Technology

coComment Does Web 2.0 Right

Despite last week’s rant about too much web 2.0 hype, I’ve made one discovery recently that’s made my life a lot easier. It’s called coComment. coComment keeps track of all the comments you make on blogs throughout the web so you don’t have to go Googling for them yourself.

Meta-ing Ourselves to Death

I’m starting to get that dot-com bubble burst feeling again. There are too many meta information tools out there with shaky revenue streams.

MySpace Spam or Clever Marketing?

In case some of you are wondering why your MySpace Friends lists are suddenly exploding, here’s why: I’ve been going crazy with MySpace promotion over the past few weeks.

Despite my misgivings about MySpace (which mainly have to do with the site’s design, functionality and usability — not its general purpose), I’m attempting to make practical use of it to promote Infoquake. And so in the last three weeks, my friend count has skyrocketed from about 75 to over 1,200. (In case you’re curious, you can visit my MySpace page.)

Screen shot of David Louis Edelman's MySpace pageHow am I adding so many friends so quickly? For a few days I was using a program called Friend Adder Professional to do the heavy lifting. With this program, you can actually send friends requests based on Google searchs of MySpace profiles, up to 500 a day. So one day as an experiment I sent friend requests to 500 people who listed Cryptonomicon as a favorite book. The next I did the same thing with Accelerando.

This might have continued indefinitely if my nice Jewish mother hadn’t instilled in me a strong sense of guilt. So I took a closer look at the MySpace Terms and Conditions and discovered that MySpace prohibits “any automated use of the system, such as using scripts to add friends or send comments or messages.” As well they should. So I stopped using the automated program and have continued adding friends manually.

But even without the automated bot, is adding friends for self-promotional purposes permitted by MySpace?

I’m no lawyer, but I can’t see why not. The MySpace Terms are somewhat ambiguous. They prohibit using profiles “in connection with any commercial endeavors except those that are specifically endorsed or approved by MySpace.com.” But later they prohibit “commercial activities and/or sales… such as contests, sweepstakes, barter, advertising, or pyramid schemes.” I don’t think my profile falls under any of those categories. Sure, there’s all kinds of information about Infoquake on my page, but there’s no exhortation to purchase. There are no links to online booksellers. The word “buy” isn’t even on the page.

(It’s also worth mentioning that the MySpace Terms and Conditions are full of strange provisos that everyone seems to ignore and MySpace has no intention of enforcing. Did you know that technically you’re not allowed to post any last names — even your own — on your profile?)

So assuming that self-promotion via MySpace is perfectly legal, the next obvious question: is this ethical?

After much thought, I’ve concluded that sending massive amounts of friend requests to strangers on MySpace is not spamming. What’s my rationale? I’m glad you asked:

  • Adding friends is a one-time permission-based activity. All you have to do if you never want to hear from me again is to click a single button and deny my friends request. If I accidentally try to add you twice, you can block any future communication with a single click.
  • The only content I’m communicating is a request to communicate. There’s no advertising in my profile photo or my profile name. If you’re interested in finding out who I am and what I’ve done, click on ahead. Otherwise, ignore away.
  • I’m targeting people with a professed interest in hard science fiction. The problem with e-mail spam is not that it’s unsolicited; the problem is that 98% of it doesn’t apply to me. If these unsolicited messages were about Richard K. Morgan’s latest novel instead of cheap home equity loans, I’d start looking at my junk mail folder again. So I’m trying to only add people whose profiles are on-topic. I’m not going to send a friend request to someone who has no interest in (or is openly hostile to) science fiction.
  • I answer all messages personally. Any questions or concerns about my book or my profile go straight to my e-mail inbox. I answer them personally, one at a time, without resorting to automated responses.
  • I’m trying to be completely transparent. Open up my profile, and I state upfront who I am and what I’m doing. I’m a science fiction author interested in getting the word out about my book. I’m soliciting feedback, and adjusting my tactics as I go to avoid pissing people off.
  • I really am trying to make friends. I’d love nothing more than to hold a nice, protracted dialogue with everyone on my friends list about the merits and shortcomings of Infoquake. I’ve been telling people to send me their thoughts on the book if they get around to reading it, because I really do want to know.

