Stir

This sort of copying is ok, right Orrin?

2003-06-19T19:20:00.000-07:00

"They have Google in their crosshairs."

Worth a look

2003-05-23T05:06:00.000-07:00

Found on Gaspar Torriero's blog: What Google leaves out - Gaspar connects it to what Doc's been writing about Printwash.

Doc on Printwash

2003-05-19T11:05:00.000-07:00

Doc's discussion of Printwash is currently #2 on Blogdex. It deserves to be #1. After all, #1 is that truly mindless tale in the Times of blogs and privacy. (Go find it yrself if you care.)

Here's Doc:

Okay, now consider your local library. Look at the periodicals section, the periodicals stacks, all those nearly unsearchable microfiches, and all those Readers Guides to Periodical Literature. You're looking at a system that deeply respects not only the printed word, but the requirement that everything be both sourced, and find-able.

On the whole, blogs are highly compliant with the ethics of the periodicals section, the ethics of the stacks, the ethics of sourcing and archiving, the ethics of giving credit where due.

The bottom line: In the age of the Web, the practice of charging for access to digital archives is a collossal anachronism. It's time for The New York Times and the other papers to step forward, join the real world and correct the problem. Expose the archives. Give them permanent URLs. Let in the bots. Let their writers, and their reputations, accept the credit they are constantly given and truly deserve.

In other words, stop the printwash.

Strategies for leveraging the milling mob of Google

2003-05-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

The concerns over Google's future policy towards bloggers needs a little leavening, and we have just the thing. Where others see a competitor, or a potential opporessor, the Happy Tutor sees a battlefield of large proportions and many happy and productive effects:

Google is a public space in which a mob is milling that will tear down the walls, and sack the archives, returning to the public domain what was stolen. As prisoners were once released in Paris from the Bastille, so the Reporters for the Times will be released from the Times Business Model, in short, from Wealth Bondage.

Google is the Wheel on which we break the Old Business Model, until it confesses its Sins and gives up the ghost, as the milling mob cheers itself hoarse, and reaches for bits of hair, flesh, and bone as souvenirs of this Glorious Day -- Freedom! Freedom from Spiritual Bondage to Brands! More...

A bit of background on Googlebombs.

Dark and hugger-mugger machinations

2003-05-18T05:43:00.000-07:00

Scoble on Google's alleged predicament - pressure to push down blogs:

Google is getting a lot of pressure from its advertisers to "devalue" webloggers and push them down. The fact that when you search for "NEC Tablet" and you find me, for instance, might really piss off NEC. Since NEC advertises on Google, Google has more reason to listen to them than it does to listen to me.

This will be important to follow - there is always this pressure. It has ruined public communication in the realm of book publishing, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV. Will it undo Google?

Hey

2003-05-18T05:40:00.000-07:00

Hey Jeneane - I think the meeting you describe is being replicated in a lot of places all over the place. For the moment, blogging is the phenom, and lots of people who like to think they can make money out of anything that's "hot" are wondering how they missed this and what they can do with it. They should listen to you. More on this to come. Just wanted to say hey.

I talked about Blogging Today.

2003-05-14T21:22:00.000-07:00

In a business meeting today, I went through my shpeel on who I am... "Hi, I'm Jeneane Sessum. I worked at Ketchum as the Senior Technology Writer for the last five years, was the voice behind communications at big brands like IBM, Cingular, Nokia, and AMS, and helped launch more companies that I can count during the tech boom. Over the past 20 years in marketing and technology, I've written every type of deliverable for every type of company in ever industry. Before Ketchum blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah..... I also have a passion for the place called the Internet and the people gathered there. I'm a well-known weblogger who started blogging in 2001, blah bl---"

"OOOh. Weblogs" (one voice)
"What's a weblog?" (another voice)
"It's an online diary (first voice to second voice)
"It's kind of where people write what goes on during their day. (third voice)

Me: "Well, not really. Kind of. Sort of. But not just."

"Tell us." (all voices)

"oh fuck." (my voice in my head)

Me: "It's a diary in the sense that it's regularly updated and is date and time stamped, and some bloggers treat weblogs as personal diaries, but they're much more than that. We are people who live out there, connecting with one another through our weblogs, writing not just about technology or marketing or gardening, or porn, or whatever our interests happen to be, but about our life, or loves, our kids, our hurts, our hate, our joy. We connect there. At the bottom. And we talk, not just on our blogs, but many of us talk by phone, meet other bloggers we care about, we know each other, we care about what happens to one another."

I keep going.

"And guess what: Bloggers do other things to earn a living. Get it? So most of us (well, not me) work someplace. And so, you see, I trust Michael O'Connor Clarke who happens to work at Weber Shandwick. I know him through his tremendous writing, I've bounced his ideas inside my head and back out to him over the last six months on many occasions. More than that, I trust him as my blog friend, because I was there when he germinated Blog Sprogs, and I was there when he and Sausage had Ruairi, and we were praying when Ruairi got sick. So who do you think comes to mind when someone asks me for a PR firm, or what I know about Weber? Do you think Ketchum comes to mind? My contacts there? No. Because those are fleeting relationships--one dimensional--even when I was there. These are human connections that exist outside of, and yet among, the construct of corporations. SEE? We are people who happen to live both on and off the net. Some of our lives are connecting both places now. Not up here (me pointing high), down here (me pointing low). That's where it starts."

I keep going.

"That's just one example. Now with Google buying Blogger, and with Google striking a deal with Amazon, do you know what that means?"

heads shake no.

"That means that one day when you're looking on Amazon for a book on kids and strep, or maybe even marketing writing, I think you'll find my blog (or a blogger like me) listed as a resource in some way shape or form along with the results returned for that book/cd/whatever. That's what I think."

Or I said something like that.

And my pal at the meeting says, "I know what it does. When I search up my own name on Google, Jeneane's blog is the second reference because she wrote something for me and uses my name on one of her blog pages."

Yes, there's that too.

I tell them about bottom up versus top down, explain it's not about getting product mentioned on people's blogs (though that sometimes helps, but most usually serves to spark discussion both good and bad, which is what you want ultimately, in other words, don't look for glowing reviews because this isn't mainstream media, it's real). It's about you guys starting to write, to blog, about what interests you--not just about marketing or technology or sales, but about you--you start blogging and you'll connect and you'll see the power of these connections, what it does for your head and heart first.

I tell them why blogs don't work like mainstream media and touch a little bit on sponsorship, but eyes have begun to glaze over and some are wondering why we're talking about this blogging thing at all.

I feel like I said some useful things. I also felt excited that real live adults cared to hear why I care about blogging.

And it sure beat strep throat!

Google to create a blog-specific search thingie?

2003-05-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

So says Orlowski:

Google is to create a search tool specifically for weblogs, most likely giving material generated by the self-publishing tools its own tab.

