Blogging and the Internet – Page 8

Facebook Thoughts

Now that I am obsessed with Facebook and expect the feeling to continue for the next sixteen days or so, it gets hard to actually read news and, you know, blog. Blogs have readers and hits but I have friends at Facebook – including that guy who insists we took a course together in New Jersey last summer. But you can understand entirely why sensible employers are cracking down as it is an utter time suck with little or no real productive use. Not the greatest co-worker though there is that picture of the guy you did not keep up with from the time he ate pickled eggs and took off his pants.

Apparently Facebook may have a death wish, however, as it wants to reinvent itself:

Facebook Inc. has bucked the Silicon Valley acquisition trend, remaining independent of larger technology companies. Now the social-networking start-up is seeking ways to reach the big leagues on its own. On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.

Translation? You are about to be spammed. Yik…it’s going to get on my favorite t-shirt and everything. But with a really useful interface, an explosion of activity recently as well as talk of billions and billions of revenue from the stock market who can blame the 22 year old geek who created the thing. Show him the money.

Oh, well. Like most things it will be fun for a while then work then moved on from and then an embarrassment then forgotten then remembered then finally forgotten and one guy in his mid-forties with wads of cash will tell his pals at the yacht club again about how he made a killing when he was 22. Unless he doesn’t take the cash.

Cheese Punting Is Down

As part of Wikiality Week, it is important to note that the rate of cheese punting around here has gotten somewhat embarrassing. My access to baubles and trinkets depends on hefty cheese punting teamwork. Your access to fabulous potential prizes is likewise a matter directly connected to boot meeting cheesy goodness.

It is your right and duty to punt the cheese. Web 2.0 is teetering folks. To the ramparts, I say! Punt the cheese!!!

Friday Cogitiferiffic Chatarama

Who the hell ever thought I would make it to August 25th 2006? Aside from the whole thing in Mexico in ’66 (thank you Pepe), I got through the nuclear war along with all of you, got through my teens without being eaten by a backroad ditch along with pals, got though a holiday in Paris as Syria was blowing bits of it up in ’86 and survived the Kings Cross Fire in ’87. Things got a little dull after that and law school and stuff but then there was the 5.4 earthquake in ’97 and that weird day in PEI around Jan. ’03 when I decided to head out of work early and got caught in a blizzard that was so thick I could only make out where the road was by checking out the tops of telephone polls. Whew. What a roller coaster. But here we are. August 25, 2006. Woot. I’m taking half a day to celebrate.

– Final lunchtime update before hitting the road update: I just created the “Kingston Society for Playing Catch” after looking at the picture of David Sommerstein of NCPR at this page. Expect splintering schismists branching out into “Adult Novice 500 Up” but that is their business and may also morph into a heritage group playing trapball and the other early games. The “Kingston Society for Playing Catch” is hereby soliciting membership as well as designs for the hat which must feature a “K” on the front. Submissions and proposals to be posted here.

– Update for the road update: As I did so triumphantly for “flogging”, I just now coined “clogging” for filling up the comments section of a blog with technically incapable comments or, I suppose, just going on and on…like this.

– It is a sad, sad day when the yapping of bloggers is not what shapes the news but is the news. Bo-ring. Everyone lay on the floor, wiggle around now and scream as one – “STOP PRETENDING BLOGS ARE NEWS!!!” I heard you . Thanks.

– There are men of destiny and then there are others who are not:

The owner of a restaurant named after Adolf Hitler said yesterday he will change its name because it angered so many people.

– I am watching the post- or to some mid- conflict reaction in Israel. Remember this post from last month. The concern appears to be mainly the lack of ability to impose immediate overwhelming force as opposed to ultimate peace – which is fine but the taxi driver may not have had that breath of relief. It is such a foreign existence it is hard to even imagine it.

– One clawed back. Five and a half to go.

– Gary’s Blogger blog has taken off nicely. Interesting post on pottery restoration services. Now there is a situation that requires a van with a big engine and the right to break the speed limit – Vrrrooommmmm. I say it gets designated the all important and still available purple flashing light.

– Have you noticed that certain cheater-ramas have entirly poached the Friday bullet idea? I knew I should have copyrighted this fantastic idea when I had the chance. Imagine the dollar bills flowing over my upstretched face and arms. Imagine.

Isn’t that enough? Off to see the newest member of the clan who is supposed to enter this world around noon and then off to grannie-in-law’s to talk sports of the 1920s to today. When is someone going to try that music format of “the music of the 20th century” anyway? Al Jolson then Ramones then “The Biggest Aspidistra In The World” then ringing my bell.

