Hapax blogomena

Here's a Google result you don't see every day.

The first time I clicked, there were precisely four results: DN, Informant, Informant, and Friendfeed (same as Informant). Now Alternet, and presumably others, at some point. But it remains a singular result: the biggest story of the day, Julian Assange says this and not a single "media" outlet picked it up for hours. Just Informant.

Google Award winner thinks educational content should be free

Idea: Make educational content available online for free.

Project funded: The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.


How UnJSTOR can u get.

Bricklin on tools

Dan Bricklin, walking his dog, ponders the difference between an "agent" that decides what you should see, and a tool:

It isn't the end result (e.g., only reading what I want to at the time I want to) that's the problem but how the tool interfaces with me. The missing difference, I realized, is "transparency."

Nontransparent countries have ministries that say "everything's fine -- trust us." ... If you don't know the details and can't find them out, it's hard to develop trust. ...

To me, a transparent user interface is one in which the user is presented with all the information he or she wants in a form that makes sense in light of their mental model of what's going on. The operations of the program should be consistent within the constraints of that model. One that isn't transparent just provides data with little context or model of where it came from or how it was derived or how to make adjustments. Bricklin on Technology, p. 244-45.

The deviser of VisiCalc knows something about tools. This difference he describes is playing out in the fates of Bing and Search, Microsoft and Google, Iphone and Android, etc.

Especially Microsoft, which never built a tool without an internal GPS homing device (where "home" is Redmond). A secret agent. One that knows what you want because you can only consume, never simply use. All this thinking is on fire now that a corporate form is developing that has a more liberal idea of tools. Not that Google isn't in a position to enjoy worrisome control. But Dan is looking at ultimately what borders on an ethical distinction -- involving a sense of the other, a recognition of otherness. If the other is merely there to consume, a host of assumptions about control come into play. Interesting, Dan offers an alternative to "markets are conversations." Markets, he suggests, are metaphors.

Anyway, Dan's book is full of searching fruits of many a dog walk on everything from tech to healthcare to economic theory. If the builders of tools would take it in, they would build better tools, and connect to user base that responds to its ethos.

(Disclaimer: Dan's book includes a short piece of mine along with contributions by AKMA, David Weinberger and a multitude of others to help convey the context of a decade ago with regard to peer-to-peer.)

Living Stories will have to overcome dead resistance

Living stories should introduce temporal duration into what has been a staccato news form. Sample.

Coursey: Living Stories improves the newspapers ability to deliver news-by-topic, which has proven difficult for newspapers to master.

Indeed. Let's ask why this has proven "difficult." Why have newspapers refused to clump related news in ways that give temporal duration and multiple perspectives?

One reason might be that this would actually require them to be more truthful - the stories would more evidently hold up or fall apart as news broke and developed.

Another might be that if news is thought of as something more than a pellet of a slice of time, it would cease enjoying pure commodity status. News orgs thrive on the idea that a story dies fast, so that they can sell another story. Banks of data that store and enrich themselves over periods would cease to have that rapidfire obsolescence.

It's hard to pretend you have a new product each day when, in fact, you are offering additional layers to an existing entity. An entity that would pretend to remember public understanding of events.

If nothing else, this is another way that Google, by virtue of its power to ferret, is transforming the way news orgs have to conceive of their own bidzness.

Tweet Update

Murd and Huff at the FTC hearing become the Ping and Pong, Mutt and Jeff, Clik and Clak of my Tweet

Anything that makes search less direct only fucks itself. To wit.

Tweet

The capitalist nightmare: search is both theft and the very ontology of the web.

about 6 hours ago from web

this and not that

"It is equal measure document and conversation.”

and platform.

IntelProp thems contentz, boyz.

unlike Bing, it conceives of communication before consumption.

GOOG pwns Prado

The fusion of art, engineering, science, glamour, Las Meninas, enlightenment, GoogleEarth, godlike geekdom. So, worry less than if this were another of Bill Gates's capture-rapture-tastic enterprises?

via

vote for Google

Insidious totalitarian temptations dept.:

Seeing something like this, I can't help think, let Google do it. All of it. The government, Wall Street, perhaps even the UN. Someone there actually seems to know how to think, plan, conceive, do something. More than one can say for the current "lights," including the media's light on those lights. How much more lunatically rash is this than Paulson's inspiration, or putting the USian Thing a McCainstroke away from Palin?

Anyway, the blogmeme thing is noice.

Chrome and Context

The Omnibox.

Make that a Double Google-Effect

Bruce Heterick, whom I interviewed a while back about JSTOR's delightful notion of keeping the world from knowledge (here and here, not necessarily here), has "published" an article about one key feature of the matter, and of our discussions. It's called Measuring the “Google Effect” at JSTOR.

I can't provide a link to the article, because it's firewalled here. I'm sure there's much of interest in the article, and regret that not just JSTOR's resources, but even the conversation about Google's manifestation of those resources, is under wraps.

Adventures in JSTOR

Too much academia probably isn't good for you

I need to read an essay by Helene Cixous. ... I spend the rest of the afternoon in an abusive relationship with JSTOR. I login and search for the article. JSTOR denies all knowledge. Trusted Archives for Scholarship my arse. ... Google shows me the front page of the article in JSTOR. It looks so beautiful. I’m sure my article will be a total disaster if I don’t read it. I begin to feel like the wife in some old film like Gaslight with JSTOR as the husband trying to convince me that I’m insane, possibly in cahoots with Google.

via Text & the World

Dream of a more semantically efficient Google

In a bleary moment, I was looking at Google search results for a movie -- in fact, it was Our Hitler, which I learned has recently been released, after many a year. I found myself wishing Google had simply grouped all the individual search results into folders - surely it has an algorithm to put similar search results in little bundles, at least in cases of specific things like Our Hitler. That way, just as you do a right click "open all in tabs" in Mozilla, so you'd right click each Google folder result, and a bunch of search results would open all at once.