CEO Eric Schmidt made the announcement on Monday, at the JP Morgan Technology and Telecom conference. 'Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs, known as "blogs,"' reported Reuters.

the joi of googlejuice

2003-04-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

Joi Ito: One amazing phenomenon of blogs is that because of all of the linking going on they end up with fairly high google rankings. At Supernova, Cory of Boing Boing talked about how people email him asking about things he blogs because his blog entries show up on the top of Google results. Also at Supernova, Sergey Brin co-founder of Google talked about how important the ranking and results algorithms were for Google. For instance, first result for "suicide" can have a life or death impact on someone depending on whether it is a page to help you decide not to commit suicide or a page about how to commit suicide. I am the second entry for "Japan + Dayton Ohio" and #3 for "Takenaka media" for instance. At Davos, I talked to Larry Page, co-founder of Google about the phenomenon. I explained that I was very excited that my entry about how the media failed to report the public support of Takenaka showed up before the media reports. I mentioned that maybe it was the way blogs created a lot of pages and linked to each other a lot and how this was giving them unfair juice. Larry said he thought that blogs were getting higher rankings because they were becoming a more important part of the Internet and implied that he felt the high rankings were fair. Cool. I was beginning to feel a bit guilty about the high rankings and worried that Google would "figure it out" and start lowering the rankings for blogs. If Larry says they're fair, I'm assuming they're fair and I don't have to worry about a "correction" in my page ranking.

Interview with Google's Schmidt

2003-04-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

Schmidt:

When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world. People are amazingly surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots, whether it is the Flat Earth Society or some other variant. Back then, everybody talked about how the Internet was going to change media, because it would bring everybody together. more...

Sorting oneself into explicitness

2003-04-15T19:42:00.000-07:00

David Weinberger gets at one of the key issues at that interface where we are sliced and diced by collaborative filter engines that wish to create the illusion of a social reality. He's talking about one such illusion, called Friendster. To what extent is the illusion false just from how it approaches "getting to know" us?

First, to jump into Friendster, I have to make explicit a social network that at its heart and at its best is implicit. There's an online social network lying unearthed in my inbox and outbox. Why do I have to reassemble it, person by person, for Friendster? And if Friendster doesn't work out, do I do it again for the next attempt? That would be a pain in the ass, but because it involves persuading my friends to sign up, it's asking others to get pains in their asses.

Then Friendster asks me to describe myself. Gender, age, occupation all are no problem. But then there are my interests, my favorite music, favorite TV shows and "about me." I don't actually have an internal list of favorite music so I can't simply make explicit what was implicit all along. I'd have to fabricate a list and do so pretty much without context. Bach? Ellington? Beck? Two measures of a Keith Jarrett improvisation that took me totally by surprise? The time I cried when listening to kd lang even though she never moved me again? The song I whistle ("Octopus' Garden") in the shower even though I don't like it?

"Making explicit" rarely means simply unearthing what's lying there unearthed. It means creating something new. That's why the best service technicians aren't necessarily the best teachers: there's no such thing as humans doing a "data dump."

I know this sounds like a rather abstract reason for not liking a well-designed site such as Friendster. But the abstraction is from a very concrete experience: facing a Web page that wants me to list my favorite friends, my favorite books, my favorite music. I can't because I don't really have an internal set of bookmarks I can simply externalize. And I wouldn't if I could. More...

Google Hacks

2003-04-15T18:30:00.000-07:00

Tara Calishain's newsletter, Research Buzz, was recommended years ago by Christopher Locke, and remains a weekly treasure of insight into search engines and search strategies. Her new book, Google Hacks, written with Rael Dornfest, is getting good press. It's full of tricks, says Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times:

What happens if you type in a person's name, followed by a comma and the state they live in? Heyyy. A little creepy, but cool. Some sample hacks.

How Google grows

2003-04-11T06:44:00.000-07:00

Fast Company on Google:

Note: Google has no strategic planning dept., according to this story, which outlines a more "democratic" regime:

Here's how one Google service came into the world. In December 2001, researcher Krishna Bharat posted an internal email inviting Googlers to check out his first crack at a dynamic news service. Although Google offered a basic headline service at the time, news was not a corporate mandate. This was simply Bharat's idea. As a respected PhD hired away from Compaq and a member of the company's 10-person research lab, coming up with new ideas is basically Bharat's job.

For an early prototype, it was quite a piece of work. Bharat had built an engine that crawled 20 news sources once an hour, automatically delivering the most recent stories on in-demand topics -- something like a virtual wire editor. And within Google, it got a lot of attention. Importantly, it attracted the attention of Marissa Mayer, a young engineer turned project manager.

Mayer connected Bharat with an engineering team. And within a month and a half, Google had posted on its public site a beefed-up version of the text-based demo, which is now called Google News and which features 155 sources and a search function. Within three weeks of going public, the service was getting 70,000 users a day.

I.e., Google is using the Net's great potential as a site of open experiment:

One big factor is the company's willingness to fail. Google engineers are free to experiment with new features and new services and free to do so in public.

via Bag & Baggage.

Edelman on Google

2003-04-11T04:49:00.000-07:00

Dave Winer reports on Ben Edelman's work with Google's SafeSearch: I work in an office next to Ben Edelman, a Harvard Law student who in his spare time serves as a watchdog and lightning rod for users of the Web. He digs things up that we should be wondering out, like how good is Google, really?

We depend on them being very good, and fair. When we turn on a feature like SafeSearch we expect to have pornography and other content that's not appropriate for children, or sensitive adults, eliminated from search results. But how good are their filters? Does it also filter out sites that talk about pornography; or human sexuality in an educational, non-prurient context?

Ben says: "SafeSearch is intended by Google to block pornography and explicit sexual content, but my research indicates that it blocks far more. SafeSearch is easily confused by ambiguous words in web page titles -- like Hardcore Visual Basic Programming, a web page that describes intense programming for experts, without any sexually-explicit content whatsoever."

Edelman is a colleague of mine at Berkman Center for Internet & Society. More....

I would just ask whether this really is addressing the ultimate quality of Google, as Dave appears to want it to. It's a klutzy "moral" filter. It's hard to do, Dave. Can you do better?

Intersubjective Forces visible in Real Time

2003-04-07T06:14:00.000-07:00

Taking up the Googlewashing question, Chris Cheshire on the Fibreculture list finds Google becoming the tracking site of "large scale cultural and linguistic patterns" as they emerge.

On Saturday, April 5, 2003, at 02:03 PM, Seamus Byrne wrote:

> In this 'Googlewashing' case, we're dealing with a living difference
> between the importance of a word IRL versus its status in the online
> community. The anti-war movement offline may have taken up this term
> after a NYT article, but its instances and linkages in this context
> online were obviously less than this alternate usage.

What interests me in the emergence of google's PageRankings as a site
of struggle is not whether it is deliberately manipulated, nor whether
it can be classified as democratic, but how it makes certain
intersubjective forces visible in real time, and spins them back into
action.

Constant shifts in language use are usually encountered only casually
and locally. A new term ("Second Superpower") turns up and might come
into circulation because of its subjective efficacy (people like using
it -- it does something that other words don't). The term's uptake may
be boosted by mainstream media like the New York Times article.
Sometimes particular terminology is subject to explicit informal
regulation, like the argument over whether the term 'mediums' is an
American abuse of Royal English or a valid alternative to the plural
'media'.