Angstity Beer Blogging

The good guys at Beer Advocate posted this…

First, we hate blogs as much as this guy. (Actually … we hate blogs more.) That’s why this is not a blog.

…and then proceeded to announce their new blog…which isn’t a blog…yet works exactly like a blog. This is good and will likely be a great read and place to comment on thoughts from the Alström brothers about beer culture. But it is a blog.

Click Fraud Revisited

I just noticed this article on click fraud in Wired care of Boing and found a very odd thing – a moral argument for the rights of property holders:

By splitting revenue with the sites that host the ads, search engines have become, in effect, the Internet’s venture capitalists, funding the content that attracts people to the computer screen. Unlike the VCs who backed the boom-era Internet, search engines now provide revenue to thousands of wildly diverse sites at little up-front cost to them – PPC advertising is one of the few income sources available to bloggers, for instance. If rampant click fraud overwhelms the system, it will muffle the Internet’s fabulous cacophony of voices.

I don’t know how click fraud actually qualifies as fraud in the legal sense. I don’t know of a crime being committed or a contracual relationship being breached. The main example given in the story is one of extorsion, the threatening of Google with release of a autobot clickotron unless payment was made. Sadder still is the illustration of slogs – spam blogs – who exists only to generate traffic click throughs for a wee cheque:

Thousands of splogs exist, snarling the blogosphere – and the search engines that index it – in spam. Splogs are too profitable to be readily discouraged. According to RSS to Blog, a Brooklyn-based firm that sells automatic-blog software, sploggers can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month in PPC income, all without any human effort.

Imagine. Vacuous blogs created for alternative purpose. Whoda thunk it? The problem, of course, is the seduction of the technology generally and what it does to one’s thinking and one’s ethics. How much different is the new economic moral thinking compared to, say, actual legal regulations like copyright and the intellectual property of others. Is it because this clicky activity undermines the beloved as opposed to the actual rights of others? It is primarily the violation of the new moral crime against technological advance that is decried by Wired – we have a new plan that demands new thinking, new commerce and new crimes for the old thinkers…and we will tell you what the new thinking is after we get to it, thank you very much.

Isn’t the real problem the false valuation? Isn’t it incumbant on a firm presenting a new mode of advertising to prove its effectiveness in the marketplace as a mechanism for setting the price? Is it that the clicks are invalid or is it the mechanism which clicks which is. Isn’t the real question whether a click ad represents or ever represented value for money. Interesting to note that the one realistic alternative mentioned is micro-payments…about ten years after they were laughed away by the new think.

Click Fraud?

I have a very hard time swallowing this:…”click fraud” could still prove to be a major challenge for Internet giants such as Google Inc., which make their money through search advertising. The concern that people fraudulently click on sites to drive up a competitor’s ad costs or to boost their own ad revenue was one of the potential pitfalls cited in a published report over the weekend. [Ed.’s subliminal message: PUNT THE CHEESE] Google shares fell 4.6 per cent yesterday after Barron’s warned that its stock could be overvalued because of click fraud, ad pricing pressures and heightened competition.

“The whole idea of fraudulent clicks really relies on the premise that you have a competitor out there that is trying to suck up your ad budget,” said Nick Barbuto, who buys Internet advertising for clients at Cossette Media.So…you set up a system that is measured by an innocuous activity like having surfers of the web clicking through from one page to another and then you penalize someone for doing it too much? What is that about? [Ed. again: no really…PUNT THE CHEESE!] It is not like there are armies of third world clicker throughers out there…is there? Is it just that people realize that by encouraging others to do exactly the activity company X tells its clients they will encourage, driving traffic to their websites.

So what if it is false bubbly economics based on no real production? [Ed.: Foot? Cheese? KICK!] Isn’t that the real issue? That by doing a certain unproductive activity that somehow valuation is ascribed and two cheques are cut, one to BigCo and one to little guy? What do you think? Is it really “fraud”? How can it be fraud when it is indecernable from successful use of the system?

When Is Theft OK?

If I never read the Boingsters, I probably would never encounter the “right to take” as a great new idea. But two recent posts point out something of the hypocrisy and the case-by-case arbitrary judgement that really is at the core of the arguments against respect for authorship – let’s call them the “anti-authorship” group – who call themselves “copyfighters” and part of the “remix” culture:

On June 29, 2005 Boing confirms that big Nike stole little rock band’s imagery without payment. The taking of the stuff of others wrong.
On July 6, 2005 Boing praises an essay in Wired which states that the new era of takery is here:

The remix is the very nature of the digital. Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.

