For those who missed it: iGoogle allowed anyone with a Google ID to create a personalized portal stocked with any of a wide selection of Ajax-based gadgets -- news, stock quotes, the now-defunct Google Reader, weather forecasts, your e-mail inbox, etc. -- arranged in tiles on a web page, and built around the foundation of Google's search interface. Pretty convenient. I used it as a Home page for the service's 8 year lifespan.
I liked iGoogle for the reason most people like Google's basic services (search, mail, calendar, maps): the user interface tends to be simple, functionally straightforward, and more richly configurable (or API-addressable) than one might reasonably expect of a service that's free. (Well, free except for that small matter of letting Google track every e-mail, search, clicked-thru web page, and third-party social connection that the Overlords of Mountain View can get their acquisitive mitts on ... the NSA would be jealous except they've been stealing everything Google knows about us on the sly).
Over several weeks before iGoogle shut down I looked at a number of the many alternative 'construct your own portal to the intertubes' services that are marketing themselves as iGoogle replacements. I don't claim to have made a comprehensive survey, but I gave Netvibes and Protopage a serious try, and checked out a few other before settling on uStart. (The uStart page displayed in this post is the default presented to users who have not logged in; the company is based in the U.K., hence the prominence given to BBC's news and London's weather.)
I'd venture that Google's idea of a happy future involves a preponderance of people using the Google search engine to find stuff that search engines find; and to use Google+ to become aware of stuff that people prefer to find through social connections / recommendations. Already, today, using Google's search engine while logged into a Google ID yields 'personalized' search results. That is, Google algorithms use every e-mail, past search, clicked-thru web page, and third-party social connection it has tracked to figure out what we're really looking for ... and what adverts the company can most profitably present to us.
In March 2012, Vic Gundotra, Google's Senior VP for engineering, was quoted on the topic of where Google and Google+ are heading in the NY Times to roughly this effect:
"This is just the next version of Google," Mr. Gundotra said, noting that he sees Google Plus as a social blanket that envelopes the entire Google experience. "Everything is being upgraded. We already have users. We’re now upgrading them to what we consider Google 2.0."
I'm not entirely comfortable with this vision.
Yeah, Google is going to track me anyway ... something I bring on myself by using many of its offerings. I'm also a willing participant in public social networking (anybody who looks can find me on Blogspot, Twitter, Tumblr, my Facebook Author (proto-) Page, and Daily Kos, never mind my web site). It's also arguably true that the NSA knows more about me than I do.
But I'm still a little queasy about the prospect of being enveloped by the Google+ social blanket given how much of my on-line search and social activity that would place in a single corporate data center.
Hence my move to uStart now that iGoogle is no more.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post asking the question "Should technology shape art?" ... and I 'fessed up right at the start that the question is a canard. Technology does shape art.
That truism was evident in stark and intriguing form on Saturday afternoon at Alley Cat Books in San Francisco, where the bookstore was hosting a "Small Press Love Fest" on 24th and Harrison. From the store's announcement of the event:
Authors and editors from New York City and the SF Bay Area come together to celebrate unique voices and indie publishing. Presented by Ambush Review, Corium Magazine, great weather for MEDIA, and Red Bridge Press.
The bookstore's revamped gallery space was full, standing-room-only full, and the poets and short story and flash fiction writers who took their turns at the podium had a wealth of witty, funny, haunting things to read.
As a professional geek I was especially intrigued by the 'found poetry' project from which Jordan Reynolds will publish in the Writing That Risks anthology forthcoming from Red Bridge Press later this year.
Starting with the poetry of Federico García Lorca as translated (or interpreted) by Berkeley Renaissance poet Jack Spicer, in After Lorca (1957), Reynolds speaks an English translation of a Spanish poem into his phone's Dragon mobile app for Android, which -- this is important, follow along please -- is configured to interpret spoken input as Spanish. Then, he copies the resultant text -- whatever Spanish the software thought it 'heard' in the English words read into it -- to Google Translate, which transforms the Spanish text back into English. Then he makes a poem from the Google Translate results.
That's an intricate sieve of process to sift a poem through. Let's break it down, with apologies to Jordan Reynolds if I am misrepresenting any particulars of his explanation:
Already-translated Spanish text is spoken aloud, in English.
The spoken words are interpreted by a software algorithm for turning spoken words into digitized text. But wait: the algorithm is deliberately sabotaged. Lied to, if it makes sense to call the use of software in a manner different than its makers intended 'lying.' ("Of course I'm speaking Spanish," one imagines Reynolds crooning to his Android ... in English.)
The algorithmically-generated Spanish text is then presented to another algorithmically-driven software service for translation back to English.
The poet arranges the results into a poem.
What I found intriguing about this process (which did, against all odds, result in something beautiful to hear Reynolds read) is the participation of software engineers in the creation of poetry. Not that they were asked or informed. They did not participate consciously. And, in fact, the poet (I'm speaking of Reynolds here, not Lorca or Spicer) had no angle, no theory about how the engineers' algorithms contribute to his work (I asked him, after the reading).
And that's the most intriguing part to me: that Reynolds accepts, as intrinsic elements of the digital substrate from which much 21st century culture grows -- with no particular interest in weighing them critically -- algorithms engineered over the course of, I don't know, twelve or fifteen years (as a system administrator I was installing Dragon Naturally Speaking for colleagues on the Berkeley campus sometime around the turn of the millenium ... so at least a dozen years).
Engineers, of course, make choices, as poets do. Those choices influence the workings of whatever they've built. Hence, to the way of thinking that struck me as I listened to Reynolds read at Alley Cat Books the other day, the participation of engineers as collaborators in the creation of his poems.
I don't suppose widely-available software is any different from the materials used to create other 'found' art: finding materials from which to make written, plastic, audio, visual, and/or video art has and always will be influenced by whomever lost the bits and pieces where an artist might find them, not to mention manufacturers of the materials themselves.
A child's discarded schoolwork. Old transit passes. A red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water. Not that one thinks of the artist's work as a collaboration with a school child, a commuter, or a chicken farmer. It's the artist's work, after all.
