isolated in a web of one

what a tangled mesh we weave

One idea was Mesh, “but it sounded a little too much like mess.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee on the deliberation that he and colleague Robert Cailliau went through before they arrived on the name World Wide Web back in November of 1990, according to Ben Zimmer in today's New York Times Magazine.

Also under consideration and dismissed for being "too egocentric": Mine of Information, or MOI, along with The Information Mine or TIM.

turn on, tune in, drop out

Goddess of TXT, OMG, It's Art
Originally uploaded by JR from Brooklyn

When I told them, my 12-year-old, Maxwell, was like, ‘Yes!’

Meredith Sinclair, blogger and mother of Maxwell, recounting her kid's reaction when she told him she was imposing a household Internet ban from 4 to 8 PM daily. As recounted in The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In in today's new York Times.

We can call the circles nodes, and the arrows links.

In providing a system for manipulating this sort of information, the hope would be to allow a pool of information to develop which could grow and evolve with the organisation and the projects it describes. For this to be possible, the method of storage must not place its own restraints on the information.

This is why a "web" of notes with links (like references) between them is far more useful than a fixed hierarchical system. When describing a complex system, many people resort to diagrams with circles and arrows. Circles and arrows leave one free to describe the interrelationships between things in a way that tables, for example, do not. The system we need is like a diagram of circles and arrows, where circles and arrows can stand for anything.

We can call the circles nodes, and the arrows links.

Tim Berners-Lee of CERN in Information Management: A Proposal, March 1989, May 1990

This is the paper credited with laying a conceptual foundation for the World Wide Web.

I find it interesting that in this early approach Berners-Lee is confronting hierarchies, especially since early expressions of the Web were slavishly hierarchical (Yahoo's endless list of links, anyone?). It's only in the last few years that social architectures like those behind Facebook and Twitter have threatened to unseat the chain of command (although, even in these contexts, the corporate sponsor lives behind the curtain).

Computer scientists Eric Freeman and David Gelernter also dismissed hierarchies as inefficient in their seminal lifestreams work -- work that I believe deserves more credit for informing the social architecture of the information streams that lie behind so much of the social web.

Reading Berners-Lee's paper this morning, it struck me that so much of political history has been about this same confrontation -- the enforcement of hierarchy by folks who have skin in the game, and the challenge of the same by people being served the crumbs.

And even though today's Internet has not succeeded in dissolving hierarchies (and perhaps would be less useful if it had), it did leave me to wonder how this conceptual model, which now informs the lives of so many of us, will shape the political leanings of future generations, simply by being the primordial soup of known experience.

needling the haystack

Were you politically motivated?

No. I just remember sitting there watching the election results thinking, why are they violently reacting to people who were voting? It's not like they were just jailing people; they were killing people in the streets – people who had a different opinion, people who wanted to share their stories and voice what they thought was right. It shocked me that someone would retaliate in such an inhumane way, and for someone to use the internet as a tool of oppression, as a tool to stop dialogue.

Haystack creator Austin Heap, interviewed in today's Guardian.

In Heap's own words:

Haystack is a piece of software that someone in Iran runs on his or her computer. It does two things: first, it encrypts all of the data; second it hides that data inside normal traffic so it looks like you're visiting innocuous sites. Daniel and I developed Haystack by looking at how the regime was using technology to filter the internet, and figured out the best strategy to get around it.

i see naked people

Photo: Sebastian Kempa

Apparently Apple even has a problem with naked legs.

German photographer Sebastian Kempa in today's New York Times, speaking of Apple's censorship of the iPhone app that he created to promote his site naked-people.de, which explores clothing as both disguise and revelation.

Importantly, the piece raises questions about American hegemony online -- namely: Does Apple have the right to impose American censorship standards on German consumers?

Related: Full-body scans go online at O'Hare today »

freedom to connect

On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress. But the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a speech delivered at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. just yesterday. Transcript provided online by Foreign Policy.

An important read. Many thanks to @derekeb for passing this one along.

