We're all sick with things that end with 'ster.'-- Jonathan Abrams, founder and CEO of Friendster, in his speech to SXSW. No doubt Shawn Fanning is thinking the same thing.
I was reading Why Republicans Should Love Larry Lessig in the Wall Street Journal Review and it got me thinking. I can't stand the way liberals jump on every chance to bash Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons. They just love the idea that all of the work that the People produce will be tied up in some fat cat government program that my tax dollars pay for. The last thing the democrats want to do is give power back to the people, whom they inherently distrust (just look at gun control).
Not only that, but he advocates Open Source software! Democrats hate this because it's free (no pork barrel politics!) but it also reduces Big Government. In Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace Lessig argues that Open Source code prevents the government from forcing the People to run software that they don't want to. That software could track you, your family, your guns - just the kind of software Big Government would love to force onto your desktop.
Just look at how the Clinton administration tried to force the Clipper chip on Americans. The democrats don't trust the people's money or privacy, so they wanted to be able to watch everything. People who know the Bill of Rights knew that Big Government went too far with that, and that's why it isn't around today.
And don't get me started on security. You know those liberals can't wait for a cyber-terrorist attack on America, they love any attack on America! That's why they get Windows installed everywhere, because they know Open Source software is more secure.
Of course, the liberal media doesn't want you to know about this because they're so invested in it too. So let's start a letter writing campaign to get the media to expose the threats of these liberal copyright laws like the DMCA (signed in by the Clinton administration, of course!) and copyright extension American culture!
Update: YHBT. YL. HAND.
John Gruber has posted Markdown, a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.
It is yet another in a long line of plaintext formatting tools. Let's see, we have Textile, Structured Text and about a billion slightly different Wiki markup languages. TMTOWTDI, but it's starting to get ridiculous.
The problem that these formatting languages solve is that it's a pain in the ass for most people to format HTML inside <textarea>s. Weblogs and Wikis are the two places I see these markups being used most. They use ASCII to format the text, using a * to make a <li> tag or !! to make a <h2>. Since the competing formats are hashing it out ad-hoc there's no standardization and everyone it pointing out how simple theirs is compared to everyone else's.
I see these languages as a half-way solution to the real problem. They attempt to make the plain text look like the rendered HTML, while defining their own arbitrary formatting rules. They are designed so that what you see is pretty close to what you get.
Most simple HTML isn't much more complex than these rules. Is it easier to remember <strong>this is bold</strong> or _this is bold_? One is certainly easier to type, but another formatting language may have *this is bold*. Because there's no standardization you need to remember where you are when you use these markups, whereas with HTML the same rules apply (mostly) everywhere.
Since simple HTML is simple enough, and global enough, why not just use HTML? Well for one thing, people seem to have trouble using HTML. Take a look at Fark's comments sometime and you'll find comments that use the UBB link tag [url]http://www.example.com/[/url] or you'll see photoshop contest entries where people just post the URL to the image because they don't remember how to make an <img> tag.
These people (probably) aren't dumb, they just have better things to do with their time than remember arbitrary formatting rules, even HTML. Put them on a Wiki and they'll be far too intimidated to contribute, even though they may be an expert on the topic. Giving them yet another way to format text won't help, they don't want to learn markup languages. A good Wiki should respect that and work with them to come up with a better solution.
I've searched and I've searched and I have yet to find a Wiki that has a WYSIWYG editor. If you take a step back, all these formatting languages are attempting to make <textarea>s as close to WYSIWYG as possible, so why not do away with the <textarea> all together?
I predict that a Wiki that incorporates Epoz, an open source cross browser WYSIWYG editor, will have phenomenal success. It would empower real people to contribute with the smallest barrier to entry. LiveJournal is already sporting a rich text editor and I suspect that it's doing quite well, although I can't find any statistics on it. I would love to see Blogger, TypePad and Moveable Type follow suit. Isn't that what Wikis and weblogs are all about, lowering the barrier to entry?
Maybe there's already a Wiki out there that uses a WYSIWYG editor and it's not phenomenally successful and I'm wrong, but it doesn't look like it. Are we really helping users by confusing them with competing markup languages that they don't want to learn anyways?
