Posted June 22nd, 2009, in: Art Etc| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc

On par with Radiohead and Bjork, Xiu Xiu is an amazing project.

I had a hard time with it at first. Remember when you were a kid and didn’t like onions? or coffee? Xiu Xiu is a savory experience.

I borrowed all of Xiu Xiu’s albums from friends.  It’s definitely going to inform my own art.

Production-wise, Xiu Xiu is some of the most interesting stuff I’ve heard that isn’t clearly “avant garde.”

Just google it.  Great music vids on YOuTube too.

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Posted May 14th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| New Media| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0

This is a draft version.  Suggestions welcome.

Short answer: People. 

What the Semantic Web (now officially called any number of other things besides that) needs in order to become mainstream, in my opinion, is people and the connections between them. The phrase “The Social Graph” comes to mind a la Brad Fitzpatrick‘s once famous, but now all but forgotten manifesto which even Tim Berners-Lee eventually commented on. 

The Semantic Web would catch on if it was seen as even remotely useful by the young people who are most likely going to be building the next big thing on the web.

The beautiful thing about the Web2 era is that highly useful tools can sprout up overnight simply because of the desires of more or less ordinary people with no credentials or affiliation with a company. Everyone knows someone who’s a programmer.  The next big social software application just might come from the bedroom of a teenager.  There is hardly any barrier to access anymore.  This is why Web 2.0 happened.  A new tool or service doesn’t need a business plan and a data center to launch and go viral.

The trajectory of innovation throughout the last five years or so, the “Web 2.0″ years, has been around capitalizing on people, the content they create, their interests, and the value added by crowd-sourcing.  The benefits in the social media space are clear from both the perspective of normal end-users, as well as giant companies. Mostly, these benefits are about filtering noise and finding relevance on the user-side and on the giant company side, gathering metrics, targeting messages and acquiring free content.   The SemWeb standards have a lot to offer the Social Media realm, dare I say, probably even more than CSS with rounded corners does (I hope I’m not offending anyone here).  

But the way things are today, for most programmers, implementing SemWeb standards is a lot of extra work with no immediate benefit. Why not just use MySQL or cook up a new XML format?  

So why are these standards being completely ignored by the coders on the street?   RSS took off.  Why not FOAF? I think it’s because there’s no useful directory of URIs for people.  There are lots of SEmWeb geeks who have URIs, but the kids on MySpace and FaceBook don’t have URIs or FOAF files.  And those kids’ eyeballs and participation are worth real money!

One fine day, back in 2006, Tim Berners-Lee came down from the mountain and gave us a commandment (or at least he logged into his blog and made a suggestion):

“Do you have a URI for yourself? If you are reading this blog and you have the ability to publish stuff on the web, then you can make a FOAF page, and you can give yourself a URI.”

Then, apparently fifteen minutes after the first post was published, Berners-Lee really got at the importance of URIs in a post called Backward and Forward links in RDF just as important:

“One meme of RDF ethos is that the direction one choses for a given property is arbitrary: it doesn’t matter whether one defines “parent” or “child”; “employee” or “employer”. This philosophy (from the Enquire design of 1980) is that one should not favor one way over another. One day, you may be interested in following the link one way, another day, or somene else, the other way.”

For those of you who don’t yet understand the idea of the Semantic Web, here’s the deal.  If there’s one web-address that represents each person, place thing or idea, it becomes possible to crawl the Web (documents as well as databases) looking for links to that person place or thing. And if those links contain tags which specify the meaning of the links, the web-at-large begins to look more like a giant database.  This is the “Web of Data” (in contrast to the “Web of Documents” we know and love).  This is what people call The Semantic Web. So what’s stopping people from being in the “Web of Data” (AKA Semantic Web)?  Like Tim Berners-Lee suggested, we need URIs for people.  That’s where it all starts.  Once there are URIs for people, and there are semantic links (ones that contain tags explaining what they mean) pointing at the those URIs, we can start making tools that use that data.

This is a fairly simple concept.  And Berners-Lee makes it sound simple enough.  Sure, we’ll all just give ourselves URIs and viala, the Social Graph will go Semantic.  That sounds great but there are a few problems with leaving it at that.

