Budaeli

We’re entering a period of information upheaval. The methods of storing, retrieving, and managing information are finally catching up to the available technology. With our collective knowledge and literature available to anyone with an internet connection, there is bound to be a flowering of scientific and artistic thought.

But we’re collectively stumbling with transitioning the technology and user interface of books.

This is important because books have grown up with our civilization to become the foundation of our complex society and advanced technology. We are all trained from an early age to harness the power of the knowledge locked up in those bundles of paper. Books define the concept of information management to such an extant that it’s unconsciously shaped the semiotics of our modern web-based system of knowledge storage.

We’ve been able to ignore the outdated book-based management system until very recently. The Amazon Kindle became the first ebook reader that married the long-form book format to the advantages of the internet and cheap storage. Now you can download a book directly to your Kindle, and store a full library in about the same space as a typical topical nonfiction.

The adoption of ebook readers has been slowed by people who feel they prefer old fashioned books to their new digital brethren. Despite the arguments, I don’t think this has anything to do with the comparative advantages of a dead tree book (no need to recharge, self-referential interface, leafability) – rather it has to do with our primal urge to hoard and the symbol of the book for knowledge. We feel safer with a physical representation of the printed word than one which disappears when the electricity stops.

This fetishism may be a good thing.

The length of the content inside books is determined by the technology itself. Authors are driven to flesh out a work to fit a standard size rather than match the minimal length that the subject matter really requires. The best example of this are business and self-help books: most of these could be cut down to have or even a quarter of the length and still get the message across – but the economics of publishing encourages writers of these works to expand their writing to book length, thus diluting the knowledge. This is why websites covering the same topics are so popular: they aren’t restricted to expanding the verbiage for reasons not related to the content.

By delaying the movement to a stable economic model for publishing knowledge online because some people still prefer paper books, we could hasten a change to short-form knowledge that better suits the technology with the added incentive of being easier to understand. A stable economic model is important because content creators need an incentive other than personal fulfillment. Right now most content online is supported by ads, while paid content is shunned. Until we come up with a method to financially support content, the evolution of information technology will stall. To see how hard of a problem this is, check out the Xanadu project*.

The process of evolving fiction to a non-book format is harder because fiction elicits a deeper emotional feeling in the reader.  The novel, for example, developed because it was the perfect fit for the age of the printing press: works were book-length, and authors were keen to make their stories longer, deeper, and richer. Currently the interfaces for reading anything longer than, say, 12,000 words induce eye-strain or lead the reader to distraction. We still need the book metaphor for an enjoyable experience. Short stories are different because of their length.

Right now we’re collectively working out how to order our written knowledge to take advantage of the new forms of transmission and storage. The web and ebooks may not be the future; however the system of web metaphors has been successfully used and improved upon for the last 20 years, so this may be it. The great thing about this process is that it’s done unconsciously by readers and writers, in the same way that language evolves and works itself out (which is changing because of the new information technology too).

What I’m getting at is that how we store and retrieve our collective knowledge is changing, and the outcome depends on the technology, how we structure the information, and how we incentivize its creation and distribution. To put this in perspective of the last revolution in information technology: Gutenberg hasn’t invented the printing press yet**.

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*The most fascinating part of the Xanadu story is that it partly inspired Tim Berners-Lee in creating the World Wide Web, but he wanted information to be free…and was pragmatic enough to create a technology that’s ‘good enough’ to use within months.

**Eurocentric, I know, but Western Civilization was better at harnessing the power of the printing press than the Chinese.

I made a little site to make it easy to find side projects of those in the so-called Favrd Crowd. Things like podcasts, web applications, real applications, themed blogs, etc.

I call it Projectrd. It’s nothing more than a single html page that lists every side project of all the Favrd and Tumblr users I could find in about an hour.

If you want to add your project to the site, send an email to projectrd@budaeli.com with the name, a link to the site, and the Twitter or Tumblr accounts of the people involved and I’ll update the page. Use the same email if you want your project removed.

Projectrd is only a proof of concept. I’m probably not going to maintain it for very long. If you want to make a directory of your own let me know and I’ll link to it on the site. Hell, use the same name if you want (there’s a sleazy website using that domain though).