Clinton lays down several freedoms, consciously modeled after FDR's Four Freedoms speech. They include:

Freedom of Expression
Freedom of Worship
Freedom from Want
Freedom from Fear
Freedom to Connect

I'll have more to say about this in time (when I don't have to run off to my day job) -- chiefly because I'm unnerved by U.S. hegemony on the Internet and the muddling of public and private online spaces where personal expression takes place -- but for now I'm simply glad that the U.S. government is framing the Internet freedoms conversation in terms of human rights.

It's a good beginning.

No nation, group, or individual should stay buried in the rubble of oppression. We cannot stand by while people are separated from our human family by walls of censorship. And we cannot be silent about these issues simply because we cannot hear their cries. Let us recommit ourselves to this cause. Let us make these technologies a force for real progress the world over. And let us go forward together to champion these freedoms.

— Hillary Clinton

a diversity of species

The U.S. government must begin by diversifying the country's digital infrastructure; in the virtual world, just as in a natural habitat, a diversity of species offers the best chance for an ecosystem's survival in the event of an outside invasion.

In the early years of the Internet, practically all institutions mandated an electronically monocultural forest of computers, storage devices, and networks in order to keep maintenance costs down. The resulting predominance of two or three operating systems and just a few basic hardware architectures has left the United States' electronic infrastructure vulnerable. As a result, simple viruses injected into the network with specific targets -- such as an apparently normal and well-trusted Web site that has actually been infiltrated -- have caused billions of dollars in lost productivity and economic activity.

Recently, national intelligence authorities mandated a reduction in the number of government Internet access points in order to better control and monitor them. This sounds attractive in principle. The problem, of course, is that bundling the channels in order to better inspect them limits the range of possible responses to future crises and therefore increases the likelihood of a catastrophic breakdown.

Such "stiff" systems are not resilient because they are not diverse. By contrast, the core design principle of any multifaceted system is that diversity fortifies defenses. By imposing homogeneity onto the United States' computing infrastructure, generations of public- and private-sector systems operators have -- in an attempt to keep costs down and increase control -- exposed the country to a potential catastrophe. Rethinking Washington's approach to cybersecurity will require rebalancing fixed systems with dynamic, responsive infrastructure.

Wesley Clark and Peter Levin argue that a diverse IT infrastructure is a more secure IT infrastructure in Securing the Information Highway: How to Enhance the United States' Electronic Defenses in the November/December 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs.

¿entiende?

Chief Almir Surui
Originally uploaded by Earthworm

Right now, under current development models, a standing forest is always worth less than its extractable parts.

Forests are very important for the welfare of the indigenous people and for the world. We want to show concretely, practically that you can have quality of life and economic development, with an intact forest.

Chief Almir of the Surui tribe of the Amazon, through an interpreter, commenting in the San Francisco Gate about an initiative under way to digitally document their cultural connection to the rainforest in which they live, and in documenting it, preserve it.

The tribe is "using tools like Google Earth, Google Maps, Blogger and YouTube. [Google Earth is] in the process of providing mobile phones with Google's Android operating system that include new software to automatically tag photographs with locational information and upload to Google Earth."

Chief Almir has a $100,000 bounty on his head, and 11 chiefs of neighboring tribes have been shot and killed during the last decade by, it is believed, loggers and miners who would much rather have easy access to the "extractable parts" of the rainforest in which he lives.

The power of this project, fueled through a partnership with Google Earth Outreach, is how technology has given the Surui people the opportunity to tell their story through a medium that is indigenous and accessible to the western world.

It catapults their story -- which from a distance seems quaint and of another era -- into this time; into our time; and anchors it squarely in a true and actual place that we can see, that we can find, that we can now more clearly imagine as real.

Through Google Earth we witness the devastation that they are suffering on the ground. Through Google Earth we hear their stories, we learn what matters to them, we make contact.

To my mind this mode of storytelling makes the need for compassion and assistance immediate and pressing.

It is all the more remarkable because it subverts our traditional colonial methods in which the white man visits indigenous tribes and acts as translator of their stories.