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Greasemonkeying with Reality

Stephen Colbert had an amusing rant the other week about how the world is turning into a wiki. Everybody has the power to edit reality, said Colbert. If you don’t like the way the world works, just log in to Wikipedia and change it.

Stephen Colbert of The Colbert ReportHe’s almost right. If you don’t like the way the world is, now you can edit your version of it with Greasemonkey.

Greasemonkey, in case you don’t know, is a plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser that lets you write little Javascripts to run on web pages after they’ve been downloaded to your browser. It’s become quite popular with the Slashdot crowd.

Sounds techno-wonky? Something that only the dude in the back room configuring the Linux servers would care about? No. Hold onto your hats, folks, because Greasemonkey is your future. It’s the harbinger of a serious change in how the world functions, and in forty years you’re going to wonder how you ever lived without it.

Let’s just start with what the Greasemonkey plug-in is doing today.

On my browser, I have a Greasemonkey script called Linkify Plus installed. This script silently searches through every web page I download for web and e-mail addresses that haven’t been hyperlinked, and it hyperlinks them. So for instance, every time I see dedelman@gmail.com on a web page, the Linkify Plus script automatically turns that into dedelman@gmail.com — whether the creator of the page wanted that text hyperlinked or not.

And why should the author of the page care? After all, when you access a page on the web, you’re downloading a copy of it. Your own copy, to do with whatever you please. If you want to open up that page on your own machine and change the code, resize the pictures, or rewrite the text, that’s your right. I have a friend who writes little rants in the margins of his books to the authors when he finds something he disagrees with. Nothin’ wrong with that. Greasemonkey just automates the process.

(I should point out that Greasemonkey didn’t invent this functionality; they’ve just popularized it. All modern browsers have the capability of changing a page’s display through custom style sheets. And before I get bombarded with snarky comments, let me point out that Opera can run Greasemonkey scripts too.)

So Greasemonkey makes it easy to tweak web pages on the fly. Why stop with just style and display changes? Why not change the content?

Take this Greasemonkey script that I’ve just written, which I’m going to call Brockify in honor of David Brock. (Brock spent many years as a sleazy right-wing mudslinger until he switched sides and became a sleazy left-wing mudslinger instead.) My Brockify script will silently swap the words “liberal” and “conservative” for you on any page on the web. Go ahead, install the Greasemonkey plug-in and the script, then test it out. (And for God’s sakes, don’t forget to turn it off when you’re done.) It’s seamless and it’s almost instantaneous. You’ll see Rush Limbaugh is now bemoaning those “conservative pinheads,” while Al Franken has taken to griping about “liberal religious fanatics.”

The Washington Times always refers to gay marriage as gay “marriage.” This annoys the crap out of me; it’s blatant editorializing, and distracting as hell in the context of a straight news story. (No pun intended.) But now I can write a Greasemonkey script and remove the belittling quotation marks once and for all.

These are fairly crude examples, but you see my point. With a simple script, you can customize, bowdlerize, sanitize, and homogenize the web.

Now here’s where things get fun.

The Greasemonkeying of information won’t just stop with the web. It’s not going to end with the editing of digital bits on your computer screen. It’s going to move onto your telephone and your television and eventually, inside that thick skull of yours.

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Why Does MySpace Suck So Badly?

In an effort to spread the word about my book Infoquake, I’ve been experimenting with several social networking services. I now have a LiveJournal that cross-posts what I post here, I’ve got a space at MySpace, I’m linked in to LinkedIn.

MySpace is far and away the most popular of these types of services. According to Alexa, MySpace ranks only below Yahoo and Google in terms of popularity on the web. If you’re curious, you can view my page at http://www.myspace.com/davidlouisedelman.

