Well, that was what I was alluding to do as their "clunky approach", in that it offers you a degree of personalization (a plus), but only in the form of past searches (and a weak form of relevance.) It's better than nothing, but just barely.
I have written up my own theory of the ideal Semantic Web search engine at everything2.com, (another link), (and another) (which of course I encourage everyone to read), but here are some ideas a good Semantic Web search engine would obey:
1) If I search for "bank", it should find my bank, and not a bunch of other banks. 2) It should follow the hierachy of personal preference -> local preference -> appeal to authority -> appeal to popularity -> all other results. So if I search for "sofa" it should go:
a) Has he ever searched furniture before? What sites did he visit from that search? Has he given his seal of approval to any sites that sell furniture? b) What furniture stores are within 20 miles of him? c) Are there any sites that do serious furniture reviews? Are there any sites that provide consumer reports on furniture? d) What are the most popular furniture sites? What are the most popular sofas? e) Any other sofa pages out there? Sofa Kingdom, what's that all about anyway?
And 3) It should have a distinctive "kthejoker" flavor to my searches. How it defines that is entirely up to my history and interaction with it, but the Semantic Web is the easiest way to get this thing done as abstractly and as simply as possible.
That was the entire point of my post! The group benefits from standardization, but the individual suffers. The Semantic Web is an attempt to give power back to the individual user. Subjectivity is a crucial element of the system, and sanitized, standardized, NPOV systems deny the individual subjectivity.
Delicious is very smart in that it left the *option* for customised tags, but they are clearly saying by implication that the best tags are the ones everyone else is using. My point being that the idea of a "standardized vocabulary" is antithetical to the ideals of the Semantic Web. We don't want a democracy of ideas; we want a free market of ideas!
Think of the concept "funny." Let's say I asked you to go to 100 different random sites and tag them as funny or not funny. Let's say that of the sites you listed as funny, it was clear you enjoyed witty, New Yorker-style humor, and not fart jokes. But let's say 99 other people did the same thing, and they did the opposite: they clearly enjoyed the fart jokes, and hated the New Yorker wit.
Now if you asked this seeded engine for a recommendation of a new, 101st site that was funny, should it give you fart jokes, or New Yorker style? This is the power of the Semantic Web. What's funny to you, isn't funny to everyone else. Why should you be punished for that? And if a total n00b comes to our engine for a recommendation, they get the fart jokes page, because it assumes they're like everyone else. But if they start marking those sites as not funny, eventually it'll figure out they're more like you, and start giving them sites that you like.
Now, will delicious ever do that? Of course not, because it doesn't offer any discrimination to you on the word funny. You get the democratic version of funny. Fart Jokes for all. And that's what "standardization" has to offer. So, no, you can keep that; I want the Internet to understand who I am, and what I like, not what everyone else likes. And if they HAPPEN to coincide, that's fine, so much the better - things are popular because of the people, after all - but they shouldn't have to.
Ugh, this is the major misconception of proper Semantic Web implementation.
There are two user types of Semantic Web materia: the individual user and the group.
The individual user only cares about context. It's like a Proustian adventure for him. If he tags Slashdot as "blatherscyte" because that's how he views it, then that's valid. If he tags it as "cmdrTaco" because he is stalking Rob, then that's valid, too. And if he tags it as "monkey" because one time he was petting a monkey while he viewed the site, then that's valid, too. It's like the old saying, "Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right." There are no wrong semantics for the individual user, because it is his context alone which defines the usefulness of a tag.
For this reason, the individual user should be allowed to tag freely and without limits, and also be able to edit or remove tags later.
----
Now for the group, they have a different goal. Context does them no good, because they don't have the same context. Their goal then is consensus. Take your problem at FreeDB. The simple solution is to let people vote on the accuracy of disputed tags. Or flag ones they view as incorrect, and then review those that meet a certain threshold for flagging. Basically, you want the group to filter out things that don't apply to the group, WHILE maintaining individual context. You don't delete the tags that the group has rejected - you just hide them from the person who has come to view the group tags.
I think this dichotomy of group vs. individual is what has gotten us into trouble with the Semantic Web. To use one example, I think delicious' big mistake was to show you "popular" tags for a given link. What that does is encourages you not to create your own tags, but instead just piggyback on popularity. Over time, this creates homogeny, which is great for the group, but not for the individual user. Sure, they can probably find that link again in a minimal amount of time, but if an individual tag might help them find it faster, but they shunned individual tags for groupthink, so much the worse for them.
And on the flipside if you don't provide proper weighting and trust metrics into your tagging system, you are opening yourself up to not only abuse and inappropriate behavior, but also to the "incompetence" mentioned in the article, which is not so much incompetence as a zero-filter. It's like reading Slashdot at -1. It's kind of a touchy-feely way to look at it, but in Web 2.0 thinking, it's bad to delete content; just filter it out instead. It's bad to censor opinions from the software side; let each user do their own stifling. Give the users complete control over the content, and they will find models that work. It's that simple.
The main problem with the Google guy's point is that philosophically, Google is more groupthink than individual user, because they're a search engine. They value consensus over context. In the future, perhaps they will value context a little bit more than they do. Until then, they have to stand where they stand, because they can't let context into their system. They've tried some clunky mechanisms to do so (Personal Search, anyone?) but until they get it right, the Semantic Web won't have any value to them.
