Jon Lebkowsky and Honoria have an interesting insight about evaluating social software according to esthetic, leading to some reflection about the criteria for an esthetic of social software.
Thinking out loud, here are some criteria to consider...
* ease of groupforming
* intimacy gradient -- ability to create spaces on a continuum from public to private
* expressiveness -- ability for individuals and groups to express mood and style
* shared memory -- the social software equivalent of bookshelves and mantelpiece photos
* attractive front porches -- social public areas preceding private spaces
* helpful navigation -- clear signage, or meditative exploration
I'm on vacation, so I don't have Christopher Alexander near to hand; that would bring some good insight.
During the fanfare around the capture of Saddam Hussein, President Bush signed a bill that gives the FBI the power to search a broad range of financial records without a warrant.
The FBI now can get these records by issuing a "National Security Letter." "To get the records, the FBI doesn't have to appear before a judge, nor demonstrate "probable cause" - reason to believe that the targeted client is involved in criminal or terrorist activity."
The definition of financial institution has been expanded from banks to include stockbrokers, car dealerships, casinos, credit card companies, insurance agencies, jewelers, airlines, the U.S. Post Office, and any other business "whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters."
This provision of the unpopular Patriot II act was pried off and attached to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2004, an omnibus bill funding all the intelligence activities of the federal government.
There's a good reason the founding fathers didn't like searches without warrants.
Quotes are taken from this article in the San Antonio Current; story via Ross Mayfield
You can tell the families of tourists. It's not just the sneakers and the cameras. The adults have a dogged, purposeful expression. Just seen attraction two-of-five; three-of-five is next, gotta get our money's worth. The kids look bored unto death.
One of the best parts of travelling is sitting down and watching the guys in greatcoats and chic haircuts, the people loading and unloading, the pathologically thin women in orthopedically crippling shoes. The cops making sure the guy sleeping in the church doorway is sleeping.
On Saturday night, I saw "Matt & Ben", the off-broadway play, about Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in their pizza, beer, and rehearsal days. The screenplay for Good Will Hunting falls from the ceiling, testing testing the friendship of the aspiring actors, who'd been buddies since Cambridge Rindge and Latin. The play is written and performed by two women, Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers, who carry off the drag pretty well, showing the loyalty and rivalry between the buddies, til a fight scene at the end which overstretches their abilities.
My favorite parts of the play were the cameos of eccentric sage JD Salinger, who discourages the guys from adapting Catcher in the Rye, their previous project, while nibbling on a pudding cup, and Gwyneth Paltrow, who encourages them to use the supernaturally acquired script, while making secret love to a cupcake.
The show's set in a grungy Somerville apartment in 1995. The details of the set were mostly spot-on, with period phone and boombox, a plaid couch they must have gotten from the house of some grad student friends of mine, and Papa Ginos pizza. The only flaws in detail were a mismatched Mac monitor and PC chassis, an out-the-window outdoor skyline that was the Village, or maybe Brooklyn, and an issue of Wired that you could tell was later from the thickness of ad pages (it was the 12/96 issue with the brilliant Neal Stephenson Hacker Tourism article).
Went with my host Judith, who is the worlds best date for cultural fun. (Don't get me wrong guys, I'm hetero). Off to more New York tourism.
Went on the night of the 25th to a performance with several Jewish groups at the Knitting Factory.
The headliners were "What I Like About Jew", a duo who perform goofy comic songs on Jewish themes. "2 pubic hairs and a 3 piece suit/Today I am a man" was one chorus. One of their pieces is the gleefully offensive Hannukah with Monica.
The best musician was Matisyahu a Hassidic Reggae/Dub performer who re-appropriates the Reggae references to Zion and the messiah. Cindy Cohn played sweet folk guitar with sharp-tongued lyrics "who do I need to fuck to get laid around here." Todd Barron did excellent deadpan standup comedy.
It was very enjoyable -- lots of native New York life forms.
Then I got food poisoning from the post-performance dinner, and spent most of the day with barely enough energy to get up. Hopefully will feel better to enjoy more of the trip.
I have intermittent wireless connectivity from the Verizon phonebooth hotspot catty-corner from my host's apartment; if you need to reach me, call my cellphone.
Zephoria grouches about a-list bloggers being catty and self-serving and mean.
To which I respond in comments:
It's just gossip, world-readable.Social networks that sustain conversation also harbor gossip, for good and for bad. For good-- models of behavior and thought to learn from the different lives of others (I hate to link, for fear of embarrassing people). And for bad -- cattiness, schadenfreude, one-upsmanship, and posing.
Seems to me that the ethics of blogging overlap mostly with the ethics of gossip.
from Wendy Seltzer back in September.
The collision of two bad ideas -- unverified e-voting and VeriSign -- is a really, really bad idea.VeriSign has been chosen by Accenture (the former Andersen Consulting) to provide key components of an Internet absentee voting system for Americans abroad. This is the same VeriSign that recently unilaterally altered the workings of the domain name system to return a VeriSign search page when someone mis-typed a .com or .net URL.
I can see it now: mis-mark your ballot and your vote gets automatically redirected to the candidate of VeriSign's choice. "We found these similar candidates: Did You Mean to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger?"
Joi Ito on address book roulette:
It originated with business cards, but has moved to mobile phones. There are three people: two players and a judge. The two players pick someone from their address books and reveal them to each other simultaneously. The judge decides which one is more famous or important. The loser has to shred the business card or in the case of mobile phones, delete that entry from the address book. It's quite funny because you try to play important people to beat the other person, but if you lose, you lose a valuable phone number. The judge's perspective of what sort of person is important also comes into play in an interesting way.It's no fun when you have backups of your phone numbers, but in Japan, where most people don't backup their mobile phone numbers, it's often for keeps.