So because it now can be done, it must be ok…except when we like the band and the company that takes is big. The sad thing is that people by what Boingsters like Cory Doctorow and Wired and they say about the appropriation of copyrighted material because he has successfully leveraged status rather than successfully argued the point. It is a tyranny of the self-described cool, which is a very weird tyranny. Sadder still is that there may be good arguments for specific accommodations of digital media which are lost through this broad and craptastic “remix culture” pap that sounds so neato…until it is your website layout, your icon, your text, your music and your art that is taken.

Not The Cover Of The Rolling Stone

So there I am, in the last paragraph 14^th story in The New York Times, Business Section, Media and Advertising page, web edition index at 6:37 am Monday morning with the precious URL, all live and linky:

No seized web site or anything. No referrers yet as I can see. Oh well. Wait for the entire workforce of New York City to get to work and turn on their computers to slack off for the morning by flipping through the web edition, I suppose…

It was an interesting process being interviewed via email by the reporter who has lots of web industry writing experience but not a homebrewer or anything. She noticed this post I made January on the nutty idea of an “open source beer”. Too bad they did not use the full quote – which I thought was really helpful – but, true, would have needed a separate section:

I have not tried the beer but think from what is provided that I would not like to try to make it or drink it. Making the beer would be difficult for most homebrewers given the volumes provided. Most homebrewers brew in lots of 20 litre or perhaps double that but an 80 litre boil as required in this recipe would find the brewer facing over 200 pounds of boiling sticky sugar syrup needing transferring by the brewer, a near impossible task in the average kitchen. By contrast, even the small end of the microbrewing scene expects an entry point at the 5 or 7 barrel scale of brewery. One barrel of beer is about 170 litres. Here is some information from the brewery manufacturer DME: which may help understand the scale: http://www.dmeinternational.com/brewing/brewbup/naturalbrew.html. So it is unclear for whom this scale of recipe is devised. Recipes can be scaled up or down but you might want to start with a point that is useful – or even safe – for one type of brewer or another.

That being said, there are issues with the ingredients, too. Beer is basically made of four things: water, yeast, hops and malt. In this recipe, there is detail provided about only hops and malt. As a result, it the same ingredients were used and made with the soft water of Dublin or the hard water of Burton-upon-Trent, England, the resulting products would be very different. These effects can be reproduced by adding water treatments which mimic one location or another. But without any guidance as to water quality, there is a great deal of variation left to the imagination of the brewer. The same is the case of the yeast. The recipe does not tell us whether it is lager yeast or ale yeast, the two general hemispheres of the beer world. Further, it does not state which of sub-type might be used. Consider this web page of a homebrew supplier which offers 33 ale yeasts and 16 for lager, aside from the 18 for the specialized wheat and Belgian styles of beer: http://www.paddockwood.com/index.php. Selection among these yeasts will greatly affect the outcome of the brewing process. But no guidance is given.

Where there is some guidance, we are still uncertain. We are told that “1 kg of caramel malt” is required. That usually defines a class of malts with a sugary aspect but they differ in the taste they impart according, among other factors, to the degree they are roasted. As a result, a pale crystal malt may give a slight nuttiness to a beer where a dark one provides a strong raisiny flavour. Just saying “caramel malt” in not specific enough. Similarly, the recipe includes 4 kg of sugar but we are not told if it is corn or cane, light yellow or dark demarara or even whether Belgian candi sugar is to be used. Sugar is not sugar is not sugar.

So in the end it is very difficult to determine what a brewer might do with the recipe as it is really only part of a recipe. If you take the information provided and run it through a popular beer recipe calculator used by homebrewers for planning you get a beer which is somewhat pale and normal strength at 5.2% but a bit cloying due to the moderate hops and likely richness of some residual sugars. It would also have no to very rich yeastiness with anything from a slight nuttiness to a strong raisin flavour. Here are the results from when I ran the test: http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator?6074722#tag. Except for the odd ingredient “300 g Guarana beans” this could be half the beers I have ever encountered depending on how the unstated variables are addressed by the particular brewer. It is interesting to note that guarana bean is included in the new Budweiser product, B-to-the-E: this author does not find that product very pleasant: http://www.wisinfo.com/postcrescent/news/beerman/beer_20024917.shtml

I do go on, don’t I.