Intriguing, though, that certain software is so ubiquitous in these times that its origin and influence is as invisible as ... a transit pass. We see through a Google glass, darkly?
I can't end before mentioning the last author who read at the Small Press Love Fest: Jenny Bitner read half of her story "We ♥ Shapes," written in the voice of a mother whose child is a shapeshifter. This ... difference in her child gives the story's narrator oodles more than the usual mom has to worry about ... and I absolutely must find out how it ends, which means that Saturday's reading gave more than enough reason to find myself a copy of the Writing That Risks anthology; scuttlebutt is that it's due out from Red Bridge Press in May. I'll be waiting.
It's been quite a year for technology "advances" -- particularly in the neighborhood of cloud and social media services, whether free or cheap.
Apple released its iCloud service in October of last year. iCloud enables users to store music on Apple-run servers and access their collection on as many Apple-flavored devices as they care to own, from iPods to iPhones to iPads to ... well you get the picture. iCloud also enables users to sychronize e-mail, contact, calendar data, and other digital ephemera between Apple devices.
E-mail and other messaging in the cloud is old news -- think Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail -- heck, AOL for that matter, or even The WELL -- but Google is expanding its incursion into synchronization-space by bringing its Chrome browser -- now the #1 ranked browser in the world -- and Google Chrome Sync to iOS devices (a.k.a. iThings). Chrome and it sync features are already available on Windows computers, MacOS computers, and Android mobile devices.
Nexus 7 is the 7" tablet announced by Google last month and available today if you can find inventory. The Big G hopes to use Nexus 7 to make a dent in iPad dominance of the tablet market. Indeed, the device looks pretty neat.
Casey Johnston reviewed the Nexus 7 very favorably for ars technica the week before last. On offer for $199 or $249, depending on storage capacity, the price looks astonishingly low, especially compared to iPrices.
How is this possible? As Johnston writes, "Google has freely admitted that it's selling the Nexus 7 at cost, and is absorbing marketing costs."
Why would Google do this? Johnston again:
Two things are going to supplement Google's Nexus 7 foray: to a large extent, the data it will cull from usage to power its ever-growing ad network, and to a lesser extent, content. The Kindle Fire's monetary viability was built largely on the same blocks, though the emphasis was reversed. Google has already been monetizing with both tools through its Android phones for a few years (now 50 percent of all smartphones in the US, from which Google makes no money directly). A tablet for $199 with no contract strings attached could well reach a new and wide audience to power Google's algorithms.
Not to mention the data culling power fueled by and powering Google Now. More on that in a moment: no Now now, hang on just a few more paragraphs.
Before we get to Now, let's recognize there's a common denominator to all these cloudy, socially networked offerings. That would be the targeted-advertising denominator, the very same tech company characteristic that allowed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerman to rake in nearly $20bn in an IPO that was more broadly considered a "flop."
The common denominator envelope please. Ahem:
You want something for free? Okay. Tell us about yourself.
On Facebook we tell Zuckerberg and company all about what and who we like.
When we use webmail, everything we write to everyone is mined to augment the host company's databanks on who we are and what we care about.
When we sync our devices through a cloud service provider, every single piece of information that moves from one of the devices we own to another of the devices we own passes through a server that somebody else owns -- Apple in the case of iCloud; Google in the case of Google Chrome Sync (this in addition to whatever the government is up to, including but probably not limited to the National Security Agency's massive data sniffing filters).
When I write "every single piece of information that moves from one of the devices we own to another of the devices we own" I mean it. Every single piece.
Changes Facebook has made to its user experience, such as Timeline,
along with concerns over privacy have brought down the social network's
consumer satisfaction score, according to a new report.
It tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favorite team's score while they’re playing. And the best part? All of this happens automatically. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them.
How does Google Now know what you need "automatically"? By keeping track of where you are via GPS; by checking your calendar so the device knows where you're going; by knowing what you're interested in as expressed through search and social media, then guessing at what nearby landmarks, commercial establishments, and events correlate to those interests.
Naturally, everything Now knows Google knows. 'Cuz you're synced!
Or ... is it "sunk"?
Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan sum up all this data aggregation and what's being done with it in a fine, on-point NY Times article of 13 July: That's Not My Phone. That's My Tracker.
Thanks to the explosion of GPS technology and smartphone apps, these devices are also taking note of what we buy, where and when we buy it, how much money we have in the bank, whom we text and e-mail, what Web sites we visit, how and where we travel, what time we go to sleep and wake up — and more. Much of that data is shared with companies that use it to offer us services they think we want.
I wrote ten days ago that new discoveries about the bacteria that live on and in our bodies mean we are, effectively, a teeming zoo enclosed in a bag of skin.
Perhaps an inverse of that way of seeing ourselves is to note that our electronica externalizes our inner and private lives, pimping our thoughts, curiosity, whereabouts, and relationships to corporations and governments that use this information to manipulate and control us.
Yuck.
When I first caught wind of Google's Nexus 7 I thought maybe it was finally time to jump into the tablet game. Now I don't believe it is.
Why would I pay a couple hundred bucks to subsidize a pimp looking over my shoulder every minute of every hour of every device-enabled day?
Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand
was published in 1984, five or six years after my most ravenous period
of devouring science fiction novels ended. Thinking of it the other day, then looking at its publication date, reminded me that I read it right around the dawn of the intertubes.
Why did I think
of Stars in My Pocket... the other day?
Google Glass and Google Glasses, natch.
Google Glasses, if you
weren't watching tech news last week, are eyeglasses with a bit of Google Glass mounted at the edge of a wearer's field of view. What's Google
Glass, then? Here's how Reuters described it on Thursday:
Google
Glass is a stamp-sized electronic screen mounted on the left side of a
pair of eyeglass frames which can record video, access email and
messages, and retrieve information from the Web. [...]
The
glasses, which weigh less than some sunglasses, contain a wireless
networking chip and essentially all the other technology found inside a
typical smartphone - save for a cellular network radio - Google
executives said.
The battery is smaller than a smartphone battery, but Google is working on ways to make the battery charge last for a full day.