• Most ordinary people do not have websites or hosting of their own and instead rely on Social Networking Services’ profile pages for their web presence.  This means that most people have no way of easily publishing themselves to the Web of Data.
• For-Profit Social Networking services have a conflict of interest with regard to providing the Web-at-large with useful, granular “Social Graph” data. Instead we see APIs that give approved developers limited access to data.  No love for the average joe like me that is not a programmer.     
• The Web currently has no trustworthy repository for facts about ordinary people.  Trustworthy means not-for-profit at the very least.  The closest thing we have is Wikipedia, but Wikipedia does not allow entries on ordinary, non-notable people.  (keep in mind that the Wikipedia publishes the facts in its ‘info boxes’ in RDF one of the core Standards of what we have been calling ‘The Semantic Web’)  

We need to start thinking of the Web more like we think of a Public Library, but completely decentralized and with infinite shelf-space.  I think WikiMedia, the organization behind the Wikipedia is the best bet for a trusted librarian for all the information about normal people.

I think what is really needed right now is a non-profit run directory of people, possibly even modeled after the Wikipedia, especially when it comes to the concurrent DBPedia project, which publishes the contents of  Wikipedia facts to the Semantic Web.  Really I think because of WikiMedia’s established trust, they would be the ideal organization to do this.  Wikipedia could simply have another layer which reveals non-notable results or ‘all results.’

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Posted May 2nd, 2009, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc

The following is a little illustration in the form of a hypothetical scenario of why I think that individual behavior makes a big difference.  I end up giving this example to just about everyone that I end up discussing my personal philosophy with.  The hypothetical scenario is not something I invented, but I can’t remember where I got the idea.  I’ve surely altered it a bit but the point is what is important.

[beginning of story]

Imagine a small town.  In this small town, everyone has more or less the same ideas about how to behave and treat one another.

In this town, it’s understood that if you were to find money on the ground outside the local grocery, you would turn it in because that’s what everyone has always done.  And in turn, if  a citizen of the town got home from the market and realized that she didn’t have in her pocket the twenty-dollar bill she had left the store with, she would likely call or return to the store, quite confident that one of her neighbors would have noticed the bill on the ground in the parking lot and turned it in to the management of the store.  

Now imagine that you [addressed to you the reader] moved to this nice little town.  And one day you come across a twenty dollar bill on the ground outside of the local grocery.  You pick it up and stick it in your pocket.  That’s how things are done where you’re from.  You just got lucky!

A while later, one of the town natives calls over to the store and is quite surprised to find out that no one has turned in the money he surely must have dropped between the market and his car.  

At this point, in his mind, it is no longer necessarily an active custom of the culture of the town to turn in found money.  In fact, later on, he reinforces this by not turning in money that he finds outside the market since he no longer believes that it is the normal thing to do.

Since you moved to this town, a chain-reaction has begun that will change what people think is the ‘right’ or ‘normal’ thing to do when they come across their neighbor’s accidentally misplaced money.

[end of story]

I know this is a fairly silly narrative, and I swear it comes across as much more believable and compelling in verbal communication, and I’m sure I could have written it more interestingly, but bare with me,

The idea is this:

The number of interactions we have with other humans in our lives that give us a real sense of how people behave is small.  If you’ve ever visited a foreign place for a few days and left with the idea that “The people there are so friendly and helpful..” remember that it was probably only one or two interactions that gave you that idea.  Maybe you were confused about a train map and someone offered to explain it to you. Maybe it was something else like that.

Later today, or tomorrow or next week, you might see someone who obviously could benefit from the help of a stranger, but you might be inclined to not help them because that’s not really how we do it around here.  But if you do help them, in their mind, it’s likely that it will become the way we do it around here, and in turn they will be more likely to do the same kind of thing for others. 

I believe that a lot of the time, people behave according to how they think other people behave.  The good news (or bad news) is that the opportunities that people have to really get a sense of how people behave are few and far between.  

So in the next 24 hours, something you do in your interaction with a complete stranger could actually have a fairly large ripple effect.  

You can change how people act just by treating people differently.

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Posted April 5th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)

As a major intaker of information about leading technologies, I am proud to say that at the time of the creation of this blog post, I am ahead of the game as far as declaring a change in the language we use to refer to the next phase of web evolution.

The term “web” has never been stronger. The “internet” goes on as something we mention almost every day. And the technologies that comprise the realm of what we have been calling semantic web, mainly markup standards, aren’t going anywhere.

