Sethop’s Interesting Times

Here’s a screenshot of a link being previewed in the new Interclue 1.5 Beta, which you should install if you haven’t already.

See the hint next to the magnify cursor you get when you mouseover a thumbnail in a the new clueviews? When you mouseover the comics in XKCD you can usually see a little in-joke in the title hint. Sometimes, the titles are pretty long, and Firefox the tooltips don’t wrap. This has been a subject of some complaint, but thankfully, with the landing of the infamous reflow branch (count the dependencies!), this will be resolved in Firefox 3.

Yep, in the 1.5 Clueviews, images of sufficient size are thumbnailed, you can click to see the image full size, and then click again to go back from there. It’s pretty cool, and we think it’s a good compromise to showing no images, or a full size window with all the images, like Cooliris does (frankly, if I wanted to see the whole page, I’d just open a new tab).

I love this cartoon, and I wish he’d put it on a T-shirt, because Turing featured in one of my favorite assignments [1] while I was at UC, where I majored in Philosophy and Computer Science.

I was never a great academic, far too scatterbrained most of the time, and being up till 3am most nights running my BBS, playing Civilization, or online backgammon (FIBS 1700+, back when that was actually pretty good), sure didn’t help, but I do have my name in the credits of one academic paper, “On Alan Turing’s Anticipation of Connectionism”, because our logic lecturer, who later went on to become co-director of the Turing Archive, discovered a mostly ignored paper by Turing from 1948, in which he definitely did anticipate “Neural Nets”, which is pretty amazing given that at the time there was only one non-specialized computing machine on the entire planet, ENIAC. [2]

Unfortunately, Jack couldn’t figure out how to make Turing’s “B Type” networks actually compute something, so in a brilliant combination of laziness, sadism and cunning, he gave his 3rd year students the option of skipping one our 20% take home assignments for the year, and instead figuring out how to make Turing’s type B networks work.

It was fun trying. In the end, I was one of about 3 students who instead succeeded in making a logical proof that these networks couldn’t work, (as specified by Turing, anyway). As I recall, I had to prove it 3 times, the last by structural induction, because Jack couldn’t accept that Turing might have got it wrong. He gave in eventually and I got full marks.

I put this achievement at the top of my list of 10 things I’ve done you probably haven’t, back in Feb 2005. Number 10 on that list was in fact Interclue, which was in the prototype stages even back then. It took a bit longer than expected to actually get it out, to same the least. I blame Hofstadter’s Law. But I’m really happy with the new beta so far, although it’s going to need some testing and tweaking, and we’d love your feedback. So if you’ve got firefox, go for it!

[1] And one of my favourite books, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

[2] Although others were under construction, and Turing had a hand in two of them - see Jack’s “A Brief History of Computing” for details).

I recently ran across the web based Mindmeister while reading about the proceedings of a recent NZKM conference on the blog of the prolific Michael Sampson. The map seen there that inspired me was drawn by my old friend Julian Carver who I really must get back in touch with. It’s very cool, and it imports Freemind files, which is the free app I used for the map I did for my 2.0 talk. I feel much better having the map in a web-friendly format :-)

It’s pretty impressive how you can drag the nodes around and actually do one or two things you can’t do with Freemind, but there are definitely a few kinks to be worked out, eg I had problems when one node was on top of another, and kept selecting the one underneath. Printing also wasn’t too flash.

It’s way too big to use as an embed really, but I can’t resist playing around, so here it is. You can zoom from the bottom left and click through to the larger version from the bottom right.

[update: removed it - slowing down the page a bit much, I should probably get in touch with them with performance tips for embedded javascript widgets… Here’s a link to it tho - and if you haven’t seen Mindmeister in action, seriously check it out. Most impressive Ajax I’ve seen in ages]

Actually I’ve thought of another thing I could say when people ask what Web 3.0 means….Wittgenstein says “Meaning is Use” (roughly speaking) and therefore Web 3.0’s meaning is bound to whatever use people put that phrase to. In general, I think they use it to mean “Some funky web stuff that supposedly wasn’t part of Web 2.0″

Unfortunately the meaning of Web 2.0 is vastly more complicated, because people use the phrase for all sorts of purposes.

