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Participating, a democratizing activity in blog space

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This article The Hype
vs. Reality vs. What People Value: Emerging Collaborative News Models and
the Future of News . Brought up some interesting ideas when blog space becomes a democratizing element in politics, traditional party politics loose power and control of the discussion. It’s no wonder that blogs have resulted in much consternation of the reigning Irish political party.

On the other hand, is it no wonder that the most practical defense of the status quo in Irish (and worldwide) politics is to prevent broadband adoption. Less talk, less action translates to less access to Blogs, and the Internet for information and dialog means less pressure to adopt radical ideas in the political arena, like working for the public good, instead of against it.

A radical idea like participation is a political poison pill.

No Blogs, no participation.

Meta Data and search engine response

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I have been observing internet search engine behavior lately and I’m beginning to believe that certain types of meta data in the HTML may elevate various web-pages to the top of search results. I haven’t found anything conclusive, but many of the top news sites include interesting meta tags, and I’ve noticed these meta types absence in similar output from Blog sites. I have often suspected that it would be relatively simple to control search results and hence elevate opinions on the internet by such manipulation.

I’m am not referring to the massive meta tags use in many pornographic sites that include anything, and everything so as to be included into any search results, but specific tag types and names. I’ll have to do more research, but in the mean time, I’ve made some attempts to include similar meta data in some of my blog output. I’ll keep you posted.

Search Engine results are rubbish

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I’ve come to the conclusion that Technorati, Feedster, Google, Altavista and Yahoo provide guaranteed rubbish as far as content search. I recently re-ran some simple searches and they returned absolutely zero useful links. Search for products, and you get a wealth of information.

So a question for the internet, is there a good content search engine?

Digitized life and the human mind

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Often when we talk about digitizing something we make reference to how accurate that becomes. We assume that qualifying and abstracting our analogy world with an arbitrary numeric precision that we have encapsulated reality in a reproducible and consistent manner not previously available in an imprecise world. We talk about digital cameras and CD music as if they are the hight of accuracy when they are merely an imprecise abstraction reduced to digital form. We can have all the Mega-pixels in 24, 36, 48 bit depths cameras in the world and still only capture a poor semblance of our world. The compromises we make to the almost good enough CD quality sound to the crude compressed noise of MP3 has affected extensively how we think about everyday life. We make decisions every day in a binary this or that product, my way or your way. However we are forever forgetting the initial compromise of our digital choices. There is a world of values between one and zero, and there is a world of difference between “the perfect product” and one that’s “almost the right product” The world of the tailors custom made suit and the cobblers hand made shoe have been lost to digital one size fits all product mentality.

This applies to the world of software where vendors of CRM and ERP claim to have the definitive answer to everyones problem. The customize in custom is no longer available. When doing business with anyone, is the same for everyone, what happens to delineation of value. A CRM is the same for every business, and forces it to conform it operations to the design of the CRM. It no longer provides a custom solution for a business to provide a custom experience to the customer.

One of the missed opportunities of the internet bubble’s collapse, and a missing aspect of the Web 2.x, is the ability to provide an entirely customized experience to the customer. To even provide a customized product to customer specs. This was in some aspects part of the success of DELL in the computer world. But it has not provided, as full an experience, as could have been provided.

This is part and parcel connected to the compromise we make in a digital choice. No tailored answers, no personalized perfect solutions. Dell and the CRM vendor, are in the business of narrowing the selections and reducing the choices to a qualifiable numeric.

Just like the digitized stair-steps of an analog wave of music, something is missing in-between, we are loosing unique for digital normal. And while many can live with CD’s there is that niche still holding out for their vinyl, and there are still tailors.

The tailors do not strive to be millionaires, they are making a living, providing custom solutions.

Web 2.x should be about custom solutions.

Metropolitan Area Network, Represents Dumb Networking

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The Sunday Business Post had a brilliant article about why the Government does not under stand broadband, or how to manage the future of Irish Broadband.