Of course they can't force them too. But once they start losing businesses left and right as other "free trade" corporations take advantage of cheap outsourced labor and Second World economic corruption to gain the upper hand in the market, they'll sign on.
It's like the cigarette tax. Of course no one is forcing you to quit. If you've got the money, great. But most people don't, and so they quit. Without being forced. Hmm. Funny how that works.
Newsflash: That's exactly what the World Trade Organization is for. So that I, as a non-Russian, can set up trade laws (most importantly IP laws) that we both must abide by. And you can bet your sweet bippy that those standards will make sites like AllOfMp3.com illegal.
What about the organizational problem of getting your phone service provider to make this work? Lots of really useful technology dies on the vine for this reason.
Your last sentence is my exact complaint. This is an organizational problem, not a technological one, and from a free market perspective, that's just asinine.
That's my point, the tech is already there, but nobody has managed to put it altogether into a nice, naet, and most importantly, ubiquitous package.
Cuecat isn't the answer, because the barcode can't store any significant amount of data, only a reference to look up data. The chips from the article (and many RFID chips) can contain the entire PDF brochure of that lawnmower you're looking at, or a trailer for a movie you're considering buying, or any other sort of informational material.
And seriously, scanning a barcode with your camera? Do a weblookup? In 2006? This is exactly my complaint. You're giving me a 3 step process that involves a lot of manual work, instead of an integrated and easy-to-use framework. Think Kodak: You push the button, we do the rest. That is the killer app. It's too bad nobody seems to want to make a useful frontend for this kind of tech...
Interestingly, the reason the lyrics were licensed and not the audio was because player pianos and other synthesizers were starting to take fold, and music was beginning to be viewed from an almost entirely scientific point of view. So musicmakers figured in the future when music was automatically created, the only money would be in original lyrics (which presumably couldn't be mechanically generated. Pre-Markov, and all...) Also, while eerily similar music could be argued to be so different as to be original, lyrics offered no such ambiguity.
Also, when they say "music publishers", they really only mean The Harry Fox Agency, which owns the lyrical rights to basically every major-label song ever. Everyone else is very small fry compared to them.
I still don't understand why RF readers and things of this sort aren't included on every cell phone, along with an easy, common standard to interface with.
Pointing your cell phone at a product for price comparisons and technical specs, or getting a small video on an item in a museum, or collecting e-mail addresses on College Night, or brochures at a convention, or any other sort of "Additional Info" normally not available at the point of contact, seems to me to be an extremely sustainable business model at a minimum of cost and input.
RFID might not be a commercial utopia, but it's a good start in a direction we could've been taking 10 years ago.
Top Ten Things the RIAA would Like To Make Illegal
10. Whistling, humming, scatting, finger snapping, head bobbing, and any other form of "grooving" (per the Groove Memorandum of 1982.) 9. Refusing the blue pill after attending an Outkast concert. 8. Not answering your cell on the 1st ring in order to hear to more of "Clocks." 7. Fair use? More like "unfair abuse", am I right!? 6. Quoting Taking Back Sunday on mySpace. 5. Thinking about quoting Taking Back Sunday on mySpace. 4. Thinking about thinking about quoting Taking Back Sunday on mySpace. 3. Being Taking Back Sunday. (I kid, I kid.) 2. Transferring all your iTunes songs to your new bigger iPod. (You've got money for a new bigger iPod, don't you?) 1. Not handing them all of your money, every day, the second you earn it.
Interestingly, Unoriginality in Hollywood *is* something new, but you are wrong in your assumption that this is a sign of a lack of depth in the film industry. It was simply poor oversight on their part to not take advantage of likeable characters and existing media before the rise of the Bond film series, the Rocky, Star Wars, and Superman franchises, and so on into our current state.
The simple fact is that we can have our cake and eat it, too. American filmgoers like their sequelized, franchised, overmarketed, easily-hyped crap, but they also like their intelligent, thoughtful works. That's why every major studio has their vanity arthouse studio, too - so you get Fantastic Four and Elektra, but you also get Donnie Darko and Clerks. And, if anything, Hollywood is becoming a bit more enchanted with more budget-conscious movies (witness the frat boy populist comedies of Will Ferrell and the Wilson brothers) and arthouse cinema as an industry itself - to suggest that somehow Hollywood's artistic sensibilities have suffered due to the rise of the sequel and the adaptation is patently false.
If anything, Hollywood is just now starting to stabilize the entire system - the adaptations/blockbusters running on top of the flops, which all help subsidize their "high art" films and other, more mass-marketed (but cheaply made) pop fare (Adam Sandler movies and CGI family films.) The ship is open to all takers; the idea of originality vs. success is a false dilemma.
While there may have been a few, it was clearly the Founding Father's intentions and beliefs that white male landowners were at least educated in the same general philosophy of life - that they would basically all know what was good for them, and that the exact same thing is good for every white male landowner (more or less.) So they may be "idiots" in some pure intellectual sense, but they had enough good financial sense to get wealthy and maintain property, which was the only kind of "intellect" our Founding Fathers seemed to care about.
And actually, what was great/poor about this limiting system was that America had finally done away with class values - you didn't have to be born into nobility to have a vote, but you DID have to have good financial sense (in order to get wealthy enough to have a vote.) But they made the mistake in letting primogeniture rule the school - so within 3 generations, you had a lazy, aristrocratic gentry created out of a system built on prosperity and hard work.