Of course, linguists have long traced etymology and language usage,
after the fact. Many linguists in corpus linguistics have been using
computers to do this since the 60s by entering written texts and
transcripts of spoken language into big databases. Online lexical
reference systems such as Princeton's WordNet
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/ organise language into synonym
sets. These approaches tend to operate to create large authoritative
databases of semantic connections.

Google's PageRank captures certain slices of language in action at a
large scale. The language in action that it captures is by no means
representative of all contemporary spoken language use. It samples
website text. Although the web has relatively low barriers to entry,
websites still tend to be associated with institutions. And the
link-weighting that Googles imposes _will_ tend to be conservative, as
it tends to capture the dominant tropes of the moment, partly
conditioned by the commercially-inflected interests of the Google
company.

Within these constraints, though, Google's trawled dataset, and its
weighted search capabilities make it possible to discover large scale
cultural and linguistic patterns as they emerge. Google's famous
zeitgeist ( http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html ) gives some
sense of these patterns. But any search at all makes apparent cultural
patterns previously accessible only with involved linguistic inquiry.
With the collective activity of millions of web authors, and the
relentless trawling of search robots, these patterns are largely
self-generating.

More significantly, Google's globally dominant position as a search
engine means that these cultural patterns are fed back into culture
again -- as query results. The top hits become prime time information,
seeding further discourse of all types (conversation, journalistic
articles, mailing list posts). This type of influence is not the same
as that of the press, television or radio. This influence is of course
what is behind the efforts such as link-banking, that aim to manipulate
hierarchies.

Google is neither a triumph of democracy, nor an elite conspiracy, but
an emergent technocultural phenomenon that is subtly reconfiguring the
terrain of human activity and knowledge. It has a specificity that
can't be reduced to categories of political science, nor dismissed as
commercial opportunism. Its consequences can't be anticipated, but as
the Second Superpower story shows, it is changing the inflection of
events as they unfold.

Chris

-- -
Dr Chris Chesher
Lecturer
School of Media and Communications
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of New South Wales

Breaking through language barriers via bloggers

2003-04-06T20:05:00.000-07:00

An idea from the hairy eyeball:

A recent post on linguablogs by Weblog Central asked "How do you read foreign language blogs?" Machine-translation tools such as Google's language tools provide gisting, but is it common to find bloggers linking to gisted posts in languages other than English? The answer, I wrote back to the WC, is that I took the trouble to learn a few foreign languages, and know other people who have learned other ones.

These are the people that I would like to enlist in this group blog — a sort of multilingual Metafilter, with community features such as forums to be added as I find time. What I envision is a game of six degrees of separation in which I, with my English, Portuguese and French, could read about memes propagated in Chinese from someone with, say, Chinese, French, and German. more...

Google and Amazon Internetwined?

2003-04-04T06:39:00.000-08:00

Google Licenses Web Search and Sponsored Links to Amazon.com

SEATTLE & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 3, 2003 - Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) and Google, developer of the largest performance-based search advertising program, today announced a multi-year agreement that will make Google's search technology and targeted sponsored links available on Amazon.com. Google's services will provide Amazon.com customers with access to billions of web pages through Google's web-wide search results.

Both Google's sponsored links and web search will be available to Amazon.com customers within the next several months; sponsored links are now available on a selection of Amazon.com pages.

"Both Google and Amazon.com built their businesses by developing exceptional user experiences and providing relevant and comprehensive information," said Omid Kordestani, senior vice president of Google's Worldwide Sales and Field Operations. "Google's services will enable Amazon.com customers to conduct research across the web."

Google's global search services provide websites and portals with access to billions of web pages and the world's most advanced search technology. Additionally, Google partner sites have access to revenue opportunities through sponsored links from Google's worldwide network of more than 100,000 advertisers. Google's advertisers gain broad exposure across Google's partner websites, including many of the largest websites in the world such as AOL, Ask Jeeves, and Earthlink.

"Amazon.com is constantly seeking new ways to provide our customers with the best and most relevant information on the web," said Owen Van Natta, vice president of Worldwide Business Development, Amazon.com. "Working with another industry leader such as Google is in keeping with our relentless commitment to excellence throughout every aspect of the customer experience."

Googlewashing the language

2003-04-03T19:25:00.000-08:00

Google gets slashdotted:

The Googlewashing Of Our Language
Posted by CowboyNeal on Thursday April 03, @07:34PM
from the english-evolution dept.
KIondike writes "The Register talks about how a term ("Second Superpower") coined by the anti-war culture suddenly got radically neutered and altered by a weblog that a lot of people link to. Searching for the term on Google now brings up his blog and other people talking about his blog for the first several entries. Can Google's power to give information to the people be misused and perverted? This only took 42 days." First the widespread usage of "googling" to mean web searching, and now this. more...

Heh

2003-04-02T17:07:00.000-08:00

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 2 (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News), the world's No. 1 software maker, on Wednesday said it is taking aim at privately held Google (News - Websites)Inc., the Web-search company that's so popular its name is used as a verb.

"We do view Google more and more as a competitor. We believe that we can provide consumers with a better product and a better user experience. That's something that we're actively looking at doing," Bob Visse, director of marketing for Microsoft's MSN Internet services division, said.

Visse said the company was making some significant investments in developing a better search engine. But the company has not offered specific plans. More...

Nationalize Google?

2003-04-02T04:58:00.000-08:00

The Fibreculture list is discussing the question of whether Google should be nationalized. Among the many interesting responses, here's one from Viveka Weiley:

At 1:35 PM +1000 2/4/03, Craig Bellamy wrote:
>Should Google become a public service or its operations here be
>determined by the democratic decisions of Australians?

Um, no. Here's why:

1. The internet is an end-to-end network.
Google is just a service at one of the ends; it is not a true
intermediary. If we want a democratic search engine, we can just
build one. If it's better than google, then people will use it
instead of google. I remember clearly when altavista was the best
search engine, and everyone used it; then when hotbot was better, and
many people went there; and then when google arrived, the netizenry
shifted to it *very* quickly. Early adopters started using it when it
was just a beta at Stanford (IIRC); then they got their own domain
(google.org), appeared on /., and moved to google.com.

2. Google demonstrates that people will choose democracy in a
frictionless environment.
The Web is the closest thing we have to a perfect market; it's kind
of like the frictionless environment of space. Economic theory is
like pure physics; perpetual motion machines work in theory, and so
do lassez-faire economics, but they both assume conditions which are
utterly unlike the real world.
Google works because it is democratic; they rank pages based on how
many other pages link to them. This works, so everyone uses google.
But only as long as it keeps working.

However:

Google is imperfect, since it is not in a perfectly frictionless
environment. The greatest source of friction is government
regulation; Google obeys all government mandated blocks on free
expression. In the US, they obey the DMCA, which allows corporations
to chill speech that they don't like. In Europe, they obey edicts to
block Nazi material. In China, they block sites as required by the
information ministry. In Australia, I assume that they would obey
takedown notices from the ABA, under our government's secretive net
censorship regime.

I would argue that these censorship regimes are unpopular (except
possibly the anti-nazi measures in Europe), and exist only because
our governments are imperfectly democratic. If Google were not
restrained by our undemocratic governments, then Google would be
closer to democratic than our governments.