But semantic web just fell out of favor as a [canditate for a] useful euphemism in our language.  The moment this became obvious to me was a few weeks ago  when I heard that Tim Berners-Lee spoke at TED and didn’t mention ‘the semantic web.’  A few weeks later I saw the video for myself and felt a certain sadness or abandonment when TBL talked about the geekiest dream ever, one that he created, without using the name I thought we had all agreed on for it, The Semantic Web.  Instead, he used a different euphemism for the most awesome library system ever conceived.  He called it “Linked Data.”

If you are a Semantic Web apologist like myself you might feel slightly deflated by a sudden change in terminology. I’m sorry.  I’m sure TBL is sorry too.  

But the reality is that “Semantic Web” is always going to be confused with Natural Language Processing, which is also a field of technology that is growing fast in its own right.  

No sustaining buzz has really caught on with “the semantic web,” as a catch phrase, beyond us geeks that are already sold on the idea.  Instead, we’ve recently heard more and more announcements (made usually by search companies) that include the word semantic as if the mere use of the word means that the company is doing something right.

The battle we’ve been fighting as SemWeb advocates is largely a battle for widespread awareness. TBL has said himself that the phrase semantic web wasn’t the best choice of words.   

I’m sure TBL spent at least an afternoon considering what he might say to the audience at TED which arguably consists some of the most influential people in the world.  I’ve concluded that he intentionally abandoned the phrase, in preparation for a brighter future in which the SemWeb technologies are no longer so easily confused with other technologies.  We’ve changed our name.

If you feel the re-branding is unfair, consider who has more right to the word semantic, the Natural Language people or the Interchangeable Data Format people?  

We lose.

Sorry.  We need to move on. 

The Semantic Web is now called Linked Data.  It’s official.  Take a deep breath, change your notes.  And let’s move on as Linked Data enthusiasts, not Semantic Web enthusiasts.

I will lead this effort by removing the category of “The Semantic Web” from this site and replacing it with “Linked Data.”  I’ll do it later this week.  I need some time to say goodbye.

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Posted April 3rd, 2009, in: Art Etc| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc

The music most people seem to accept as “Post-Rock” is instrumental music with long songs featuring rock-ish musicians grooving on a few chords and/or a motif, with a lot of dynamic variation and intensity for as long as an hour at a time.  

For most people, the term “Post-Rock” has become synonymous with a certain aesthetic, long, slow-moving guitar-centric (largely diatonic) songs that swell and die out with musical sensibilities largely created in the seventies and eighties.  

I want to extend the meaning of Post-Rock. 

I think that Post-Rock might include (just a few ideas):

• Music that sometimes incorporates rock sensibilities, but is not made with the goal of being rock.
• A temporary early 21st century terminology for “classical” music which uses rock-n-roll instruments. 
• Impressionism in music in the 21st century
• 21st Century music that is agnostic to typical marketing-driven categories such as hip hop, rock, folk, metal, Etc.
• Rock music with a structure informed by electronica.
• Any rock-based music that stands outside of its own genre.

On the other hand, when a friend mentions “post-rock,” I usually assume what they mean is ‘long-boring-electric-guitar-music.’  

If Post-Rock is a useful genre, I think we should include bands like The Fiery Furnaces.  Otherwise we should just call it “Bedtime Music…” 

I think Bjork is post-rock.

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Posted February 10th, 2009, in: Art Etc| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Videos

If you make Art, you should watch this.  If you don’t make Art, you should still watch it.

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Posted February 6th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| New Media| Reviews & Thoughts About Products| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| Web 2.0

If you haven’t played around with EtherPad, and you have a few friends you can get to screw around with you on this thing, do yourself a favor and try it out.

At first, it’s very simple:

EtherPad is a Collaborative Text-Editing environment. It’s real-time though, so it’s not as much like Google Docs (remember Writely?) as it is like IM.  Yes, it’s like Instant Messaging only more instant.  Every character typed or removed by anyone working on the text is seen in real-time by everyone else editing the document.  The page never has to reload or anything!  Ah, the beauty of Javascript.

Be warned though, this means that the people you’re working with can see how slow you type!  And as of yet, there’s no spellcheck, so you’re basically letting it all hang out. 

I heard about this from the Technometria Podcast, and it’s clear to me that, as they discussed in the show, for students taking notes during a lecture, nothing I’ve ever seen in my life could ever be as valuable as this technology is, even in its youngest form, that is, as long as the students in question have computers and friends.