Also, I’m aware of the awfulness of the name. It’s worse if you pronounce ‘projectrd’ like Merlin Mann pronounces ‘Favrd.’

(reposted from…somewhere else)

On Monday, United Airlines’ stock plummeted from around $12 to $3. At first glance it was perplexing because it just dropped and United’s holding company, UAL hadn’t announced anything big enough to cause a 75% drop in price. Well…they announced something that would have, in 2002.

Silicon Valley Insider has a great analysis of exactly what happened, so go read that and come back here.

Something about this story feels like a piece of luddite science fiction. Just because the Chicago Tribune didn’t put a dateline on a story in 2002 that a corporation with enough problems of its own gets its stock hammered because some software was doing exactly what it was designed: dishing up popular stories to people who want to read such things. Suddenly United’s stock is very cheap for no logical reason. So much for rational investing, no? Actually, it shows that markets move according to the best possible information. But when that information is dished out by inflexible software programs, how efficient is it really?

There is so much information available to any one person, and so much potentially useful information, that we need tools to help us sort through that information. We can no longer rely on individuals at newspapers to decide what’s newsworthy, because even they can’t sort through all the information. Instead, we must use tools that can remove the signal from the noise. To give us the information that we need, that’s important, that we need to know.

But every website, every company, every entity online has their own systems for managing this information. And even in a single organization there can be several to hundreds of different ways of sorting information: by topic, popularity, etc. These tools don’t exist in a vacuum – the internet has no dark matter. So when Google crawls a website at an ungodly hour when all two visitors happen to be reading the same old story, the page gets cached and changes Google’s search results. Later in the morning, when a reporter at Bloomberg sees the page pop up on their Google Alerts, the wrong story goes out on the wire all because of the randomness of human action interfered with logical code.

This kind of thing is an informational flaw, a data mutation. Kinda like a biological mutation. Only cooler, because it’s easier for us to toy with information than with living organisms. This could cause all kinds of mutations, from viral videos to bands becoming suddenly popular to a spontaneous political movement to leaps in technological advancement. All because of the interaction of automated systems.

The impetus for me to use Twitter in earnest was the Twitterrific app for the iPhone. By making it easy to update my status and to check on others, regular posts just started coming out. I twittered about the olympics, Obama’s speech at the DNC, and other random bits. I watched as others responded to various events; for example, today there are lots of snarky comments about Sarah Palin’s daughter and what it means to McCain’s chances of winning the presidency.

Yet despite my active participation, I don’t see the point of Twitter. Is it deliberatly-short posts of a blog combined with a newsreader for other user’s blog? Is it a status program, to keep others updated on what you’re doing? Because Twitter is both, it is nothing more than a collective mental wank. Let me explain.

Twitter as a microblogging platform.

This makes slightly more sense to me than a status feed. But why would anyone want have a blog severe restrictions on post length? Because not every thought wanting to be written down and shared needs to be meaty and loaded like what’s being attempted here at Budaeli.

And while anyone can set something like this up on any sort of blogging platform, the secret sauce is combining it with a newsreader so that your comments mingle with everyone else’s that you’re following.

If we look at two examples from the blogger John Gruber, his Twitter feed and his link feed from his great website, Daring Fireball, you can see the difference in how the content is presented. I’ve seen twitter posts coincide with link posts in the same vein, and he reveals more of how he’s really thinking through twitter, especially when readers can respond immediately. In fact, his posts about Sarah Palin’s daughter where full of personality, while his one post to his linked list showed only a direct response with only the slightest hint of what he really thinks about the situation. And yet they go hand-in-hand.

Does Gruber need both? Well, that’s the interesting part: Gruber is one of the few professional bloggers. He has carefully crafted a brand around his Daring Fireball that I think includes his Twitter feed. There are regularly-sized posts, short links with concise opinion and description, and a feed where he reels off whatever is on his mind with less of a filter than the other two. Taken together and combined with his valuable insights, you have a great resource for analysis of technology (specifically Apple- and web-related), with a few prescient coverage of other topics.

Twitter as a status feed.