They also left out people under 21 and people who didn't own property. So let's see:
White. Male. 21. Own Property (ie white-collar or aristocracy.)
Sounds pretty limiting to me. And of course, there was that whole electoral college - that idea wasn't just the popular vote translated to faithful elector formality that it is today. The Founding Fathers expected the electors to be lifelong appointments by states, and that those electors would all sit around in their smoking rooms and rich plantations and pick out who the next President of the United States would be, in perpetuity, forever.
So what really happened in our first Presidential election? Well, each state was doled out some electoral votes based on population. North Carolina and Rhode Island hadn't ratified the Constitution, so they didn't get any electors, and amazingly, New York, despite having 8 electors (making them the 2nd most powerful state, much like today), didn't actually pick any people to be electors, and didn't participate.
Of the 10 states that did actually participate, *only 4* used any sort of popular vote to determine how their electors would ask. The others simply sent in delegates they thought would represent their state interests - in that case, it was more or less a given that Washington would be selected President. And of course he was.
The same held true in Washington's relection in 1792, but when he declined to serve a 3rd term in 1796, the whole system went to pot. Of the 16 states who had electors that year, only 6 states allowed popular votes to determine how the electors would vote, with 3 more splitting their electors between a popular vote and the state legislature. The other 7 states relied entirely on their state legislatures to provide their electors (and their votes!)
And then, with the major snafu of 1800 with Burr and Jefferson, Congress ratified the 12th Amendment to guarantee popular voting for all Americans - FOR VICE-PRESIDENT. The President was still subject to the electoral college.
Does that sound like maybe our Founding Fathers thought most uneducated men and women weren't fit to vote? That in fact that only people fit to vote were the same people fit to be elected? And that until the Civil War, South Carolina continued to let their state legislature cast their vote for President? And that since then, several states have still done so or threatened to do so (see Florida, 2000)?
Seriously, don't stick your foot in your mouth when you're fighting back against authoritarian jerks. It was enough to say he has no right to dictate your life, but to suggest that our Founding Fathers weren't elitist aristocrats with an exclusionary agenda is wrongheaded.
I agree with this completely, but what you're missing is that clearly someone feels there is a market for this out there. Hollywood ought to jump on this business model stat. They could sell their movies straight out the church doors every Sunday: "Sex-Free Version of Not Another Teen Movie! Family-Friendly 40 Year Old Virgin!" etc etc.
The model obviously works, someone in the biz needs to step up and capitalize. Man, I wish I ran a major media conglomerate, I would be a slave to the long tail - every customer gets exactly what they want, at a reasonable* price, all the time.
* Off topic: What's reasonable to you? $10 a month? $15 a month? For 3 movies, 500 songs, a cheap book delivery system, magazines, TV on demand... Seriously! What the fuck is wrong with you, Hollywood?!
Who's to say whether a scene is gratuitous? Well, clearly Cleanflix would have you believe that they can be trusted as arbiters of gratuitousness. And, in fact, that is the very basis of their business.
And actually, you are incorrect (from a legal standpoint) as to your views towards customers making good judgment. Everyone loves to argue "just change the channel" if something offends you, but the US Supreme Court has ruled that that is not a valid defense against displaying inappropriate material on TV or airing offensive material on the radio. Companies like CleanFlix more or less provide an advisory guide for first-time viewers.
Again, the key here is choice, not censorship. If I go, "I hate all violence, even the artistic kind displayed in Schindler's List and American History X", and CleanFlix provides me with the scrubbed versions, then that is an equally valid exercise of one's own judgment (or at least it ought to be.) Now, if I said on the other hand, "I hate gratuitous violence, but I can respect violence in film if used artistically," and CleanFlix continually "over-scrubbed" my movies, taking out bits I felt should not have been, then I stop using their product.
I dunno, just from a market / choice point of view, all of this sounds great for the discerning consumer, without busying themselves directly with every potentially unwanted scene. I mean, you can argue it's dumb to not watch the actual version of the film being pushed by the director (what's the point?), but the beauty of the market is it is not mutually exclusive - you can watch a CleanFlix, you can watch the Director's Cut, you can watch everything in between.
So no, there is no slippery slope in the market, because the market contains the entire slope, from the bottom of the hill on up.
What every MMORPG needs is a handicapping system. You go into settings, you set your handicap, and you get to ascend accordingly.So you could have Level 1, the Casual Gamer, who levels up quickly but doesn't get access to all of the quests or best weaponry or any of the fancier materia vs Level 10 the Ubergame, whose grinding takes twice as long as normal, but has exclusive access to the +70 Vorpal Sword of Fantasticness and SideQuests A, B, and C.
Again, this goes back to the whole "What Suit Are You?" style of RPG gameplay. Some people are completists, some people like community, some people just like the theatricality and fun of playing a game, and some people are stat freaks, and most people are shades of all 4. MMORPGs needs to acclimate for that better - want to be a completist? you have to grind more. A stats freak? We'll boost you up, but it'll cost you. In it for the community? Level up faster if you're playing with a friend. And these are just ideas off the top of my head, but they strike at the heart of what's dumb about grinding: it's not for everyone.
The parent poster complains about 6 hour grinds - if there were 2 hour grinds (in the midst of a fun sidequest, or with a clear "save this countryside" campaign behind it), nobody would complain. So what's the difference between 2 hours and 6 hours? The very arbitrary nature of these kinds of numbers prove that the problem is not the time, but the very concept itself, and the fact that no game designer seems to want to cater towards allowing more flexible leveling and participating options for gamers (and yes, non-gamers) into their world.
