Saturday, May 13, 2000

If you check my biography, you will see that I make my living selling content. I do not extend knee-jerk sympathy to systems publicized as ways to circumvent copyright enforcement. But investigating Gnutella, Freenet, and Napster, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that they're intriguing innovations in the best tradition of the Internet pioneers. While it's important to talk about their potential for the distribution of illegal content, we have to look at their larger goals and the promise they offer."

The Wall Street Journal Despite Lawsuit, Napster Offers A Model for Music Distribution
"...the record companies just don't get it. Like most entrenched interests facing a revolutionary business innovation, they are reacting to it purely as a threat, not as an opportunity. Even the few music companies that plan this year to put some name-brand music online are thinking of charging prohibitive amounts, like $2.50 a song, and building in all sorts of restrictions on usage.

Amazon.com, the biggest Web CD retailer, and RealNetworks, the biggest digital audio company, have told me in recent days that they stand ready to help the industry construct and manage an official version of Napster. Both are in Seattle. If I were a music executive, I'd be on the next plane there."

redux [05.02.00]
Infoworld Napster sends a message to music industry: 'Your customers aren't happy'
"The Recording Industry Association of America wants to educate consumers with the message, "Artists deserve to be compensated -- artists won't make music if they can't make money." I can only imagine the public service announcements with multimillionaire artists pleading for their right to a seventh Porsche in the driveway. There's no rationalization for piracy; it is what it is. However, rampant music piracy online indicates that the music industry's distribution and pricing model is out of whack with what people want. The problem isn't the piracy; the problem is unhappy customers. And the music industry had better do something about it. This is a dinosaur moment -- with the big rock looming overhead -- where the music industry needs to ask itself how it will adapt. "

Freshmeat Client As Server: The New Model
"The RIAA mentality is one and the same as that of the Russians of yesteryear: a desire to stop the flow of information through the network. The answer to the Russians is one and the same as the answer to the RIAA: a completely distributed system. If every client on the network was connected to a handful of other clients, each of which in turn connected to others like some apocalyptically enormous online incarnation of Amway, then every person could have some connection to every other person through a chain of mutual acquaintances. It's Six Degrees of Freedom."

"This is a "virtual Internet" of sorts in which links are not physical (a wire from you to me) but logical (I know you). Data flows through this "web of friendship" in such a way that it looks like you are only talking with your friends, when really you are talking to your friends' friends, and so forth."

ZDNet Think Napster -- only for movies
"If you think online music-sharing software like Napster and MP3 are causing a fuss, wait about six months. The World War of digital rights is welling up on the Internet. There's a new, easy way for pirates to trade illegally copied movies -- and black market film trading is flourishing."

Friday, May 12, 2000

Within the core, the knot of the bow tie, Web surfers can travel smoothly between sites through hyperlinks. One side of the bow contains origination pages that allow surfers to reach the central knot. The other side of consists of termination pages that can be accessed from the core but are not linked back to it.

The final region consists of disconnected pages, which are cut off from the core but are connected to other areas peripherally.

"Webmasters and people doing e-commerce need to understand how to position their sites," said Andrei Broder, vice president of research for AltaVista. "If you want to have more international traffic, you need to be in a better connectivity position. It's always better to be in the center of the town than far out.""

IBM Almaden Research Center Graph structure in the web
"The study of the web as a graph is not only fascinating in its own right, but also yields valuable insight into web algorithms for crawling, searching and community discovery, and the sociological phenomena which characterize its evolution. We report on experiments on local and global properties of the web graph using two Altavista crawls each with over 200M pages and 1.5 billion links. Our study indicates that the macroscopic structure of the web is considerably more intricate than suggested by earlier experiments on a smaller scale. "

"In a sense the web is much like a complicated organism, in which the local structure in a microscopic scale looks very regular like a biological cell, but the global structure exhibits interesting morphological structure (body and limbs) that are not obviously evident in the local structure. Therefore, while it might be tempting to draw conclusions about the structure of the web graph from a local picture of it, such conclusions may be misleading."

Mappa.Mundi A Shared Reality
" In the beginning, maps were fiction. We perceived our world as myths defined by belief not geography. Maps of these imagined worlds came in many shapes and sizes, but they all mixed the unreal with snippets of the real world. The process of mapping the real world was one of going from geographies of ideas to maps of real geography. On the Internet, we will pursue a reverse path: maps of the Internet will progress from our current maps of network topologies to maps of virtual worlds that we build, maps of ideas and thoughts."