[Google
co-founder Sergei] Brin said he expects the glasses to be available to
consumers less than a year after the developer version is available.
Google
is still experimenting with various aspects of the glasses, including
potentially providing directions on the screen and the ability to have
the glasses speak out text messages, Brin said.
Fulfilling futurist vision
I've
forgotten much of the detail of Delany's 1984 novel, in which (from the novel's dust jacket) "the Web [is] a shadowy organization that controls the flow of data between worlds." Still, I'm surprised by how
frequently I continue to remember his description of the General Information service when I mull over the reach of our current web, and its ability to provide most any information one seeks, most any time, via some of the simplest and most useful interfaces you can load in a web browser: Google's home page, or Bing's or Baidu's (Yandex and Yahoo are more crowded and confusing, but their reach is analogous).
Delany's General Information service -- GI for short -- is a mode of hooking up, telepathically for all intents and purposes, to local nodes of massively cross-indexed data. The universe of Delany's novel is very very big, thousands of inhabited worlds across vast sectors of multiple galaxies; so "local nodes" refers to planetary, solar system, and star-sector sized aggregations of information. As in our actual, single-planet world, information has value. Access to it may be restricted. Here's how Delany portrayed his then-theoretical concept as it exists on a free-data transfer point called Kantor, somewhere in the fictional universe of Stars in My Pocket...:
GI on Kantor dwarfs any on any given world. To walk in the weak gravity by the great aluminum and ceramic banks in hot and cold storage is to walk past macro-encylopedias -- encyclopedias of encyclopedias! I recall my first time through, when I stood on a plane of scarlet glass under an array of floating light tubes and thought out: "What is the exact human population of the universe?" and was informed, for answer: "In a universe of c. six thousand two hundred inhabited worlds with human populations over two hundred and under five billion, 'population' itself becomes a fuzzy-edged concept. Over any moment there is a birth/death pulse of almost a billion. [...] Thus 'exactness' below five billion is not to be forthcoming. Here are some informative programs you may pursue that will allow you to ask your question in more meaningful terms..."
Does Free-Kantor or, indeed, any free-data transfer point contain all the information in the human universe? Far from it. On such a scale, data-quantity itself is even more fuzzy-edged than population. By in the way that an urban complex soon becomes a kind of intensified sampling of the products and produce of the geosector around it, so a free-data transfer point becomes a kind of partial city against the night, an image of the city without the city's substance, gaining what solidity in possesses from endlessly cross-filed data webs.
Google
Glasses promise to go further toward delivering what Delany wrote about,
speculatively, twenty-eight years ago, than humankind has ever gone before. Access to the hive mind, all the
time, as background to one's everyday activity ... without even having to take a smartphone out of your pocket and poke it.
TMI: an oopsie-daisy scenario, with teeth
Developments like Google Glass naturally lead one to ask: is internet everywhere, all the time, a good thing? When Google Glass becomes available to Joe Consumer it will dramatically up the ante on
those same questions.
One way to answer the questions is with parody, as in the video embedded below, posted a few months ago by Tom Scott as he followed the progress of Project Glass:
But if Tom Scott gave us the "oops, sorry" sound-byte, consider another novelist's lengthier take on life in intertubelandia, this one on life lived with the net as we know it rather than as a speculative fiction.
Helen Schulman's This Beautiful Life (2011) gives an open-eyed view to where too much web access -- even
the 'pedestrian' web already woven deep into the fabric of 21st
century life -- can go wrong. From Schulman's dust-jacket blurb:
When
the Bergamots move from a comfortable upstate college town to New York
City, they're not quite sure how they'll adapt -- or what to make of
the strange new world of well-to-do Manhattan. [...]
But the upper-class cocoon in which they have enveloped themselves is ripped apart when [fifteen-year-old]
Jake wakes up one morning after an unchaparoned party and finds an
e-mail in his in-box from an eighth-grade admirer. Attached is a
sexually explicit video she has made for him. Shocked, stunned, maybe a
little proud, and scared -- a jumble of adolescent emotion -- he
forwards the video to a friend, who then forwards it to a friend. Within
hours it's gone viral, all over the school, the city, the world.
The
ensuing scandal threatens to shatter the Bergamots' sense of security
and identity, and, ultimately, their happiness. They are a good family
faced with bad choices, and how they choose to react, individually and
at one another's behest, places everything they hold dear in jeopardy.
It's true that a novel of Upper West Side manners depicts a far different, far more sheltered sensibility than that of Delany's work, in which sexual expression and mores are treated way outside the mainstream. After all, a centerpiece of Stars in My Pocket... is the relationship between Marq Dyeth and Rat Korga, two fellows whose synaptic maps have been analyzed such that the shadowy organization that is The Web has discovered "Korga happens to be your [Dyeth's] perfect erotic object -- out to about seven decimal places [...] More to the point [...] out to about nine decimal places, you happen to be Rat's." Delany's fictions extrapolate from even more remote byways of the real world we know than New York's Upper West Side.
But it's not hard for anybody with a webcam -- let alone anybody with a child who has a webcam -- to imagine how easily damage might be done.
Have you ever looked around a restaurant, a subway car, a classroom, or a sidewalk and wondered at the proportion of people paying more attention to their devices -- smartphones, iPods, laptops -- than to their surroundings?
Might developments like Google Glass tempt us to forget altogether that there's a real world out there?
To
me it seems the real point is to make the Internet and technology a
more pervasive force in our lives. In fact, it feels like a half step
toward a bionic future, where we pump up our cognitive and physical
abilities with the aid of ever present computers.
Now, whether
that sounds like a techno utopia or electronic hell depends a lot on
your general attitude toward technology. As I joked with a colleague
earlier in the day: the reaction to the glasses has been roughly divided
between those who think affixing a computer to your face is crazy — and
people who watch Star Trek.
I certainly see the appeal, but I
fear what we sacrifice along the way. Google Glass may add some
capabilities or convenience, but it’s also a filter that sits between
our eyes and the real world.
I might never again miss an opportunity to record a precious life moment, but I might miss an opportunity to experience it.