Before I go any further, I should mention that my techie friends are all telling me about JQuery… I’m not a programmer, so that doesn’t mean anything to me (yet)… Also, EtherPad is only one of several spotlight applications running on a new platform called AppJet, which I guess is a Javascript-based development platform that’s really visual/browser-oriented.  Maybe even a sort of WordPress for Ajax?  

Well whatever. I’m not a dev so I’m not qualified to criticise that stuff, but the mention of JQuery seems timely given what I’ve been hearing, all-hype though, as far as I’m qualified to say, as a non-programmer.  The use of Javascript in general,  is not all-hype, my instincts tell me… We better move on because I don’t know shit about Javascript. But I do think it’s the future, if you’re asking my nose.

I would like to see EtherPad with TinyMCE because at the very least, UL’s and OL’s (un-ordered and ordered lists), Bold and Italics, Links Etc, would make the collaboration so much more useful! 

Beyond that, I’d love to see an app that can be installed anywhere that allows people to run controlled instances of ET, while controlling certain parameters like the maximum number of characters or lines per document… Etc…

I have a lot of ideas about the possibilities of this kind of real-time text-editing.  Big ideas.

Hey AppJet! Wanna talk?

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Posted January 29th, 2009, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Intellectual Property| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| New Media| Technology| Web 2.0

From the “Availability Notes” that appeared when I checked Hulu for new episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia…”
Apparently, they took down many of the episodes (they had a few seasons of the show up in entirety) all at once without warning.
The tone I get from this, is that Hulu may even be thinking along the lines of posting ‘expiration dates” for the content… That would be smart. It would be another way to browse (browse by what’s about to expire), and it would give Hulu users more of a sense that Hulu is almost like their free, ad-supported DVR, a good place for Hulu to be in people’s minds, I think.  The message is an apology from Hulu… All and all, I say, good going, Hulu.  You guy’s are rockin’ it!

Availability Notes:
Hulu can provide five episodes of this series at a time. We’ll add a new episode each week as we take down an older one, following the same schedule as the official site.  

Customer trust is hard won, easily lost. On January 9, we removed nearly 3 seasons of full episodes of ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” We did this at the request of the content owner. Despite Hulu’s opinion and position on such content removals (which we share liberally with all of our content partners), these things do happen and will continue to happen on the Hulu service with regards to some television series. As power users of Hulu have seen, we’ve added a large amount of content to the library each month, and every once in a while we are required to remove some content as well. 

This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to _how_ we handled this specific content removal and to apologize for our lack of strong execution. We gave effectively no notice to our users that these ”Sunny” episodes would be coming off the service. We handled this in precisely the opposite way that we should have. We believe that our users deserve the decency of a reasonable warning before content is taken down from the Hulu service. Please accept our apologies.

Given the very reasonable user feedback that we have received on this topic (we read every twitter, email and post), we have just re-posted all of the episodes that we had previously removed. I’d like to point out to our users that the content owner in this case – FX Networks – was very quick to say yes to our request to give users reasonable advance notice here, despite the fact that it was the Hulu team that dropped the ball. We have re-posted all of the episodes in the interest of giving people advance notice before the episodes will be taken down two weeks from today. The episodes will be taken down on January 25, 2009. Unfortunately we do not have the permission to keep the specific episodes up on Hulu beyond that. We hope that the additional two weeks of availability will help to address some of the frustration that was felt over the past few days.

The team at Hulu is doing our best to make lemonade out of lemons on this one, but it’s not easy given how poorly we executed here. Please know that we will do our best to learn from this mistake such that the Hulu user experience benefits in other ways down the road.

Sincerely,

Jason Kilar, CEO, Hulu

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Posted November 14th, 2008, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Intellectual Property| Reviews & Thoughts About Products| Technology| Web 2.0

This is a message to the guys behind the IP Colloquium Podcast, an Audio Podcast about Intellectual Property Law, hosted by Doug Lichtman, Scholar in Residence at the UCLA School of Law, and brought to us by the UCLA School of Law, the law firm Loeb & Loeb LLP and the Intellectual Property Symposium. I hope you guys have your ears on!  If you’re an attorney, the IP Colloquium Podcast can be used as CLE Credit.

First of all, Thanks for the IP Colloquium Podcast.  This is great stuff so far.