Screen shot of David Louis Edelman's MySpace pageHere’s the problem: MySpace is an abomination. Nothing works. The things that do work are poorly designed and shoddily implemented. Here’s just a small sampling of problems I’ve been having:

  • Member search doesn’t work. Try searching for members using multiple criteria, and watch the search go splat. (Then again, Yahoo’s member search has been broken for years and nobody seems eager to fix it.)
  • Importing contacts doesn’t work. I tried importing my online address books from Yahoo, GMail, and AIM. MySpace said it sent out a dozen or so invites. It didn’t, and I had to redo the whole thing by hand.
  • Instant messaging doesn’t didn’t work. I tried sending a friend a message just to see what it would do, only to receive a very unprofessional-looking error message stating that the instant messaging was out of commission.
  • Cross-posting from WordPress doesn’t work. I have managed to get this working with LiveJournal (http://david-l-edelman.livejournal.com if you’re curious) using a nice little plugin I found on the web. There used to be one of these for MySpace, but the plugin developer gave up because MySpace kept mucking with the API.
  • Reporting spam doesn’t work. This morning I received friend requests from kinkymonica, flirtymonica, and luvymonica. How do you report these friend requests as the porn spam they so obviously are? You can’t.
  • Approving your friends doesn’t work. I’m currently staring at my “approve/deny your friends” queue, which states that I’m looking at “Listing 1-6 of 6.” Only about an inch away, however, there’s another column that says “1 of 1.” And below, there’s nothing listed. Do I have five phantom friends? (Actually, that would explain a lot of things…)

To add to the functional problems, the site is full of the worst kind of design heresy. Boxes float around the page with seemingly no rhyme or reason. The default icons look like rejects from your old Windows 3.1 installation. Navigation seems to float around the screen in illogical places, to the point where the only button I can rely on is the browser’s Back button. Things get even worse when users start mucking with their MySpace designs and adding polls and plug-ins and garish animated GIFs. You get stuck with endless pages that take forever to load and are impossible to read.

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Look Ma… No Program Menus!

It’s pretty much official at this point: Microsoft is ditching program menus. By program menus, I mean that narrow bar at the top of every program in MS Windows which usually starts with “File” and ends with “Help.” These menus have been a part of day-to-day computing experience since the first Macs in the ’80s, and have a history that extends back to Xerox PARC in the early ’70s. And now Microsoft is putting them … Read more

Limits on Speed, Limits on Freedom

Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange (and the Stanley Kubrick film based upon it) made a bold statement about what our technology should and shouldn’t do. Forcing citizens to obey the law is immoral, asserts Burgess. Once you’ve taken away our freedom of choice, you’ve taken away our souls.

But technology isn’t always about giving us more freedom to do things we couldn’t do before. Our lives are stuffed to the gills with choice, and there’s such a thing as too much of it. Sometimes technology can help precisely by taking away our freedoms. Small, inconvenient, and irritating freedoms.

Driving scene from A Clockwork Orange.For instance: speed limits.

Most of us have precisely two feelings about speed limits. One, they’re too low; and two, it’s annoying to have to pay attention to them. Oh, we recognize in the back of our minds that speed limits are necessary, that speed limits act as a reminder and a deterrent and in the long run save lives.

But it’s difficult and irritating to pay attention to them. The signs are standardized across the nation so they’re easily recognizable, but you’re never quite sure when you’re going to see one. When you travel to another state, you never know what the interstate speed limit is. As a result, most of the speeding tickets we get — most of the ones I’ve gotten at least — are a result of ignorance, not disobedience. We want to obey the law, we really do. It’s just not easy enough.

So here’s a perfect opportunity to use the power of information technology to put our insignificant freedoms on pause.

What if the Department of Transportation created a national database of speed limit information tied to GPS coordinates? And what if every car was equipped with a specialized GPS unit that could tap into this database and therefore tell you what the proper speed limit was at all times?

