On Web Culture

Anil Dash:

Google’s announcement of Knol shows that they understand some of their key business drivers very well; With as much as 5% of the search result links for popular terms going to Wikipedia pages, a solution to capturing some of that traffic in an environment that Google can control and display ads on makes good business sense. The idea of sharing the earnings from that content with authors is also good business sense. But as with Google Pages (Page Creator), Blogger, Google Notebook, JotSpot, Google Docs/Writely and other tools, Google has not proven that it understands content creation and publishing as well as it understands its core businesses of search and advertising, or even its ancillary tools for communication and collaboration.

Worse, Knol shares with Google Book Search the problem of being both indexed by Google and hosted by Google. This presents inherent conflicts in the ranking of content, as well as disincentives for content creators to control the environment in which their content is published. This necessarily disadvantages competing search engines, but more importantly eliminates the ability for content creators to innovate in the area of content presentation or enhancement. Anything that is written in Knol cannot be presented any better than the best thing in Knol.

Danah Boyd:

…given that page rank algorithms are proprietary, I can’t wait to see what happens when Knol articles are “magically” higher in rank than the About and Wikipedia equivalents.

As one of the unwashed, or one of those without an iPod, Shuffle, iPod mini, iPod nano, etc, I feel like I get the short stick of podcasting. Whenever a website says download our podcast I read that as “download our .mp3 which is probably huge, served from a slow server and then put it on your mp3 player” which I decide sounds like a lot of effort for something that might suck. So I don’t bother.

Even then, once the mp3 is on my mp3 player my fast forward/rewind just spins along until I tell it to stop. So if I listened to 23 minutes of a 40 minute podcast it’s no quick thing to get back to 22 minutes 50 seconds to start listening where I left off.

I’ve listened to some good podcasts and some boring ones. I like Authors@Google but that’s on YouTube, how do I get that onto my mp3 player quickly?

This is what I want so I can embrace podcasting with vigor:

1. The online podcast market, where a user feedback system allows me to sort by genre, topic, country of origin, most popular, most downloaded, newest, most downloaded in last 24 hours/6 hours/1 hour, etc. A way for the system to make good recommendations “If you liked this podcast you might also like…” Selling podcasts is fine but don’t force them upon me. If a podcast is good, give it away the first one for free and then if ratings and reviews by users are good then it will become popular in spite of.

2. Here is my mp3-playing gps-driven personal-details-embedded iPhone in my pocket. I click podcast on screen, podcast is transferred to iPhone.
3. Pull up podcast on iPhone. Meta data describing podcast, user reviews, jump-to-this-point-in-time bookmarks with description of what is happening at each bookmark. The ability to jump quickly between bookmarks and also stop the podcast with the option to return to that point easily.
4. Let me send portions of the podcast to my friends easily “Export bookmark 3 to bookmark 5 > send to friend with this comment: …”. Let me send it to my blog, back to the podcast market, etc.
5. This podcast sucks. Let me tell the world from my iPhone by feeding back to the podcast market my ranking and review. Is there an option for the content creator(s) to open/close responses on their podcast? So if they wanted my review is limited to the podcast market or I can feedback commendations and criticisms directly to the content creator(s).
6. Downloading album art for podcast ala iTunes. What if I want to add my own custom album art? What if I want to share my custom album art to the podcast market? What if I want to transcript the podcast for aurally impaired users and upload that?

rock and roll could never hip hop like this

Zune Theme (.msi) [microsoft.com]
Double-clicking the .msi will install this theme. You might want to change that wallpaper though…

Royale Noir Theme - Download .rar file [istartedsomething.com]
Extract the .rar into the Themes folder usually found in the following location on standard Windows XP installs:
C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes

Auckland International Film Festival
Who made this website? And why does it suck? This happens every year and I don’t understand why. This is not good design, it frustrates my attempts to click on different links and open them in new tabs. Why is only the text and not the whole block clickable? After I opened 15 new tabs of films I was interested in seeing, Firefox 2.0 crashed and then caused my computer to hemorrhage trying to restore the previous session. Website crashes Firefox? Tick!