That's a pity, and I hope that in the next 5-10 years, some more adventurous game companies figure out that with episodic content, different methods of entry for newer players, different schemes of success and advancement, and a better sense of handicapping, they could easily hook 5, 10, or 20 times the number of players they do now.
(I say all this as a huge fan of single-player RPGs (Final Fantasy in particular) who couldn't stand the grinding of Diablo II or EverQuest and never tried to get back on the bandwagon.)
This is only vaguely ontopic, but are there limits to how many people can "own" a DVD (or the license to watch the DVD, or whatever)?
I ask because if my wife and I purchase a DVD with our collective funds, am I the owner? Is she the owner? Or are we both the owner?
What if 100 people all contributed a nickel and bought a $5 VHS tape of a movie? Can they each make a copy of it? Do you have to own majority share in the VHS to make a copy?
What if 10 million people each paid $1 and all agreed to purchase a certain bundle of films and music that was valued at $10,000,000? Clearly SOMEONE must own it, but who?
Are there any laws about this? I can't seem to find any online (I think my searching skills are for crap on this one), but it seems like a very interesting question.
I have the strange retro futures of 1966 in the back of my mind constantly.
The home automation. The robots. The on-demand lifestyle accoutrements. The click of a button gadgetry.
What we need is a computer the size of a cellphone, with a 10 gig flash drive, some flash RAM, a USB port, a 1Ghz CPU, and WiFi/Bluetooth. And we need it for $100. And as ubiquitous as possible.
With all of our technology, we still don't have the mythical "fridge that knows when you're out of milk."
What strikes me as particularly hilarious is that, in this day and age, in 2006, a year in which humanity has access to Fiber to the Home, carbon nanotubes, nearly room-temperature superconductors, iPods, bitTorrents, IPv6 - this list could go on interminably - but again, the hilarity in 2006 that the idea of a magicITX box running a mythTV frontend to your home entertainment center is not only novel, but practically a geek hobbyist venture, instead of being sold out of the box at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and CostCo.
That WACI boxes, icepick's remote cams, satellite radio, and TomTom GPS mapping systems are still not only so expensive, but viewed as a luxury instead of a necessity.
And if webOSes lead to thinner clients which helps expedite the future, then I'm all for it.
Re:Google should ban Ebay listings from searches
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eBay Bans Google Payments
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· Score: 2, Informative
When eBay first started off waaaaaay back in the 90s, they charged a nickel for listings under $10, and a dime for everything else. That was it. People used to MAIL in postcards with their fee taped on. It was mostly just the Bay Area (hence the name), and it was a very nice and active market, lots of kitschy stuff, lots of really good deals ("Hey, I love this Chagall painting, but I really gotta pay my alimony, so it's yours for $100"), and generally just lots of goodness.
Fast forward 10 years, and eBay is now a blight on Internet business. Beyond the fraud, the chicanery, the snake oil, and the exorbitant fees, eBay is simply no longer a viable place to do "garage sale"-style auction business. The community at large is no longer involved in the selling business - only buying. The selling has been taken over by Power Sellers, retail stores, and scam artists.
What we as the tech community in specific and the world community in general need to do is re-create eBay every 10 years (that appears to be the life cycle under which a grassroots auction site becomes a lumbering behemoth of corporate blase.) Someone just write some good open-source auction code - a RDMBS, a CMS, some RSS feeds and an open-source shopping cart/payment system (that is payment-platform independent) - and then we'll just create another eBay every decade. It doesn't even sound particularly hard to do, and as long as we're clear up front that there's probably not a lot of money in it (since eBay has the entrenchment factor), we can make something, you know, for kids! And for everyone else who just wants to sell their backlog of shi^H^^Htuff* sitting in their garage.
Make it easy, make it cheap, make it roll up, make a code snippet you can dump on mySpace or liveJournal or a Wordpress site, make sniping impossible (I like the idea of extending the bidding by 5 minutes every time there's a bid), make it easy to translate, make it secure, make it standards compliant, and guess what? You've probably got a Web 2.0 hit on your hands.
Thinking violent thoughts against someone in the briefest of instants is one thing. Making an explicit icon shows quite a bit more effort. This clearly was at least one or two orders of magnitude more than your average excited utterance.
Also, just to be clear, if you yelled at someone, "I'll kill you!" you can be arrested for assault, too. Fighting words are not protected speech because they aren't designed to interact in the marketplace of ideas and speech - they're designed exclusively to provoke violent action.
(PS It's awesome that the Supreme Court has made numerous decisions around the term "fightin' words.")
As an employee of a state's executive branch, I can assure you that for us, cost is far and away the most important aspect in making any sort of A vs B comparison. Our entire system is driven by the lowest bidder. (And if you save $50 on something you don't care about, that means you get to spend $50 extra on something you do. Governors are very, VERY specific as to what they do and don't care about.)
And ODF = free.
In fact, I'm fairly certain that if Massachusetts wanted to hire 5-10 developers to create a program to deal with ODFs in a disability-accessible manner, it still wouldn't cost as much as using proprietary software.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, Rails is a framework, not a language. Not quite the same thing.
Go check out Synfony, the PHP5 framework. Exact same concept.