Save all that damn clicking and clacking.

[Later] Maybe Google could let you tell it how many results to cluster in each bundle.

GoogleMe

When Google

enables everything I blog, and knows every blog I regularly read,

and is the substrate of my email, docs, photos, groups, blog searches, videos, appointments, news interests, books, map queries, purchases, finances, scholarly research, web searches, mobile platform, ad sensing, and





soon my wireless provider








and for $999 my Genome reader,

spidering the text of my DNA and relating it to ancestors, physicians, populations, datasets, marketers, political strategists and advertisers across Google Earth




and under Google Sky










I should probably be anticipating a few questions, like, which is trending toward greater ontological heft: me or GoogleMe, and which will command a higher price?

And if not yet I, my kids will need to know:

Should they love Google?

Ought they pray to it?

or



::





Foolishly seek to hide?

Glurgle can't step up?

It is incredibly shabby of Google not to address Jeneane's and others' email vanishings openly and in detail, as is apparently the case according to this story.

Email is where many on the Net -- whatever their various e-lives, e-xploits, e-jive, e-deologies -- live. More and more, for many pursuits, one's email address is one's online name.

One's inbox and archive contain so much substance that if there are security issues or technological problems with it, every user ought to be made aware of them ab initio, instead of being blown off after the fact.

Android indeed.

Google is not Google if it blocks Open Access

I'm also irked by all those libraries jumping into bed with Google to digitize their books without imposing hard rules about public access to this material. The Open Content Alliance offers a sensible alternative. Why would you undo in less than a decade what it took a century or more for your library to build--a great collection accessible to the world? (The tax-paying world that actually owns your collection.) Karen G. Schneider, formerly of the ALA TechSource blog, via Joho.



The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large. . . T. Jefferson via A Tiny Revolution

Black Holes in Google?

It's being noticed that 911truth.org has suddenly plunged from its former high Google ranking.

Is Google vulnerable to control?

Is Google suppressing sites?

Have conspiracy theorists discovered a new conspiracy?

Google really should say something.

"As Captain Ahab said, 'You are not other men but my arms and legs —' ”

roughly, quasi, meta

via

A fascinating "rough draft" on meta-ness at Notebulb. The title suggests it might undergo change. String theorists and the topologically inclined are invited to quasistabilize every bit of it for me and other math-challenged types.

[Update/afterthought: All the morphisms noted by Notebulb are spatial, no? Google's clones of the Net are magic mirrors - when I click "publish post," they change, but there's a lag.]

Search can create what it seeks and transform how it finds

More about the relation of data and metadata, spurred by David Weinbergers' book, Everything is Miscellaneous, and spinning out of miscellaneous conversations, e.g. here and here:

Query/search can precede data:

“When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds,” he says. (He is Mr. Singhal, at Google.) #

So the search for data that does not yet exist becomes metadata that helps to create the new data it is proleptically about.

And Google does more than simply build an outsized, digital table of contents for the Web. Instead, it actually makes a copy of the entire Internet — every word on every page — that it stores in each of its huge customized data centers so it can comb through the information faster. Google recently developed a new system that can hold far more data and search through it far faster than the company could before.

The instrument created to search the Net replicates the Net over and over. Is the Internet different because of this? Is it different because its performance transforms what it is?

And, duh, the question that first occurred: Are the replicants of the Net data or metadata?

speed bumps

David Weinberger comments here on the preceding post about JSTOR. Meanwhile, having recently read Everything is Miscellaneous, I can't help but think of its relevance to JSTOR, and, conversely, to consider implications of the JSTOR-Y for David's argument/vision.

Toward the end of chapter 1, having described in some detail the Bettmann Archive and contrasted it with Corbis, and both their modes of organization with that of Flickr, David goes on to say:

We have entire industries and institutions built on the fact that the paper order severely limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry, and television schedules are all based on the assumption that in the second-order world, we need experts to go through information, ideas and knowledge and put them neatly away.

But now we -- the customers, the employees, anyone -- can route around the second order. We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves, and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them.

"Isla: En Mi Carcel de Papel"

Two - uh, three - quick points:

1. The "paper order" of scholarly journals, thanks to the work of JSTOR, is subject to vast abbreviation. Instead of requiring duplicate tons of paper redundantly delivered to and stored in thousands of expensive buildings, one set, well cared for, or two, or at most a very, very few, are all that's required to meet the needs of a readership that, by virtue of the modality of that abbreviation, could now be expanded to include virtually everybody. This is a vast and stunning alteration of the first-order economy.

2. We have a Pisgah view of these journals thanks to Google's crawl. Without that algorithm spidering through 23 million pages, we would still be subject to the rule of paper.

3. We are still subject to the constraints of paper insofar as the business model of JSTOR has a ways to evolve before it can revolutionize its gatekeeping function to allow open access.

It seems that between the prisonhouse of paper and the unfettered bliss of what "we" can do with universal miscellaneity lie some bumps in the road: the event of Google, and the encrustations of first and second order economies, at the very least.