There is absolutely no reason for anyone to actively update the a feed telling others what they’re doing. It’s nothing more than how people nowadays will be at a party, but calling their friends to see if there are any better, while degrading the quality of the party that’s already happening around them. Only now you can spray your whereabouts to everyone, including strangers and people who have no right/don’t care what you’re doing.

This doesn’t just go for twitter, but every other service that has the same functionality. How hard is it to just exist in the place we are, without having to suck everyone else in? Even the case for automated status updates is silly, because it’s just that much more information to lose any justification. It’s OK to keep track of news from specific areas, but to keep tabs on the exact goings-on of all your acquaintances is bordering on absurd. This is partly why I have so far succeeded in joining the major social sites, the major exception being Last.fm. If any of my friends, family, coworkers, or anyone else wants to check up on what I’m doing, they can easily call me, email me, semaphore me, leave a comment on Budaeli, whatever. There is lack of a good argument to make it so easy for others to know what you’re doing, and to get regular updates. It’s more complex than that, and I can see the benefits of having a page for people to catch up with you while being 1,000 miles away, but in general it’s a wee bit silly. I mean, whatever happened to the American dream of disappearing from others for awhile?

Will Twitter succeed? Will it ever get past the early-adopter phase?

I don’t know. With any of these micro-blogging systems, a lot depends on reaching a critical mass of users, much like instant messaging platforms. Twitter has a head start at the moment, but they’ve had enough technical issues to allow space for other systems, like Pownce. Also, slightly different systems like Tumblr also exist that provide a slightly different experience and potential for content.

For now, I’ll remain perplexed as to the real power of Twitter. Until I figure it out you can check out my own twitter feed.

In between resetting my iPhone (see below for more), I’ve been loving all the new apps available. Even before the 2.0 software release in early July, having a near-perfect mobile web browser came in quite handy and even allowed me to travel without any additional computer (like my now-neglected Eee PC). Despite the tiny screen, I could keep tabs on my feeds with Google’s wonderful mobile Reader, and had enough horsepower to manage my Netflix queue (341 and counting!).

That was before the Apple added the ability to install software on the iPhone. Once that happened, my 9-month-old phone felt like a brand new…computer. The third-party software meant that I could make my phone do exactly what I wanted. If I wanted a dedicated twitter client, a beefy weather app*, a Yelp interface, and a program to control iTunes and AppleTV, well dammit I can do that.

The iPhone’s apps are its new killer feature, and the millions who have bought the 3G model can attest to that. I almost bought the new model, but decided to wait until I played with the new software. After realizing that I had a new phone, for free, I couldn’t justify paying $200 for occasionally faster network speeds and GPS when I got the best feature as a free update.

Unfortunately, Apple took on more than it could handle at a single time for the launch. The new OS was rushed and buggy. Remember that resetting I started talking about? I’ve had to reset my phone three times in the last week after the phone did a forced-reboot but wouldn’t finish, thus bricking my phone. It happened today, and I was without a phone until I could get home. All that for a friggin’ Wikipedia app!

A lot of people blame apple for being greedy, but this was a tactical mistake in a well-constructed strategy. If done right, having a new phone, new software, and a new sync software all on the same day would be mind-blowing for those of us who are as fully digital as current technology allows.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. MobileMe tanked and barely worked for two weeks. My own exposure was minimal: most of the problems were with email, and I’ve migrated well away from my .mac address, while everything else was syncing fine and I could access iDisk fine. Apple, for their part, gave everyone up to 3 months free, and accepted the blame. There was even a MobileMe blog for a short while which began, “Steve wanted me to create this blog…” as if the big man himself was using his legendary temper to get the troops to fix the problems.

Then the iPhone platform started to develop problems weeks after everything launched. Users are currently trying to figure out who’s the blame for the mediocre 3G reception. And applications are crashing the phones, and crashing them hard.

Apple most likely knew how important having third-party software on the iPhone was going to be. All those fakes of promoting web apps and denying third-party software were just to buy them time to get things ready, and the applications had to be ready to install by the one-year anniversary or the wind would leave the sails. And now that they’ve accomplished two herculean feats: launching the original iPhone and the pushing out the updated version, it’s crunch time to keep the new platform from collapsing and for people to lose faith in the company.

