW? Was it by pistol duel?

5.) “Intellectual property rights are different than ordinary property rights.” Yep, but both are based on theft. We stole from those who came before us and now we’re trying to stop everyone else from stealing from us. We have enough guns and lobbyists to put up a good fight, but eventually it’s a losing battle. The richest-of-the-rich get smaller and smaller, while “everyone else” grows larger and larger. History repeats, privelege is redistributed, game over.

6.) “The DMCA contains an anti-circumvention provision.” See number 2 above. It cannot forbid, it can only punish.

7.) click-wrap, shrink-wrap, bad rap: “The ultimate power of a contract depends upon the decision by a court to enforce the contract or not.” No one reads them, no one complies, no one sues. Case closed.

8.) The Framers were writing about one King. Now content is King. But they showed that a King can be thrown off.

9.) If a trusted system becomes too controlling and authoritarian, it too may be thrown off… in a virtual tea party.

10.) “…we do not expect that anyone is keeping track. We would be shocked if we learned that the library was keeping tabs on the books that people checked out and then using this data in some monitoring way.” I got news for ya: the librarians have been whispering about you for years.

trying audio post again

this time on why Sandra Day O’Connor switched her vote on Betamax

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still i love taxonomy, but not as much as you, you see

Taxonomy. It’s the word on everyone’s lips these days. No, it’s not the study of 1040 Forms. Nor does it have anything to do with stuffing and mounting small animals. It’s the art of writing down words on index cards and then shuffling them until they are ordered into a controlled vocabulary.

Amy J. Warner, in “A Taxonomy Primer” (2002) (from Lexonomy via The Information Architecture Institute) says taxonomies, thesauri, classification systems and synonym rings are all “controlled vocabularies: organized lists of words and phrases, or notation systems. They are used to tag content and then to find it through navigation or search.”

The reason you need a controlled vocabulary is to develop a navigation and/or search scheme-so the user can find your website’s content. Here’s an example: suppose your user is looking for a recipe for zucchini. Natural language tagging simply won’t suffice. You need synonym rings, so that all your recipes for courgettes will come up too. See?

“The next level of organization of your terms is to arrange them in some way. Usually, a hierarchy is used,” says Warner. “This level of organization is generally what people are referring to when they use the term taxonomy…. Hierarchies also show the relationships among content items.”

Vegetables / Squashes / Zucchini is one path. Relating terms across hierarchies (associative or related term relationship) is the most complex level of control, according to Warner. That’s how you arrive at Main Courses / Vegetarian Dishes / Zucchini Parmesan.

When all this taxing taxonomying is done, you’ll probably be hungry. Just search for Zucchini Parmesan-and voila!-you’ll find those tasty courgettes.

The good news is that you can apparently buy these vocabularies as there are “literally hundreds, if not thousands…floating around.” Warner suggests shopping around first to see if there are any you can adapt to your website, but more than likely you’ll end up building your own, “so that you can create a stock of structured terms to organize as you wish.”

One final word of caution from Warner: “Make sure that the results you get from developing, using, and maintaining a controlled vocabulary [taxonomy] are worth the investment…. Otherwise, it may not be worth the effort.”

B.G.: Before Google

I read Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think last year; I’m a big believer in his theories on web site design and usability. As the descriptive “brochure” style of first-gen sites is increasingly replaced by Web 2.0 makeovers, his emphasis on ease-of-use is more relevant than ever.

There’s only one problem with this reading-and the other one from 2001 on usability testing: neither mentions Google once. (Well, OK, the University of Buffalo case study does mention Google once, in citation #15.) And while not surprising (Google hadn’t swallowed the Web yet), Google has since then, of course, changed everything.

Recently, I was called in to consult with a major publishing company contemplating a site revamp. Their main page, like that of the U. of Buffalo Library, was a mess: too much explication, too many choices. They had a century’s worth of great content in their database, they just had to get out of the user’s way.

They asked me how they could make their homepage THE destination for professionals in their industry. My answer-and it was one they didn’t like-was: You can’t. Google is your homepage-and everyone else’s too.

I really do believe it. So much so that as I paged through the screenshots accompanying the Buffalo Library story, I kept Xing out the multilayered schemes and drawing in a single horizontal box with the word SEARCH.