In this case, the people tell their own stories to an audience who can hear and understand.

There is no more powerful act than that: a simple story, well told, and received by hearing ears.

Inside me I realized the need to use internet technology as a tool to make my people's situation known.

-- Chief Almir

roiling boil

The most important program on your computer is your web browser.

Narration from What is a browser? created by Jason Toff, an Associate Product Marketing Manager at Google.

Toff's statement, which he makes twice in his one minute video, caught me off guard, in a frog in a boiling pot of water kind of way. Maybe I've been working on websites too long, but I still think of my trade as marginal. (When I first started telling folks I developed web sites I often heard: "what's a web site?")

So getting online is now the most important thing we do with our computers?

I guess it is.

I also think Toff is doing a valuable service with his what is a browser primer -- seeing how it wasn't too long ago that MSN.com went down and folks called Microsoft tech support to tell them "the Internet is broken".

the persistence of durable objects

English Cigarette Card from the NYPL Collection

Rimbaud (dead)
Lautréamont (dead)
Breton (gone to America)
Marx Brothers (forbidden)
English cigarettes (too expensive)
American cigarettes (see English cigarettes)
Jazz (no phonographs or recordings)
Getting out of here (no papers, too expensive)
Whiskey (too expensive)
Picasso
Cocteau

Text from a postcard from the Belgian poet Christian Dotremont to Paul Éluard written on 26 May 1942 from Nazi occupied Paris detailing what could and could no longer be had in the city under the occupation.

The postcard appears in Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation on the first floor of a double decker stack of exhibits regarding liberty -- the loss of it, the pursuit of it -- currently running at the New York Pubic Library.

The ground floor exhibit features artifacts from artists and writers in France under the occupation -- the program from the first production of Anouilh's Antigone is here, as is a pseudonymous review of Sartre's Les Mouches. There are film posters and still shots of films made under the occupation including Marcel Carné's luminous Children of Paradise.



There are letters: one penned by later Marxist critic and then POW Louis Althusser who, en route to his concentration camp wrote of "the train that shakes my pen" before he enfolded his missive into an envelope addressed to his uncle and dropped it through the train's window onto the railroad tracks. It bore no stamp, only a request that it be delivered to his uncle's address in Paris. And it was.

There was another epistolary exchange between Marguerite Duras and her husband Robert Anthelme: his scribbled on a small spare scrap of paper that he has survived the camps; to which her letter replies "You're alive! You're alive!" and in which she writes of her fear that she might not have survived news of his death. Never mind that she had been sleeping with their mutual friend Dionys Mascolo since before the war; never mind that eventually she would throw the former over for the latter. Never mind. He was alive right then when worse was feared.

Photo: Robert Anthelme, Marguerite Duras and Dionys Mascolo

So downstairs there are writers surviving, collaborating and resisting Vichy France, and upstairs, in that lean hallway that runs alongside the Rose Reading Room there's Stonewall. 1967: The Year of Gay Liberation isn't afforded nearly the same real estate as the Vichy show, but like so many of the shows that hang in that hallway it's tightly curated to deliver a full body blow with minimal artifacts, and it's cast in a strong palette of groovy golds that put the yellowing sepias of the Paris show to shame.

Here too there were more print pieces: posters and zines; pamphlets, police reports, newspapers, and letters produced in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots and the Lavender Menace response to Betty Friedan's lesbians-are-a-threat-to-feminism remarks. Ephemera, again. Small voices grasping in the swallowing din for a bullhorn to be heard by; a message in a bottle set upon the sea.

Here I am. Hear me.



I don't know if the NYPL planned these exhibits as complements. It's the first time I've seen such a strong echo between two simultaneously running exhibits in that space. The reverb was made stronger, perhaps, by the shouts coming now from Iran in the wake of the protests following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was impossible to not be keenly conscious of both the magnanimity and the fragility of the small human voice set against the force and will of a State that does not want to hear it.