London is considered the most spied-on city in the world, courtesy of its ubiquitous CCTV cameras, purportedly there to reduce crime. But according to a recent report, there's been little or no change in London's crime rates since they were more widely installed in the mid 1980s.
Privacy activists are worried that Britain will become the bleak totalitarian society George Orwell painted in his classic novel 1984, where citizens were spied on and personal freedom sacrificed for the benefit of an all-powerful state.
"We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society where we’re watched from control rooms by anonymous people," says Emma Carr of the BBW. "The worrying thing is that we don’t actually know how many CCTV cameras there are out there."
Imagine, then, a world in which you're surrounded by people wearing Google Glasses or the equivalent.
Which of them is piping every one of your unguarded gestures and utterances into cyberspace? How many have accepted 'special terms' on discounted glasses that required 'only' agreement that their data stream be uploaded, 24/7, to "OmniWatch Corporation," which reserves a fine-print right to direct certain data, at their sole discretion, to ambiguously defined 'security partners'?
When was the last time you read the fine print on your Facebook privacy agreement, or your cell phone contract, or that terms-and-conditions-on-tissue-paper pamphlet issued with your credit card?
Are Google Glass and its spawn going to be good clean fun? Or are we talking instruments of social control?
* * *
I don't know which world Google Glass and its descendents will usher in. Maybe it will be a world of lives shattered by spontaneous oversharing of adolescent impulse-porn. Maybe it'll be a world of algorithmically enhanced hook-ups. Might it be a matrixed world of electronically simulated experience? Or a world in which police agencies evaluate everything each of us does, says, spends ... and even looks at?
Perhaps a better question would be in what order and with what attendant chaos will technologies like those Samuel Delany visualized -- technologies like today's, whose disruptive effect Helen Schulman portrayed and Dharun Ravi thoughtlessly abused -- transform current human behavior and relations in ways we don't yet imagine?
I do not now and I never have owned shares of Facebook, now officially known to the World o' Commerce as FB. No skin off my nose, then, that on Friday, as the LA Times put it, Facebook stock stumbles in big public debut:
Facebook Inc. shares got off to a rocky start in what has been the most highly anticipated initial public offering in history.
The stock jumped more than 10% in the first few minutes of trading. But then sellers swept into the market and that gain evaporated.
"It's a total disaster because the stock is trading right at the IPO price," said Francis Gaskins, editor of IPOdesktop.com in Marina del Rey. "They didn’t want that in a million years. A traditional IPO is up 10% or 15%."
Mark Zuckerberg remains one of the 30 richest people on Earth after shares of Facebook Inc. (FB), the world’s most popular social networking company, hovered near the initial public offering price in its trading debut.
The Facebook IPO was not a disaster for Mr. Zuckerberg, though if I were him I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to squeeze through the eyes of any needles.
Hmmm... I'm not much of an investor myself. On the rare occasions I've prepared to buy a few shares of stock, members of my own family have begged for advance notice so they can sell short. With that disclaimer, I'll declare I have no intention of ever buying shares of Facebook stock.
Why not?
Because it's only a matter of time -- and probably not much time -- before Facebook becomes the next MySpace. Between uncertainties like those brought to public attention by writers for AP, PC World, and The Atlantic, and the ephemeral nature of 'cool', I don't see a lot of upside when it comes to Facebook, looking from the perspective of day traders or of long-term investors.
Will it be quick or easy to dislodge Facebook from its dominant position in social media space? I strongly doubt it. Have you checked your Google+ feed lately? Probably not, and to note that the staff over in Larry and Sergi's shop are smart and well-funded would be something of an understatement. But it ain't over 'til it's over, and for all we know the next big social media thing may be an app that hasn't been invented yet.
Facebook is valuable today because it's where 900 million people hang out. Eventually, if not sooner, whiling away the hours in the ho-hum social space where everybody else is jammed in with you is not going to be cool.
That's how trends work.
I check Facebook at least an order of magnitude more frequently than I check Google+. That's this week. Next week? I'm not placing any bets.
So many people have written about what went dark on the web and why
yesterday, you'd think there'd be nothing left to say. Well I'm going to
give it a shot.
First the sound-byte version of the context of
yesterday's blackout, taken from Wikipedia, perhaps the most visible and
important site that participated in (led, really) the action:
Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge
For
over a decade, we have spent millions of hours building the largest
encyclopedia in human history. Right now, the U.S. Congress is
considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open
Internet. For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out
Wikipedia.
Google's TakeAction page
posted yesterday -- titled "End Piracy, Not Liberty" -- gives a
slightly more contextualized explanation of what it was all about ...
this is the page that came up on 18 January (yesterday) if you clicked
on the blacked-out Google logo on the search engine's U.S. home page:
Two
bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate
and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the
Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of
Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.
The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. [...]
Both
of these sites gave visitors an easy path to express their opposition
to PIPA and SOPA: a petition to sign in Google's case, and a quick link
to contact your representatives in the House and Senate in the case of
Wikipedia. What fascinated me most about this was the huge range
of individuals in my Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ circles who posted
in support of the blackout: from the most libertarian Republicans I know
(yes, I do know more than a few), to the anarchist lefties.
So
that's all great, and you probably heard all about it already. I hope
you signed Google's petition or someone else's, and found your way to
your Congressperson and Senators' in-box ... if you haven't, it's not
too late. Yes, I contacted my legislators, and was interested to see
that Senator Diane Feinstein's "E-Mail Me" page was down in the morning,
so I had to come back for a second visit last night. Heavy traffic, you
might imagine...
But here's a sampling of the 'little stuff' you might not have noticed unless you are one of the web's bazillions of content providers beyond Wikipedia. You know, if you tweet, blog, tumbl, share photos or video, and so on.
Tumblr made it easy to black out one's own Tumblr blog for the day (see image)
Were
there other ways for individual content providers to participate in the
content blackout organized to protest SOPA and PIPA? Oh yes, indeed.
