Month: April 2003

Categories
Random

Perspectives on UpMyStreet…

A few days on, here’s what the media and webloggia thinks about UpMyStreet (where I have worked for the last eight months or so) going into administration:

  • Bowblog
    “While I was running another.com, we thought the UMS guys were golden. They were supposed to have survived the bust, they were supposed to have a bullet-proof (at least not chewing gum and string) service-based business model with recurring revenues. They had groovy, meaningful technology and excellent people who weren’t running dog dot.com opportunists. What happened, guys?”

  • Blog.org
    “I hope that someone decides to pick up its assets and do something with them. The idea of linking information and discussion to postcodes is an excellent one and with the growth of location-based services of all kinds the site is bound to have a future – its directors say it is “only months from turning a profit”.”

  • Guardian New Media Diary
    “Diary was disappointed last week to chronicle the demise of UpMyStreet, the innovative dotcom that allows you to check house prices, crime rates, listings and so on in any given area. The site is to go into administration in the hope of finding new backers. UpMyStreet was one of the few good ideas of the dotcom goldrush.”

  • NewMediaZero
    “There’s no doubt that UpMyStreet provides a unique, quality service online.
    Its distribution on the Web through third-party commercial sites is second to none. It’s been backed by News International, which has helped its move onto Sky’s interactive areas. And it’s also deeply involved with Government plans to bring public services online.”

  • NTK
    “It’s not often – but, we guess, not rare enough either – that a company gets slashdotted and receivershipped in the same week. But that’s what’s just happened to one of Britain’s pluckiest start-ups, UpMyStreet.”

  • Whitelabel.org:
    “Buy my baby, please.”

In related news – some of my co-workers are prudently updating their CVs just in case the worst does come to past and the company doesn’t find a buyer.

Categories
Religion Science

On America, Science and Fundamentalist Christianity…

Probably the one thing I understand least about America is its relationship with religion. American is a country that (i) is particularly known for not being hide-bound by convention in science or business and (ii) often demonstrates an astonishing (and often laudable) amount of bombast and rule-breaking in both domestic and foreign-affairs. How then can it be that so many elements of American life can be held so firmly under the sway of religious fundamentalism?

You’d think this kind of thing would be more of a problem for countries like the UK – old European powers whose organisation includes no inbuilt distinctions between church and state. I mean – look at the facts – in the UK, the monarch is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. The same woman is also the country’s Head of State and has been for over fifty years. The UK also has – by law or convention – several representatives of the Church of England in our Upper House (The House of Lords), although there is considerable discussion ongoing about whether they should be there or whether all religions in the country should be represented.

But in fact the UK’s religious right has radically less power within the country than in the US. Presidents of the United States essentially have to be church-going Christians. Church-going in the UK is simply considered a bit odd. We have anti-abortion campaigners just like in the US, but nowhere near as many and nor are they so overtly religious. And while it would be naive of me to say that there are no schools in the UK in which creationism or intelligent design are taught, I can’t find any evidence that it’s even mentioned in the UK’s National Curriculum or that any religiously-tinted competitors for evolution are presented as of equal plausibility.

It’s the effects of religion on science, I think, that most appals me. I don’t believe – never have believed – that science is a completely value-free space. Decisions are made every day about what to study, who to study (and what not to study as well). Initial hypotheses are almost necessarily built upon assumption, intuition and the influx of current mainstream political consensus. But the idea that challenges to theories like “evolution” can circumvent the entire academic peer-review and testing process by way of the courts – inspired by people who want to find ways to equate the world with their religious beliefs… Well, it’s scandalous! Totally, utterly scandalous!

The Guardian is running an article in its new Life section today on exactly this subject: The Battle for American Science. It’s this article that part-inspired me to write about this subject today. Here’s a quote from it:

Critics speak with similar alarm about other theories that have been getting a new airing recently, on Aids and abstinence and global warming, for example – theories presented as rival scientific ideas asking only for a “fair hearing”. “It’s a very good rhetorical strategy, because it appeals to the very American sense of openness and fair play,” says Miller. “But there’s something called the scientific process, you know – involving open publication, criticism, and rejection of things that aren’t convincing. We don’t teach both sides of the germ theory of disease and faith-healing. Evolution isn’t in the classroom because of political action or court decisions. It’s in the classroom because it made it through, it stood up to scrutiny and became the scientific consensus. It fought the battle and won.”

Categories
Random

In Internet Magazine…

The wonderful weirdness of print publishing schedules means that the latest issue of internet magazine contains a news story about Google buying Blogger – a full five weeks after the story broke online. It’s got a few comments from me in it – which I think always greatly improves a publication – but even apart from my individual wisdom, the article itself is pretty cool. But enough about them…

    Tom Coates, author of the opinionated Plasticbag weblog (www.plasticbag.org) said webloggers themselves have been sorting out the Web’s content for some time. ‘There are a million webloggers out there, all writing stuff and linking to things in neatly organised and timely chunks,’ he said.
    ‘Webloggers are collectively, hyperactively and accidentally making sense of the Web. So it’s not so much about categorising weblog content as it is about using them to categorise everything!’
    Coates said he doubted that there’d be a Google News of weblogs, but thought that their links would be used to “add value” to existing news coverage. “Putting some of the good weblog posts at the end of conventional online news reports might bring that kind of context and grass-roots reaction back into online news,” he said.