Well, that was what I was alluding to do as their "clunky approach", in that it offers you a degree of personalization (a plus), but only in the form of past searches (and a weak form of relevance.) It's better than nothing, but just barely.
I have written up my own theory of the ideal Semantic Web search engine at everything2.com, (another link), (and another) (which of course I encourage everyone to read), but here are some ideas a good Semantic Web search engine would obey:
1) If I search for "bank", it should find my bank, and not a bunch of other banks.
2) It should follow the hierachy of personal preference -> local preference -> appeal to authority -> appeal to popularity -> all other results. So if I search for "sofa" it should go:
a) Has he ever searched furniture before? What sites did he visit from that search? Has he given his seal of approval to any sites that sell furniture?
b) What furniture stores are within 20 miles of him?
c) Are there any sites that do serious furniture reviews? Are there any sites that provide consumer reports on furniture?
d) What are the most popular furniture sites? What are the most popular sofas?
e) Any other sofa pages out there? Sofa Kingdom, what's that all about anyway?
And 3) It should have a distinctive "kthejoker" flavor to my searches. How it defines that is entirely up to my history and interaction with it, but the Semantic Web is the easiest way to get this thing done as abstractly and as simply as possible.
That was the entire point of my post! The group benefits from standardization, but the individual suffers. The Semantic Web is an attempt to give power back to the individual user. Subjectivity is a crucial element of the system, and sanitized, standardized, NPOV systems deny the individual subjectivity.
Delicious is very smart in that it left the *option* for customised tags, but they are clearly saying by implication that the best tags are the ones everyone else is using. My point being that the idea of a "standardized vocabulary" is antithetical to the ideals of the Semantic Web. We don't want a democracy of ideas; we want a free market of ideas!
Think of the concept "funny." Let's say I asked you to go to 100 different random sites and tag them as funny or not funny. Let's say that of the sites you listed as funny, it was clear you enjoyed witty, New Yorker-style humor, and not fart jokes. But let's say 99 other people did the same thing, and they did the opposite: they clearly enjoyed the fart jokes, and hated the New Yorker wit.
Now if you asked this seeded engine for a recommendation of a new, 101st site that was funny, should it give you fart jokes, or New Yorker style? This is the power of the Semantic Web. What's funny to you, isn't funny to everyone else. Why should you be punished for that? And if a total n00b comes to our engine for a recommendation, they get the fart jokes page, because it assumes they're like everyone else. But if they start marking those sites as not funny, eventually it'll figure out they're more like you, and start giving them sites that you like.
Now, will delicious ever do that? Of course not, because it doesn't offer any discrimination to you on the word funny. You get the democratic version of funny. Fart Jokes for all. And that's what "standardization" has to offer. So, no, you can keep that; I want the Internet to understand who I am, and what I like, not what everyone else likes. And if they HAPPEN to coincide, that's fine, so much the better - things are popular because of the people, after all - but they shouldn't have to.
Ugh, this is the major misconception of proper Semantic Web implementation.
There are two user types of Semantic Web materia: the individual user and the group.
The individual user only cares about context. It's like a Proustian adventure for him. If he tags Slashdot as "blatherscyte" because that's how he views it, then that's valid. If he tags it as "cmdrTaco" because he is stalking Rob, then that's valid, too. And if he tags it as "monkey" because one time he was petting a monkey while he viewed the site, then that's valid, too. It's like the old saying, "Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right." There are no wrong semantics for the individual user, because it is his context alone which defines the usefulness of a tag.
For this reason, the individual user should be allowed to tag freely and without limits, and also be able to edit or remove tags later.
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Now for the group, they have a different goal. Context does them no good, because they don't have the same context. Their goal then is consensus. Take your problem at FreeDB. The simple solution is to let people vote on the accuracy of disputed tags. Or flag ones they view as incorrect, and then review those that meet a certain threshold for flagging. Basically, you want the group to filter out things that don't apply to the group, WHILE maintaining individual context. You don't delete the tags that the group has rejected - you just hide them from the person who has come to view the group tags.
I think this dichotomy of group vs. individual is what has gotten us into trouble with the Semantic Web. To use one example, I think delicious' big mistake was to show you "popular" tags for a given link. What that does is encourages you not to create your own tags, but instead just piggyback on popularity. Over time, this creates homogeny, which is great for the group, but not for the individual user. Sure, they can probably find that link again in a minimal amount of time, but if an individual tag might help them find it faster, but they shunned individual tags for groupthink, so much the worse for them.
And on the flipside if you don't provide proper weighting and trust metrics into your tagging system, you are opening yourself up to not only abuse and inappropriate behavior, but also to the "incompetence" mentioned in the article, which is not so much incompetence as a zero-filter. It's like reading Slashdot at -1. It's kind of a touchy-feely way to look at it, but in Web 2.0 thinking, it's bad to delete content; just filter it out instead. It's bad to censor opinions from the software side; let each user do their own stifling. Give the users complete control over the content, and they will find models that work. It's that simple.
The main problem with the Google guy's point is that philosophically, Google is more groupthink than individual user, because they're a search engine. They value consensus over context. In the future, perhaps they will value context a little bit more than they do. Until then, they have to stand where they stand, because they can't let context into their system. They've tried some clunky mechanisms to do so (Personal Search, anyone?) but until they get it right, the Semantic Web won't have any value to them.