Check out Mashable.com's These Websites Are Going Dark... article of 17 Jan for detail. Did the blackout have any effect? Check out this from the NY Times article In Fight Over Piracy Bills, New Economy Rises Against Old:
When
the powerful world of old media mobilized to win passage of an online
antipiracy bill, it marshaled the reliable giants of K Street — the
United States Chamber of Commerce, the Recording Industry Association of
America and, of course, the motion picture lobby, with its new
chairman, former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat
and an insider’s insider.
Yet on Wednesday this formidable old
guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by
Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through
Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable
message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with
the Internet.
As a result, the legislative battle over two
once-obscure bills to combat the piracy of American movies, music, books
and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for
the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the
new economy rose up against the old.
So this all gets me to thinking:
Wikipedia serves community-generated content, and is one of the most visited sites on the intertubes.
Tumblr,
Flickr, Wordpress -- ditto, in a much more distributed,
everybody-says-their-own-piece kind of a way. And these sites get a lot of eyeballs too, day in and day out.
So what we had yesterday was a political action that was, in some very significant venues, enabled by technology companies that are big and staffed and funded and organized to
fight for its own self-interest ............... but that was realized by the individual writers, photographers, and videographers who pulled their contributions for the duration of the action.
That, methinks, looks a lot like a general strike.
Somebody
calls a general strike. Unions and other organizations may help to make
it easier by providing food, signs, organized pickets, and so forth ...
but it's the people who walk off the job who make it happen.
What
was proven yesterday was that an online general strike can have real
political effect in the highest levels of government. Again, from the same NY Times article quoted above:
First,
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, took to
Facebook, one of the vehicles for promoting opposition, to renounce a
bill he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who leads the
G.O.P.’s Senate campaign efforts, used Facebook to urge his colleagues
to slow the bill down. Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina
and a Tea Party favorite, announced his opposition on Twitter, which was
already boiling over with anti-#SOPA and #PIPA fever.
Then
trickle turned to flood — adding Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Roy
Blunt of Missouri, and Representatives Lee Terry of Nebraska and Ben
Quayle of Arizona. At least 10 senators and nearly twice that many House
members announced their opposition.
That's pretty
interesting, wouldn't you say? Seems there are a fair few people who are
mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore.
Two things happened in my little life this week that strike me as TMT.
Too much technology. I'm going to blog about that because everybody else
in the world is blogging about the Occupy movement, and I've filled my quota for the week.
Well,
okay, OWS does come up at a certain point in this post. And, what the
heck, I'll put up photos from last night's shutdown of the Port of
Oakland, which was a rousing success, included about a zillion people
out to participate in the blockade, and turned out to be a great way to
run into old friends.
Now. About too much technology....
First, I found myself using Google's search engine to find out how to spell a word.
Not because I don't have a dictionary. Heck I have multiple dictionaries, I'm a reference-book fetishist. And I've got Merriam-Webster on my desktop computer. And I've got Merriam-Webster's free and fabulous app on my iPod Touch.
(The
desktop dictionary came free with the purchase of the Collegiate
Dictionary, 11th edition. That was quite a few years back. The software
came on a CD -- an ancient, donut shaped digital medium once used to
transmit information. Do people even have desktop computers any more?
The iPod app is downloaded ethermedia, thank you very much.)
But back to dictionaries vs. Google. If Google does everything, why not use it? Am I right?
What led me to the search box was a flailing effort to spell a word correctly (I'll not say which word, to paraphrase Woody Guthrie). Point is, I was far enough off that my desktop app wasn't helping. It isn't good at inferring what I meant to spell, whereas Google does this trick pretty nicely.
Those who follow agent blogs might have seen John Rudolph of Dystel and Goderich, on Googling vs. looking things up in reference manuals
just a couple of days ago. So I'm not the only person noticing The
Change. Is something in the jet stream turning us all into Google
Zombies?
(Go on, click the link a couple paragraphs back, to the
Woody Guthrie song. It's Billy Bragg & Wilco performing "Walt
Whitman's Niece" from Mermaid Avenue, the most perfectly brilliant album you've probably never heard of.)
Second, I got a robocall the other night.
That's not news, I get robocalls all the ding-dang time, just like you do.
This robocall? It was some speed-talking robowoman urging me to support
... wait for it ... Occupy Wall Street.
Yup.
She
identified herself as a caller from Justice for All, which is either an
organization that tries to undermine women's reproductive rights (sorry,
not linking to them); or a "Criminal Justice Reform Organization" that
thinks the U.S. government's efforts are "inadequate in protecting the
lives and property of law-abiding citizens" (not linking to them either;
and, by the way, they explicitly deny sponsoring these calls); or ...
somebody else.
I hung up and ... um ... Googled for robocalls
about Occupy Wall Street -- and was directed by the friendly server
farms at the world's favorite search engine to a fellow on Posterous who
posted an audio file of the exact same call that I got.
Does it ever seem to you that Being Connected is just too much?
Maybe sometimes?
Thanks to me for snaps of Occupy Oakland's shutdown of the port yesterday evening, and especially the one of the fellow who turned out to be a friend of a friend and was carrying the best sign of the evening, a takedown of the extremists at the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas.
When I
began to blog regularly here on Blogger, I favored Google Docs to draft
& organize posts. The native Blogger editing interface was cramped,
permitting one to view only a fraction of even a short piece as one
edited.
Google Docs, on the other hand, was well-suited to
developing pieces that were destined for publication as medium-length
blog posts. The editing pane gave a work-area that filled most of a
browser window, and simple formatting controls yielded straightforward
HTML markup 'under the hood.' The Google Docs content could be copied to
Blogger and edited in its GUI or HTML interface, and/or the HTML could
be tweaked in a simple text editor (the latter, for example, vis-à-vis
cross-posting elsewhere). Better still, documents that took a long and
winding path to completion are protected in Google Docs by functionality
that permits recovery of any previously-saved version of a
post-in-development -- a "revision history" in the parlance of the
cloud-based application.
Google Docs began to evolve in April
2010 toward a model meant to better support rich formatting
functionality found in desktop word-processing applications, and
augmented that support by making it possible for multiple parties to
edit a document in real-time. As Olga Belomestnykh put it in A rebuilt, more real time Google documents, a Google Docs blog post dated 15 April 2010:
But
we didn’t want to just bring you traditional word processing features.
