Tag: Blogging and Computers

Thinking Back To Blogging When We Was Young

I heard the news about Aaron Swartz like everyone else. And then I heard another way as way back when I started blogging I belonged to the Berkman Thursday discussion group through the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I still get the digests via email when something is posted coming up on a decade after it was busy. This week I received this:

It is with great sadness that I share with you the news that one of tech’s bright minds and a blog group participant, Aaron Swartz, has left us. Many people are sharing thoughts about this amazing fellow. I’ll share a few links below. Some local memorials have already happened and more are yet to come. Since Aaron was on the MIT Mystery Hunt team sj and I and several other blog group folks are on, we are tentatively planning a gathering during the Hunt. If you’re participating in the Hunt, keep an ear out for more info.

It was sad news. I knew the guy was young but when I look back I really had no idea that in my late 30s I was in a chat with folk then only a little more than a third of my age. It was interesting stuff and the discussion was hopeful. There was lots to dream about. I saved stories to my blog like this one from 2004 about how blogs might make money one day. I wrote hopeful things this even though for the life of me I have no idea now what I meant to be saying. I argued. And on Thursday evenings for a while I would fire up the computer, turn on the speakers and listen as the Berkman bloggers’ group talked. There was a chat function – was it on IRC? – that allowed anyone to participate. So I have this dim recollection of chatting about blogging with a lot of people including Aaron. Maybe I just listened or watched his words pass on the screen.

At some point I got less interested in the theory. An argument point developed that somehow folk were able to appropriate the works of others. I didn’t disagree with the point as I had no clue what the heck was meant. The idea generally faded but it took a number of years for the fine points to come to the surface. No one speaks of a “mash up” world any more like in 2004. But Aaron did, I think.

I won’t connect dots and I don’t expect you would either. As was pointed out, there was depression involved. At least one pal of mine died at his own hands due to depression. It’s sad. Does not take a grand design or conspiracy or even anything that makes very much sense. But when I think of the keen interest I had a decade ago and the voices that I listened to in pursuit of that interest, his was in the forefront. And he was so young. As young as my kids now. Sad news.

None

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 Bullets For Shane

When I was seven, I had to go to the hospital in North Sydney. I had something but the doctors couldn’t figure out for a week they poked around me, one day taking so many blood tests that they ended up having to hold me down. They ended up figuring it out and I was out in about ten days.

Andrew from Bound By Gravity wrote me a few days ago about another seven year old boy who is in hospital in Ottawa with a tougher haul these days. He has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. But that boy, Shane, has a request. He wants cards from around the world for his birthday. Here is Andrew’s explanation of what you can do to help Shane. I like how Brooksie puts it:

Yes, you do have time to do this. He’s a seven year-old child with leukemia sitting in isolation at a hospital right now. You’ll make the time.

Right?

You can make the time, too. He address to write to is here. Bullet points in a moment.

  • US College baseball season has begun.
  • Earlier this week I saw a blip pass by that for some reason did not get much attention. Canadian pension funds are doing very well.
     

Canadian pension funds moved into a healthier financial position last year, buoyed by strong stock market performance and higher bond yields, Mercer Investment Consulting reported Tuesday. The median return for Canadian pooled balanced pension funds was 13 per cent for the year, “benefiting from strong performance in most of the major equity markets in 2006,” Mercer said in reporting the results of its pooled fund survey.

Whenever there is a tough patch for pensions, people go one about how the sky is falling and turn, in despair, to libertarianism. Expect packed union halls and a spike in NDP polling for the next wee while.

  • A few weeks ago we discussed the meaning of local in our form of Federalism. It appears, however, that in the heartland of the individual, local does not actually mean the local community as the council of Fort MacMurray Alberta is looking for a stop to the expansion of the tar sands that are the windfall fueling the provincial boom and the local social bust. Here is the story for Jim Elve’s place. So is the best “local” really just the next big faceless bureaucracy below the national level?
  • Rob posts an very lucid article from the New York Times on the way food and health have been treated for the last number of decades.
  • Dick Cheney is getting a hard rap this week. Last night on CNN there was a little tag line on the screen which was something like “Cheney Deluded?” Now, if I was ever to have a bull headed crazy power freak in my like, Dick’s the man. Why? Well, he wrote Dad a letter one that hung on the cottage wall next to the one from Michael Palin for one thing. Maybe it is the Libby case where all of a sudden the defense is not backing up all those bloggers that claimed the charges were overkill. NPR has more on Dick the Contrarian, who even seethed at Wolf Blitzer this week – seethed!!
  • I think I would be more sympathetic if there was a concurrent promise to create a Maritimes Union with centralized services, two of which were not nepotism and patronage…did I say that out loud?

That must be it. If you want to check out some great blogging, pop over to the beer blog and read about Knut’s adventures at the world’s northernmost bar. Tough crowd that likes a mural of a shot polar bear.

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.

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.

Pay off Google?

From this morning’s Kingston Whig-Standard in a story about efforts to counteract the decline in local tourism from America and elsewhere:

…popular Internet search engine Google was paid to rank the www.kingston-itsabouttime.com Web site high in Google searches so that people who are looking for information on Kingston or tourism in Canada are sent to the campaign site first.

Surely Google would be useless if rankings were to be affected by payment.

CB Radio for Today

Jevon has recently written about egos and blogging. This made me consider what writing on these things is like and I keep coming back to that wonderfully dead-end technology of the 1970’s – CB radio.

In both, you get on the medium, yap about what ever comes into your head and use funny names and other stuff inherent in the medium to abstract who you want to be seen as from what you are – “Foxy Lady”. Also like CB radio, you have to lug one bit technology around [PC or Mac/Chevy van or Mack] to get at the communication media [blog/CB radio].

So who will be the Red Sovine of bloggetry?