I’ve just installed Twitter Tools for WordPress, and this post is intended to test it. If I’ve set it up right, it’ll automagically send out a tweet when I publish a post. Which means I won’t have to tweet manually to inform people. Labor-saving devices FTW!
Update: Huzzah, it worked. Just what I always wanted!
And now, so your time isn’t entirely wasted, the world’s cutest dog.
Last week, I was at the bookstore and came across China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford. This book, based on a series of NPR stories Gifford filed in 2004, chronicles his trip across China on Route 312, a highway stretching across the country from Shanghai to the border with Kazakhstan in the far northwest.
After I read the book, it occurred to me that I had tools for following his journey that did not exist at the time–namely, Google Earth and Panoramio. So I fired up Google Earth to see what I could find.
For those who aren’t familiar with Panoramio, it’s a photo-sharing site, owned by Google, that allows photos to be stored with geotagging information–either added automatically by the camera, or created by hand afterward. The site is loaded with millions of images from all over the world, mostly created and shared by amateurs. And many of them also find their way into Google Earth and Google Maps. So this is a marvelous way to get an idea of what a given place looks like.
Now, I wasn’t expecting to find many images outside of China’s major cities; not too many Westerners find their way into the back country, and I assumed that few Chinese out there would have the motivation and ability to share their photos. So, I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only had some Chinese (mostly cyclists) visited these areas and posted pictures, but a few foreigners had also traveled the long and slow way.
In particular, there was a German fellow that I had already known about, who walked across China in 2007 in a project called The Longest Way. (I found out about him through an awesome video self-portrait he had posted.) So imagine my delight when I found that he had taken lots of photos all along his route–over 7000 in all–and that all of them were geotagged and placed in Panoramio.
So I got to spend several hours over three days virtually traveling Route 312, through his and others’ eyes.
It’s difficult to express how it felt to see all of these places that I probably will never visit in person. I’m not just talking about major landmarks, though those are definitely interesting. I’m much more interested in the little places.
Dusty towns in the desert. Strange sculptures and spectacular monuments. Brown hills in southern Gansu province (which, by the way, looks just like Nevada). Major cities that few Americans even know exist. Cartoonish murals painted on decaying ruins in the middle of nowhere. And amazing, wonderful sights that I’ll never see with my own eyes.
They say that nothing feeds the mind and broadens the soul like travel. What about virtual travel?
This afternoon, I participated in an online conference (I refuse to call it a “webinar”) sponsored by ALA TechSource, covering technology issues that came up during ALA’s 2010 Midwinter meeting. It was a lot of fun, and I have to say, it felt good to reconnect with the profession a bit. I should do more of these while I’m looking for library work.
The topics were many and varied, from ebooks to mobile discovery tools, from open source to API’s. One topic in particular, however, is near and dear to me: augmented reality. This term is still new enough that many reading this may not know what it means; the best definition I’ve heard is from MIT educational technology professor Eric Klopfer, who calls it “a digital layer of information spatially overlaid on the real environment”. A good, though rough, example might be Google Earth, which takes the physical world and adds all kinds of spatial information onto it, such as roads, political and economic data, and user data as well–right down to decent places to eat.
The reason I call Google Earth a rough example, however, is that normally “augmented reality” refers to seeing the data on top of the real world, or at least at the same time. Usually this means using a location-aware mobile device to add information to whatever you happen to be looking at. The best current example of that might be Layar, an Android and iPhone app that uses your phone’s camera, GPS, compass and accelerometer to figure out exactly where the camera is and how it’s oriented, and can then show you the same view with added data from a variety of sources.
That might sound confusing, so here’s Layar’s first promotional video, from last summer. It’s still a pretty good introduction.
And the latest version adds 3D graphics, which leads to such weirdness as this:
Which may seem silly, but imagine the possibilities. Moving your car navigation system to your windshield, for example, and having it show you where to go by projecting arrows right on the street in front of you. (Of course, transparent display technology isn’t quite there yet, but it soon will be.) Or, if you’re looking for a restaurant, simply pointing your phone down the street and having it color-code every restaurant it can see according to the reviews it’s gotten.
Or–and this is where I think it gets really exciting–games. Or artworks (like the Beatles image currently on the Layar home page). Or historical images. What did that Scottish castle over there look like when it was new?
