Monkey See, Monkey Do

years ago i attended the annual machack conference in michigan. it was such a fun geekfest; coding 24 hours straight and then presenting the results with much silliness. i’m really excited to see a similarly geeky gathering in san francisco this february and now wondering what i might whip up for codecon! (from boingboing)

one week to go and then i’m off to vermont for a month-long meditation retreat. i’m really excited. both to wrap up a number of projects before i go and to spend a whole month with just my mind to contemplate (like always).

the first news back about the moon Titan has me daydreaming about very far off lands.

so i had this strange thought (over dinner of course) about carnivorous or omnivorous animals and how that fits into a larger view of the earth as a biological system. consider for a second that most animals share the vast majority of their DNA. if you compare dogs to cat to mice, for example, there is very little really different between them. sure from a human view point they are very different kinds of animals, but if you were to say take the view of a space alien first visiting this planet you would probably conclude that dogs and cats and mice are all practically siblings - genetically speaking. so when a wild dog tries to eat a wild cat who was hunting a wild mouse, then you could make the argument that from the space alien’s point of view the “food chain” is more akin to cannibalism than an ecosystem. don’t ya think? (sorry for the gross train of thought)

it amazes me how polar the political situation is right now. there is a certain logic to parity between the major parties, because each will position itself against the other to claim the largest mind share. they should approach equality as a result then, but the level to which they have parity now is still startling to me.

it makes me wonder if some of the shifts in technology and society are actually encouraging polarity or if some other social factor is taking place. does the proliferation of cable TV channels allow people to settle into factional views more easily than in the past? does the communication technologies in the Internet enable greater factionalism? I really don’t know, but i doubt the actions of the current president and establishment are enough to create such polar views. perhaps there is just a habit toward polarity which is played out more as emotional energy is increased, kind of like a superbowl game. do people tend toward 50/50 parity in those contests simply to increase the sense of drama and life in the whole situation?

yay, finally figured out why file uploads were not working in this blog - and i turned off error reporting in pages with errors which is just a good security features.

this test image is courtesy of creativecommons.org which as a legal concept will help move us all to the next level of richness and diversity i believe. check them out.

file servers allows computer users in a local environment to share files easily, but how often do you think any collaboration on documents is occurring? by collaboration i mean two people working on the same content at roughly the same time to produce a collaborative work. a shared folder on a file server allows two people to alternate working on a document, for example.

i have a theory that typically a shared folder on a file server is used for a few things, but very rarely for collaboration. main uses i’m guessing:

• consumption of content. files are put there by one person for later finding and use by multiple people
• communication. large files are placed on the server as a way to deliver them to another person or to a group of people, and the context is sent in a message in email or in person

a file server is probably never the primary means of communication, but more of a way to include large amounts of data in other forms of communication - from email to personal conversations. as email servers have been able to handle larger and larger attachments, this use of a file server is less interesting. the email itself includes the crucial context for the data that is lacking with just a shared folder.

the consumption use is interesting - in that case the shared folder on the server is more of a known location or address to archive and find things from multiple computers or by multiple computer users. wiki’s with file upload or email integration (like jotspot) might be a more modern approach to satisfying that need in a richer way. just as in the communication case, a shared folder offers little context, whereas a wiki allows comments about the content to be included easily - or even better can allow the shared content to appear directly in the wiki page.

i think collaboration fails as a use case for similar reasons. the communication required to effectively work together is tough. people can work on the same document, but need good schemes for sharing notes and discussing changes or agreeing on areas of responsibility. but a file server offers none of that, only the transport medium. wiki makes it easy to create a web page together, but what might be good to add to a wiki to help people build pages of content together? comments which only appear in the edit view? visual aids which show what has changed recently in time and by whom? what do you think?

i went looking at different web hosting options today, to consolidate a few web sites onto one host so they could share a database easily. wow these services are getting cheap. for less than $10 a month one can pretty much get a web site that would do everything a person or a small business might need. and for $30 a month you can even get your own dedicated server and install whatever you want on it. that used to be a deal at $100 only two years ago (which this site is costing a few of us collectively). of course, these value leader operations might not be the best in terms of support and uptime, but it’s really impressive nonetheless.

sorry for the long delay between posts, i have had a mix of much to do and a question in my mind about what types of things to write about. i took such a swing toward buddhist subjects that this blog has become almost a journal of learning the dharma. that’s likely to continue but i’ve also been thinking about technology trends more latety - p2p, rich media, subscription based business models versus micropayments. i’m psyched to write more soon.

i really appreciated danah’s critique of the feed aggregation fad at web 2.0 last week. i had noticed intuitively some difference between blogs that have commentary and criticism and the more dairy like personal or intimate content. but i hadn’t thought about a correlation between those and the frequency of posting and comment, or the differences in use between blogs across that spectrum. so then i scanned some generic youth blogs and sure enough the comments in each entry often looked like an IM capture - with mostly social banter back and forth, meaningless to someone who didn’t already know the people and slang of that clique. just a few data points, but very interesting to draw the comparison between email/IM and the different types of blogs.

i wonder if there’s a pace which defines the qualitative difference. the IM crowd interacting at a more frequent pace, the email crowd slower, more thoughtful. the former more interested in frequency and immediacy of contact as a currency of friendship and the latter more interested in the quality of the contact as the currency. seems to also be a difference of interruptive versus postponable in the two mediums.

as i’ve gotten older, it does seem like time constraints make it harder for me to have frequent contact with my circle of friends or interruptive communication so we check in periodically and tend to have more thoughtful sharing of what’s going on; certainly compared to ‘wassup?’ kinds of quick phone calls or IM messages. i’m also used to friends increasingly asking, “is this a good time to talk?” but maybe my circle of friends is just getting stuffy.

i’ve been spending more time lately thinking about how people share, send, and publish digital photos and files lately, because of my focus at work. but sent files always include messaging about them, as a form of context. sometimes the context is just framing the content (e.g. here are pictures from my trip to hawaii), sometimes it’s a request for commitment or confirmation of agreement (e.g. please review this document by friday, or here are the proofs please typeset these)

this would seem to have implications for photo sharing or music sharing, but i’m not sure if the interfaces would be different as much as the requirements. if the comparison with blogs follows, then IM style photo sharing is much more along the lines of just ‘hey, check this, dude’ and then expecting similar responses. i wonder if commenting systems or feedback/rating would then be better if they were interruptive and immediate (through an IM client or another running service) compared to delayed in email. that would be interesting to test. what do you think?