"Maps help us navigate. On the Internet, finding things has become the big challenge. Death by a thousand clicks is the bane of any net user. The reason? We are attempting to shoe-horn the metaphor of maps–tools for navigating complex spaces–into existing metaphors, such as the infinite book that is the World Wide Web.

The Internet is a network of many metaphors. The core infrastructure supports many protocols, and each protocol adopts a metaphor. Electronic mail uses analogies taken from a postal service. Streaming media started with a radio metaphor before evolving into a unique medium. The World Wide Web is also a metaphor–pages in an infinite book.

What is missing today is a metaphor that helps us tackle the problem of meta-information: information about information. As we look at a page on the Web, the logical next step is to find other pages that are conceptually near. Near, of course, varies on your point of view. Meta-information is what helps the Internet become smarter about organizing itself. As we develop the tools to describe Internet resources, to manage meta-information, maps will happen. Until then, we are stuck in a world of many facts: all content, no context.

Metaphors all have limits, and it is important to understand that maps of the Internet, and of virtual worlds built on the Internet, will look and act very different from from the folded static bitmaps we use to navigate the real world"

redux [04.21.00]
George Lakoff The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System
"The way ordinary people deal implicitly with the limitations of any one metaphor is by having many metaphors for comprehending different aspects of the same concept. As we saw, people in our culture have many different metaphors for IDEAS and the MIND, some of which are elaborate in one or another branch of Psychology and some of which are not. These clusters of metaphors serve the purpose of understanding better than any single metaphor could-even though they are partial and very often inconsistent with each other."

"If Cognitive Science is to be concerned wtih human understanding in its full richness, and not merely with those phenomena that fit the MIND IS A MACHINE metaphor, then it may have to sacrifice metaphorical consistency in the service of fuller understanding."

redux [04.21.00]
John M. Lawler Metaphors We Compute By
"I'm going to talk today about metaphors. Everybody here has heard and used the word metaphor plenty in the course of your educational experience (and the amount of educational experience in this room is pretty staggering, so that makes lots of uses of the word). To quote a famous sage, "It's a common word, something you use everyday." It generally gets stored in memory with all the other stuff you learn in literature classes, like simile, plot, characters, rhyme, meter, and so on. And then it gets forgotten, or at least not looked at often, until and unless you do something literary. I'm here today to suggest that in fact there is a human phenomenon (which I will call metaphor, though what name you give it doesn't really matter much) that is much more important to everybody than all this would imply."

The Register The world may well be a great big onion, but the Internet is a big bow tie
"Those wacky funsters at AltaVista, Compaq and IBM reckon that the Web is like a bow tie.

Attempting to explain the mysteries of life, the universe and everything, researchers discovered that the Web is Not as Connected as Previously Thought – in fact almost a quarter of web pages can't be accessed by links from other pages."

Thursday, May 11, 2000

"It occurs usually around age 2 in America, when your mother is cooking breakfast," Rapaille said. "Your mother loves you. She is going to feed you. You are happy," Rapaille said. "This is the American code for coffee's aroma: 'home."' So when you smell coffee, Rapaille said, your mind summons up childhood sensations of cozy domesticity."

"I told the people at Procter & Gamble, 'Don't care about the taste,"' Rapaille said. "You have to own the aroma. The commercial we designed has a young man in an army uniform arriving home in the early morning. He goes directly to the kitchen and kkssshtt, opens the package. As the aroma goes upstairs, we see the mother open her eyes, smile and what does she say? She says, 'He's home!"'

Rapaille sipped his fresh-brewed coffee.

"Folger's has been using that study for more than 10 years, and it's still working," he said. "So that is what I do. I break the code.""

Digiscents, Inc DIGISCENTS, INC., AND CLONTECH LABORATORIES, INC. DISCOVER NOVEL HUMAN OLFACTORY GENES
"The companies have isolated, cloned and sequenced 126 human olfactory receptor genes. This latest discovery combined with publicly available olfactory research gives DigiScents access to close to half of the estimated 1000 genes that code for human olfactory receptors. Olfactory receptors are expressed in neurons of the olfactory epithelium and allow humans to detect and distinguish between smells ranging from flowers to pizza and chocolate to burning wood.

"This milestone represents a significant development in aromagenomics," states DigiScents' CEO, Joel Bellenson, referring to the application of molecular biology to the field of olfaction. "DigiScents is combining biotechnology, informatics, and sensory research to create a digital index that will revolutionize the world of smell.""