Perhaps the most exciting possibility of all is social data. Currently, this is a fairly cumbersome thing to do with these tools, but it can and will become easier. I’ve seen one example lately. I’ve been playing around with a Chinese mapping tool called City8, which gives street-level views of a number of Chinese cities. It’s very similar to Google Street View. But what’s most interesting to me is that they make it very easy for people to add informative placemarks and share them. The following video shows how easily it can be done (in Chinese, subtitled in English; the shared placemarks are at about 1:25):
There’s no reason Google couldn’t do the same, and I wish they’d copy it. Imagine having this kind of social data, combined with Layar’s locational awareness and 3D graphics, all at your fingertips.
As usual, science fiction writers have been the first ones to think about the implications of this. In Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, people are able to subscribe to seamless virtual-reality environments that completely replace their view of the world–and yet still allow them to interact with the rest of us. William Gibson’s Spook Country has augmented reality artworks–recreating famous crime scenes in the actual locations where the crimes took place. And in Charles Stross’ Halting State, these technologies have grown to be an accepted part of the everyday landscape, with everyone from police to spies to hackers using them routinely to collect information at all times.
Of course, the world usually turns out to be far weirder than even SF writers can imagine, especially when it comes to a technology as potentially disruptive as this. Prediction is a dangerous business. But personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on this stuff (oh, for the day I trade my Palm for an Android!), and I’m looking forward to seeing what applications people come up with.
Yesterday, as previously announced, I deleted my account on MySpace. I thought long and hard about it, but I finally decided I just didn’t need it anymore. Most of my contacts there were also on Facebook, and neither I nor the rest were spending any time there; I hadn’t gotten a wall post in over a year. So, goodbye MySpace.
I sent messages a couple of weeks ago to my remaining contacts there who weren’t on Facebook, letting them know I’d be leaving and giving them contact info. Most of them read the message; one of them replied. So I feel like I did my duty as far as notification.
It’s interesting, though, that I started worrying toward the end about intentionally removing myself from that segment of the online population. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you might remember this post about social and class divisions online. There’s a very clear class difference between MySpace and Facebook, and I hate the thought that I’m cutting myself off from the so-called “lower” class–even if I don’t really know anybody in it any more.
It reminds me of one time when I was in Las Vegas, and the person I was visiting took me to see The Lakes, a planned community in the western part of the city that’s built around a large manmade lake. We didn’t go inside. We couldn’t go inside, because the entire lake and everything around it was carefully walled off from the likes of us.
But every once in a while there was a break in the wall, where you could sit on a bench and look through a fence at the lagoon. And so I looked in, and saw a collection of extremely large houses surrounding the lake. Each house had its own dock, and there were a number of boats out on the lake, enjoying the breeze.
And I looked in on this playground of the rich, that had thoughtfully provided a place for those outside the wall to look in on the wealthy at play, and I swore a solemn vow that I would never live in a gated community. I would never buy into the idea that I was so much better than my fellow humans that I deserved to cut myself off from them.
So, by leaving MySpace, am I now doing this very thing online?
Okay, so when I wrote about the possibilities for an alternate Twitter protocol the other day, I was unaware of the solutions that already exist. A couple of days ago, Wired published an article detailing the various alternatives that people are working on.
One system, Laconica, seems to offer pretty much everything that I had in mind in that post. And sites using it have already sprung up–notably Identi.ca, which essentially duplicates Twitter in open-source. And most of these systems offer things Twitter doesn’t, such as trackbacks and image & video support. Most of all, it appears that these microblogging platforms would be immune to the kind of DDOS attack that took down Twitter last week.
I’ve just gotten my account on Identi.ca, but haven’t posted anything on it yet. I’m going to play around with it a bit first, and in particular, I want to be able to crosspost to Twitter (and possibly Facebook, which will be even more powerful once they integrate Friendfeed).
I’m looking forward to seeing how these things develop. Microblogging is an incredibly useful concept, and it will be even more so once freed from Twitter.
So, word is spreading that the DOS attacks on Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal yesterday (still causing problems today) were apparently targeted against a single individual: a Georgian blogger calling himself cyxymu. Since cyxymu generally writes nasty things about Russia, speculation is rife that the sites were attacked by the Russian government to shut him up.