If you’re going to some festival films drop me a line with what ones you’re seeing.

We are meant to be here
Such a notion often requires an absence of pride. We as a people are not good at doing this. I am human, I know it all.

The Lamest Wikipedia Edit Wars
You might have passed over the Lamest Wikipedia Edit Wars the first time. I encourage you to give it another go. Watch as we strive for excellence. Watch as the validty of Spyro The Dragon’s inclusion in the Crash Bandicoot article is debated in detail:

* Calm down, kid. As I’ve explained numerous times, those situations are not the same. And if they were, I’d argue for them to be changed too. As for the Pirahna Plants, why do they link to a Mario page? Because they’re Mario in origin. Just like Spyro is, well, Spyro in origin. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be noted on the template. He features in a number of Crash games, therefore he’s part of the Crash “universe”, therefore he should be in the template. It’s that simple.

* And, as WE’VE (all three of us) have explained to you (or tried to), the situations ARE the same, you’re just insisting that they aren’t the same so your opinion can, once again, be portrayed as fact. And the plants in Crash are NOT Mario in origin, they’re a totally different plant. Spyro IS Spyro in original, so he is NOT a Crash character. Yes, we KNOW he’s been IN several Crash games, but that does NOT make him a Crash character. He is STILL a Spyro character. Will you give it up already?

* All three of you? The only person to comment here (other then you, myself and Klaus Kratchet) agreed with me. As I’ve said, those situations are not the same, with the possible exception of Nights and Sonic, and if that’s the case, I think that should be changed too. What’s your point?If the Pirahana Plants are not taken from Mario, why does the link go to a Mario page? Obviously they’re considered to be a ‘cameo” or a reference to Mario, or whatever. The point is, they appear in several games, like Spyro, they’re recognised as coming from another series, like Spyro, and they should be in the template, like Spyro.

* Further proof that you ae incapable of reading. We’ve repeated this information numerous times…they are NOT the same flipping plant! Sheesh! You’re a rock, you know that? It’s impossile to get blood out of you. (more)

Source: Time

What The World Eats feels like one of those ‘click-or-miss’ links that you quickly read, go “…huh” and move on. But it takes a little while to get through the photos and then you find yourself looking at the people wondering who they are, what they do. What the world eats is amazing.

Source: Baraskit

The random collections.

I got Photosynth to go at work but at home it refuses to work on Firefox 2.0 (.xpi) or Internet Explorer 6 (ActiveX). I don’t know why, I don’t completely blame them because Flash doesn’t work on my Firefox either so there might be ghosts in the machine. Check it out though, it may work for you. When I was playing with it at work I was thinking “Yeah, but it is as useful as Street Maps?”

I’m also using a couple new plug-ins that I picked up over at technosailor. If you’re a WordPress user the Subscribe To Comments and Popularity Contest plugins seem robust.

climb on the back and we’ll go for a ride in the sky.

Only nine years late, via Speaking Freely, I am reading the paper ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine‘ (a.k.a Google) by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

I liked this bit about the Google crawler interrupting an online game:

It turns out that running a crawler which connects to more than half a million servers, and generates tens of millions of log entries generates a fair amount of email and phone calls. Because of the vast number of people coming on line, there are always those who do not know what a crawler is, because this is the first one they have seen. Almost daily, we receive an email something like, “Wow, you looked at a lot of pages from my web site. How did you like it?” There are also some people who do not know about the robots exclusion protocol, and think their page should be protected from indexing by a statement like, “This page is copyrighted and should not be indexed”, which needless to say is difficult for web crawlers to understand. Also, because of the huge amount of data involved, unexpected things will happen. For example, our system tried to crawl an online game. This resulted in lots of garbage messages in the middle of their game! It turns out this was an easy problem to fix. But this problem had not come up until we had downloaded tens of millions of pages. Because of the immense variation in web pages and servers, it is virtually impossible to test a crawler without running it on large part of the Internet. Invariably, there are hundreds of obscure problems which may only occur on one page out of the whole web and cause the crawler to crash, or worse, cause unpredictable or incorrect behavior. Systems which access large parts of the Internet need to be designed to be very robust and carefully tested. Since large complex systems such as crawlers will invariably cause problems, there needs to be significant resources devoted to reading the email and solving these problems as they come up.