Tony Hung argues very cogently that what’s really needed is a comments policy, not a code of conduct, but I think he’s missed the point. If you want to maintain the moral highground when you censor people who have got out of line in your comments section, particularly if you are in an argument with them at the time, or have a “history” with them, then it’s very handy to be able to point to a code that applies not only to them, but to you, and not just when you’re in the comments section. Otherwise you’re clearly at an unfair advantage. If when you point to these “principles” you can also point to the fact that a fair old number of people have subscribed to exactly the same principles, and that they were arrived at by a consensus process, then that defintely increases the height of your moral highground.

Whereas if you have a comments policy that doesn’t apply to you or your blog posts, that somewhat lowers it.

And the ability to censor people who have got out of line is the point. If you have no code of conduct or comments policy, then what are you going to do when someone posts something appalling? You either engage in ad-hoc censorship or you make up a policy in the heat of the moment (looks bad!) or if you’ve totally rejected the idea of censoring comments and it’s gotten out of hand then you might have to shut the whole blog down (as happened with Meankids and unclebobisms, which started this whole mess).

In general I see no reason that there shouldn’t be some shared principles out there that I can point to rather than having to point to my own. If there’s a badge (but the sheriff’s badge is awful, Tim, sorry) that makes it easy for commenters to spot the principles of my blogging and comments section, then all the better - just like the Creative Commons for copyright. I’m not expecting anyone come in and *enforce* anything on me, but then I wouldn’t choose to subscribe to a set of principles that I disagreed with, so if I transgress then I’ll withdraw and apologise. There are people out there who refuse to apologise for anything they’ve said, but I’m not one of them - I think if you can’t admit when you’re wrong, then people aren’t going to trust you when you claim that you’re right. More importantly, how are you going to trust yourself?

I’ve got a little badge on this blog pointing to a “Blog Honor” code of conduct. It relates to disclosure policy, and in truth I linked to it because I didn’t have time to write my own, and it seemed fairly close to what I believed at the time (and still do).

The “code of conduct” that Tim O’Reilly is calling for does not cover disclosure, but the real question is whether linking to any shared codes of conduct is a good idea. To say the least, it’s somewhat controversial. I think that as posted, it’s impractical and doesn’t show the depth of thought I would expect from Tim, who’s one of the biggest blogospheric thinkers out there. Sadly he’s being more or less shredded in the comments of the assembled masses, who hate even a whiff of censorship far more than they respect Tim or Kathy, it would seem. Seth Finklestein is an anti-censorship crusader (who I generally have admired in the past when I’ve run across his writing), so it’s no wonder he’s one of the loudest critics, and he makes a valid point about enforcability. I think his comments insinuating this is designed to reinforce the tyranny of the supposed “A List” are dead wrong, however. [1]

In my case, I thought “good start, needs more work” and got stuck in over at the Wiki they set up. I think having a voluntary code of conduct that people can sign up to if they want is not a bad idea if it’s structured properly, which to me means it’s got variants and versions, and ideally you can fit it all in a microformat as well as link an online version that not only shows the code but links to the discussion regarding each point so that people can see why those points were arrived at. So if people want to allow anonymous posting, or what to play with their trolls, but still want some sort of set of declared principles to point to when they delete a comment for stepping over the line, then they can do that.

The alternative to a shared Code of Conduct is posting your own individual one, and I think it’d be very hard to go past borrowing and tweaking this one by Allen Jenkins, as Tyme did. Allen has is own wise words about all this.

If there was going to be a shared code of conduct, then you’d want it to be agreed as part of a shared process, not handed down by fiat. What an enormous number of Tim’s commenter seem to have missed is that this is exactly what Tim wanted to happen, and why there was a wiki and a mailing list set up to discuss it. But naturally enough everyone ignored those and fired away on their blogs or in comment sections.

[1] The problem of “enforcement” happens when someone who’s blog is wearing the badge ignores the code. Obviously it can’t be enforced on anyone who hasn’t signed up for it.

