4 out of 5 Doctors Agree

That my other blog helps fortify your bones.

Not really, but with 74% of all statistics being made up on the spot you’ve no way of double checking my claim. I’ll have to come back to this blog later, but until then I’ll be updating that one more regularly since it’s linked to my Flickr account already and I’ll be posting pictures at least semi-regularly. Mostly frisbee pictures, but I’ll hopefully start finding more time to take pictures of other interesting things. If I’m ever feeling intellectual or anything I’ll be sure to head here, though so keep that RSS rolling.

Below is a picture I took at the park across the street from my house about five or six years ago when we got three inches of snow in a few hours.  I think that has to be one of my favorite memories of living in Irving.  I don’t know if I’d enjoy 20 inches of snow every year as much, but I certainly wouldn’t mind getting nice amounts of build up on a yearly basis.

 

A “video killed the radio star” reference? Seriously?

I think video has surpassed audio as far as web 2.0 prosumer content thanks to YouTube.  While you still can’t tag a certain instant in a video or directly quote it through an excerpt clip like you can text blogs, YouTube makes video blogging a two-way street by allowing viewers to instantly reply by capturing video online directly from their webcam at home.  No fuss, no mess, no Windows Movie Maker.  I think this development actually hinders the evolution of audio blogging because I’m sure a lot of people prefer the visual medium to audio because it adds a dimension of personality to the content they’re taking in.  I hope audio catches up.

 

I Know Exactly Where Everything Is

I was sure I had posted this, but logging in told me I had an unpublished draft.  Whoops.

Weinberger argues that the internet and all of its content is miscellaneous mostly because we’re running out of ways to specifically classify everything. I say that the internet is specific because everything is so specifically classified. The internet is one big mess in your room that your parents claim they can’t even walk through for fear of being sucked in: it’s full of anything and everything and if you’re not careful you’ll step on two week old pizza, but amidst all of these things you know the order to your piles of clothing in descending order of cleanliness and which sandwich has only been sitting there since this afternoon and is still safe to eat. A bit less than a fifth of the world is online, roughly the entire population of the world in 1850. That’s a lot of minds to appeal to, yet everyone seems to find exactly what they’re looking for, why? The third order of things. The data about data that allows someone to Google purple monkey dishwasher and come up with 171,000 results in a matter of 0.18 seconds. Just because sites are boiled down to this minute category, it doesn’t make them miscellaneous, I think it may do the opposite and make them even more relevant for the few people that want to find their old t-shirt at the bottom of the third pile from the door.

 

Derrida. We meet again.

I think what Derrida is saying in “Paper or Me, You Know…” is a continuation of what he argued about the book to come.  Paper isn’t dead, just like the book isn’t dead.  When someone is an author, a writer, a typist, anything, they are out to get control of “the screen.”  A writer puts on paper what he wants you to read in the order he wishes it to be read and this is not a concept that changes with an emergence of new formats and media as the world goes “paperless.”  Sure, there are varying degrees of importance of a sheet of paper, from toilet paper to a signed and notarized business document, but paper is still a part of our world, and will remain so long after sheets made from trees are gone.  Just the computer screen serves as our paper, because even though we can layer windows on top of one another, we are still only reading one side of one page in one dimension.  Even if the text is in strange format, that does not mean that it is doing something that cannot be done on paper.

The book House of Leaves is a great example of an author wanting to control the screen that is paper.  Text runs up and down the page, goes wherever it can, with this method used as a device to manipulate the readers to do things they had never had to do before with a book and thereby flexing the muscles paper has now and will have once every word you read will be linked to something beyond it.  Even if it is linked to thousands of things, one can only see them one at a time,  so in essence all new technology allows us to do is sift through information faster, but not in any manner different from looking at paper.

 

It’s not like we’re paying to access the internet or anything…

It’s pretty much accepted that when you sign up for any sort of internet service, be it 56k or 30/5 Mbps fiber service that you’re not actually getting the 30 megabits per second out of your connection right?  Why is that?  If internet providers claim that you’re not getting anything near what you’re paying for because there are too many people using the internet, isn’t it only fair that they not promise such extravagant speeds?  It’s certainly not a hardware issue because pretty much every ethernet port is rated for at least 10Mbps and most standard connections don’t go beyond that, and if they do and you’re a subscriber of a super-speed ultra fast connection, your computer probably has a 100Mbps port or a 1000Mbps connector so you should be able to handle all the bandwith your fat pipe provider claims.

Yet the people on the other end of the line claim that some users wanting to get the most out of the connection and get, God forbid, the vaunted 5Mbps down and 2 up out of the connection they’re probably shelling out 50, even 60 bucks for are the problem with your 5/2 connection really only being 1.5/768 AT MOST!  So what do they do?  They see themselves as a great bartender in the switch and tell you you’ve had enough of that internets for today, you can’t have no more!  They block ports, not to prevent illegal downloads and the like, but so can’t enjoy the connection speed they’re paying for because if they do, their system doesn’t have enough bandwidth to spread around.  It’s like that scene in It’s A Wonderful Life where there isn’t enough money in the bank for everyone to cash out at once and everyone gets angry, except not even Jimmy Stewart could calm us down if push came to shove, we’re paying for internet, if the people on the other end are overselling, maybe they should take all their profits and update their hardware to keep up with the demand, not claim that they can’t update without jacking up the price.

On top of this, the bigger boys, the ones with the lines, want to tell us that since they’re running the lines, they’ll be running the show.  As we all know, when someone with pockets that deep is running the show they’re only looking to make their pockets deeper.   This is where Net Neutrality comes in.  The line holders don’t want everything on the internet to be seen equally, they’re looking to gimp what you can see and how fast you can get it.  How is this going to happen?  Corporate sponsorship, of course!  If the government doesn’t get their heads out of their butts and puts in some preventative measures through neutrality legislation, the internet will soon go the way of the ham radio, or old opinion pamphlets, two concepts the internet has brought back to life: self-broadcasting, and self-publishing.