Your car would then be able to sense when you were approaching or breaking the speed limit. Perhaps the dashboard could signal you with a flashing light or an audible chime. Or maybe, like videogame controllers, the car could give “force feedback” to make pressing the accelerator noticably more difficult the faster you’re going. Perhaps ultimately you might choose for the car to simply not let you exceed the speed limit — or to cap you at ten miles an hour over.

The first objection you’re going to raise is that we’d start seeing a new breed of Road Warrior out there hacking cars and telling you the speed limit is 55 in a 25 zone. (William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light begins with a scene of this kind of automotive hacking.) So security would obviously be paramount. I’m willing to bet that we could come up with a relatively hack-proof method of securing car GPS units and speed limit transmissions.

Then, of course, the question arises of what happens when you’re driving through a tunnel or a hurricane and the GPS information isn’t available. Well, there’s a simple solution for that: store a cached copy of the speed limit database locally in the car. (If that’s not a practical solution because of storage limitations, then certainly the car should be able to hold speed limit information within, say, a 200-mile radius.)

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How to Get Information to Flow Backward

A certain Mr. Marc Tarrasch of Los Altos, California wrote in to Newsweek magazine last week to complain about actor Johnny Depp’s disparaging comments about America in 2003. Depp was quoted by the German magazine Stern as likening America to “a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you” and “a broken toy.” Says Mr. Tarrasch:

Apparently, it is acceptable for Depp to make movies in Hollywood while at the same time publicly disrespecting the country where he was born and from which he reaps enormous financial benefits. Until Depp retracts his foolish statements, I will not pay a dime to see any of his films, no matter how wonderful an actor Newsweek thinks he is.

Johnny Depp promoting Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's ChestWe can discuss the merits of Mr. Depp’s remarks — and Mr. Tarrasch’s criticism — some other time. The point is, Johnny Depp did issue a public apology. In fact, within 48 hours of the article’s publication, he claimed that his words had been misquoted and taken out of context:

There was no anti-American sentiment… My deepest apologies to those who were offended, affected, or hurt by this insanely twisted deformation of my words and intent.

(Let’s also put aside the question of whether Depp’s apology was sincere, or whether he was just engaging in some frenzied damage control after seeing the negative reaction his comments received in the press. Johnny Depp doesn’t strike me as the type of guy who would apologize for a political statement unless he sincerely meant to apologize. Do you think an actor who once jumped at the chance to star in a black-and-white film about an unknown cross-dressing homosexual B-movie director really cares if his political views affect his box office draw?)

So the news of Johnny Depp’s retraction did not reach the editors of Newsweek, and they printed Mr. Tarrasch’s letter. One can only wonder how many of Newsweek‘s circulation of 4 million heard about the whole flap for the first time through this letter and decided to boycott Depp’s film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest this past weekend. A few hundred? A few thousand? Could Mr. Tarrasch’s letter have been one of the flakes in a snowball of conservative resentment that led to Pirates‘ disappointing second-weekend box office?

There’s a technological point to be made from all this, and here it is: information only flows one way. It goes forward, not backward.

Like the stuff that flew out of Pandora’s box, information is almost impossible to control once it’s released. Attempting to retract information that’s already out there is doubly difficult, and I’m willing to bet that Depp will be hearing conservative tirades about his supposed anti-American statements for decades to come.

It’s a problem that’s been a part of the human experience since the very beginning. And now the problem is ingrained in the very structure of the web, our greatest informational tool. Hyperlinks only point in one direction. From a technical standpoint, every page on the web is completely ignorant of the pages that link to it. As soon as you click on a hyperlink, the only connection back to that original page is through your browser’s history stored on your local machine. Move a page on the web or change its content, and watch the hundreds of linked pages dumbly continue to insist that the data is still there.

But here’s the really fascinating thing. For the first time in human history, we may be on the verge of finding ways to allow data to flow in the opposite direction. And this could very well be one of the small technologies that changes the world.