Some other passages from Krug resonate with where my thinking is on Web 2.0 now:

Links and buttons must be obviously clickable: I favor those big shiny glassy or brushed metal buttons you see nearly everywhere now.

Cut out the busy-ness and background noise: “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left” is another Krug chapter.

Keyword functionality: “They just look at what you type and do whatever makes the most sense,” says Krug. I call this “letting the user drive.”

Making pages self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better…. If Web pages are going to be effective, they have to work most of their magic at a glance.

Or, as Malcolm Gladwell puts it, in a blink.

We scan, we satisfice, we muddle through, says Krug. As I put it: your site must be “plug and play.”

And, as the Buffalo Library case study demonstrates, do whatever Jakob Nielsen says about testing (including signing up for his Useit.com Alertbox newsletter)

Krug touches on the issue of “delight” only briefly in this chapter-“Oh, it’s a _________. Neat.” This reminded me of the Mobile Phone UCD selection we just read: “Users need to be able to touch the buttons and see software that feels like it is actually working” [Kangas and Kinnunen, 2005].

It’s the positive reinforcement that comes from making those guesses Krug tells us users make-and having those guesses turn out to be right. There’s something deeply satisfying about having your intuition proved right. It’s what keeps the user engaged, what keeps a site “sticky.”

Of course, you do want to throw in some curves from time to time, to keep the game interesting-though not as often as Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun. In this game, the player (and not the house) must win.

Gordon Needs a Wife

“Gordon returns home from a business trip”-so begins the (perhaps unintentionally) humorous opening scenario of Digital Memories in an Era of Ubiquitous Computing and Abundant Storage [Mary Czerwinski et al, 2006].

By the time he had finished downloading his conference photos, sharing them with friends, accessing related email, noting his elevated temperature and finding his missing hat-all through the use of ubiquitous computing-I could not escape the thought: Gordon needs a wife (or if you prefer, significant other).

That happy day might arrive a lot sooner than the article’s “vision…not yet fully realized [but] becoming possible as a consequence of making everyday objects computationally enhanced and networked.”

While it is true that embedded processors and network connectivity are being added to many of the objects that surround us, we still seem very far away from having even the most basic of them function reliably enough. Servers crash, sophisticated networks like Second Life are under frequent attack, and my GE Monogram freezer keeps icing up near a leaky gasket.

But it is certainly fun to speculate, as the authors do here, about “what we might do with a life’s worth of digital memories and the applications that might prove useful.” Memory, shared personal experience, personal reflection and analysis, time management, security-these are all legitimate areas for development that might prove especially helpful to the aging Baby Boomer generation.

Also interesting are some of the countervailing factors cited as reasons why “we may not want a complete and objective memory of the past”-including the potential for self-incrimination and the possibility of a “privacy crisis.” Personally, I found the authors’ assertion that “security is not an issue” to be somewhat disingenuous. Recent highly publicized breaches of government and commercial data demonstrate that in a digital, networked environment there simply is no security. (My advice: pay your hate-group membership dues in Krugerrands.)

Nevertheless, as this article notes, “convenience often trumps security concerns… [and] it is clear that the growing availability of low-cost storage, coupled with improved technology for recording multimedia data and the ubiquitous use of sensors has stirred researcher (and public) interest.” But I also agree with the authors’ conclusion that “difficult technological, legal, and social issues must…be solved to make lifetime recording valuable.”

blogorrhea

Apres moi, le deluge. That is, I seem to arrive shortly before the herd. I was very, very late to the blog party, and might have skipped right to the Second Life lovefest altogether had this course not required the setting up and maintenance of a WordPress account.

Sure, I’d played with Blogger and Blogspot when they came out (just as I am willing to try any social networking thing that comes along). I had just come off a decade-long domain-buying binge-I racked up several dozen, including vitualyulelog.com and 13hourwatch.com (“Not enough time in the day? Buy our 13-hour watch.”). I’m not kidding about any of this, by the way. I took howtodobusinesswithchina.com then howtoretiretocanada.com (presumably after doing business with china).