The voices of the Green Revolution, as some have called it, are being amplified across the Web through retweets and vias and blog posts that trumpet the injustice and argue for the cause. These posts have and will most likely continue to play a potent and powerful role in spreading the word.

The social network Twitter acted as such an important conduit of information while events were unfolding in Iran that the U.S. State Department suggested that perhaps they should put off their scheduled maintenance and downtime in light of the fact that a revolution was underway. According to the New York Times:

This was just a call to say: ‘It appears Twitter is playing an important role at a crucial time in Iran. Could you keep it going?’” said P.J. Crowley, the assistant secretary of state for public affairs.

Viewing the Vichy France and Stonewall exhibits at NYPL I was reminded that the government cannot always be trusted with preserving public freedom of expression, but I'm still alarmed that online there is no place that is truly public. We are having a public conversation across private enterprise channels.

The power and potency of the social graphs that folks are creating across social networks like Twitter and Flickr and Facebook and their blogs on Wordpress and Blogger ride on corporate dollars. That social networks afford individuals influence across the web and through their network neighborhoods is undeniable; the fact that corporations are bankrolling a dialogue that once upon a time unfolded in the public square or through businesses like newspapers where public interest was the core mission, is hardly being discussed.

I'm not ready to make an argument for government intervention in the online space, but it's a concern that has been gnawing on me since the SxSW conference in March where I heard over and over again folks speaking about using the Interweb as a communication tool for furthering human rights and self-expression -- but no one mentioned the fact that we're doing this on the back of big business.

Which brings us too to the question of the ephemera generated online during events like the Green Revolution: How will we recount the voices that spoke up when these events have passed and history has been written by the winners? Where will we display the green swathed avatars and the tweets that spread like a lightening strike in a dry tinder forest?

You couldn't identify anything anymore. The persistence of durable objects had been solidly defeated.

The poet Jean Follain describing Sant-Lô, Normandy, which was decimated by the allied bombing that accompanied D-Day.

google evolves

People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it. I think we [Google] have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis.

Google co-founder Larry Page in his closing remarks at Google's Zeigeist Conference, as reported in The Guardian.

I thought it was interesting that on the heels of this comment Google, which has the delightful habit of rolling out unique art on their home page to celebrate calendar events like historic birthdays and the Olympic Games and holidays, featured an image that drilled down to news results for a news story that has just hit the presses: that of the Missing Link Found in Germany.

It's possible that Google has been spotlighting breaking news stories with their Googleart for some time, rather than running a easily anticipated commemoration of an occasion or historic marker. It's possible that I only noticed it today because the Guardian article was fresh in my mind.

It's also possible that Google, one of the most prescient creatures on the Internet, is doing everything it can to evolve into the kind of life form that will continue to thrive in the changing online landscape.

google's equivalent of the cotton gin

The basic technique it uses involves two infrared cameras which determine how flat or curved each page to be scanned is and then adjusting the optical character recognition software it uses to read the text accordingly.

In other words, the infrared cameras help figure out a book’s three-dimensional shape and then back out any resulting distortions. This results in much faster book scanning since each page doesn’t need to be flattened by glass plates and spines don’t need to be broken.

The TechCrunch synopsis of the book scanning technique for which Google received patent no. 7,508,978 on 24 March of this year. The improved method, it's reasonably assumed, will improve the efficiency of preparing publications for the Google Book Project.

where it's at.

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Click on any placemarker to read the case history of an individual who has contracted, or is suspected of having contracted, swine flu.

Or embiggen »

in real life

Crazy that in a consumer's paradise like America we need a day to promote shopping, but the cause is a good one: Today is Record Store Day, where all kinds of events and in-store only releases are happening to encourage folks to shop their favorite indie record store in the flesh.