Where are the smart mobs when you need them?

 

Foucault That

Foucault’s “What is an Author” seems to tangle with the notion of an author being something of a creation of the reader’s mind more than something that dictates the work that has been authored.  If you go to a book store and look for a book you’ll most often find that they are grouped in a first order by genre, then by author instead of by subject matter.  Would you ever think of going to Barnes & Noble looking for IT in the evil clown/demon section?  NO!  You’d ask where they keep the Stephen King.  Foucault basically wants to find out why authors are set apart from the rest of humanity and what purpose an author really has.

With all the functions he presents the author as having and the many hats an author may wear, I don’t see why he thinks the author function will be phased back out and will no longer be the big issue for readers that he sees it as being now.  It seems to me that we are at a point where we want as much authorship as we can get, if nothing else to know where to trace what we just read to and, if need be, place blame where blame belongs.

 

Polarizing Copyright and the Jumping Frog Jubilee

Even Mark Twain had a problem with copyright laws.  While his stance didn’t go as far as a perpetual copyright, he did want a copyright that was secured through the life of his children.  I think something along the lines of what we’ve got today would suit the man just fine.

 He noted on more than one occasion that the grandkids should fend for themselves, but for Twain and his daughters, he sought to combat “the pirates.”

The “pirates” Twain referred to were publishers who would profit from his works that would be popular long after his death so the “immortal” publishers could benefit from his work while leaving his daughters out in the cold.  From the Ars Technica article, I think Twain would object to what the government is doing with copyright laws today.  The seemingly never-ending expansion of copyrights is taking away more and more what we, the public in “public domain,” can do with anything made by anyone.  Next thing we know people will come out of the woodworks and lay claim to the lineage of Virgil or Homer so they can expand copyright laws further and make money off of being born, which seems to be the entire purpose of this “rich get richer” concept of the modern copyright.  I think we need to pull back the reins on our politicians who are answering to none other than the the al-ighty -ollar to help everyone benefit from works that have compensated their creators many times over and have had a good run without worrying about all the crazy copyright laws that limit you from doing anything with anything.

 

Wiki – Not Just Rapping Onomatopoeia

While looking for something on Wikipedia to edit, I thought I’d take a gander at ultimate, but the game has one of the most extensive pages I’ve encountered on Wikipedia, including a link to Ultipedia, a wiki based entirely on the sport.  Eventually I decided to contribute to the existing page for the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D, since it was missing some things I thought were pertinent information for people researching the camera.  Check it out.

 

Maybe not bastard coated bastards, but not quite smart mobs

I think the point I was trying to get at in my response to Smart Mobs is that while technology is, or may be depending on how you see it, advancing at a clip similar to what Rheingold predicts in his book, the people that become the users for these technologies are the factor setting the technologies back. I can’t find the post, but a few months ago I read someone’s opinion that said that MySpace is setting web design back ten years with a bunch of users that have no knowledge of how to use the resources available to them and thus their pages ultimately boil down to a faster loading, more annoying version of the dancing baby or the hamster dance. This is my biggest issue with internet mobs that may or may not be smart, users that refuse to inform themselves on whatever advances, however brilliant, in technology become available to them. The fact that a tech support call usually starts off with the question “have you tried turning it off and on again?” is disheartening to me and makes me cynical as to how far we as a potentially smart mob will go in the next five years.

 

Rheingold – I can’t quite figure it out

I’ve been trying to come up with some sort of response to how smart mobs have been coming along as Rheingold foresaw five years ago for the last hour, but I don’t think we’re getting anywhere.  Instead of collective immersion in new technology, people are isolating themselves further with every innovation in connectivity.  Instead of sharing their experiences with each other, there are only a few experiences being shared with everybody, and for the most part these are not the kinds of examples that lead me to believe that this increasingly connected world we’re in is getting any smarter.  TMZ.com started with a group of people sharing their camera phone videos about celebrities doing stupid things, and it seems that the trivial garners much more attention than the important.  The school shooting at Virgina Tech was huge news for about a week and permeated a huge number of media outlets, but all the while people were still more eager to find out how long Paris Hilton was going to be in jail and who was going to interview her fresh out on parole.  While people such as you and I may not care, for every one of us, there are dozens who live for these news.  Instead of utopian online societies where people can interact  and do things that benefit each other, most people want to know only how what they get from the internet benefits them, not who in their area might need a gallon of milk from the grocery store while you’re out that may later be able to pick your kids up from school when you’re running late at work.  In order for truly smart mobs to become a more common standard, the people accessing the technology have to wise up to the potential of what is at their fingertips.  We need to become more than consumers.  The internet is full of freeloaders and as more people become connected, the number of freeloaders will only go up.  There is not enough natural selection taking place online and this leads to rampant wastes of time and thought.  I think that the main problem is that there are still too many people that work under the assumption that there is nobody watching them online, and until there is an effective, but not too intrusive, means for people to police each other, we as an online society will not prosper.

I seem to be rambling, so I’ll step back for a while and see if I can come up with a more proper way to articulate my thoughts on smart mobs and find some examples to back up my thoughts, but for now I’ve been at this for more than an hour, I’ve written tons and started from scratch more times than I can recall and started with enough time to allow myself to get this in before midnight, but it seems that tonight was not my night to sort out my thoughts.  I think we all have a long way to go to truly smart mobs, that’s if we ever get there, and because of that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the concepts Rheingold seems to have such a gleam in his eye over.  I guess it’s because “people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling” and the happy future where everyone contributes doesn’t seem likely when most people on the internet just want to have fun.