I had started accumulating domain names in the mid-1990s and collected a strong hand of political ones. Taking KerryEdwards.org eighteen months before that ticket formed earned me a few minutes of fame during the last election cycle (in case you’re wondering, some guy named Kerry Edwards already had the dot-com). More recently, I picked up johndanforth.com and feingoldobama.com with an eye toward ‘08.

But a “been there done that” attitude kept me on the sidelines when the whole blog phenomenon exploded a few years ago. Charting the creation of blogs by the minute on Technorati-how was that any different than the days when everyone had to have a website (or even more recently, when everyone had to have a MySpace or Facebook page)? Even the charts looked the same!

Brief detour: According to web usability guru Jakob Nielsen, “There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet only 55 million users (5%) have weblogs according to Technorati. Worse, there are only 1.6 million postings per day; because some people post multiple times per day, only 0.1% of users post daily.

“Blogs have even worse participation inequality than is evident in the 90-9-1 rule that characterizes most online communities. With blogs, the rule is more like 95-5-0.1.”

A colleague at work who is a real working journalist kept pointing out that bloggers were the ones breaking the news, by capturing sensational words and/or video from underreported events. News that big media then picked up and amplified. But I was still unimpressed. Didn’t everyone already know about Trent Lott…and Mark Foley?

What finally turned me into a blog fan was not the abstract or ideological; it was RSS and SEO. Simply put, the underlying technology that allowed blogs to rise to the top of Google searches by virtue of their “freshness”-and the ease with which blogs can be syndicated (distributed) across the Web with a URL and a couple of clicks.

So you can take the whole clamoring gang: Spiers, Denton, Calacanis, Sullivan, Huffington, and the rest. (Flash: the guy who was writing Gawker-or was it Jossip?-is now writing Intelligencer. Yawn.) You can even take the endless debate about citizen vs. celebrity journalism, and whether the lowly blogger is being supplanted by the blog mogul. Just leave us with those powerful tools. The rest will sort itself out.

wanna play me?

I used to think of God as the “third place”-an external hard drive on which we stored all the contradictions and unknowns, the programs that would crash our daily operating systems. Now I have a new third place: Second Life.

Which is fitting since as J. Huizinga reminds us in “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon” [Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 1950], Plato conceived of religion as play consecrated to the Deity. Life in Second Life is definitely play-a game, according to C. Crawford, because it is representational, interactive and safe [“What Is a Game?,” The Art of Computer Game Design, 1982].

During the class session we held in SL, one student-avatar said that to be interesting a game must have an element of danger. But clearly, his dramatic act of stripping down to his Jockey shorts while risqué was hardly risky-unless someone snapped a screenshot and is able to tie him to it in RL incontrovertibly.

One of the main bases of civilization, play, says Huizinga, must by definition be safe, offering the illusion of conflict with no consequences. But it is also illuminating to contemplate play as revelatory seizure, an involuntary repetition representing a cosmic event (Frobenius’ “the order of nature as imprinted on [man’s] consciousness”).

Like ritual, computer gaming presents a third space in which players can invest themselves, create stories and imprint their personality. In “We Live Here: Games, Third Places, and the Information Architecture of the Future” (2006), A. Hinton says these game environments prefigure where we’re headed with conventional software and networked experiences. They may also prefigure where we’re headed in Life (the First).

In MUDs, MOOs and MMOGs, as in the Web itself (which Tim Berners-Lee viewed as “a democratic antidote to the hegemony of hierarchy”), decentralized games produced not accidental anarchy but “a social environment encouraging community and creativity” and “a collective consensus of use.”

Blurring the boundaries between first, second and third places with real-life connections outside the game, such “immersive-yet-permeable” game environments, says digital activist Joi Ito, represent “the future of real-time collaborative teams and leadership in an always-on, diversity-intensive, real-time environment. [The game] is a glimpse into our future.”

With all three “places” increasingly connected, interrelated and ever-present in a world of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), games and the Web “represent the inevitable triumph of spielraum [the third place],” concludes Hinton.

For me, the blurring of lines has already begun: I had trouble falling asleep the night I entered Second Life. And every day since, my SL story line has been running-not on some external hard drive but on an expanded memory chip implanted somewhere deep in my brain.