Chicago's Reckless Records is hosting live music across three locations »

And Pitchfork has posted a listing of all the releases that you can only get IRL »

It's ironic to me that my industry -- online commerce -- has posed the greatest threat to my dad's original industry -- the music business. When I was a kid, take your daughter to work day meant hanging out in a recording studio. My dad's vinyl collection overwhelmed his book collection (which was itself monumental), and the last time we sat down to breakfast he mentioned that he'd gotten in touch with an old friend and colleague, who was once the Art Director at Elektra, and to whom he once suggested the concept for the caterpillar logo on the Elektra 45s, above. ('Cause, you know, the Elektra butterfly was on the LPs...)

There are so many commonalities between the online space I've worked in for the last 15 years and the music industry he worked in, starting in the 60s; so many similarities between the way they each grew primordial out of the garage and grew into swanky conference rooms.

My theory? Many of the folks who work in the Internet space would have worked in the music business if they had born a few years earlier. It's the same kind of problem solving, the same kind of rough hewn industry, the same kind of cobble together a creative product and find a market for it so the kids can eat and so you feel like you've made something that matters at the end of the day.

And I'm more than certain that I wouldn't have found my groove as naturally as I did if my dad hadn't encouraged me to do what he did: listen to your heart, first, always, and feed the fire.

temps perdu

I have a theory about how computer human interfaces shape our perception of time that took shape when I was just out of college. I went to school on the cusp of the transition -- maybe half of us used word processors and fewer owned their own. I put myself through school and the best I could afford was a Brother typewriter that I bought with my boyfriend (I would later buy out his share, with cash dollars pulled from the ATM, when he tossed me over). Which meant I wrote my papers out by hand, arrayed the work in progress in piles (around me on my bed, usually), scribbled and scratched and when I got where I was going, typed them out.

Just out of school I worked long hours in L.A. for a litigation consulting firm, creating court evidence -- scanning texts in question and creating callouts in PageMaker to call attention to the pertinent bits.

The output of my task was reams of paper handouts. It wasn't uncommon to deliver 1000+ pages to our attorneys, carefully indexed and correlated to their delivery of the evidence.

Sixty hour work weeks were not uncommon, and although I was exhausted I was always startled by how little I felt those thousands of pages that moved through my hands.

The theory that took shape was simple: in the absence of the physical artifact we lose our markers in time. In the virtual space I never felt the weight of the work. The hours I spent absorbed in the task flew by and felt much briefer than the hours I was familiar with when handwriting documents and shuffling paper piles in space.

Now, of course, the majority of my work is performed this way; although I still prefer to sketch initial UI designs on paper, or draft outlines or mind maps in the physical world -- and that sketch time is the time, in retrospect, that feels most real and is most memorable, when I look back on a project.

I think the emergence of the chronological information stream which characterizes the architecture of Web 2.0 -- posts that proceed chronologically in a long stream of information, with the most recent post at the top of the pile -- is an effort to restore those markers in world that conducts itself increasingly in the virtual space. The word blog was birthed from "web log", of course -- like a ship's log. Our diaries, our journals. I find I rely on my blog to help me keep track of the passing of time, to recall where I was and what I did, and has a year passed really, since then?

I spend hours in conversation with folks I've never met in real life. The common posture is laptop on my lap, fingers on the keyboard, eyes on the screen. How will this concretion of Twitter and Flickr and Facebook exchanges encode themselves in my memory over time? Will they shape my experience of the world the same way an hour's conversation in a cafe with a friend has? Will I remember it as clearly if I can't recall the way the light fell across his face, the weight and warmth of the coffee mug in my hand?

I'd like to think these exchanges are only a conduit to establishing a real life friendship -- but there are folks whom I may never meet in real life. Whom I could I pass on the street and not recognize, because although I might know their thumbnail snapshot I don't know their gait, or the way they carry their book bag, or the way they shyly say hi to a passing stranger.

speaking of more human

Illus: Yearbook Project: Excelsior 1968 by John Martz

When there is a picture, your attitude and approach changes — the human aspect is inserted.

Dr. Jonathan Halevy, the director of Shaare Zedek Medical Center, commenting in Tuesday's New York Times on a study kicked off by Dr. Yehonatan N. Turner -- who found that attaching a photograph of the subject to an x-ray file resulted in the delivery of "longer, more meticulous reports" by radiologists.