I’ll quote:

The network … They were backed by the government in an attempt to stimulate competition in the broadband market. …. The networks are also catering solely for large businesses and cannot deliver broadband to homes or small businesses, which are experiencing major difficulties obtaining the service. … Eircom already offers broadband to 118 of the 120 areas covered by the network.

so let’s review.

  • The network is only available for big business
  • Big business has difficulty obtaining it
  • There is already a competing service in 98% of the coverage area
  • Small businesses and home owners can’t get the service even though their taxes pay for it

So they are 1) trying to deliver broadband to companies that don’t need it, 2) who will have trouble acquiring it, 3) in areas that already have it, 4) But not to people that need it, and are paying for it.

Does that sound stupid or what? Pick any number or all of them combined, and ask yourself how many points did the government miss here.

Flocking

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I have been trying out Flock. And while it’s very pretty, and actually very functional. On my old iMac (800Mhz, 512GB flat-panel) it’s to say the least, Glacial. Smooth, but Glacial.

Update: I have tried it out on my iBook (500Mhz G3) and the performance is almost the same as on the faster iMac platform.

Donncha Thinks differently Flocking Fast

Web 3.0â„¢, and push clarity

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I have been hearing all kinds of talk about web 2.0 being ‘push’ technology. But it’s not. And for the sake of clarity, Blogging and Web 2/3.0 is not PUSH! Back in the old Web 1.0 day’s you could do the same thing as web 2.0 except that with the old HTML pages the ‘posting’ date was available as a file creation date, and there were plenty of tools around to check for ‘refreshed’ html pages. Which is more or less what RSS and Atom do, check for refreshes of posts.

Web 2.0 is not Push!.

MicroPayments, again?

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I may have gotten myself in trouble with Britt Blaser at the Web 2.0 pre-conference dinner when I slapped down his discussion of micropayments for the Internet. This is a subject that I have heard at least a dozen time over the years, I even had the the same discussion with Bob Medcalf years ago. I don’t believe that micropayments will reach a critical mass of trust necessary to bring this off. The economy is really just a complex barter system. Don’t let it fool you into believing it is some numeric machine. It’s roughly the same as having a fool proof gambling scheme. The economy is a belief and trust model, I believe my money is worth this much, and I trust that you do too. If we don’t have the same foundation, that one currency is stronger than another, or that the exchange isn’t fair, it all collapses. Micropayments are the same thing, except that it operates at internet speed. Too fast and too mystical for the average person to trust. Even a credit card provides a receipt, and a signature or a pin. Prices can’t change from moment to moment, micropayments could provide that, and no one could trust that happening.

I suppose that If I had known how famous Britt was, I might have kept me mouth shut. But I’m becoming Irish, and it just won’t close on it’s own.

And you thought you couldn’t preserve privacy from the NSA?

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I love it, when you think the NSA has a plan to catch all the terrorist in the world, the terrorist just won’t play along. Armed groups shun electronic media to counter U.S. high-tech surveillance It must be frustrating for George Bush and company that the only people they can eavesdrop on, Aren’t Terrorist! The big question, I suppose, is this due to the publicly of the NSA spying on Americans scandal, or would it just be common sense on the part of the Terrorists and we are only now finding out that the NSA wasn’t looking for terrorist because the terrorist were already using primitive, non electronic methods of communications?

A brief historical of the WWW

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Just so no one forgets a few elements of the history of the WWW, often referred to as the World Wide Web.

1) In reality there was a beginning to WWW before HTTP servers appeared on the internet.

and only later did HTTP, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol appear, along with HTML, or Hyper Text Markup language, a derived, or DTD from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)

2) The original ‘Web’ browser was Mosaic as it place all of the WWW protocols under one browser. And linked these together to what we now call the World Wide Web, a real “Mosaic” of the Internet protocols.

I know this as I was developing Gopher and Anonymous FTP servers when HTTP was developed. And you can still find some of the protocols still listed in the URL of your favorite browser

http://
gopher://
ftp://
https://
shttp://
archie://