The problem is that porn has no use for this. If you could find out how to use this for porn, we'd be soaking in RF tech in a month.
Of course they can't force them too. But once they start losing businesses left and right as other "free trade" corporations take advantage of cheap outsourced labor and Second World economic corruption to gain the upper hand in the market, they'll sign on.
It's like the cigarette tax. Of course no one is forcing you to quit. If you've got the money, great. But most people don't, and so they quit. Without being forced. Hmm. Funny how that works.
Newsflash: That's exactly what the World Trade Organization is for. So that I, as a non-Russian, can set up trade laws (most importantly IP laws) that we both must abide by. And you can bet your sweet bippy that those standards will make sites like AllOfMp3.com illegal.
Wake up to the New World Order, kid.
Your last sentence is my exact complaint. This is an organizational problem, not a technological one, and from a free market perspective, that's just asinine.
That's my point, the tech is already there, but nobody has managed to put it altogether into a nice, naet, and most importantly, ubiquitous package.
Cuecat isn't the answer, because the barcode can't store any significant amount of data, only a reference to look up data. The chips from the article (and many RFID chips) can contain the entire PDF brochure of that lawnmower you're looking at, or a trailer for a movie you're considering buying, or any other sort of informational material.
And seriously, scanning a barcode with your camera? Do a weblookup? In 2006? This is exactly my complaint. You're giving me a 3 step process that involves a lot of manual work, instead of an integrated and easy-to-use framework. Think Kodak: You push the button, we do the rest. That is the killer app. It's too bad nobody seems to want to make a useful frontend for this kind of tech ...
Interestingly, the reason the lyrics were licensed and not the audio was because player pianos and other synthesizers were starting to take fold, and music was beginning to be viewed from an almost entirely scientific point of view. So musicmakers figured in the future when music was automatically created, the only money would be in original lyrics (which presumably couldn't be mechanically generated. Pre-Markov, and all ...) Also, while eerily similar music could be argued to be so different as to be original, lyrics offered no such ambiguity.
Also, when they say "music publishers", they really only mean The Harry Fox Agency, which owns the lyrical rights to basically every major-label song ever. Everyone else is very small fry compared to them.
I still don't understand why RF readers and things of this sort aren't included on every cell phone, along with an easy, common standard to interface with.
Pointing your cell phone at a product for price comparisons and technical specs, or getting a small video on an item in a museum, or collecting e-mail addresses on College Night, or brochures at a convention, or any other sort of "Additional Info" normally not available at the point of contact, seems to me to be an extremely sustainable business model at a minimum of cost and input.
RFID might not be a commercial utopia, but it's a good start in a direction we could've been taking 10 years ago.
Top Ten Things the RIAA would Like To Make Illegal
10. Whistling, humming, scatting, finger snapping, head bobbing, and any other form of "grooving" (per the Groove Memorandum of 1982.)
9. Refusing the blue pill after attending an Outkast concert.
8. Not answering your cell on the 1st ring in order to hear to more of "Clocks."
7. Fair use? More like "unfair abuse", am I right!?
6. Quoting Taking Back Sunday on mySpace.
5. Thinking about quoting Taking Back Sunday on mySpace.
4. Thinking about thinking about quoting Taking Back Sunday on mySpace.
3. Being Taking Back Sunday. (I kid, I kid.)
2. Transferring all your iTunes songs to your new bigger iPod. (You've got money for a new bigger iPod, don't you?)
1. Not handing them all of your money, every day, the second you earn it.
Interestingly, Unoriginality in Hollywood *is* something new, but you are wrong in your assumption that this is a sign of a lack of depth in the film industry. It was simply poor oversight on their part to not take advantage of likeable characters and existing media before the rise of the Bond film series, the Rocky, Star Wars, and Superman franchises, and so on into our current state.
The simple fact is that we can have our cake and eat it, too. American filmgoers like their sequelized, franchised, overmarketed, easily-hyped crap, but they also like their intelligent, thoughtful works. That's why every major studio has their vanity arthouse studio, too - so you get Fantastic Four and Elektra, but you also get Donnie Darko and Clerks. And, if anything, Hollywood is becoming a bit more enchanted with more budget-conscious movies (witness the frat boy populist comedies of Will Ferrell and the Wilson brothers) and arthouse cinema as an industry itself - to suggest that somehow Hollywood's artistic sensibilities have suffered due to the rise of the sequel and the adaptation is patently false.
If anything, Hollywood is just now starting to stabilize the entire system - the adaptations/blockbusters running on top of the flops, which all help subsidize their "high art" films and other, more mass-marketed (but cheaply made) pop fare (Adam Sandler movies and CGI family films.) The ship is open to all takers; the idea of originality vs. success is a false dilemma.
Yeah! I'm tired of multiple megaconglomerates pushing me around!
My new motto: "Big Brother, not Big Family!"
While there may have been a few, it was clearly the Founding Father's intentions and beliefs that white male landowners were at least educated in the same general philosophy of life - that they would basically all know what was good for them, and that the exact same thing is good for every white male landowner (more or less.) So they may be "idiots" in some pure intellectual sense, but they had enough good financial sense to get wealthy and maintain property, which was the only kind of "intellect" our Founding Fathers seemed to care about.
And actually, what was great/poor about this limiting system was that America had finally done away with class values - you didn't have to be born into nobility to have a vote, but you DID have to have good financial sense (in order to get wealthy enough to have a vote.) But they made the mistake in letting primogeniture rule the school - so within 3 generations, you had a lazy, aristrocratic gentry created out of a system built on prosperity and hard work.