When my dad went down in red rock canyon country and wound up wired and intubated and in a coma at St. Mary's trauma center for an infection that none of us immediately understood, maybe six hours elapsed from the time I got the telephone call to the moment I boarded a flight to Grand Junction from O'Hare. I packed badly and regretted it for the next -- was it two weeks? -- that I stayed in Colorado, right there, doing whatever needed to be done, along with the rest of my immediate family.

The one thing I packed right was his photograph: a picture of him playing his Gibson, smiling like he does when he sings, which I posted next to his bloated and prone and unrecognizable form in Critical Care.

More than one nurse asked me: "Is that him?" Surprised. Amazed. And informed, I hoped.


Related: A study conducted by Marketing Sherpa, based on initial research by Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, showed that a more "personable" About Us page -- including a photograph of customer service folk -- elevated the conversion rate (that is, the rate at which visitors actually buy something from the site) by up to 30% for the people who visited that screen.

That's a remarkable statistic in ecommerce, and it's further evidence that technology is just a conduit.

It's people -- knowing them, loving them, digging them -- who are the prize.

what are you deliberating?

So Johnathan, what did you do today? Oh nothing really, I just gave away TWELVE MILLION DOLLARS of somebody else’s money.

@johnathan tweeting post-trial in a case for which he sat on the jury, as cited today in the New York Times piece As Jurors Turn to Web, Mistrials Are Popping Up

thank God we have a government

Photo: Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Jonathan Dillon April 13- 1861 Fort Sumpter was attacked by the rebels on the above date. J Dillon April 13- 1861 Washington thank God we have a government Jonth Dillon.

The inscription left behind within the inner workings of Abraham Lincoln's gold watch when, on April 13, 1861, the watchmaker who was repairing it received word of the first shots being fired at Fort Sumter, as reported by this morning's New York Times.

Lincoln's watch was opened yesterday in a public ceremony at the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. to verify whether the story, related across generations, was true.

Like a game of Operator, the original inscription turned out to be quite different than the one related, which collective memory recalled more eloquently as:

The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try.

The actual inscription burns half of its character count relating the inscriber's name -- three times -- and the date twice. (The first shots of the Civil War were in truth fired on April 12th, but it took time for news to travel in 1861.)

Incidentally, if the inscriber's name and date had been handled as metadata, the way they would be in a digital context, the same way blog posts are stamped with the time they're created and the identity of the blogger, then Jonathan Dillon's inscription would fit neatly within the 140 character count limitations of a tweet.

Importantly, he carved what he had to say into an artifact that he could reasonably expect would endure and would be carried to places of importance in Lincoln's pocket. Hidden, perhaps, from its owner, but the story didn't remain buried: he told the story to whomever would listen; to his family, to his friends and even to the New York Times in 1906.

In the NPR segment on the event you can hear the awed pride in the voice of Dillon's great great grandson, Douglas Stiles, as he acknowledges the impertinence of his ancestor's action, saying: "My goodness that's Lincoln's watch. My ancestor put graffiti on it."

The story goes that Dillon was the only Union sympathizer working in the watch shop, which gives his inscription even more poignance: unable to voice his emotion to his immediate community, he broadcast his sentiment to the larger world.

This bears all the hallmarks of a tweet -- or perhaps a tweet bears all the hallmarks of a furtive inscription inside Lincoln's watch. Or of graffiti scribbled on an historical monument; or a petroglyph carved into a rock face. Each of these is a brief declaration that simply states: "I am here, right now, inside this larger landscape where these things are happening -- and this is what I think. This is how I feel."

mind map

“Coupons” up 161%
“Unemployment” up 206%
“Discount” up 26%
“Mortgage” up 72%
“Bankruptcy” up 156%
“Foreclosure” up 67%
“Unemployment Benefits” up 247%

Year over Year growth in Search Terms related to the Economic Downturn, December 2007 vs. December 2008.

Via: comScore