If this is true, then it’s fairly important. After all, these are sites used by hundreds of millions of people every day. Including Russians. That somebody wouldn’t think twice about taking down a significant chunk of the Internet to go after a single blogger–and somebody who’s not particularly well known, at that–is disturbing, and it does not bode well for the future.
There have been rumors for quite a long time that the cracker underground has a kind of “gentlemen’s agreement” where the Internet is concerned: that, while they’re capable of shutting it down, it’s so important to society–and to they themselves–that they would be shooting themselves in the foot. Essentially, an online version of Mutually Assured Destruction. I have no idea if this is true, but it sounds plausible to me.
But now, if this scenario is true, we have a major world government that is perfectly willing and able to cripple their own citizens’ online capabilities in order to silence one dissident. In other words, they don’t see themselves as being bound by any such scruples about preserving the Internet for themselves or their opponents.
This is going to be seen as a watershed event, I think. But who knows where it’s going to lead.
Like millions of other Twitter users, I’ve been highly annoyed today to watch Twitter struggle to its knees after suffering a denial-of-service attack. It’s been interesting watching the various parts of the site going in and out of operability; generally, the API has worked while the website hasn’t (at least for me). I presume that they’ll get things under control before too long, but this is the worst outage they’ve had in quite a while.
And, given how many people depend on Twitter now, it might be high time to consider how to establish these kinds of real-time updates as a separate Internet service, independent of any one company or centralized system. Twitter-the-company, sadly, has shown itself to be not all that reliable when it comes to maintaining their core service.
So, how can we decentralize one-to-many text messaging? The obvious model would be the old Usenet newsgroups. Possibly a new protocol could be created, based loosely on NNTP.
But somehow I doubt if that kind of system could scale to the number of “groups”–one per user–that would be needed, even if each message were restricted to 140 characters. Estimates vary and Twitter isn’t telling, but there appear to be somewhere around seven million to 11.5 million users, sending Eris-only-knows-how-many tweets per day. If Twitter-the-company can’t get six sigma uptime with that, how is a distributed system going to?
Anyway, this is just idle speculation. I’m not enough of a hacker to design a distributed microblogging protocol that could replace Twitter. But I do think it’s time to seriously rethink our dependence on this fun but flaky company. Anybody out there got any ideas?
Update, the next day: It occurred to me during the night that one could easily roll a custom microblogging solution with RSS: simply write a lightweight application that would let one update an RSS feed through a web page, and then anyone interested in reading it could subscribe to the page. I could easily do it myself as a proof of concept, but I won’t have time in the next few days.
However, if the rumors are true that this was caused by a political attack against a single person–see my next post, above–then no such system would be able to defend against it. Sadly, it looks like Twitter and Facebook and the like will simply have to figure out how to beef up their systems.
One other quick thought about the danah boyd talk, having to do with Twitter:
Consider the discussion of the Iranian election. If you were in certain cohorts, you couldn’t miss the green-ification of people’s profiles, the discussions of #iranelection. But, even though said conversations were massively prolific, only a small percentage of the user base was even aware of this beyond the trending topic. Those who were following 50cent and Miley Cyrus were oblivious to these conversations. And, in a matter of moments, this became visible when Michael Jackson died and captured the attention of a much broader swath of users, nearly taking Twitter down with it. In your world, Iran probably matters more than Michael Jackson. But don’t for a second think that this is universal.
It occurs to me that this is an extreme example of just the kind of willful social differentiation that we’ve seen all along with social media. Unlike the old broadcast media, the user has (a) a vast array of choices for what she can expose herself to, and (b) essentially complete control over which of those choices she will accept. Twitter is, as far as I know, the most extreme form of that. So, if her friends aren’t interested in something that’s happening, she won’t necessarily hear about it at all. The end result being that users really do end up choosing different realities to live in.
I can think of all sorts of things to say about the implications of this for society and democracy, but that’s another post.
I know I wrote about Web ethnographer danah boyd not long ago, but she came out with another talk a few days ago that’s too good to pass up. “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online” is about the role that class identification plays in social networking; in particular, how race, economic status, and education influence the choices that teenagers make in creating their social spaces online.