Oh - the other main problem with Google is that it has ties to the
NSA, and is likely building a database of all your searches (through
their persistent cookie), for the benefit of the Secret Masters. Yet
another example of undemocratic government interference.

For this reason, using government as a mechanism to make Google more
democratic would have the reverse of the intended effect. A better
option would be to set up a democratic search engine in a data haven
like Sealand, and ignore the censorship rules of other jurisdictions.
Sealand has only one censorship rule that I'm aware of; they will not
host child pornography. This ban is qualitatively different to other
censorship rules as the production of that material involves the
heinous crime of child abuse, so it's not a ban on expression as such.

A democratic search engine free of undemocratic governments would be
likely to prove more popular than google, but many governments would
choose to block it at their borders.

In general, I'm in favour of nationalising infrastructure, regulating
corporations, dismantling monopolies, and so on. But screw ideology,
look at the evidence. It is possible to build online systems that are
far superior democracies to national governments.

As usual, thanks for the thought-provoking question, Craig.

Peace,

V.
--
Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut.
{ http://www.karmanaut.com | http://www.planet-earth.org
http://www.MacWeb3D.org | http://sydney.siggraph.org.au }
Hypermedia, virtual worlds, human interface, truth, beauty.

More Sergey

2003-03-30T15:05:00.000-08:00

Another report on Esther Dyson's interview with Sergey Brin, from Jeremy Allaire:

What will happen with Blogger?

As we've heard, he says there is no master plan. They're getting tons of feedback on ways to leverage Google into Blogger, and the team will probably experiment with a few of these. The major focus now is getting Blogger into their infrastructure, including their ad infrastructure, which can really improve both the user experience of ads in Blogger as well as the contextual linking of blog content to ad content.

the obvious

2003-03-27T05:39:00.000-08:00

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Via Euan Semple: Sergey Brin of Google at PC Forum 2003, impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow

Reverse lookup from phone numbers are easy, we can detect them and return appropriate results. But looking up proper nouns is hard. Some combination of pagerank and other technologies will have to be brought to bear.

Some day, you won't be able to email a query to a friend and rely on her getting the same results -- that's the downside of customization. If you take the average Google Query and give it to a librarian, 80% of the time, he'll be able to find the answer without any further customization -- they don't need to know how old or young the questioner is, or what her zipcode is.

But that does mean that 20% of the queries could be improved through personalization. We need to figure out how to introduce that fairly complicated technology quickly and without it being confusing.

We do Google News. It's great, but we don't know how to make money off it. On the other hand, after acquiring Deja and turning it into Google Groups three years ago -- a purchase we thought would just give us great content and no money -- but now we're running ads targeted on the content of the message posts in Google Groups. That's good for the advertisers and for users.

And now we're trying this on hundreds of other sites, like http://HowStuffWorks.com.

The Blogger opportunity came up -- a successful product, but not a successful business. We looked at it and said that Google could bring a solid infrastructure (like 10,000 machines, data-centers around the world) and the ability to run targetted textads atop Blogger pages.

Beyond that, dozens of ideas have been thrown around about where to go next, but the Blogger guys are currently occupied with getting the migration done, and they'll have to figure out which of those ideas to try later.

We'd be foolish not to consider and IPO, but right now, there are a lot of downsides to it. It's a lot of work (I'm inherently lazy), and the S1 form is very long (laughs). All of our financials would be disclosed to our competitors. Worse, it would focus the company too much on the short-term money picture.

But our employees and investors expect to get some money for their stock, so we still keep the possibility open. But laziness keeps on winning out. There are so many better ways for us to spend our time -- at the rate our biz is growing, the benefit of going public would be far exceeded by the opportunities we'd lose int he 3-6 months we spend working on it.

Esther: What don't you want disclosed about your finances?

There's nothing, really -- nothing a competitor could turn into an advantage. We probably worry too much about secrecy. Our employees know our financials today, but after an IPO they'd be distracted by all the analyst chatter and the stock-ticker.

The Semantic Web sounds really improbable. Asking everyone to write in a new language -- XML or RDF -- seems like an unreasonable burden on too many people, to make computer-readable info. We should use computers to understand humans, not humans to speak in computer-ese.

We wouldn't ignore RDF or XML if it were present, but we don't expect it to be in great profusion. We'll go anywhere that there's lots of information.

Re: a Google for your own hard drive. Well, Google's goal is to make everything searchable. Most of the products that do this suck. They index and use the disk when I want to and I end up turning them off. Google doesn't make client software, but we haven't excluded the possibility.

Re: Google's "immortal" cookie. If we set a one-year cookie, then all of your preferences would disappear at the end of the year, so we set a cookie that lasts indefinitely.

Do our algorithms embody values? I think if they do, we discover them retroactively. PageRank is a democratization of the Web, but we only figured that out some time after we invented it to solve a concrete problem.

I think that there's promise in the idea of not just linking people up with documents that experts have identified (viz. PageRank), but also linking searchers up with those experts. It's not in the pipe, but I like the idea.

2003-03-23T14:44:00.000-08:00

Dave Winer:

Here's an idea. Should Google take who's doing the search into account when doing its page rank work? For example, last night over at Bob Doyle's house, I said Let's go eat at that Chinese restaurant on Central Square that has spicy noodles. Bob said Okay, what's the name? I thought, How am I going to find the name? Aha! I put it on Scripting News for just this occasion. So we go to Google, click on Advanced Search, set the domain to this one, and search for MIT noodles. Two hits, the top one is the correct one. Then later (and here's the insight) I realized that Google could take note that I do that kind of search a few times a day. Clearly I think Scripting News is pretty authoritative, way more so than almost any other site. Can that be factored into the results they give me? I think perhaps I should patent this so no one else can.

Later, he notes Google did acquire a company that does this sort of personalized search - in 2001.

Doc points to Dave Sifry

2003-03-21T13:32:00.000-08:00

From Doc:

''David Sifry has done it again with Technorati. Dig Current Events in the blogosphere, new in the last 2 hours. This is where, for the first time, the blogosphere's news flow begins to resemble and complement the mainstream counterpart over at Google News.''

'' [Later...] On the phone with David, who's explaining the differences between Technorati and indexes like Daypop, Blogdex and Popdex:
There are three: 1) The number of blogs we watch — what in the search world we call "completeness". 2) Freshness — indexing as often as possible, which in our case is in thirty minutes or sixty at the most, for any weblog. Plus we update every fifteen minutes. We also only track links made in the last two hours. So we have a lot more churn. 3) Context. We have as many different contexts as there are weblogs. We also put them together on the same page. In current events we have three links, and they're all as authoritative as possible, over the last two hours. If Glenn Reynolds posted about the same link a day ago, it doesn't show.
So there ya go. Good shit: He just added This is a rectal thermometer in the blogosphere. ''

West : All. Everywhere else: Zilch

2003-03-20T16:36:00.000-08:00

From Zilch Zilch, a blogger in India:

Mar 20th, 2003:
''Way back at the Institute of Mass communication, all that stuff about the asymmetry of newsflow between developing countries and the developed countries looked hopelessly theoretical and just plain whining. But when I see how the second Gulf war is being covered, the truth of it hits home. Everybody interpreting, eyewitnessing and reporting on this war for the entire world belongs to the Western TV and newpaper networks. Forget Indian TV, not even the newpapers have anybody reporting from Baghdad or Washington or even Kuwait. So all the coverage is along predictable lines: the bad guy being rogered, the good guy addressing the nation from Washington, the world being saved from scum.......Why is this so? The first thing is that it is very expensive to cover any war, and the economics of any single third-world country newspaper or TV covering the event is simply not on, because the is a real danger that you cannot recover the money you spend. As for sheer prestige, the newspaper and TV management are typically penny-counting shortsighted suits for whom only money has meaning. So, relax, forget all this, and tune in to Nic Robertson and Christiane Amanpour!''