$CLIENT's new site launched today at their new domain, which matches their name. The reason that it's their new domain and not their current is because they only recently acquired the domain name. It had been dead for a while, but it previously housed a search engine.
I was watching the stats thinking Wow, they're extremely popular
when I realized that a disproportionate number of those requests were coming to 404 URLs. As it turns out, a lot of tools out there still think that this search engine (which has been dead for about 4 years) was still there, ready to search or whatever. I'm seeing searches from multi-searches and forms embedded in ugly web sites and I'm seeing URL submissions from site submitters that have probably never heard of Google.
The short term solution is to make the 404 page as low bandwidth as possible, but it may come to blocking people coming to known-bad URLs.
Here's something I wrote last night after being inspired by the generic spam solution response form.
Did Slashdot just post another story about camera phones? Quick you've got to comment about how worthless they are! But it's so hard to form a coherent argument while wiping all that foam from your mouth, what to do? The solution is in front of you! I've used science to create a form that lets you express everything that's wrong with camera phones, just by checking off the appropriate lines. Just put an X next to the statements you agree with and post away. Score: 5 (Insightful) was never easier!
( ) Now I'm not a luddite, but
Camera phones are stupid because they are:
( ) over-hyped
( ) inferior to digital cameras
( ) inferior to landline phones
( ) inferior to wireless neural communication
( ) stupid
I don't need a phone with a camera in it, I just need a normal cell phone that:
( ) makes calls
( ) receives calls
( ) send and receive text messages
( ) lets me have a Kraftwerk ring tone
( ) has videogames
( ) syncs with my computer
( ) stores my calendar
( ) has a speakerphone
( ) has push-to-talk
( ) looks good
( ) has voice dialing
( ) stores phone numbers
( ) reminds me of birthdays
( ) is open source
( ) makes coffee
( ) suggests attractive members of the appropriate gender to hit on
( ) has GPS to direct paramedics to my car crash caused by me making a call on my "normal" cell phone
Why can't they just give me the exact features I want, nothing more and nothing less?
I don't even understand why you would want a camera in your cell phone because:
( ) I always carry my digital camera with me
( ) I usually don't have my cell phone with me
( ) I only see interesting things that I have pre-scheduled
( ) My friends and family have all been blinded in a horrible accident
It's not just that they are (over-hyped/stupid/inferior to digital cameras/inferior to landline phones/inferior to wireless neural communication), they are a threat because
( ) I am very attractive and someone may take a picture of me changing in a locker room, which is not possible with a regular camera
( ) I am very ugly and someone may take a picture of me changing in a locker room, which is not possible with a regular camera
( ) Someone may take pictures of every page of a magazine (at camera phone resolutions) instead of buying the magazine, which is not possible with a regular camera
( ) My company depends on the secrecy of a specific document which we leave lying around. Someone may take a picture of this with a camera phone, which is not possible with a regular camera
( ) I am a criminal and people may take pictures of me at "work", which is not possible with a regular camera
( ) People may take pictures while driving, which would distract them from the road, which is not possible with a regular camera
My solution to this problem is:
( ) Promoting legislation to have any device that transmits aural and visual communications banned
( ) Yelling at anyone I see carrying a camera phone, not accepting spare change when offered by people mistaking me for a homeless person
( ) Staying inside for the rest of my life so that my soul isn't stolen when They take my image
( ) Not buying one and shutting up about it [Note: this will reduce your Slashdot comment's score by 4]
In conclusion,
( ) I am a far better judge of what your phone should do than you
( ) I harken back to the Good Old Days™, the simpler time of our forefathers when you could be in touch with your friends and loved ones anywhere with a cell phone that did not take pictures
( ) Free Kevin/Dimitri/Darl McBride
Saw this on CNN this morning, Google has taken Search By Location out of the lab and into Beta under the name Google Local. A search for George Hotelling in Ann Arbor, MI didn't do as well as a search for pizza, which is strange since it's obvious exactly where I am.
mehack is a blog about taking what you've got and pushing it further. Recent posts include installing Linux on your mp3 player, extracting the drive from your mp3 player and free car diagnostic software (which probably doesn't play mp3s). So it's kind of fitting that they've hacked advertising into their RSS feed.