And you know what? Apple will pull through and everything will be fine. This is still new territory, and the important part is that the iPhone actually shipped. The only difference between what’s happening now and earlier rough patches (releasing the original Macintosh, OS X) is that a lot more people are using Apple products. And that’s because they’re the only ones making computers and gadgets that are useful and feel futuristic at the same time.

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*The combination of being an information junkie and growing up in Tornado Alley has given me an appreciation for knowing the weather forecast and keeping a radar map handy.

About three weeks ago I got one of those Eee PC. You know, the tiny, linux running laptop that was designed to be the OLPC for adults. It’s cheap, easy to use, based almost entirely on open source software…and is absofuckinglutly awesome. Seriously, it’s the few non-Apple gadget in years that was thoughtfully designed and planned out.

Oh, and it’s cheap. $399 cheap. Compare that the OQO or the Flipstart!

I’ve got a black model with the 4gb flash drive, 512mb RAM, and the webcam. It has Firefox, OpenOffice.Org, some games, and that’s about it. And that’s all it needs. Really, how much power do you need on a secondary laptop? That’s about all this can be, unless your computing demands are very light (mine aren’t).

After using this for several weeks it’s become clear that this is about as small as a laptop can go – the keyboard is just big enough to kinda-sorta touch type and the screen is just big enough to do browsing and document creation (I giggled when I put the Eee’s 800×480 next to my iMac’s 24″ 1900×1280 screen). But the portability is very useful for me. I can take it anywhere to get some work done or do some writing or just surf. I can’t wait to test it out on a trip when I go home to visit the family in a week.

As for the software, I think using open-source software for everything is a giant leap towards commoditizing the most common software. It also means that if I were so inclined, the Eee is deliciously hackable. Hell, even the open source games are fun!

This is a great computer for very portable computing. I use it to take my work anywhere, like on the couch in the living room. And while there are some rough edges, it’s the sum of all of the parts that makes this computer great.And I can use it to justify to my friends that I like good design, not just Apple products.

This does mean that I now have three computers – the iMac, the Eee PC, and the iPhone. That’s right – my phone is a computer. Think about it – I can use it for web browsing, checking my email, playing music, watching video on YouTube. That’s like 90% of what constitutes my everyday computer use. But sometimes I need something a little bigger. With a keyboard. And a bigger screen. And Crack Attack.

***Oh, and a word for those of you who decide to get one: be very careful when you take this out in public. It’s like the iPod when it first came out or a PowerBook when no one owned one. People will bug you incessantly if you’re not careful. I really want to take this down to the neighborhood Starbucks but I was mobbed the last time.

Technorati Tags: apple fanboy, computer review, Crack Attack, Eee PC, iPhone, laptop, linux, machead, OpenOffice.org, technology, umpc

Sport talk has always bored me. Between the excessive stats of baseball, the bizarre rules of football, and the mythical stature of soccer/football stars – it just didn’t excite me like it does for many people. An unintended side effect is my hampered ability at small talk due to the fact that I know embarrassingly little of team standings, history, or how well anyone is doing for the current season – not to mention I still don’t quite get the rules of football. And probably never will.

That said, I am beginning to see how people can get very involved in the myths of their favorite team. Why?

Because Apple is my sports team.

I root for them every chance that I get. The sport is hard to follow because there is lots of speculation on what plays Apple will make, and the equivalent to actual games are the Macworld Expo, the WWDC, and the occasional official announcement events scattered throughout the year. The team has a very restrictive block-out period for games, so us fans have to rely on text-based announcers physically at the event. But boy is it exciting! Who knows what moves Apple’s star quarterback, Steve Jobs, will make!

I became involved with the team late in its history – they were making a strong comeback and kicking serious ass. But despite all the hype that Apple gets in the press, the company is less like the Yankees and more like the Red Sox – they had a long, embarrassing losing streak, but have come back and whipping everyone’s ass*. To extend the analogy, Microsoft more like the Yankees – they were killing everyone for a while but now can’t get their act together, while still being the biggest money-making club (it’s not a perfect analogy, of course – a technology company can’t win an equivalent to a World Series, they can just get lots of users, and the fan base for Apple outweighs the fan base for Microsoft so much it’s absurd – OK, well I wouldn’t call that last link absurd but you get the idea :) ).