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Stupid Writer Tricks: Choose the Right Tools

Since my last Stupid Writer Tricks column about casting your characters with Hollywood actors proved so unpopular with — well, everybody, I’m hoping this one will be a little less controversial. It’s very simple: make sure you have the right tools for the trade. What are the right tools for the trade of writing? Well, obviously they differ from writer to writer. Some prefer to write longhand with ballpoint pens. Some prefer to bang their literary masterpieces out … Read more

Dave’s Grand Ideas: Amazon for Voters

What’s the biggest problem with our system of democracy? John McCain and Russell Feingold seem to think that it’s lax campaign finance rules that allow moneyed interests to funnel cash into campaigns. Others think it’s media bias or homogeneity of opinion between the two parties.

I happen to think the main problem is too much information.

The general public is often only aware of the hottest of hot-button issues — gay marriage, flag burning, the war in Iraq. And while sometimes our own personal stance on a particular issue is strong enough to tilt us in favor of one candidate or the other, it’s often a more nebulous decision-making process than that. There are a million issues that deserve our attention and a legislative trail a thousand miles long. So, overwhelmed by all this data, we end up voting for our national representatives strictly on the party line. Or, even worse, we vote on the basis of our feelings about a particular candidate — and as we all know, our feelings are easily manipulated by the mass medium of television.

And that’s just on a national level. What about all of those tens of thousands of candidates for local and regional office? Most of us know that we can tune in to the local newspaper on the last few days before the election and get a nice, concise summary of the candidates’ views. But we don’t necessarily trust these concise summaries. And so we end up staying home from local elections simply because we don’t know anything about these races.

One might think that you could conduct adequate research about political candidates via the Internet. But have you ever tried to wade through a politician’s website? They’re invariably stuffed to the gills with self-promotional blather and doublespeak. Like the television commercials, they’re generally designed not to disseminate information, but to give the prospective voter a warm and fuzzy feeling about the candidate.

So here’s a Grand Idea: what if someone built an independent voter information aggregator? Let’s call it Amazon for Voters. (You’ll see why I invoke the name of Amazon shortly.)

Here’s how it would work.

You, the voter, access the Amazon for Voters website and fill out a short questionnaire. Which issues are the most important to you? Choose from a set of drop-down menus a list of the top ten issues that you care about. Let’s say you choose gun control, abortion, and welfare reform. Amazon for Voters asks you where you stand on each particular issue. Pro-gun or pro-gun control? Pro-life or pro-choice? More money for welfare programs, or slash the heck out of those welfare budgets?

Click “Submit,” and the system instantly tabulates a list of the candidates for whom you’re eligible to vote that match your viewpoint. You get a numerical score: “Rep. John Doe is an 83% match on your views.”

How is this score calculated? Through legislative scorecards from independent organizations like the League of Women Voters, the National Rifle Association, NARAL, etc. Through a statistical analysis of that person’s actual voting history. Through endorsements by this or that organization.

Or better yet, through the candidates’ own self-rankings. Candidates (or rather, their staffs) fill out voter questionnaires like this all the time, but I’ve never heard of anyone compiling all of them into a comprehensive statistical database. (Or if someone has, they haven’t bothered to put it in a nice, user-friendly package for the masses and publicize it.)

There are certainly a number of issues in which most candidates are going to rank themselves squarely in the mushy middle — “I feel like government can’t afford to pay for our senior citizens’ prescription drugs, but I also feel like we can’t leave our elderly population out in the cold” — but there are also a number of issues where candidates are happy to make their positions widely known. How many politicians try to hide their position on abortion, for instance?

The best part about Amazon for Voters is that it’s completely nonpartisan. The system doesn’t place any judgment on the politicians’ views, or your views for that matter; it simply provides a numerical index for how closely your views match with each candidate’s views. It will work equally well for anyone from the hard left to the hard right.

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