One very interesting point she makes is that the social division between MySpace and Facebook, and the movement from the former to the latter, mirrors that between the working and educated classes, particularly where unconscious awareness of class was involved:
What happened was modern day “white flight.” Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those who deserted MySpace did so by “choice” but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.
And, also, that those in the upper class (Facebook) show a familiar condescension toward those in the lower class (MySpace), as well as a distrust of their taste and values:
The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to everyone out there. And if we think back to the language used by teens who use Facebook when talking about MySpace, we should be truly alarmed. Those who are from privileged backgrounds tend to be far more condescending towards those who are not than vice versa. Many of us in this room come from privileged worlds where we want to “help” those who are not well-off. Here is where a privilege-check is necessary. How often do our language and mannerisms reflect a problematic level of condescension? Perhaps we should look at our teens. They are certainly speaking in a manner that reveals distrust and condescension.
“Class” is a forbidden topic in the United States, so much so that most of us–at least, those of us not at the very top–are barely aware of its existence. But despite our deplorable lack of class consciousness, the classes themselves are very real, and social technologies have only enhanced our ability to wall ourselves off in our own communities. boyd uses the excellent term “homophily” to describe our instinctive drive to stick to those like ourselves. How many of us really know anyone outside of our own class? Or would have anything to say to them if we did?
I do wonder, however, what kind of role social aspiration and upward mobility might play. Do those who have migrated from MySpace to Facebook see it as a place where they can be around a better class of people?
Anyway, I think that those who are interested in creating social spaces online would be wise to take these social attitudes into account. You might think that your cool new technological playground is the perfect place for people of all kinds to work and play together–but your intended audience may not see it that way. We should always look at the assumptions of the people we’re aiming our work at–and our own assumptions most of all.
(The following is adapted from a bulletin board post I wrote for a class on Web 2.0 nearly a year ago. I just ran across it, and I still think it’s pretty good.)
Meredith Farkas, in her book Social Software in Libraries, describes social software as having the following values (in her words):
The “Web 2.0″ buzz implies that all of these values are new. But, in fact, most of them were characteristic of the early Internet, before the advent of the World Wide Web in the early 1990′s. The core Internet services of email, Internet Relay Chat, and especially Usenet newsgroups, allowed a wide range of interactivity and collaboration, between people spread around the world, much like the modern Web. A little history might help to illustrate what I mean.
The Internet began in the 1970′s as a government-sponsored academic network. Having been developed in an atmosphere of free and open collaboration (both in the culture of scientific research and in the sharing of software), the early online culture organized in such a way as to provide for easy collaboration and sharing of information.
Anyone who wished could contribute to a Usenet group, and their contributions would be quickly judged, and either promoted or shouted down. Email addresses were generally public knowledge (spam did not yet exist), and so anyone who was online could be easily reached; and IRC and other chat services allowed for quick real-time discussions. Therefore, communities were able to organize quickly around particular projects or subjects, and there was a huge amount of collaboration at all levels.
When the World Wide Web came along, on the other hand, it required considerably more technical expertise in order to create material for it. WYSIWYG web page editors did not exist, nor did blogging tools; if one wanted to have a presence on the web, he or she had to write the page directly, in HTML, from the ground up. Additionally, in the early days it was necessary to maintain server software, often a dedicated computer, and even one’s own persistent Internet connection.
With these barriers to entry for potential authors and collaborators, the Web, unlike most existing Internet services, evolved as much more of a broadcast-style medium, with a few technically-minded producers creating material for a large audience, and with very little collaboration between them. When the Web was commercialized starting in 1994, much of the expertise and resources needed to create advanced content became concentrated in the corporate sector.
What has changed with the new social tools is that those barriers to entry and collaboration have begun to come down. It is now far easier than in the early days of the Web to create material and to add to and comment on others’ work. This mirrors the Internet as it was in the 1980′s–except that the audience is far larger than before.
Therefore, in my opinion, Web 2.0 technologies really represent a restoration of the original values of Internet culture–community, collaboration, interconnectedness, two-way communication. Only now, the tools that enable those values are available to the mass culture rather than to a few technically-minded academics. Of course, the so-called “Web 1.0″ period was necessary to build this audience, but now they are learning the benefits of the kinds of community that existed in the early days.
A perennial student, with an utterly insane variety of densely interconnected interests, carefully plotting his course through the Singularity.