We also wanted to extend collaboration capabilities in documents. We
added a sidebar that lets you see who else is editing at the same time,
and, if you click the sidebar, you can chat with collaborators right
next to the document. And when other editors type, you can now see their
edits as they happen character-by-character.
Cool stuff.
But with the advance in collaboration capability, Google Docs lost
simplicity that was much-valued by those who used the application to
draft documents destined for the web. Documents drafted in Google Docs
acquired a tangle of div and span baggage when opened in
an HTML editor, with no added value to those drafting what were
intended to be simply-formatted documents.
On the same day that the new Google Docs features were announced, editowl began a thread on the Google Docs help forum titled Why no "Edit HTML & CSS" in new Google Docs?
It was one of multiple venues in which Google Docs users railed
fruitlessly against the loss of Google Docs HTML-friendly functionality
(this blog included, cf. It's new, but is it improved?, 5 July 2010).
I
continued to use Google Docs to draft my blog posts because -- like
most improvements Google rolls out -- the new interface was optional for
quite some time. I chose to stick with the old interface and document
format, and thus hung onto the simplicity I wanted from the app. That
worked for quite a few months -- I repeatedly declined to 'upgrade' to
the new editor.
Some months ago Google yanked users' option to
create and edit new documents using the old style interface and format.
Bummer, I thought. But I quickly realized it was still possible to force
the old-style by pasting a certain URL in one's browser instead of
relying on the menu in the application interface.
That
dodge stopped working, maybe about a month ago. Yes, there's still a
workaround: one can still make a copy of an "old format" document to
create a new doc in the old style -- then just change the document's
name and body, and click when offered a chance to use "the latest version of the editor."
This'll
only last for a short while, I'm guessing. ("Gill," who is ranked a
Google Docs Guru in the app's help forum, made the same prediction
fifteen months ago in a discussion thread titled The new google docs SUCKS big time!!!!! Comparatively speaking, my complaints are pretty darn mild, eh?)
The solution
So now we get to the good news, and the real topic of this post:
On 31 August Chang Kim posted Blogger's fresh new look on Blogger Buzz. Yes indeed, a new Blogger interface rolled out just last week.
The
new interface includes a new editor for bloggers who post on Google's
platform. One of the excellent updates to the interface fixes a problem
that made the old Blogger editor effectively useless. As Kim put it, "the post editor has been expanded and simplified to give you a larger canvas for drafting and previewing your work."
Amen to that.
I
won't comment (yet) on the nifty new navigation and blogging
functionality features of the new interface. I think I'm going to like
most of them, but it'll take a bit of use over time to reveal whether
they are improvements or impediments -- I won't declare myself before I
have something solid to say.
Hands down, though, the new editor
on Blogger blows away the cramped screens Google-hosted bloggers have
been living with for years. The real-estate given over to one's post is
generous, the GUI editor boasts a sensibly small number of HTML-friendly
formatting features, and it's easy to switch between composition (GUI)
and HTML mode. When one does look at the HTML it's not as awful a snarl of divs and spansas those emitted by desktop word
processing programs or the new(ish) Google Docs app. Looking at
broader elements of functionality: it's easy to apply labels, scheduling
a post for future publication is a snap, and -- now that the web is all
about GIS -- you can even associate a post easily with a geographic
location, using a handily-familiar Google Maps interface.
Well done, Google.
The caveats
However.
Two aspects of using Google Docs as a separate app for drafting are going to be hard for this blogger to give up.
The first is revision history. I really don't
want to 'accidentally' delete paragraphs that I spent loads of time
drafting and polishing, then have no way to recover them. But the
Blogger editor lacks this feature (which is offered by Google Docs, and
has been for some time).
The second is another sort of
accident-protection. Like many bloggers, I often stack up a fair few
proto-posts in advance: candidates for blogs that begin life as a
disorganized jumble of notes and half-baked ideas -- material that is
far from ready to see the light of the public intertubes. Some of these
candidates never do see publication. Some of them are flat-out bad
ideas; or I lose interest in them; or the moment just, well, passes.
That's what cutting room floors are for. I would hate to see those posts go live just because I accidentally click the
button on Blogger's editing interface. Yeah, I could un-publish,
pulling the post back into draft post-haste, but those who subscribes to
One Finger Typing via RSS or e-mail would be treated to an
eyeful of not-ready-for-prime-time draft and there wouldn't be a thing I
could do about it.
I haven't figured out what to do about the lack of revision history. A recent forum thread on this topic, I Must Be Missing Something. Surely There is a Way to Recover Text Mistakenly Edited From a Post, garnered a quick reply from gatsby, a member of Google's Blogger team, who suggested, "If
this is an issue which you are especially concerned with, you might
want to compose your posts in Docs first, which supports revision
history." Not so helpful from my point of view. See prior paragraphs.
On
the second sort of accident-protection I've implemented a crude sort of
fix: I've created a private blog, one that is visible only to me, so
that even if I accidentally publish a post no one can see it other than
yours truly. I can draft my posts in that private Blogger space,
stacking up as many half-baked ideas as I like and organizing them to my
heart's content using labels (tags) applied to the posts. I think
that'll work; it's been working thus far.
Despite these
reservations, my early call is that Google got this one right: a usable
editor for a publication platform, I can't complain about that.
Have you tried the new Blogger interface? What do you think?
I flew yesterday on Virgin America, and took a spin on one of the Google Chromebooks the airline is loaning to all takers this summer on its routes between Chicago, San Francisco, Dallas, and Boston. Yeah, I know, that makes this blog post something of a shill-piece. Still, the concept -- a lightweight machine that relies on network for most everything it does -- is worth thinking about if one thinks at all about how technology is evolving. So, here goes...