This is partly why we are interested in the possibilities between Google and blogs.

shfting spaces of the here-and-there

2003-03-17T20:45:00.000-08:00

Anne Galloway, quoting herself picks up and carries the thread about community into the endless zone:

'' 'I couldn't agree more that we are living and describing a world without ends, rather than a world of ends. I admit to finding binary constructions inadequate, not least because they suffocate a gentle part of me that strives for flexibility and tolerance. I believe in individual and collective spirit, but only if they allow and account for a wide diversity of constantly changing interests and experiences. Recent travels brought to my attention how difficult it can be to distinguish between social presence and absence. With mobile technologies, interactional contexts appear voluptuous, taking place not within the boundaries (or ends) of here *or* there, but in shifting spaces of the here-and-there. And I've always believed that being social, in large part, involves what we are able to be in the presence and absence of others. I also believe that to draw clear distinctions between individual and community tends to deny our experiences and potentials in the world.' '''

Your own newspaper

2003-03-17T20:40:00.000-08:00

Leo Laporte says RSS is not Pointcast redivivus: "If you want to create your own newspaper with just the content you want, download an RSS reader. And if you run a site with content you want other folks to read, make sure you support RSS." via Denise Howell at Bag and Baggage, who adds, "(I say put the aggregator in the browser, but that's a segment for another day.)"

I for one would like to hear more about Denise's idea. I'm still wondering why, with the NET, I would ever again want my own newspaper.

Click momentum

2003-03-14T20:12:00.000-08:00

Matt Webb, thinking about Marks' s vote tags:

"Hypertext links having weight [via Joho the Blog]. Links as vectors complete with magnitude. Your browsing has a direction and momentum that carves out a space. So if you always follow link-then-link then the subsequent link will be in the same direction. We need a topology that fits over the screen that affects your mouse cursor, so some links (in the same direction) are easier to move towards than others. (Example: Clicking a link is like propelling yourself in a certain direction with a certain velocity. This direction/velocity is determined by the link author and your own behaviour. On the target page, you retain your browsing momentum. Links in a different direction are harder to move towards. This is attained by putting a third dimension over the page which changes how easy it is to move your cursor. Perhaps.)"

Marks for +/-

2003-03-14T08:27:00.000-08:00

Kevin Marks sends mail:

"I've put up a simple proposal on how to make links more useful by applying votes to them:

I think this fits in well with the Googlers/stir stuff you've been writing about.

The motivation is to have a per-link expression of whether it is to something you agree with or disagree with, or are indifferent to. The indifferent one is likely a good default for automatically-generated links, such as trackbacks."

simmer

2003-03-14T06:33:00.000-08:00

Just a pointer: Juha Haataja is writing about "Weblogs on the borderline of control and chaos". This whole area of intrigue is heating up.

shifting rhizomes

2003-03-14T03:41:00.000-08:00

Anne Galloway said a lot about how blogs interrelate: ...we're looking at constantly shifting contexts, shifting uses, shifting practices, shifting meanings, shifting understandings.

I'm talking about how each time a post is referenced somewhere away from its place of origin, it is recontextualised and takes on a more or less different meaning. During the panel discussion I was struck by the lack of consideration for any type of tool that could point to (measure) the qualitative experience of blogging - wouldn't that be valuable information if one were developing the next wave of blog-related applications? I'd like to know how social interactions differ amongst different types (genres? voices?) of blogs. I'd like to better understand how excited people (including myself) were when we actually met some of our favourite "people behind the blogs" while at SXSW. I just think blog-spaces are much bigger (less contained?) than they sometimes appear.

One of the reasons this seems so important an insight has to do with how so much of what is going on between and among bloggers falls outside what can be identified and tracked as "content." I tried to flesh this out in a comment:

''Much of the effort at tracking blogs has been made under the sign of "content" - as that unholy word is generally understood in media circles. As such, the representation of relations among various blogs, bloggers and blogged stuff is oriented toward discursive speech and often insensitive to other elements, such as the social, temporal, affective and recontextualizing elements you point to, along with qualitative elements of design, tone, timing and figure that go to matters of voice, indirection and sensibility that can elude "capture" by bots looking for "memes" or other discursive connections. Lots to mull here and to revisit.''

Anne points to the model of the rhizome as a model better suited to represent "the constantly shifting contexts, shifting uses, shifting practices, shifting meanings, shifting understandings" that obtain between and among blogs.

[Later: Euan Semple: The Internet is just a bunch of words we can link to. He's taking issue with Seb Paquet's thoughts, found in Towards Structured Blogging.]

mycellial effects

2003-03-13T12:45:00.000-08:00

Through Ton's blog, we found mrG speaking thusly: The key is, we don't go looking for a guru, we go looking for consensus and while it's far from finished product, right now the combined mycellial effects of the blog ecology are the best consensus-sifting machine invented. This suggests to me yet another different way to look at the Power Law observations: Could it be that we seek those voices that agree with our alignments to a consensus, and not the other way around?

There's something to this notion of looking for "consensus," although the "con" is always a matter in question. Some days on Blogdex it seems to be largely Persian bloggers, other days, politicos. But consensus finding via blogs brings with it a host of additional values - time, voice, dialogue, familiarity with the writer(s) etc.

Can't touch this, Dan

2003-03-12T15:01:00.000-08:00

A scarcely pondered notion, but what the hell: News travels fast in music. Much faster than in "news." Music is aural news. Think about jazz - someone plays a new tune - that means it's out - seconds later, sidemen are all over it, taking it somewhere else. Parker takes the tune to some fucked level of speed insanity, and, like, simultaneously, everyone Parkerizes. Jeneane or George might have more to say about this. A lot of hearing and riffing is bouncing around and through blogs. Ears find the tunes, the feeling of news, faster than the news. Dan Rather, cry into the folds of your silent accordion. You have too much ass to cover, too many layers of Dullness to contend with. You are never heard, only cited. Voice is dead in there. Blogs chase tunes the way Parker chased what he heard his fingers play.

Ton not deaf

2003-03-11T16:47:00.000-08:00

Ton Zijlstra: "Like I said before knowledgesharing is a complex thing, chaotic, pseudo-random, a composite of many different 1-to-1 interactions. The blogosphere reflects that, it's a cloud, not a hierarchy or a necessity of consensus on content, like forums, or congresses. There is no centralized push, you experience only push as far as there are pulls within you to accept it. It's not ideal, but it feels comfortable like an well worn coat." via wood s lot.