One of the big complaints about RSS from content providers is "how do we make money?" There are a couple schools of thought on this, the first using RSS to drive traffic to their site. Sites like Slashdot, Wired News and the like don't give you the entire text of an update in RSS. Instead, they provide teasers that force you to visit the site for the full story.
By contrast, what mehack does is displays ads as RSS items, displayed just like any other story. What's really impressive is that they use Google ads to provide advertising based on whatever they've posted. You can see what it looks like in Bloglines to get a better idea. The ads are clearly labeled, so you don't confuse them for site content.
I'd like to see mehack document their technique and experience with this. It could provide incentive for other sites to provide RSS feeds, or it could just get really annoying. Hopefully it won't make RSS stand for Rudely Syndicated Spam.
There's an interesting side effect of using Google text ads with RSS. mehack posted about an open source an ODB II reader over a week ago. Since it's still on the front page and appears to be the most popular text ad term, they keep posting ads for ODB II stuff even though it has nothing to do with whatever new item shows up in Bloglines. Maybe they should tweak their code to pull the text ad for their permalink entry instead of their frontpage.
I just received an email from i absolutely hate sites which do not provide full RSS and i find excerpts to be completely annoying. i hate how slashdot's rss feed does not have the full content -- i want all my information to be in one place and i don't want to be having to switching between netnewswire and safari just to see a story (for many sites that i read very often, i have a python script that screen scrapes the site and produces rss that i can read in my reader.
r,
the person who runs mehack, about his or her RSS ad system. I've reprinted it below with permission. Direct any questions to mehack.com@bitwaste.com
but, as you mentioned, if i provide the full text content in my rss feed (which i actually do not. there have been stories that have a "more" link on them on my front page, and those render the same way into rss), then there is barely any incentive for people to go to my site. i don't mind, actually. my design isn't that great, and i don't even allow comment posts (for now). the only way for the adwords to "work" were either for me to always write really long posts with "more" on the bottom (to do that honestly, and not have it seem that i'm posting an excerpt on the front page means that i have to take even -more- time to write a simple post, and i don't have that time to spare), or for me to include adwords into my rss feed.
there are lots of technical difficulties in getting the adwords into the rss feed. google urls change often (even for the same ad), there is no documentation on how to do it properly (so i have to every once in a while painstakingly reverse the whole process), and its questionable whether this is even within their terms of service. i'm personally giving the blosxom plugin to people who want to use it with the restriction that they do not distribute it, and if they receive questions about it, to direct it to me. i want to stay under google's radar until i know they won't pull the plug on the only way i can pay for site hosting.
One of Apple's big selling points of OS X is its applications. These applications are targeted at filling the need of people to manage their content in as easy a way as possible. Here's a list of applications found either in the default dock because I will be coming back to these apps in a moment: Safari, Mail, iChat, Address Book, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iCal, QuickTime.
Completely shifting gears, let's look at some of the best things on the web right now. Four sites that I can't live without are Bloglines, del.icio.us, Upcoming and LiveJournal. Google too of course, but I haven't figured out how to work that into my thesis, so I'm going to pretend that I could go a day without it.
The common theme of these sites is to provide a collaborative space for people to connect and share. What struck me was the intersection of these social sites and Apple's product line. iCal flows perfectly into Upcoming. Safari's bookmarks are distributed by del.icio.us. And what are Bloglines and LiveJournal but inboxs for other peoples' email to everyone
? Now you see where I'm going with this.
The Apple programs provide a good guide for what collaborative, social programs work well. Let's go through that list of programs again:
It's surprising how well Apple's product line matches up with collaborative sites. There's a line of thought that says that Apple creates software for people who create, while Microsoft for people who consume. This could have something to do with it; because social software requires a two way Internet they and Apple would migrate to the things people create.
Where could Apple go with this? iMovie is conspicuously absent, most likely due to bandwidth concerns. Of course you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of dvds, but there's still a latency problem.