The sports analogy is getting carried away, so I’ll wrap this up. While I don’t decorate my bedroom with Apple-branded stuff, the majority of my electronics are made by them (iMac, iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, and if everything works out a Mac as my work machine) and I have more of those logo stickers than I can possibly use. And my talking about what the company is up to with my friends borders on annoyance.

So maybe I can relate.

*I should point out that it’s impossible to live in Boston and not adore the Red Sox, even if just a little.

Technorati Tags: apple, apple fanboy, mac, machead, fan, red sox analogy, sports fan, steve jobs

About once every two weeks I get an email from Facebook telling me someone wants me to be their friend and create an account. I’m told that this is because when you first set up a Facebook account, it asks for email addresses of your friends and checks to see if they have an account.

So far I’ve ignored every request, as well as peer pressure from other friends to get a page up.

To be honest, originally I didn’t want an account on any social site because I was afraid it’d show how pitifully few friends I really have (I have a problem with keeping up with others and general self-centeredness). But the longer I held out the more I realized that these sites had disadvantages that I didn’t like. One of my heroes, Cory Doctorow, just wrote an article articulating what I’ve been feeling about these sites. The crux of his argument is that these sites don’t help you to segment what you tell your friends – either you show them everything or show everyone nothing. In addition, you may ‘friend’ people that are really ‘acquaintances’ rather than ‘friends’ – those words seem to be interchangeable nowadays but there’s a whole spectrum of how we relate to others – from the coworker who occasionally goes out for drinks to the person you know from college who knows all the right things to irritate you and can generally pick out thoughtful gifts for you…all the way to the guy who grew up down the street from you who listens to the same music and likes the same movies and can guess how you would react to certain situations. This range of relationships isn’t really supported by most, if not all, of the social sites.

And don’t get me started on MySpace. How people came to use that to connect with friends is beyond my comprehension. MySpace makes it too easy to connect to others, too easy to become friends, too easy to show your bad taste to everyone.

So, if you want to be my friend, email me and let’s strike up a conversation. But don’t make Facebook try to get me to join.

Update: Technically, I’m actually on exactly one social site: Last.fm. But that’s because I’m always looking for new music…and I’m obsessed with the play counts of the music I listen to. Here’s my page.

Update 2: OK, things have changed. I’m on Facebook now – turns out Facebook is quite useful to track down old friends. And I have a Twitter account as well – which is great for finding new and interesting people.

Amazon released their Kindle ebook reader yesterday. And for a while I was excited: Amazon’s product is one step closer to the ideal ultra-portable super-library that had a user interface close to that of a dead-tree-book – even closer than the sleek ebook reader from Sony. I even was OK with the rather jagged design of the machine because of the cool box it came in and the device’s status as a first-generation device (here are some pictures of an unboxing).

But my interest died when I discovered two things:

1. Amazon is making it very hard for the user to add their own content – and more importantly copyrighted documents not available from Amazon directly. Buried in Amazon’s help site for the Kindle are instructions for getting other documents onto the device – you have to email them to Amazon directly where they will convert the document into a Kindle-compatible format (unless it’s an ASCII text file). The manual even states that Amazon will charge for this service!

2. Even though I haven’t bothered with hacking my iPhone to use third-party apps, I can use my iPhone as an ebook reader. While Safari will only work with web pages, the Mail app can read PDF and Word attachments. Even better, it’ll remember the page you were on and return to it later. So as a test I downloaded an ebook from manybooks.net that was a PDF formatted for the iPhone and emailed it to myself. And it worked beautifully! It even switched to landscape mode when I turned my iPhone on its side. So I’m happy…although I’ll have to get my non-public domain books in a more dubious manner than I’d like.

Despite my successful convincing of myself to not get a Kindle, I still think the device is very important in our march toward an improvement over the book as a technology for the written form. And eink was a brilliant invention – I hope more devices use this technology.