Internet Memories

Along with the lack of any coherent or useful organization or indexing, this medium suffers from a lack of its own history. Sure there is the Internet Archive capturing something like one front page screen shot in every 12,486,081,230 and those high level no details stuff time lines about when the first email was sent.. but you were not there. What we need to do is create anecdotes to capture what the experience was really like when you first plugged in. Here are some of mine:

German Web TV – around 1996 or so someone had set up a system where you could watch screen shots from German TV. I do not recall any audio. I do recall they were about the first site to try to do this and there seemed to be about 15 channels or so. They refreshed every 3 to 10 seconds. Soccer was hard to follow. Blue movies at suppertime were a bit of a startler in the days of far fewer cable channels in smalltown Canada.
Operating stuff through web cams – sort of related to the above but interactive. You could run the switching of a toy train set in Germany and usually you had to wait a few minutes for your command to come up in the line up of global command givers. Somewhere else there was a garden in a small room which you could look around with a camera, dig a bit and even plant a seed. Probably the most nicest most innocent amateur sites you will ever see.
Usenet – an actually working uncensored universal bulletin board system where you could find the greatest nerds in any topic you wanted debating the issue of their affection in fine and incredibly nasty detail. Killed by cross posting porn spammers and, I think, take over by Google.
The coffee pot and the aquarium – just so someone else won’t mention them first, there were two sites with extremely early web video. The cameras were static, one aimed at a coffee pot and one aimed at a tank of fish. We stared for hours.

Some of these things may sill be there but I don’t go looking for them anymore.

Share your web anecdotes. It’s been ten years now since I started playing with this damn thing so its about time to get nostalgic. If you have a link to that German toy train, it would be a nice touch.

Internet and Defamation Decision

I came across an interesting case on defamation and the internet today in a newsletter passed around the office. On 4 June 2004, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in the case Barrick Gold Corp. v. Lopehandia, the key facts of which are set out in paragraph 12:

Mr. Lopehandia embarked upon an Internet campaign by posting a blizzard of messages on “bulletin boards” or “message boards” on various Internet web sites. The web sites in question are dedicated to providing information to those interested in the gold mining industry, including those interested in investing in the stocks of gold or gold-industry companies. Some of the web sites are dedicated to discussions concerning Barrick specifically. The web sites include www.lycos.com (in the financial markets message board sections dedicated to Barrick and another company, Durban Roodeport Deep Limited (“Durban Deep”)); www.yahoo.com and www.yahoo.ca (in the financial markets message board section dedicated to Barrick); www.siliconinvestor.com; www.theminingweb.com; and www.miningindia.com.

Cut to the chase and the internet slagger was ordered to pay to the internet slaggee $75,000 CDN in general damages and $50,000 CDN in punative damages. In support of that award, the Court of Appeal found at paragraphs 75 and 76 that:

Mr. Lopehandia is ordinarily resident in British Columbia, but there is no way to determine from where his postings originate. They could as easily be initiated in an Internet café in downtown Toronto or anywhere else in the world, as in his offices in Vancouver. Given the manner in which the Internet works, it is not possible to know whether the posting of one of Mr. Lopehandia’s messages on one of the bulletin boards in question, or the receipt of that message by someone accessing the bulletin board, traveled by way of a server in Ontario to or from the message board. It may have, however. The highly transmissible nature of the tortious misconduct at issue here is a factor to be addressed in considering whether a permanent injunction should be granted. The courts are faced with a dilemma. On the one hand, they can throw up their collective hands in despair, taking the view that enforcement against such ephemeral transmissions around the world is ineffective, and concluding therefore that only the jurisdiction where the originator of the communication may happen to be found can enjoin the offending conduct. On the other hand, they can at least protect against the impugned conduct re-occurring in their own jurisdiction. In this respect, I agree with the following observation of Kirby J. in Dow Jones, at para. 115:

Any suggestion that there can be no effective remedy for the tort of defamation (or other civil wrongs) committed by the use of the Internet (or that such wrongs must simply be tolerated as the price to be paid for the advantages of the medium) is self-evidently unacceptable.

…The posting of messages on that board constitutes at least an act done by the defendant that affects Barrick’s reputation, goodwill, and personal property in Ontario, and arguably constitutes an act done by him in Ontario. The courts in Ontario must have jurisdiction to restrain such conduct.

Common sense and an innovation that only a Court could provide. Based on the technological obscurity, the Court chose certainty. Beware my fellow Pajamistanians of the pitfalls of defamatory internet discussion in Canada.