I've been on a few flights in the past year on which interent is offered for twelve or fifteen bucks, but it just hasn't been worth it to me to fork over even a few dollars for the privilege of being tethered to a screen while tethered by a seatbelt. I like having a good excuse to spend hours off-line. But the freebie, and knowing I was too brain-dead to do much else following back-to-back three day meetings -- one for work, and one with writers in my critique group -- led me to the "Chromezone" station at my boarding gate in Chicago. And there I was an hour later, drafting this post on a Google Chromebook at 34,175 feet and 478 mph according to the screen on the back of the seat in front of mine.
The loaner machine Virgin America is providing this summer is a Samsung Series 5 (note that Acer makes a Chromebook too). The basic machine feels solid, though the hinged plastic doors that cover the ports feel pretty flimsy to me. I decided not to exercise them too hard: a condition of borrowing the device included a 'you break, you buy' agreement signed with my credit card at ORD's Gate L3.
It was a bit strange to be on-line in an aisle seat, complete with intermittently wailing 15-month-old beside me (an iPad seemed the most effective device to keep her calm). At the same time it felt a bit too normal. A bit too much like being matrixed in, you know? Doesn't matter where I am, I'm in GoogleWorld, drafting a Google-hosted blog on a Google Chromebook, using Google Docs, keeping an eye on my Gmail account, and broadcasting the fact that I'm on-line and in the air at the same time on Google+. It was almost enough to make me feel the back of my neck, to make sure I wasn't actually hardwired to the headrest.
This matrixed-in mode is meant to be a feature not a bug. The Chromebook FAQ answers the question "Who should use a Chromebook?" as follows:
Chromebooks work best for people who live on the web - spending most of their time in a browser using web applications.
Yeesh... Live on the web?
Maybe I'd have more to say about the device and the experience if I were a "real" reviewer (check out David Pogue of the NY Times, who doesn't recommend the Chromebook concept).
From my perspective? The Chromebook is a limited-function laptop that works reasonably nicely if you've got network. That's the story in a nutshell. (For what it's worth, the Samsung feels more like a laptop than a netbook to me, but my comparison point is a work-issued Macbook Air, which is more-or-less the same size and weight as the Chromebook I test-drove).
Bottom line, the Chromebook doesn't run software oriented to local storage, let alone to finding oneself offline. Yeah, you can plug in a flash drive and use or save files to actual hardware, yeah, there's some functionality without network ... but basically the Chromebook is a screen, a keyboard, and a Chrome browser. Nothing wrong with that, but it's pretty limited once you step away from wi-fi (you can buy 3G access if you've got the the $500 model of the Samsung device, or tether to a phone with a data plan ... but you still need a cell tower).
To be fair, you can't overlook the fact that Samsung is selling the package for less than a third the price of the Air. And you don't have to pay for OS upgrades, at least not yet. I suppose the cloud-based bit-box model might work for some people.
It was fun to do some in-air IRC, but the novelty wore off fast. In the end, I'm not one of those people who wants to live on the web. I was pretty much done with the device when we reached San Francisco and it was time to hand the loaner back to the guy at the gate.
But, hey, if you happen to find yourself flying Virgin America between now and 23 September, why not give the Chromebook a test drive?
Thanks to Andy Sternberg for the image of the Samsung Chromebook Series 5, on Flickr.
In 21st century Intertubelandia, everything's connected to everything else. From the perspective of a web-oriented or mobile-oriented software developer, that often means that some part of what gives value to the software one builds is the available and accessible software that someone else is running elsewhere in Intertubelandia.
Examples on the web: If you've ever visited a web site that offers the option to click a button that translates the page into another language -- perhaps one you can understand more easily -- you're likely seeing a link to the Google Translate web element. If you've set up a iGoogle or a My Yahoo! page, and populated it with widgets that show you the weather in your city, or a scrolling feed of what your Facebook pals are up to, or the latest news from the New York Times or CNN, you're taking advantage of services being run someplace other than the company or organization whose URL you're visiting.
Examples on mobile devices: If you own or have test-driven an Android-platform mobile phone, or an iPhone, or an iPad, and have fiddled with apps that allow you to discover what movies are playing nearby, or to check in on foursquare, or to tweet, or to update your Facebook status, or to check stock market prices -- you've taken advantage of somebody's server running someplace, somewhere, that's communicating with an app on your device.
How does all this technomagic work?
The devil's in the details, but the short answer is via exchange of data through a set of consistent patterns of request and response that programmers call an API -- an application programming interface.
When a programmer creates software that relies on somebody else's service being available and accessible, she strongly prefers that the relied-upon service be stable.
Stable means that the API -- the patterns by which data is exchanged -- won't change radically or frequently, so she won't have to rewrite her software over and over again. Stable also means that the service will continue to be available, so that her software continues to work.
When reliable services prove unreliable
There are a lot of programmers out there in Intertubelandia who count on Google services to remain stable. On its face this seems like a reasonable expectation. Google is a very large company. They employ a lot of talented engineers, and their server farms are ginormous. They are as popular, powerful, and highly-valued as they are in large part because their stuff works consistently and is pretty much always there (except when it breaks, as things do).
Caught up in its ubiquity, it's easy to forget that Google has its own agenda. And that having an agenda means that the company might shift directions for reasons that aren't obvious, or at times that aren't predictable.
Like last Thursday.
Google announced on the Google Code blog this past Thursday afternoon that they'd be doing Spring cleaning for some of our APIs. Here's a pullout quote:
[...] some of our older APIs have been superseded by bigger and better things and others may not be receiving the necessary love. As the web evolves and priorities change, we sometimes deprecate APIs – that is, remove them from active development – to free up resources and concentrate on moving forward. Today we're announcing a spring cleaning for some of our APIs.
The blog post's author was Adam Feldman, Google's product manager for the company's APIs. He went on to list twenty APIs that Google would deprecate, including a number that will be shut down later this year -- not just "remove[d ...] from active development," but killed outright.
Some of the APIs that are being shut down are pretty popular. That is, a lot of developers have relied on those APIs to make their own software interesting or valuable. These software developers are confronted with two choices. They can find another way to obtain the functionality offered by the marked-for-death Google APIs, or they can give up on their obsolete software.
Oh well. "As the web evolves and priorities change..." (Or, as some might translate, "When our business model changes, without regard to yours...")