What would be nice is if Apple could somehow unify social presence under an open protocol. The same platform that lets me IM would also let me check out someone's public calendar and read their weblog. Dashboard provides a glimpse of how this might work.
Apple could also make it easier for content producers to become content distributors. They already have started the process with the iTunes Music Store, what if they made a P2P platform that allowed anyone to publish their iMovie online? Or a content server for network illiterate people on cable modems? iLife, except collaborative and social. cLife. Apple could lead the charge into the world of ends.
Upset at Textamerica for 0wning your pictures and spamming you reserving the right to spam you? Buzznet looks like a pretty good alternative, and they support Creative Commons.
Personally, I'm using Airblogging to post pictures to my LiveJournal although it supports Moveable Type, TypePad, and Blogger too.
Be sure to check out Wax Elastic, which now looks better than my site. Not that that's saying much...
Here's a quick overview of what's happening: AT&T Wireless is sending out new phones to upgrade malfunctioning phones to its customers for free. Sounds good, right?
Well the new phones that it's sending out are newer, but in almost every case not as good. Take a look at the comparison between the new T226 and my T68i, while it has a nicer display and polyphonic rings it lacks Bluetooth, IR and a calendar (which are important for iSync) and has half as much memory among other things.
As for the phones malfunctioning, as it turns out they're malfunctioning because AT&T has decided to turn off the 900Mhz band in favor of 850Mhz. I have to assume that they had been planning this for a while, this isn't the kind of thing you decide to do overnight. So why were they still selling 900Mhz phones to customers when they had obsolescence plans in place? Engadget provides even more information, including a neat looking map.
I suspect that the timing has something to do with their acquisition by Cingular. Either they need to convert to 850Mhz to work with Cingular or they don't have to worry about their share price any more and feel they can jerk around their customers.
I recently switched from AT&T to T-Mobile because my T68i had been acting up for a while. I had them send replacement phones but that never really helped. Maybe if they had been more forthcoming with their customers I would have stayed, but I doubt it. My phone became unusable on their network and if I had been more motivated I probably would have looked into class action suits for people in the same boat as me. I suspect that's what they're trying to avoid by sending out these token phones.
When I called T-Mobile to have my number transferred from AT&T to T-Mobile, they said it could take up to 14 business days. As it turned out it only took 6 hours, but during that 6 hours I was SMS'd by AT&T saying that I would be receiving a free T226 in the mail. I suspect their organization isn't responsive enough to cancel my order after I cancelled, so I'm half expecting it to show up.
Some people are saying that if you don't send AT&T a phone back (old or new) you'll be charged by AT&T. Fortunately, it's illegal for AT&T to charge you for unsolicited merchandise. Personally, I plan to get my T68i unlocked as a backup T-Mobile phone and sell any other phones that happen to arrive in the mail. It looks like I'm not the only one with that idea.
So what can AT&T do to make things right? According to Phones Under Lock & Key AT&T has a habit of refusing to unlock phones that are owned by customers; I chose T-Mobile because they appear to treat their customers with more respect. What they should do is offer affected customers the choice of leaving the service with unlocked phones and discounted early termination fees, so that they can use the super nice phones that they bought. They are rightfully pissed off that their nice phones are being dropped and should be offered a compromise.
On a slightly different subject, I've been bookmarking useful sites for my new phone over at del.icio.us in case you're looking for cool stuff to do with your 3650.
[Update: I must be suffering from information overload. Most of the system described is implemented in Cellspotting, which I had previously posted to my del.icio.us links. Doh!]
I hereby invoke the LazyWeb:
I propose a service that allows both mobile phone and traditional application developers to determine the approximate location of a phone based on the locations of cell towers.
Continue reading for a complete description of how this would work.
While most phones do not carry chips to receive accurate GPS data from satellites, their location can be estimated from the tower ID that they are currently talking to, if the location of that tower is known. CellTracker is an example of an application that tracks cell towers and performs actions based on the phone's location.