From Cory
On that note: I have a special request to the toolmakers of 2004: stop making tools that magnify and multilply awkward social situations ("A total stranger asserts that he is your friend: click here to tell a reassuring lie; click here to break his heart!") ("Someone you don't know very well has invited you to a party: click here to advertise whether or not you'll be there!") ("A 'friend' has exposed your location, down to the meter, on a map of people in his social network, using this keen new location-description protocol -- on the same day that you announced that you were leaving town for a week!"). I don't need more "tools" like that, thank you very much.
More or less taking the day off. This morning, I bought supplies for the NYC trip:
* CD player to listen to music on the airplane
* Gloves, for New York weather
* Battery for cellphone
Hmmm.... coulda gotten good headphones and power adapter for the laptop instead. Didnt' think of it.
Being Jewish, I'm exempt from the frenzy of rushing and shopping (talk to me before Passover). The fun is in browsing, without a tight deadline, to-do-lists, and consequences.
For folks who celebrate Christmas, have a very merry. And a happy vacation to all.
"Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers." Uh, Joel, what about Amazon.com and Google? Linux core, custom applications. Possibly the most useful and broadly usable computer programs out there.
Joel Spolsky is usually insightful, smart, and lucid. His most recent essay, critiquing a book by Eric Raymond on The Art of Unix Programming, is dead wrong and confused.
To be fair, Spolsky is writing about Eric Raymond, who epitomizes the ubergeek arrogance of a class of unix infrastructure hackers. But Spolsky attributes this attitude to all Unix-platform developers, leaving out the user experience brilliance at Amazon, Google, and many other elegant and popular web-based applications.
Spolsky's essay equates Unix infrastructure development with Windows end-user applications. Apples and oranges.
Seb writes about RSS feeds from AudioScrobbler playlists. What a wonderful idea!
Using a RSS-to-HTML device like feedroll, letting others know what you've been listening to recently on your weblog becomes a snap. ...All of Audioscrobbler's data is published under the Creative Commons licence, and so are the user feeds. Which enables clever people to build crawlers ("Musicrati"?) and devise algorithms that exploit the distributed database and add value, for instance by matching participants' listening profiles (à la blogmatcher) or by building new playlists out of the raw materials.
I have friends with fabulous taste in music, and would absolutely love to be able to "listen in" to what they're listening to. Because only the titles are syndicated, there's no RIAA problem with sharing, and a feed listener could go off and get the music on itunes or somewhere. Music wants to be social.
what better place to catch up on blogging than a flight delay at DFW?
Flemming Funch writes about a study that contradicts some popular stereotypes about the use of IM at work.
Socialtext is a distributed team, we use IM a lot, and this certainly reflects my experience. There's worry about the misuse of informal communications tools like IM and blogs at work, but these aren't well-founded. People probably engage in the same amount of off-topic, relational conversation about sports, recipes, kids in electronic conversation as they do in analog conversation.
Scientists, Democrats distrust new electronic voting machines
By Scott Shepard, Sunday, December 7, 2003, Austin American-Statesman Washington BureauWASHINGTON -- Computer voting machines have been touted as a solution to the problems of the 2000 presidential election, but some election officials and computer scientists are concerned that the machines, especially those with touch screens, might be inaccurate and, worse, susceptible to sabotage.
Great that the Statesman has the story. The only local folks they quoted were at Hart Intercivic.
Bloglines, a web-based RSS reader, recommended by Chip.
What I like about it most is the way that it helps you manage and avoid weblog subscription cruft, with:
* an easy "unsubscribe" link that you can use to sign off from blogs you really don't want to be reading.
* ability to synch the list of blogs you read, as maintained in bloglines, with your blogroll.
One of my hesitancies about using RSS instead of web browsing to read blogs is that RSS subscriptions gather, unread, in your reader, like magazines in the corner. If you browse, and return to a favorite blog that you haven't read in a while, it's a delicious treat. If you subscribe, and see 52 unread posts, it's a guilty burden.
The Bloglines pruning functions seem like they'll help manage the joy/guilt ratio.
via David Weinberger, Zephoria has an insightful post about why profile-based conversation is wierd:
Reacting to a profile is just 10x more socially odd than small talk. And unfortunately, the profile itself takes away one's ability to engage with the standard "what do we have in common" questions. Thus, the lurker gets that far and then they have to find something meaningful to say without the ice breaker. Given this, it's such a miracle that profile-based dating ever works..
More than that, even Friendster degree-of-separation introductions lack the artfulness of a good party introduction, where the host can meet two people, spark a conversation about a topic they have in common, and slide away.
Blog-browsing and commenting feels like a more natural way of making an introduction. Not only do you know that someone is interested "politics", you have an idea of how.
Ed Felten has a seemingly sensible suggestion for a consumer guide to End User License Areements, those pages of legalese that you click through to download software.
People comment with typical apologetics for the status quo. EULAs aren't enforceable in court; buyers who know enough don't believe them; sellers don't believe them; and well-meaning lawyers insist that they are needed anyway, since everyone else uses them.
EULAs are a funhouse conversation between buyers and sellers, where nobody believes what they are saying, but everyone is compelled to recite these ritual untruths.
Didn't get my act together to travel, which worked out well.
Attended a lovely Thanksgiving dinner party with fantastic food and interesting conversation, hung out with a friend in from out of town, can see the bottom of my email inbox, have a stocked fridge and an uncluttered house, caught up by phone with lots of family and friends, had a chance to give thoughtful responses to several book recommendations.
I'm imagining the sheer overwhelmedness of coming back from a weekend away to a messy house, an empty fridge, a thousand emails, and a dozen little stacked up unfulfilled obligations.
Worked out quite nicely.