Hock to Joi

2003-03-10T20:12:00.000-08:00

"Unless new cultures are able to consciously visualize, create and implement new forms of governance (remember, that means the codification and regulation of its new relationships and values), the old forms of corporate and political governance will assert themselves, penetrate the new culture and turn it to the same old ends. The Internet culture was too enthralled by new toys to pay attention to such mundane matters as governance. It failed to "Institutionalize its deinstitutionalization."

"Democratic or otherwise, rarely, very rarely, does any concentration of power or wealth desire to see subjects well informed, truly educated, their privacy ensured or their discourse uninhibited.

........ [In Visa] Every neuron trusts the other neurons to perform in an acceptable manner which results in the trust between cardholder and merchant that is essential to the functioning of the system. Multiply this single transaction by twenty thousand banks, 220 countries, millions of merchant locations and more than a billion card holders and you have a whole hell of a lot of excitement. Imagine what such a system would look like if its currency were ideas and concepts rather than money. Is this what you mean by blogging?"

- an email from Visa founder Dee Hock to Joi Ito, found on The Obvious? The whole letter is worth a look.

2003-03-07T13:53:00.000-08:00

This needs to be slept on

...mulled over, cogitated, ruminated, digested, discussed.

Dave continues to react strongly in the negative to the Google-Blogger deal in his "Weaning off Google" post.

This is to be expected. As he admits, his main issue is that Google is now, to Dave, essentially a competitor. It's not an easy thing to figure out.

2003-03-06T09:56:00.000-08:00

Ceci n'est pas une vache

This is not a link to the Raging Cow blog.

Emergent BlooGoo

2003-03-05T20:40:00.000-08:00

Stephen Berlin Johnson: "About ten months ago, I wrote this in Salon:

"The true revolution promised by the rise of bloggerdom is not about journalism. It's about information management. The bloggers... can actually help organize the Web in ways tailored to your minute-by-minute needs. Often dismissed as self-obsessed 'vanity sites,' the bloggers actually have an important collective role to play on the Web. But they're not challengers to the throne of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. They're challengers to the throne of Google."

He said it here.

routing around the failure to rout around

2003-03-05T06:24:00.000-08:00

I have to come back to this from Jeneane (see also below):

...human voices--nobodies, really--are resonating farther and longer through this medium than the power structures of institutions like corporations, big media, government, religion... It's the bottom up thing that's important.

Take this in juxtaposition with the fantasy tool dreamt by Joe Duemer, immediately below. Or even without such a cool tool, the suggestion is, Google or whatever surpasses it is enabling nobodies' voices to rout around the gravitational pull of Money, Branding, Advertising-driven media and the like. This is precisely what is important about Blogger/Google. If, as some fear, other agendas will forestall that outcome, this would merely give another aspirant the opportunity to come in, do it right, and displace Google.

Blog fantasy tools

2003-03-05T04:47:00.000-08:00

Joseph Duemer: "Blog fantasy tool: Maybe now that Ev & his crew have gotten Google to back their technology they could come up with something like this for weblogs. I would be eternally grateful. The thesaurus tracks connections of various classes; it would be useful to be able to trace the shapes of conversations among bloggers on a particular subject. The dictionary the thesaurus draws upon, of course, is more or less static, while a blog argument (in the broadest sense of that word, meaning an idea tested & developed) is born, evolves & then fades into a kind of informational twilight.

Jeneane Sessum: it ain't all about text

"Finding voice through the backdoor--arriving at voice through imagery. You know, Voice isn't all words. Voice isn't all about text. Sometimes I search google because I'm feeling a certain way--I'm not looking for sites or blogs or healthcare pages. I go straight to the Images tab to see if something finds me there. Tonight that happened." more...

nobodies, really

2003-03-03T13:56:00.000-08:00

Jeneane is looking for a way to sum Blogging. She writes in the comments on this entry on Allied:

I have promised to make some VIPS a list of articles and blogs that will somehow wrap the largeness of all of this into a single email. So far I haven't been able to do it. The importance of it, really, is that human voices--nobodies, really--are resonating farther and longer through this medium than the power structures of institutions like corporations, big media, government, religion... It's the bottom up thing that's important. I'm not saying we'll TAKE OVER any of those institutions, but we will penetrate and change them.

try explaining that to someone who wants to know what a blog is. yeh.

I dunno, I think you just did...

The vision of Mr. Allchin

2003-02-28T21:48:00.000-08:00

"Google's a very nice system, but compared to my vision, it's pathetic," he said. He is Microvisioinaire Jim Allchin, drinking his own brew of microblather. C'mon Jim, what exactly is the use of thinking we even want our computers to know about us? Yes, a sensible way of finding stuff - something apparently not on your agenda at any time in the past two decades - would be nice. But you microguys are way over impressed with your presumption that you can create products that are smarter than your customers. It's that contempt that has caused most of them to hate you even before you wow us with your brainy longhorn bollocks..

Corner your niche now!

2003-02-27T17:29:00.000-08:00

Fishrush Now that Google has merged with blogger, it seems to me that it'll be imperative that bloggers 1) use blogger and 2) develop an area of expertise. Flaxseed.

Steve Yost : weblog standards?

2003-02-27T17:12:00.000-08:00

Steve Yost: Could search engine results be made even more effective by formalizing the structure of weblogs and other related entities? Here are some areas of standardization that the Google/Blogger combination could ultimately produce (again, we hope it's an open process of standard creation):

A weblog format standard
The standard would define markup for the well-defined parts of a weblog, minimally: the posts, including author and date for each; the blogroll area, containing links to other weblogs. Given this, Google and other search engines could more effectively spider and index weblogs. But it could go further, with standard categories for posts: e.g. movie-review, book-review, auto-dealer-review, political-rant, lazyweb-request. Search engines could create their own channels using these categories, and (if desired) target ads or do more elaborate partnering. More... Discuss here.

Dave sees one possibility

2003-02-27T08:13:00.000-08:00

Dave Winer: Here's what Google can do for weblogs that would be a service to the weblog community -- classify them and group them. Give me an accurate list of all the librarian weblogs, and all the lawyer weblogs, and all the weblogs of people who have implemented an XML-RPC stack. You get the idea. They have been able to do this with news stories, it seems they should also be able to do it with weblogs. This is the biggest unsolved problem I see in this world, and I don't know how to solve it, it's not what I do.

I'm especially glad to see Dave saying this, since it's one of the key wishlist items also described here - (scroll down a bit to Throw another Pyra on the Google? )

- Ease of directory assistance for bloggers. E.g., say you want to find bloggers who know all about Matisse's childhood, or Indonesian cuisine, or Ponca City, OK - how, at present, do you find them?

(the other two major items were:

- Persistence of blogged content - e.g., now if a blogware company goes belly up, what happens?
- Ease of searching blogs - exactly where is that brilliant bit you wrote some eons back about Fainting Goats?)

Head Lemur gets it

2003-02-27T04:18:00.000-08:00

Googgler

''Blogging Google. Googling Blogger. The sound and the fury over this pure internet play is amazing. Make no mistake, this is a pure internet play. Neither Google or Blogger has any meaningful existence outside of the internet. That being said, I can only laugh at all the folks who are wondering, What are they going to do?