SethF appears to be arguing that an “A lister” involved in such a dispute would win any such arguments with the help of the “Pilot Fish” wanting to impress them and scared of being, ah, I don’t know, excluded? Called out? I’m not sure. I’m not buying it. Arguably being attacked by an A-lister is a great way to get noticed - and if they’re wrong to attack you then it’s going to be obvious to some of the other big guns, who will call out that A-lister, and bingo, you’re subscription count jumps up.

The moment another “A lister” comes in on the other side, then any “Pilot Fish effect” will pretty much evaporate because they wouldn’t know which way to turn. And I think it’s a delusion that the “A listers” somehow all conspire in some fashion to stay on top of any given argument. I also think calling the rest of the blogosphere “pilot fish” is pretty damned derogatory - certainly anyone who wants to gain an audience won’t want to be seen to be a slavering toadie, and anyone who doesn’t want to gain an audience is really unlikely to care what these supposed A listers think of them. So I just don’t buy that line of argument at all.

Besides, the reason these people are the “A list” is partly because they usually make a certain ammout of sense. I can only read so many feeds, and anyone who stops making sense just gets deleted.

Of course, the problem with wanting to engage in this particular conversation, which covers a topic of great interest to me (and was long before Kathy’s shock announcement), is that it’s taking time away from Interclue, which I will get back to forthwith!

It’s that little “Blog Honour” badge, bottom right of my blog. I put it there after reading Stowe Boyd’s comments about Pay Per Post, and finding that honor badge on his blog. I actually couldn’t care less about my pagerank, it’s the principle of the thing, I’m metaphorically tilting at windmills just like all the other bloggers who wish people would quit making a mess of the web as they try to monetize it.

To get an idea of how roiled up the blogosphere got about this PayPerPost “Payola” scheme, count the trackbacks to the original Techcrunch post. Mike has blogged about it about it serveral times since, and it’s a controversy that PPP definitely encourages (even to the point of paying payola for people to post their point of view), because as they know, it’s all about the PageRank.

This is a from from a comment I recently made on TechCrunch, in which I indulged in an awful lot of alliteration:

For those of you who simply think Arrington has an Agenda related to his Advertising, I think you’re wrong.

People, PPP = Paid Pagerank Pollution. That’s really what it’s all about so far as I can see. I’m stunned nobody has used the “P” word in this thread so far. I mean, that’s the Point of all this, isn’t it?

The Pagerank algorithm doesn’t care if the reviewer said something sucked or not. All links are good links, more or less, in the same way that all publicity is good publicity, more or less. So it makes perfect sense to allow bloggers to pan the product they’re linking too - just so long as they link to it.

I’m presuming that most of the PPP customers are being advised by their SEO people (or are in fact SEO people themselves) because PPP links seem like a perfect way to drum up pagerank in a way that must be very difficult for Google to defeat. Of course over time they will figure out some algorithm for detecting PPP shills, er, agents, er, whatever they’re called, and will mark down their pagerank accordingly, but there will always be more willing to play the game. (For those of you new to this game, your site’s pagerank depends strongly on incoming links, and it is the #1 traffic driver on the net)

Now, if everyone declared on their posts that they were PPP agents in a distinctive and clear way, then Google could automatically discount those links as meaningless for the purposes of pagerank calculation, which would mean that the smart SEO people would stop recommending PPP, and eventually advertisers would pay a lot less per post.

So, I don’t think PPP will do that.

But Google has so much data they could just work it out algorithmically. Ie if PPP got *too* popular Google might just start watching for where known PPP shills link to, and detect new shills based on noting which other blogs link to the same place at the same time. All known shills could them have their pagerank docked from then on (pagerank is transferable via links, so if a source is “tainted” the easiest way to tweak the results is probably to decrease the PR of the source). However I suspect it would have to be making a genuinely large distortion in the search results before Google would care, and in reality Google no longer cares so much about search quality since they probably sell more adword clicks against bad natural results, and they’re so far ahead of the others on search quality at the moment it’s not really to their advantage to “try harder” in this regard.