If a lookup database could be made to turn cell tower IDs into approximate lat/lon then application developers could create free or cheap location based applications that did lookups over the Internet. A service would be set up to perform these lookups and accept location information on cell towers.
The database could be created by culling public database, but real-space data gathering would be essential to fill in the gaps. To gather this data, an application that records cell tower IDs and the current location of the phone would be distributed for free. This application would be able to submit the data back into the database. Most likely, it would record where cell "handoffs" occur, which would be the edge of a tower's network. These handoffs would form a polygon and the tower could be estimated to be in the center. More information about this is below.
As for the database itself, it would have to accept information submissions as well as provide cell tower ID to lat/lon lookups. This could be done via a web service to enable applications like Gallery to get location information on tagged images. An interface suitable to the low bandwidth and memory capabilities of mobile phones.
Licensing the data is an important concern. The technical first adopters who are likely to drive this project would be all to familiar with what happened when Gracenote closed the CDDB database and are not likely to submit data unless they know it will remain open.
A copy of the database should be made available to developers who want to run their own service. This is likely to encourage more participation in the project by assuring developers that if the project's database becomes unavailable they will be able to set up replacements for their users.
Also, commercial databases like Tower Maps are available for thousands of dollars and partnerships with mobile providers for location services exist. Unfortunately, the small or open source developers that are most innovative are also unlikely to have access to these resources.
It would be imperative to the success of this project that privacy is given a priority. Users who submit their data are unlikely to want to feel tracked. The database project must have an explicit privacy policy and an officer who's role is protecting users' privacy. The database should accept anonymous submissions by default to prevent people from being tracked.
The applications that use this data will have to decide on how to use location data on their customers, although if possible a specification like P3P should be included to tell end users how their information will be used. It will be important to differentiate applications from the project database so that if one application breaches users' privacy they do not lose faith in the project.
Because the users will be anonymous, the security of submission comes into question. Rather than track users that submit false information, false information would have to be determined on its own merits. If location data for a cell tower is submitted that is obviously outside of the known data, it should be treated as false until enough corroborating data is submitted to indicate that the existing data was false. This allows the system to remain intact without requiring the identities of users.
This would be an application that would run on cellphones, either as a J2ME or native application. It would record cell tower IDs and then log the current location when a handoff occurs between two cell towers. The location would be determined by a traditional GPS unit either embedded in the phone, added on to the phone like this GPS shell or a Bluetooth GPS receiver.
It could also potentially guide data gatherers in the direction of unrecorded data. This would make it easy for volunteers to log an entire city in a single day, without worry about missing towers.
This application would embed lat/lon information in the EXIF headers of JPEGs. This weblog entry provides a good overview of embedding GPS locations in JPEGs. A user would be able to select an image on their camera phone and embed the current location. It could potentially act as a replacement camera application and embed the location when the photo was taken.
Wow, just wow. The Kleptones present Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots
. I'm digging this moreso than most mashes, the Flaming Lips album provides a great backdrop for hip-hop lyrics. Go download all these songs right this second. I don't know that it's legal to add to SongBuddy though, which is why I didn't add it. (via WaxyLinks)
OK, so I just got my new phone, the Nokia 3650. Yeah, the same one that was used to make the worlds first music video shot on a mobile phone. So this is my first phone that can actually run apps and such, so what's good out there right now? I've seen Soundcover, what else is good?
The Macomb County Sheriff's Department has a new program to enlist citizens to chat up pedophiles online. The goal is to expand the department's capacity to find people who are interested in statutory rape. I suspect this is an attempt to recreate the ratings Fox 2 News got when they staged a similar stunt a month or two ago, although I didn't hear of their sting resulting in any prosecutions. While the Sheriff's Department's goal is admirable, I have to question their methods.
Entrapment was the first thing that I thought of, but my law degree from Law & Order taught me that an entrapment defense is actually pretty hard to prove. You have to prove that you wouldn't normally have been open to the crime in question and that it was only the specific methods that enticed you into a life of crime. I'm not the only one with reservations.
"I think it's shocking," said Detroit defense lawyer Elizabeth Jacobs. She opposes law enforcement agents posing online as children because she said it tricks law-abiding citizens into committing crimes.