It doesn't matter. Because whatever it is, it will be inevitable. Blogging as a method of communication has surpassed the old 'free website with your internet connection' routine. The ability to write what you feel and post it on the web without knowing anything about code, servers, connections, standards or browsers is one of the most liberating and democratic methods of expression since clay tablets.''

Language shifters

2003-02-26T20:18:00.000-08:00

Marek J.: ''We need translators. Those shamans of old who speak both the language of the tribe and the language of the gods. We need translators who can live in one language and then shift and live in another. We need language travelers. Language shifters. The world is much richer than the best constructions of English language can ever reveal.''

Or if you prefer poetry, see Jeneane.

Miasmatic emphases

2003-02-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

Miasma adds pointed insights to some points, aiding and abetting the pointillism that makes this pointy-headed blogululation different from the same old univocal talk we get eeeeevererererey day.

Another take on Google/Pyra

2003-02-26T18:20:00.000-08:00

Jon Husband, on Wirearchy:

Googlogger

There is a rapidly-growing amount of commentary (and "forecasting") about what the tag team of Google and Blogger will make manifest.

If the tinder catches fire, I believe force will be created - a force of transparency, a counter-force to the spin and propaganda of the powers-that-be. Veteran bloggers have been suggesting this, hoping for this, trying to create this since the obvious power of "Push-Button Publishing For The People" came into being.

The means exist for beginning to create something other than the monied, closed-connections dynamics of the ruling hierarchy. Perhaps it's not the Internet that is the new revolution to rival Gutenberg's printing press, perhaps it's the distribution, collection and indexing capabilities offered by:

Googlogger ? Bloogler ?

that will allow tapping into the emergent and self-organizing properties - perhaps this will be "The Experiment" that tests whether or not Emergent Democracy is something that collectively we humans aspire to and/or possess ?

asked, answered?

2003-02-26T12:46:00.000-08:00

Hey Jeneane - saw yr post on Googlers about RSS, and lo and behold, Dave Winer has a post entitled RSS for Liberal Arts Majors.

Saltire as Satire

2003-02-26T12:43:00.000-08:00

Steve McLaughlin clarifies his satiric intent
.

back room rhumba

2003-02-25T07:46:00.000-08:00

Dave Winer: Part of the weblog phenomenon is opening up the back rooms so they're visible to the public.

Another part, one can fondly hope, is blowing the back rooms out the back wall into the shitosphere.

[Later:] Ev.

the public space of speech

2003-02-25T06:24:00.000-08:00

Spinning off a lively discussion here on Shelley Powers' blog, I said some stuff about public conversation here. One snip, fwiw:

Sharing what we apprehend, filtered through several minds capable of informing and disproving each other, offers glimpses of possibilities of larger representational richness than what we've grown used to.

2003-02-25T06:19:00.000-08:00

Doc replies to Steve's critique of Pyra, and among other things, makes this point:

What I love about blogging is the way we inform each other. As a knowledge-expansion system, it scales like nothing else in the world.

Times folo

2003-02-24T20:36:00.000-08:00

More than a week after the blogbreaking Live at the Blogosphere, the New York Times is picking up some hints of what might come of Google/Pyra. It manages to slam Google News along the way, then speaks with Meg Hourhihan, who says, "I very much think it's about having the Blogger database, not so much the words but what people are pointing to, and getting their finger on that in real time."

Also, Jeff Jarvis, who says: Follow Weblogs and you follow the buzz." Jarvis = president of Advance.net, the Internet unit of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications, and was an investor in Pyra.

Actually, the Times doesn't appear to have advanced the story an inch beyond what Dan Gillmor had in his news-breaking blog the night of June 15...

And Steve McLaughlin on Saltire weighs in, none too pleased:

Some bloggers think this is a big win for weblogging. As if Google's acquisition of Blogger should be viewed as a triumph for the weblogging medium. It's not. It's just one company deciding they can take out the little guy for some printed paper, and the little guy gets released from his silicon handcuffs. It's just another company that you thought was different proving that they're just like all the other sell outs.

Powers on mass power

2003-02-24T08:51:00.000-08:00

Beginning from Michael's discussion of CNN, Shelley Powers ponders the Google/blogger fusion through the binary opposition of individual perspectives versus mass-minded coordinated action:

What irony: by being an individual and writing on what I want, when I want it, and encouraging others to do the same, I'm trying my best to disrupt this push for a mass-minded power capable of possibly changing the very war I fight with all my breath.

One would ordinarily not consider blogs as the best vehicle for mass movement, since even to google-bomb, one needs to coordinate an effort in which each blogger has to individually execute an act. This is quite a different arrangement from, say, radio call in shows, which by catering to a specific niche, can seem to be representing a far larger block of right-wing ignoramuses than actually exist. The happy failure of blogging to be a mass phenomenon makes it seem, at least from a purely formal point of view, a somewhat preferable tool for serious discussion.

Joious Marksism

2003-02-23T09:40:00.000-08:00

Emergent Democracy - Joi Ito (via Doc)

Google and Blogging - Kevin Marks

The growth of weblogs has been a classic disruptive technology event,
with adoption and traffic driven by individuals rather than
corporations. Google has had a leading edge insight into this because
of the objectivity of the PageRank algorithm in measuring the
connectedness of the web.

Blog Power Laws - Kevin Marks

Listening post

2003-02-22T06:01:00.000-08:00

"If the movements of each person browsing through Yahoo! right now made a sound, what would that sound like?"

How the Net listens to itself matters. At the Whitney Museum, an effort is on display. To bring it - us? - to our senses.

language google

2003-02-21T19:59:00.000-08:00

Perhaps Google can tap into the folks who have helped them translate their site into more languages than I knew existed to bridge the gap on whatever information comes out of Iraq, or out of those who know Iraq intimately, if this all begins, which I guess we're all afraid by now that it might.

Some time ago, I wrote a few emails back and forth with Hoder (Hossein Derakhshan), an Iranian blogger now living, if I remember right, in Canada. He is a good writer--and writes in English, so I can tell you that first hand. He has an interesting post about top officials now actually leaving comments in popular Persian weblogs:

"I'm not exactly sure if this has happend anywhere else. But some top officials are not only reading and following Persian weblogs, but also are responding to and commenting about some posts in popular weblogs. After Fazel Larijani called me when I wrote a pieace on his newly started mission in Ottawa as a cultural embassador, 2 of top reformist officials -one of them is a an MP from Tehran- put comments on Sina Motallebi's post about Iranian journalists' association's lack of support to the recently-arrested journliast, Alireza Eshraghi. There were other news that many top politicians are closely following these writings, but this is the first time they actually reacted to them."

I imagine progress through comment boxes, including the excluders in the discussion without requiring that they fully participate. That could actually be a very good thing. Google may need to give us a more robust and reliable comment feature, while they're at it.

Hodan gives some hopeful news here as well.

His blogroll list a bunch of Iranian bloggers, if you're interested in reading more.