How developers are taking the news
How are developers taking Google's news of last week? It's a mix. There's a juicy string of comments on the Spring cleaning for some of our APIs blog post. They range from pissed off to disappointed to restrained to disgusted to pleading. Here are a few examples:
idndomains: "I guess A LOT of webservices will be hurt. Your new APIs are either pure bullsh[*]t or specially aimed to promote your own affiliates."
Franz Enzenhofer: "i have a question: why should any developer, any company which wants to build a valuable product for the long term use any of your APIs ever again?"
elmar: "I'd also like to voice my disappointment with the shutdown of the Translate API. It was a really cool tool for experiments in the language learning space."
Shortseller: "This is a pity. Is there any option to let the translate api live on a paid basis?"
Alexu: "Charge for Translate API, don't shut it down!"
In a very odd coincidence, on the very day it was announced, I discovered the Translate API was going bye-by as I wrote a blog post for Project Bamboo, in which I am involved through my job at UC Berkeley. My post announced a service that a colleague has just made available. That service relies on the very same Google Translate API that is now deprecated and set to shut down in December. Though we announced our service to project colleagues on the day Google Translate was slated for the dust-bin of intertube history, we're fortunate that our service is meant only as an example and an experiment -- a pattern for other services our project is slated to produce. We only needed Google Translate as an example of a remote service that our services can call. There's not a lot we invested in hooking up to Google, and by the time the Translate API goes away we won't need it anymore.
But.
The larger lesson is clear: you can't count on 'free' or 'experimental' services. If you do, you're going to be disappointed or worse.
Is it really Google's fault?
Did Google do wrong in deciding to shut down some of its APIs? I don't think so. Harm, perhaps, but not wrong.
The thing is, there's nothing surprising about Google deciding to shuffle its portfolio of service offerings. They never promised otherwise. They're a for-profit company -- with shareholders, even. What else could anyone reasonably expect? The company exists to make money.
One commenter on the 'spring cleaning' blog post noted, "It doesn't seem like Google is being honest regarding the reason for shutting down these APIs" (Amos Benninga). I'd have to agree. "As the web evolves and priorities change..." ... I mean, puh-leeze. On the other hand, that's not surprising either.
"Don't be evil"? Remember those three famous words? Wikipedia calls them "the informal corporate motto (or slogan) of Google, originally suggested by Google employees Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel at a meeting." The key word there is "informal." Google's "philosophy" states something a little bit different: "You can make money without doing evil." The key word there is "can."
It's silly to expect a for-profit company to continue to offer a service just because you like it or want it or even need it.
The NY Times, reporting on the demise of blogs in February, gave unique-visitor stats to Google's Blogger service as 323 million in December 2010, a 9% gain worldwide. It's kind of a funny article, in that all the 'evidence' for the death of blogging is allegorical ... whereas the numbers lead to an opposite conclusion.
News. Go figure.
So with all that traffic, I don't suppose I was the only one put out when Blogger had an aneurism last week. That's not a technical term, but I think it conveys the big picture. Time Magazine's Techland reported on Friday in Outage Silences Blogger Blogs that:
Bloggers at Google-owned blogger.com were locked out of their blogs for a number of hours overnight, apparently after a behind-the-scenes update that went awry.
The outage continued for more than twenty hours, during which posting and commenting was blocked. Content posted on Wednesday and Thursday disappeared, among other disconcerting rips in the fabric of the intertubes. Google promised the missing content would be restored, but, well ... you know ... one hoped for the best. As far as I can make out, much of the affected content does appear to be back on-line as of Sunday evening, though Blogger's status updates have not yet declared that data is fully recovered. I am aware of at least one blogger whose posts are back on-line but whose comments are still MIA.
Here's Google's not-quite-post mortem explanation, posted on Friday morning as Blogger is Back:
We’re nearly back to normal -- you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored. [...] Here’s what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages.
A couple hours after that announcement this blog was still unrestored, and when it did come back my latest post was incorrectly timestamped and its labels had been concatenated into gibberish. No big deal. I fixed it Friday evening.
If your data matters, you need a hybrid strategy, with local storage and local content creation and editing tools. If your local storage fails, you can grab what you need from the cloud. If your cloud service fails, you’ve still got it locally. But if you rely just on the cloud, you’re vulnerable to exactly this sort of failure.
In September of last year, I posted a blog titled Safeguarding cloud ephemera Part II: keeping your blog alive. In it I suggested several concrete strategies for backing up products of the many hours bloggers put into their posts. I summarized with this:
Whatever way you save your blog posts, backup matters. For your digital copies -- whether in blog export format, e-mail, word processing formats, etc. -- be sure you take the same kinds of precautions with the data that you would with any other file(s) you hope to keep beyond the life of your current computer's hardware. Back it up. Save it in a safe place, on a device that you will be able to read into the future. When technology changes, it's your responsibility to move data to a format or device that the new technology can read. If you delay this chore, it can become onerous or impossible, as my experience converting a pile of near-obsolete 5.25" floppy diskettes showed me earlier this year. There are no magical solutions to this problem ... letting a "cloud" provider safeguard your data works until it doesn't; and that nifty floppy / CD / DVD / Zip disk / external hard disk / flash drive will become obsolete in two or five or ten or fifteen years. Bank on it.
Did I get my knickers in a twist when Blogger went bye-bye last week? Nope. A friend and frequent commenter on this blog e-mailed on Friday, wondering what happened to Thursday morning's post. He wanted to comment on it, he said, but all of a sudden it had gone missing. "I'd say something here about 'I hope you have a copy,'" he wrote, "but I know you well enough to know that there at minimum there's one copy, possibly multiple versions!" He was right. I take my own advice.
By the time this post hits the intertubes, most bloggers hosted on Google infrastructure will have been made whole, or whole enough to repair the damage without too much trouble. I hope that doesn't leave too many feeling too complacent.
Technology breaks. It's always best to hedge one's bets...
I write fiction, take an activist interest in politics and culture, and am a recovering information technologist. My novel Consequence was judged Best General Fiction in the 2017 Green Book Festival competition; please visit my website for more info. ~Steve
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