She said adding average Joes and Janes to the mix is even worse. "It sounds like Soviet Russia where everybody spies on everybody else," Jacobs said.
Mark Bowser, an Ingham County Sheriff's Department detective and president of the Michigan chapter of the High Technology Crime Investigation Association, said the program should be used carefully.
"There's too much that can go wrong, even as a police officer," he said.
Personally, I'm not entirely comfortable with a couple parts of this. First, let's look at what's going on. Two adults are exchanging text messages. The context is that one adult believes that the other adult is a horny minor, and when they show their intent by taking the action of trying to meet the fictional minor. If they attempt to crack down on this at any point before then I have a big issue with it, but what's being done now seems fine.
Second, since they haven't actually done anything to hurt anyone; I would hope that these criminals get plenty of rehabilitative therapy with their punishment. If the person is linked to a crime where real sex was involved the punishment should be much stricter. I also have to wonder if they should be labeled as sex offenders, because technically they're potential sex offenders.
The Sheriff's Department has no shortage of help for this endeavor. This isn't too surprising for anyone who's read Baiting.org. They're doing background checks on over 100 applicants, hopefully better background checks than the Catholic church has been doing. I doubt they'll need that many people, considering they only had 20 arrests last year. I have to wonder though, if these background checks would find problems with the people they catch...
My girlfriend Jenny did a write up of her tour of the Wayne County Medical Examiner. It's fascinating stuff, and worth checking out.
It was filled with suicide notes, belts, and ropes used in suicides. One note said, "IF I CAN'T BE AN ARTIST, I CAN'T BE ANYTHING". There was one picture that really stuck out. It looked like a little girl looking over something. When I asked the Inspector about it, he said some little old lady was trying to hop the fence, but ended up falling and hanging herself in the grid of the fence.
A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 44% of American Internet users post content online and between 2% and 7% keep weblogs. CNN considers the number of bloggers is small but I get the exact opposite impression.
First, 44% of users contributing content to the Internet is huge. People in message boards may not realize it, but they are making the Internet the global knowledge store that it is. Can you think of any other medium where nearly half of the content consumers are also content creators? Imagine if half the people who go to the movies were also film makers, or if half of the people who listened to music also composed it. That's what the Internet is, and I think this is astounding news.
As for the weblogging numbers, I would have guessed that 0.001% of people online keep weblogs. Either people online are savvier than I expected or there aren't as many people online from the general population. Either way, I think that these are impressive numbers and will only go up.
In celebration, go out and speak your mind online. Post content. Become the media.
Here's a brainfart I just had, and I would love feedback: A big problem with spam is the unsubscribe link. We all know by now not to attempt to unsubscribe because that's how spammers know that your email address is active. Legitimate email newsletters also contain unsubscribe links, but we're usually too afraid to click them. The exception is when you know that you've done business with the company in question. For example, if Amazon sends out an email that I don't want, I have enough faith in the company to try to unsubscribe.
Unfortunately, many companies get their email addresses legitimately from companies that you've done business. It's the checkbox that reads something like "Allow our partners to contact you with information we feel you'd be interested in?" (which translates to "Allow us to make money selling your email address to anyone who wants it?") So while the company sending the email may honor unsubscribe requests, you won't know that they're legitimate because you have no idea that they got your email address from a company you've done business with.
So here's my idea: Force companies to say in their email which company you gave your email address to so that you can make your own decision as to whether they're on the level. For example, an email from ABC Direct Email Inc. that bought its email address list from example.com would include at the end of the message "You are receiving this email because you asked to be notified of offers from 3rd parties at example.com."
The force doesn't necessarily have to comes from legislation, it could come from a social movement (which would require this meme to spread) or it could come from several high-profile companies doing this and the market forcing other companies to follow suit. The last option isn't as likely as I'd hope because I doubt companies would want to admit the fact that they're selling your personal information.
Obviously spammers could (and would) lie about the origins of their email databases. But suddenly they're violating trademark law, which would cause the companies being impersonated to start prosecuting spammers. Get them to take back the net for us.