Khorishid Khanoom is another Iranian blogger I emailed a couple of times, but how to get by the language barrier. She's on my blogroll and every now and then I go there and look at the characters--it's more like art than language to me. You can still get a tinsy bit of English--more like punctuation than English--like at the very very end of this post.

I don't know how, but Google has to find a way to let us read and understand one another regardless of our native language. And to make it simple for non-bloggers to participate in cross conversations through more robust commenting functionality than we now have.

We need a bridge somehow across languages through language.

or something like that.

sods of war

2003-02-21T08:47:00.000-08:00

Michael, the speed you talk about is being harnessed by positions of all persuasions:

Here's some pathetic shit: Blogs of War - listed on IraqWar.Info, which was spawned by this, which makes it, if I'm not mistaken, a marketing device. And indeed, it has ads for those who prefer to experience their war from the comfort of their playpens.

I wonder if IraqWar.info would list bloggers from inside Iraq, if any are found....alive...

Michael O'Connor Clarke on Google/Blogger as the New CNN...

2003-02-20T16:23:00.000-08:00

Here and here. Among other good points, Michael makes this one:

"The critical dimension in which bloggers absolutely have old media – both print and broadcast – smacked down cold is time. It’s about blogspeed. Or more fundamentally: netspeed. The rate of info flow from the news scene via the blogvines is currently exponentially faster than the rate of news dispersal via ‘traditional’ media."

This is one of the reason's Michael thinks it crucial to have bloggers posting from Iraq--to give us the unfiltered human story, the story we won't get from CNN this time.

"Given what we know, we just can’t depend on old media to deliver the truth/whole truth/nothing but the truth. Mini-army of ‘embedded’ frontline media or not. The embedded journalists will get to see and report on only what the Pentagon chooses."

One thing we can do is search out and find more bloggers writing from inside Iraq. And we can hope to perhaps have a team of human blog translators engaged since I doubt if Google can boost its language capabilities to translate Arabic in time.

I wonder what it would take to send "bloggerists" there. Should we begin a blog sponsorship campaign to sponsor some willing bloggers to go to Iraq? What would it take, and what would they need to take with them? How long might they be there? How would we keep them funded? How would we get them access to the front line? Or should we? How would we get their stories back? I wonder if at a different time in my life I would have said, "Send me." Probably not. There was a time when I longed to be a front-line journalist, though, but that's another story, a lifetime ago.

If they go--one or more--they will make journalistic history. Because we'll be sure of it. And Google will help. Beyond that, they'll be transmitting unfiltered human voice, which is as close to truth as we ever get.

emergent

2003-02-20T12:50:00.000-08:00

And just to make the point that I've been trying, yammering, to make for the past few days: The linking of Google and Blogger had, for precisely the reason Adrian defines (in previous entry but one), the extraordinary effect of seeming a natural evolutionary step. An (inevitable?) articulation in the organism. As when something decided a neck would go well here, an esophagous there.

Dave Weighs In with a Thoughtful Essay on the Google Blogger Deal

2003-02-20T12:49:00.000-08:00

"In other ways, the Blogger-Google deal may signal a change possibly as deep as the personal computer revolution, where huge glass palaces controlled by technologists were routed around, by software and hardware that did the same thing, for a fraction of the cost. "

Dave Winer

Miles ahead in getting it

2003-02-20T12:34:00.000-08:00

As evident as this point is, it hadn't occurred to me, and I haven't seen it made until, via Jill Walker's rich blog, I saw this from Adrian Miles:

google is the first search engine that understood the web as a system of links and that these links, what expresses connection between parts, is the major semantic, structural, thematic, and commercial economy of the web. that is it is the first large search engine that treats the web as its native habitat, rather than bringing flatland values to the problem of data, indexing, and retrieval.

similarly blogs are the first native genre to have developed in the networked writing space that is the Web. so it makes sense that one sees the value of the other, but together . . . this is not just a question of commercial capital but also of the intellectual (cultural and networked) capital that comes with living the web in vitro. in 3 - 5 years publishing will have changed so dramatically as a result that what we today will appear odd. (vlog, 17/2)

memex

2003-02-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers -- conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear.

... Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re- enter on a new path.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.

... Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

... Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

... There [will be] a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.

Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race. Vannevar Bush: As We May Think. July, 1945.

Bursts of Zeitgeist

2003-02-19T10:38:00.000-08:00

Check this out, (via Boing Boing).

And now I see...

2003-02-19T09:58:00.000-08:00

...there is a Gogol - a lovely site which, in its own words, ne tient absolument AUCUN compte de ce que vous souhaitez chercher - doesn't give a crapola about what you were trying to find, but returns purely random results. heh.

blam

2003-02-19T09:25:00.000-08:00

A new blog, like this one, is like one of those weird things in physics - where, a moment ago there was nothing, and now there's a little tiny thing, and whoops bang oops blam - a universe with people walking around, hailing cabs, eating Chinese food, blogging...

But a blog doesn't quite precipitate out of nothing. There are pointers, signs of its impending arrival. In this case, e.g., here and here and here and here and here.

Jeneane, I suspect your translation idea is eminently doable, and is already being explored at Gbloogle et al.

One of my fond hopes is that the combination of bloggery and Google will produce something we might call Gogol. Nikolai Gogol is one of my favorites. A very unhappy fellow, but that's beside the point. Gogol offered a voice that is like no other. He made worlds out of langage and one can revel in them. But that's not the point either. The point, such as it is, is that voices have power. Not just to communicate or portray or to persuade but to invoke, to re-call, or call forth, or summon, etc. Like, you rang, and here we are. Gogol could be a convocation of voices, an augmentation of the nuanced conversational powers that have been advanced by the advent of blogging per se. Blogging is a deepening of the presence of voice even as it enjoys the speed and amplitude of other Net artifacts. But it is the depth, the linkage, and the immediacy combined that make this special. At least, that's the wager.

I Speak Google

2003-02-19T08:58:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about the Google + Blogger deal as I drove Jenna to school today, and although I'm too sleepy to do it justice, I began thinking that this would be an interesting time to know more languages than just English, and the useless bit of Latin I know from three years of study. Why? As coversations among regular people get bumped up a notch or two or three in frequency and access with Google's likely incorporation of weblogs in their offerings, I want to be able to communicate--albiet not perfectly--with folks whose language I don't speak or read. I started thinking, which language class would I take, if I decided to really take this on.... French? German? Italian? Portugese? What?

And then I thought about Google's language translation tool. AND THEN I came home and looked at my google tool bar. AND THEN I thought, yes. They could do that. Google could add a translation engine behind the blog interface and give us an easy way to translate what we're writing and reading into our languages of choice. No, it wouldn't be perfect. Yes, some miscommunication might arise among onliners whose thoughts get garbled in the translation. But this happens among those of us talking to one another in a common language too. So what's the difference? Anything that keeps the conversation going and arching outward is significant.

So google, my wish number one is to make your language translation machine more robust--offering more languages and more precise execution--and for you to bundle it in my blogging application with your usual grace and ease and understanding of what we want, and what we haven't even thought of wanting yet...

Et tu?

2003-02-19T08:45:00.000-08:00

Jeneane, you're always pushing this blogging shite. Are there no limits? ;)