I wanted to point out a few things about your WebSite that are annoying for ‘Power-Users’ like me and/or that are standing in your own way.

1. Flash is not the way to go.  Flash Websites are less accessible than sites that display HTML. There are many reasons why.  Here are a few:
   • Navigation-Buttons or Links within Flash sites don’t allow right-click functions such as “Open Link In A New Window/Tab,” which people who use the Web well use often.
   • Flash Content is Less Machine-Readable (for instance, by robots like Search Crawlers), Less Universally Semantic, Less Friendly to Alternate Viewing (Like Text-Only Browsing or Viewing of the Page-Source).  The reason is that the content is hidden within the Flash animation objects.  Essentially, Flash sites are about as Machine-Readable as pictures of text are, probably less.  You want to be found in Search Results, right?
   • Flash sites require an extra browser plugin which is sometimes a barrier for people on alternate systems or that aren’t very technically savvy.  Barriers aren’t a good thing.
   • The Text within your site cannot be copied from the browser window, making it harder for people to quote you etc.  I had to actually look at Doug Lichtman’s name etc to post this entry.  Sure hinders my abilty to blog about you guys.
   • Since your site is Flash, updating it is surely more complicated than it would be if you were using some sort of Content Management System (CMS), like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc. This is also true for making minor ‘look-n-feel’ changes. When your design elements are separate from your content, you have a lot more flexibility if you decide you don’t like some font or color etc.  Again, HTML and CSS based sites are superior for this reason.
2. You do not have an RSS/Atom Link in your Site’s HTML Head.  This is easy to do and is what is expected of modern sites that are content sources. All you need to do is put the following line in the top of your HTML: <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” href=”http://ipcolloquium.com/rssfeed.xml” /> …This is what makes the little RSS icon/indicator show up in the URL field in FireFox/Safari/Etc, which is expected from sites that are Syndicating content via the web (like you are). 
3. Your Feed is not set up properly for “Enclosures” which is what makes Podcasting tick.  Perhaps the iTunes Subscribe link you give out is being processed by FeedBurner or something, but I can’t tell because the site is Flash so I can’t “Copy Link…”  …Really, if you moved to WordPress, you could use any number of podcasting plugins that will take care of all the dirty work of making your feed Standards-Compliant, iTunes-Ready and user-friendly.  If you don’t want to go down that road, you should at least consider running your feed through FeedBurner and then linking to that feed rather than the “/rssfeed.xml” one.  This way, the Audio files show up in your feed properly as ‘enclosures,’ and your feed will work in all feed-readers and ‘pod-catchers.’  
4. It’s also mildly annoying to have links on your site automatically open new windows.  It’s just one of those things that gets on people’s nerves.  If we want a new window or tab, we’ll open one.

I really think you guys should consider a quick re-build using a more standards-compliant Content Management System (CMS), like my favorite, WordPress (which is free and great for podcasting).  This really only takes about an hour or two to do and requires no special skills.  It’s especially easy for a site like yours that has such a minor burden of content migration.  Joomla and Drupal are also free, but for the IPC-Cast, I recommend WordPress.  There is also a handful of other powerful open-source CMS solutions out there that I haven’t mentioned.  Bottom line, you don’t need to spend money on software.

Anyway, I’m just trying to help.  Keep up the great work!  The Podcast is great.

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Posted November 9th, 2008, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Intellectual Property| New Media| The War on Free Culture

I left a comment for the Obama Administration via their new online “suggestion box“at change.gov.  I sent in a suggestion hoping that the Obama Administration look at Lawrence Lessig as someone who could help out in some way.  I didn’t say “Attorney General” but maybe I should have.  Here’s what I did say:

Lawrence Lessig should be looked at by the new administration for positions like ‘Technology Czar,’ ‘Federal CTO,’ ‘Chairman/Commissioner of the FCC,’ or any other position in which Ethics and the Public Interest in matters of Technology and/or Communications are concerned.

Professor Lessig has already proven himself as an advocate for the people as an Educator, an Attorney, an Author and an Activist.

I’m sure there are many, many others like me who believe that the Obama administration, and more importantly, the American People would benefit from having Lawrence Lessig’s sound judgement and clear voice involved in the Federal decision-making processes.

He’s one of my personal heroes, and he cares about America, its consumer’s, their rights, the possibilities of modern technology, and the importance of our culture as it evolves and we grow with it.

Thanks for having this open suggestion box.

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