Source: ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine‘ Brin/Page, p. 10

It is also interesting to note the beginnings of Google Book Search in the acknowledgements:

The research described here was conducted as part of the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project, supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306. Funding for this cooperative agreement is also provided by DARPA and NASA, and by Interval Research, and the industrial partners of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project.

Source: ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine‘ Brin/Page, p. 16

Note also their thoughts on the relationship of search engines and advertising:

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is “The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.

Source: ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine‘ Brin/Page, p. 18

Lawrence Lessig on The Differences Between Culture And Code [video.google.com] at German conference 23C3. I think this footage runs well over 100MB when it has fully downloaded so you may want to start it loading and come back to it. It is well worth the wait especially for the exchange between Lessig and John Perry Barlow at the very end.

Via BoingBoing.

I’ve been looking for ping services and free web statistics tools for On Web Culture, below is what I’ve come across…

Free web statistics tools via contentious.com (updated):

http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://www.sitemeter.com
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
http://www.webtrends.com
http://mach5.com/products/analyzer/index.php
http://www.tracewatch.com/
http://www.addfreestats.com/
http://bbclone.de/
http://www.trafficfile.com/
http://www.haveamint.com/
http://www.summary.net/
http://www.reinvigorate.net/
http://statcounter.com new

Unfortunately Google Analytics is invite only at the moment, sign up here.

XML-RPC Ping Services [codex.wordpress.org]

I’m a sucker for these things. And go Slate’s crazy new Javascript nav menu, not sure what to make of it.

The Movie I’ve Seen the Most?

Firstly I think it is fair to discount kids movies your family owned that got thrashed in the VCR player, i.e. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or that movie about some dinosaurs that don’t die. I know I saw Return of the Jedi far too many times.

Then there were a number of films I watched many, many times as part of my film studies paper’s at university which would have been difficult not to watch and try to write essays about.

I’ll get the ironic one out of the way, I have seen Most - The Bridge about 5 or 6 times. The last time I was privileged to play it to an audience of about 40 people. And that was like watching it all over again, observing the way others responded. Most is a fantastic film.

I’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption again about 5 or 6 times. These were more spread out though because I think the first time I saw this was in the middle of high school. Those English classes were awesome, I’d get lost in 50 minutes chunks of the movie before the period ended. “Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free”

I’ve seen Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Garden State and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a few times each. I thought Eternal Sunshine was a terrific film before I read an alternate draft of the script and went “Whoah, they could have gone to these places in the movie as well?” and well impressed, I had to watch it again.

As far as movies go, I’m happy to watch a good movie again but I can’t match 30 or 40 times for movie I’ve seen the most. For the most part I think of good movies like good books, it’s nice for some time to pass between viewings so you forget the details a little bit and the movie has some magic next time you see it.

Aha! is an exclamation for finding a link I wanted to blog that I thought I had lost.

The lost-but-found link in question is to B List’s Let’s talk about frameworks which adds ‘big belly’ to your web vocabulary. It brings up Ruby on Rails which Penny-Arcade is based on. I heard a little about Ruby on Rails at Webstock 2006 from Michael Koziarski. My impression was it seemed accessible kind of in the same way PHP is. I don’t know massive amounts about PHP but it always seemed something that I could learn if I needed to.

2Advanced’s “Attractor” website is a pretty spectacular effort for a completely Flash-based website. I think it has a pretty big download so dial-up users may want to open this one in a separate tab and come back to it. I’m particularly interested in the effort to have ‘pages’ in a Flash site so you can bookmark pages and use your back and forward browser buttons. It doesn’t happen all the time, for example when you click to download the wallpaper that opens in a Flash window, but it’s still impressive nonetheless.