They also left out people under 21 and people who didn't own property. So let's see:
White.
Male.
21.
Own Property (ie white-collar or aristocracy.)
Sounds pretty limiting to me. And of course, there was that whole electoral college - that idea wasn't just the popular vote translated to faithful elector formality that it is today. The Founding Fathers expected the electors to be lifelong appointments by states, and that those electors would all sit around in their smoking rooms and rich plantations and pick out who the next President of the United States would be, in perpetuity, forever.
So what really happened in our first Presidential election? Well, each state was doled out some electoral votes based on population. North Carolina and Rhode Island hadn't ratified the Constitution, so they didn't get any electors, and amazingly, New York, despite having 8 electors (making them the 2nd most powerful state, much like today), didn't actually pick any people to be electors, and didn't participate.
Of the 10 states that did actually participate, *only 4* used any sort of popular vote to determine how their electors would ask. The others simply sent in delegates they thought would represent their state interests - in that case, it was more or less a given that Washington would be selected President. And of course he was.
The same held true in Washington's relection in 1792, but when he declined to serve a 3rd term in 1796, the whole system went to pot. Of the 16 states who had electors that year, only 6 states allowed popular votes to determine how the electors would vote, with 3 more splitting their electors between a popular vote and the state legislature. The other 7 states relied entirely on their state legislatures to provide their electors (and their votes!)
And then, with the major snafu of 1800 with Burr and Jefferson, Congress ratified the 12th Amendment to guarantee popular voting for all Americans - FOR VICE-PRESIDENT. The President was still subject to the electoral college.
Does that sound like maybe our Founding Fathers thought most uneducated men and women weren't fit to vote? That in fact that only people fit to vote were the same people fit to be elected? And that until the Civil War, South Carolina continued to let their state legislature cast their vote for President? And that since then, several states have still done so or threatened to do so (see Florida, 2000)?
Seriously, don't stick your foot in your mouth when you're fighting back against authoritarian jerks. It was enough to say he has no right to dictate your life, but to suggest that our Founding Fathers weren't elitist aristocrats with an exclusionary agenda is wrongheaded.
I agree with this completely, but what you're missing is that clearly someone feels there is a market for this out there. Hollywood ought to jump on this business model stat. They could sell their movies straight out the church doors every Sunday: "Sex-Free Version of Not Another Teen Movie! Family-Friendly 40 Year Old Virgin!" etc etc.
... Seriously! What the fuck is wrong with you, Hollywood?!
The model obviously works, someone in the biz needs to step up and capitalize. Man, I wish I ran a major media conglomerate, I would be a slave to the long tail - every customer gets exactly what they want, at a reasonable* price, all the time.
* Off topic: What's reasonable to you? $10 a month? $15 a month? For 3 movies, 500 songs, a cheap book delivery system, magazines, TV on demand
Who's to say whether a scene is gratuitous? Well, clearly Cleanflix would have you believe that they can be trusted as arbiters of gratuitousness. And, in fact, that is the very basis of their business.
And actually, you are incorrect (from a legal standpoint) as to your views towards customers making good judgment. Everyone loves to argue "just change the channel" if something offends you, but the US Supreme Court has ruled that that is not a valid defense against displaying inappropriate material on TV or airing offensive material on the radio. Companies like CleanFlix more or less provide an advisory guide for first-time viewers.
Again, the key here is choice, not censorship. If I go, "I hate all violence, even the artistic kind displayed in Schindler's List and American History X", and CleanFlix provides me with the scrubbed versions, then that is an equally valid exercise of one's own judgment (or at least it ought to be.) Now, if I said on the other hand, "I hate gratuitous violence, but I can respect violence in film if used artistically," and CleanFlix continually "over-scrubbed" my movies, taking out bits I felt should not have been, then I stop using their product.
I dunno, just from a market / choice point of view, all of this sounds great for the discerning consumer, without busying themselves directly with every potentially unwanted scene. I mean, you can argue it's dumb to not watch the actual version of the film being pushed by the director (what's the point?), but the beauty of the market is it is not mutually exclusive - you can watch a CleanFlix, you can watch the Director's Cut, you can watch everything in between.
So no, there is no slippery slope in the market, because the market contains the entire slope, from the bottom of the hill on up.
What every MMORPG needs is a handicapping system. You go into settings, you set your handicap, and you get to ascend accordingly.So you could have Level 1, the Casual Gamer, who levels up quickly but doesn't get access to all of the quests or best weaponry or any of the fancier materia vs Level 10 the Ubergame, whose grinding takes twice as long as normal, but has exclusive access to the +70 Vorpal Sword of Fantasticness and SideQuests A, B, and C.
Again, this goes back to the whole "What Suit Are You?" style of RPG gameplay. Some people are completists, some people like community, some people just like the theatricality and fun of playing a game, and some people are stat freaks, and most people are shades of all 4. MMORPGs needs to acclimate for that better - want to be a completist? you have to grind more. A stats freak? We'll boost you up, but it'll cost you. In it for the community? Level up faster if you're playing with a friend. And these are just ideas off the top of my head, but they strike at the heart of what's dumb about grinding: it's not for everyone.