NPR Web-site, Web-sound, Web-smell?
"Host Bob Edwards talks with Eli Fisch, co-founder of Sense-It Technologies, an Israeli company that's developing a device that would allow electronic devices to re-create scents. Fisch believes the new technology will become an indispensable sales tool for e-commerce firms selling products such as perfume, lotions and flowers."

Wednesday, May 10, 2000

"Steven Jones, a professor of communications at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said the Pew findings help bring balance to the debate on the Internet's social impact. He said the new study confirms his own research that Americans are learning to treat the Internet as a communications tool as fundamental as the telephone.

Fifty-five percent of Internet users say e-mail has improved communications with family and 66% believe contact with friends has increased because of e-mail. Among women, 60% reported better contact with family and 71% with friends. "

redux [02.04.00]
The Guardian Online Why content isn't king
"Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world."

redux [02.21.00]
Alertbox Does the Internet Make Us Lonely?
"In assessing the impact of the Internet, the question is not whether it replaces (fully or partly) some other forms of communication and social contact. Because the Internet adds its own new forms of communication and social contact. For example, people may well attend fewer meetings and events outside the house and yet feel connected to a community of others who "meet" on a much more regular basis online.

The question is whether the new lifestyle is enjoyable and whether it nourishes humans or causes them damage. There is certainly a risk that some people get overly caught up in chat rooms and role playing, but a different kind of study is needed to assess this problem."

Wired News Study: Humans Do Many Things
"An obscure university study, but a study nonetheless, reveals that Americans who have dogs spend the time with their dogs instead of said time watching TV, visiting with friends, sleeping, going to movies, surfing the Internet, and doing nothing.

They walk their dogs, play with them, train them, speak gibberish to them, comparison-shop for dog food, and read up on them to the point that it detracts from actually interacting with other human beings, obscure researchers have concluded."

Tuesday, May 09, 2000

"On Tuesday, the university launched its first for-profit venture, an Internet medical company called e-Skolar. The startup will market an online information service for physicians called Stanford Skolar, M.D."

""We've gotten some income from our associations [with Stanford-inspired companies] but it's minimal to the value created." Determined to profit from its intellectual property, Stanford formed e-Skolar, taking a majority ownership stake."

Netfuture Who's Killing Higher Education? (or is it suicide?)
"A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings."

"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.

In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.

NPR Stanford's Own Internet Company
"NPR's Chris Arnold reports that today Stanford University in California is announcing the launch of its own internet company, e-skolar."

Sunday, May 07, 2000

Within a few weeks, both contestants in the genome race plan to declare victory, but in different terms, each already judged imperfect by the rival team.

At stake is academic glory for the genome researchers, an eventual gold mine for the companies that are first to develop useful drugs from the genomic information, and a landmark in scientific history as the foundation for human self-knowledge is put in place."

The Third Culture Design For A Life A Talk With Patrick Bateson
"Some people see the process of growth and development as very simple. They seem to think it is something that is read out of the genes, and that when the human genome project is completed we shall have the book of life, including an understanding of all human behavior.

Others take the view that the developmental process is so immensely complicated that we shall never understand it properly. I take the view that although on the surface developmental processes may look complicated, the underlying rules are analogous to those that underlie a game like chess. The rules of chess are simple, but the games that can be generated by those rules are enormously complex.

What we have to do as scientists is try to understand rules that produce a design for a life."

The Nation The Details of Life
" "Peter's dog ate Jefferson's cat," says Mother Martha in a letter I received from the South Bronx.

Mother Martha is the priest of St. Ann's Church in the Mott Haven neighborhood, still the poorest section of the Bronx and, as physicians tell me, one of the most unhealthy places for a child to grow up in this or any other country of the Western world, with pediatric asthma rates and HIV infection rates for females in their older teenage years believed to be the highest in the nation.

Why does this story about Jefferson set off some warning signals for me as a writer? Perhaps simply because I know the fairly hard-nosed attitudes that govern social policy in urban neighborhoods today and can anticipate that this may be perceived as a preposterous distraction from the bottom-line concerns with "discipline" and "rigor" and "job preparation" and "high standards" and what is now known as "high-stakes testing" and the rest of the severe agenda that has recently been put in place for inner-city kids. Burials for cats somehow don't fit into this picture.

Then, too, in the business-minded ethos of our age, any money we may spend on children of poor people must be proven to be economically utilitarian and justifiable in cost-effective terms. But much of what goes on around St. Ann's cannot be justified in terms like these. You could not prove to anyone in Washington that Mother Martha's talk with Jefferson about the possibilities of an afterlife for animals will have "a positive effect" upon his reading scores or make him more employable a decade later."