So if Google doesn’t really care, what’s The Problem?

The problem is the collateral damage. I consider a business to be morally wrong if it destroys more value than it creates. And paying others to do the destruction for you is even worse. Currently PPP is slowly dragging down the average value and pagerank of all blog content - blogs are becoming just that little bit less trusted as sources of unbiased information, which is what everyone is looking for. However, balanced against that are the PPP agents who actually put a bit of thought into their post, are honest about the fact that they are being paid (and being honest means saying so within the post, or right next to it - posting a policy somewhere no one looks does not cound), and create little nuggets of value.

My strong hunch is that at the moment PPP does more harm than good. If they forced their agents to be transparent then it would swing back the other way and on average they would be creating value, but then they would probably make less money. So let’s watch and see what they do.

But giving it some more thought, I’m going to be more condemnatory. Mr Arrington gets it exactly right when he says that “their disclosure policy is like the Tobacco Industry sponsoring tobacco research“. Essentially, they’re damning themselves with this dangerous “disclosure” duplicity.

If I had to pick the one person on the planet who I admire most at the moment, it would probably be George Soros. I was reminded of this when he recently poked his head up and said some intelligent things on Rocketboom - major kudos to Amanda for scoring an interview with one of the planet’s major players. One very appropriate question given her audience - how does he use the net? I was interested to discover that he uses it “through other people” - a pity, I think it’s better to get your feed unfiltered. I guess it all depends on whether your people are paid to give you the truth, or shield you from having to know the truth. ^[1]

Anway, what I admire about Soros as a philanthropist is that he has a great grasp of the complexity of human societies, just how hard it is to effect any significant change, and then he goes ahead and does his best anyway, without fear of the inevitable failures. He isn’t hoping to find easy answers or make flashy gestures, but he knows that there are things that can be done that definitely help - like investing in education and health, and monitoring government activity, that will gradually move a society in the right direction.

I think quoting Soros is the ultimate answer to naive libertarianism and free-market fanatics. It’s obvious that he has a very strong understanding of the world financial markets, from which he has made billions, but he is also very clear that markets are not enough on their own, and can do some serious damage if left unchecked.

“We need to maintain law and order. We need to maintain peace in the world. We need to protect the environment. We need to have some degree of social justice, equality of opportunity. The markets are not designed to take care of those needs. That’s a political process. And the market fundamentalists have managed to reduce providing those public goods.” - George Soros

Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then various people in New Zealand complain about our health system and say that we would be better off if we privatised it. I think they’re wrong. I think they’re practicing reflex libertarianism, or free-market fanaticism, without looking at the actual facts of the matter.

Frankly, I’ll take our somewhat inefficient public healthcare system over the mindnumbingly expensive US private healthcare system any day of the week, or year, or millenium for that matter. Apparently, as a percentage of total GDP, the Americans pay more to handle the admin costs for their health system than we do to handle the entire thing. I think it’s all to do with the fact that private health insurance companies and providers naturally gravitate towards the formation of a system that maximises the public’s spending on health, and then they use the massive profits derived from that spending to pay lobbyists to ensure that the system stays bloated, inefficient and profit maximising.

Inefficient? Bloated? Surely an inefficient provider would be destroyed by leaner competition? It just doesn’t seem to work out that way. Perhaps it would work out if the health providers were competing with each-other, but in practice they’re mainly competing with all the other things the government and the public might want to spend their money on, and the people who pay the lobbyists in Washington are smart enough to realise that. ¹

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought about calling this blog “Musings On Technoprogressivism“, because that’s probably the political philosophy that most closely matches my own leanings, but in the end I decided to talk about philanthrogeeking instead so I won’t end up getting into arguments about what technoprogressivism actually means. Like most neologisms, there’s some debate^[1]. I used to call myself a utilitarian transhumanist freethinker, but technoprogressive is shorter :-)

I’m very open to discussion on which parts of the general technoprogressive agenda are good, and which are not. I’m inclined to think they’re mostly all good. Or at least all mostly good.

[1] Don’t even get me started on “Web 2.0″.