The parent poster complains about 6 hour grinds - if there were 2 hour grinds (in the midst of a fun sidequest, or with a clear "save this countryside" campaign behind it), nobody would complain. So what's the difference between 2 hours and 6 hours? The very arbitrary nature of these kinds of numbers prove that the problem is not the time, but the very concept itself, and the fact that no game designer seems to want to cater towards allowing more flexible leveling and participating options for gamers (and yes, non-gamers) into their world.
That's a pity, and I hope that in the next 5-10 years, some more adventurous game companies figure out that with episodic content, different methods of entry for newer players, different schemes of success and advancement, and a better sense of handicapping, they could easily hook 5, 10, or 20 times the number of players they do now.
(I say all this as a huge fan of single-player RPGs (Final Fantasy in particular) who couldn't stand the grinding of Diablo II or EverQuest and never tried to get back on the bandwagon.)
This is only vaguely ontopic, but are there limits to how many people can "own" a DVD (or the license to watch the DVD, or whatever)?
I ask because if my wife and I purchase a DVD with our collective funds, am I the owner? Is she the owner? Or are we both the owner?
What if 100 people all contributed a nickel and bought a $5 VHS tape of a movie? Can they each make a copy of it? Do you have to own majority share in the VHS to make a copy?
What if 10 million people each paid $1 and all agreed to purchase a certain bundle of films and music that was valued at $10,000,000? Clearly SOMEONE must own it, but who?
Are there any laws about this? I can't seem to find any online (I think my searching skills are for crap on this one), but it seems like a very interesting question.
"A strange game. The only way to win is not to play."
I have the strange retro futures of 1966 in the back of my mind constantly.
The home automation. The robots. The on-demand lifestyle accoutrements. The click of a button gadgetry.
What we need is a computer the size of a cellphone, with a 10 gig flash drive, some flash RAM, a USB port, a 1Ghz CPU, and WiFi/Bluetooth. And we need it for $100. And as ubiquitous as possible.
With all of our technology, we still don't have the mythical "fridge that knows when you're out of milk."
What strikes me as particularly hilarious is that, in this day and age, in 2006, a year in which humanity has access to Fiber to the Home, carbon nanotubes, nearly room-temperature superconductors, iPods, bitTorrents, IPv6 - this list could go on interminably - but again, the hilarity in 2006 that the idea of a magicITX box running a mythTV frontend to your home entertainment center is not only novel, but practically a geek hobbyist venture, instead of being sold out of the box at Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and CostCo.
That WACI boxes, icepick's remote cams, satellite radio, and TomTom GPS mapping systems are still not only so expensive, but viewed as a luxury instead of a necessity.
And if webOSes lead to thinner clients which helps expedite the future, then I'm all for it.
When eBay first started off waaaaaay back in the 90s, they charged a nickel for listings under $10, and a dime for everything else. That was it. People used to MAIL in postcards with their fee taped on. It was mostly just the Bay Area (hence the name), and it was a very nice and active market, lots of kitschy stuff, lots of really good deals ("Hey, I love this Chagall painting, but I really gotta pay my alimony, so it's yours for $100"), and generally just lots of goodness.
Fast forward 10 years, and eBay is now a blight on Internet business. Beyond the fraud, the chicanery, the snake oil, and the exorbitant fees, eBay is simply no longer a viable place to do "garage sale"-style auction business. The community at large is no longer involved in the selling business - only buying. The selling has been taken over by Power Sellers, retail stores, and scam artists.
What we as the tech community in specific and the world community in general need to do is re-create eBay every 10 years (that appears to be the life cycle under which a grassroots auction site becomes a lumbering behemoth of corporate blase.) Someone just write some good open-source auction code - a RDMBS, a CMS, some RSS feeds and an open-source shopping cart/payment system (that is payment-platform independent) - and then we'll just create another eBay every decade. It doesn't even sound particularly hard to do, and as long as we're clear up front that there's probably not a lot of money in it (since eBay has the entrenchment factor), we can make something, you know, for kids! And for everyone else who just wants to sell their backlog of shi^H^^Htuff* sitting in their garage.
Make it easy, make it cheap, make it roll up, make a code snippet you can dump on mySpace or liveJournal or a Wordpress site, make sniping impossible (I like the idea of extending the bidding by 5 minutes every time there's a bid), make it easy to translate, make it secure, make it standards compliant, and guess what? You've probably got a Web 2.0 hit on your hands.
* Thanks, George Carlin.
Thinking violent thoughts against someone in the briefest of instants is one thing. Making an explicit icon shows quite a bit more effort. This clearly was at least one or two orders of magnitude more than your average excited utterance.
Also, just to be clear, if you yelled at someone, "I'll kill you!" you can be arrested for assault, too. Fighting words are not protected speech because they aren't designed to interact in the marketplace of ideas and speech - they're designed exclusively to provoke violent action.
(PS It's awesome that the Supreme Court has made numerous decisions around the term "fightin' words.")
As an employee of a state's executive branch, I can assure you that for us, cost is far and away the most important aspect in making any sort of A vs B comparison. Our entire system is driven by the lowest bidder. (And if you save $50 on something you don't care about, that means you get to spend $50 extra on something you do. Governors are very, VERY specific as to what they do and don't care about.)
And ODF = free.
In fact, I'm fairly certain that if Massachusetts wanted to hire 5-10 developers to create a program to deal with ODFs in a disability-accessible manner, it still wouldn't cost as much as using proprietary software.