God knows if I did say all that. It sounds pretty good though, so I’m not going to protest. I even agree with most of it…

Categories
Random

Excerpts: Baudrillard, "The Transparency of Evil"

A couple of interesting thoughts from Jean Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil (Verso 1990)

     And why does terrorism exist, if not as a violent form of abreaction in the social realm?
     The most stiking thing about events such as those that took place at the Heysel Stadium, Brussels, in 1985, is not their violence per se but the way in which this violence was given worldwide currency by television, and in the process turned into a travesty of itself.
     ‘How is such barbarity possible in the late twentieth century?’ This is a false question. There is no atavistic resurgence of some archaic type of violence. This violence of old was both more enthusiastic and more sacrificial than ours. Today’s violence, the violence produced by our hypermodernity, is terror. A simulacrum of violence, emerging less from passion than from the screen: a violence in the nature of the image …
     Another remarkable aspect of a happening like this is that it is in some way expected. We all collude in the anticipation of a fatal outcome, even if we are emotionally affected or shaken when it occurs. The Brussels police have been criticized for failing to avert the explosion of violence at the Heysel Stadium, but what no police could ever guard against is the sort of fascination, of mass appeal, exercised by the terrorist model. (p.75)

From a different article in the same book:

     The high degree to which AIDS, terrorism, crack cocaine or computer viruses mobilize the popular imagination should tell us that they are more than anecdotal occurrences in an irrational world. The fact is that they contain within them the whole logic of our system: these events are merely the spectacular expression of that system. They all hew to the same agenda of virulence and radiation, an agenda whose very power over the imagination is of a viral character…. (p.57)

Categories
Random

Wotchadoin' World?

I’ve been making diagrams. Don’t ask. I’ve been making diagrams. I’m in love with Omnigraffle and I don’t have time to post about what I’m thinking about because I’m too busy making diagrams about it. Hopefully I’ll hit some kind of legitimate plateau soon though and the diagrams will all coalesce with the stuff that I’ve been meaning to finish for ages and suddenly there’ll be loads of longer pieces from me appearing about Trackback, about Micro-paradigm shifts as a metaphor for online discussion, about social networks and the like… In the meantime, it’s brief link-log orgy time again – today mostly about online publishing work…

  • Evil Nick Denton seeks Kottkesque Designer
    For some reason I keep thinking of Phil Gyford when I read this job description, although maybe Phil’s work is a bit astringent for the consumer press. Maybe Denise would be a better bet. Having said that though, Nick probably wants someone who’s not only based in the USA but also stinkingly cheap.

  • Salon secures funding
    To which – in my current mood – all I can really say is “Well bully for you” – and what precisely have you done to empower the citizenry..? In the meantime, UpMyStreet has got a really nice write-up in The Register at the moment.

  • The Always-On Network
    There’s something simultaneously very satisfying and utterly depressing about a stripped-down Slashdot clone founded by people like accenture and KPMG. It’s like the apex and nadir of weblog culture in one. Like Madonna singing “American Pie” – you win / you lose. They’re almost the same thing anyway…
Categories
Technology

Hydra – a brief experiential review…

So Mr Webb and I have been playing with Hydra for a couple of days, trying to find uses for it and trying to get other people engaged in its use (with the hope that in the process we’ll come to some decent first-stage conclusions). Standard disclaimer here – all decent insights are collaborative in origin, all mistakes entirely my own.

First things first, for those of you who have come in late – what is Hydra. Essentially, it’s two (or more) people fiddling with the same document from two different computers at the same time with each being able to see what the other is doing. If you’re on the same network, then you can find documents to work on over Rendezvous. Otherwise (if you know your IP and are not trapped behind an unforgiving firewall) you can join with documents over the net.

Our first impressions weren’t entirely favourable. It may have been easy enough to connect to a shared document, but once there – what to do? We found ourselves using the first document in a peculiar inscribing way – kind of writing on it an ongoing discussion but in a non-linear graffiti kind of style. It reminded me a lot of those pictures you do when you’re a child where you draw a plane and then another plane and then you draw a missile coming from one plane and then you draw it hitting the other one, and then you turn that plane into an explosion and then you draw a little man in a parachute flying down to earth…

Starting a document from scratch, it seemed, was to be an almost impossible enterprise. The document itself kept getting lost within our debate about it. Later we would adopt the slightly odd approach of having two shared documents open at the same time – one as our newly discovered chat-graffiti-wall, the other for actual work on a document. The Apple key depressed with the ` made a relatively convenient way to skip between windows. But even with this approach in place, it became difficult to find a way of pulling the first initial strands of a document together. It was almost like you needed a separate scratch-pad incorporated into the program so you could push a piece of work a certain amount down the line towards completion before exposing it to your colleagues…

Working with code or mostly finished documents was a hell of a lot easier and more productive – and I think this is something we’ll probably find ourselves doing again in the daily course of our work. Keeping the two window model (one for debate / one for editing) we played for a while with a weblog post – amending it as we felt appropriate – bashing it more cleanly into place. The most useful feature here (weirdly) was one of the most simple – the ability to select a piece of text with a sweep of your cursor and then go, “that bit there needs a change” or “I love the turn of phrase” in the other window. That simple act of gesturing to a passage was tremendously liberating.

Finally Matt pulled the HTML source of a standard plasticbag.org page out and slapped it in the window – which turned into a debate about embedded RDF and Trackback. We could have been using it to understand why a page wasn’t rendering correctly or to debug or debate the correct syntax in any individual spot – or even (if we used a more literary or commentative text) simply as a medium for discussion – like being able use a laser pointer to signal a dubious passage and have your colleague know exactly what you were talking about even though he was on the other side of the room / city / planet…

First Impressions: I still can’t quite decide whether Hydra feels like a tiny niche application with some surprisingly significant uses or whether it should be considered a slightly clunky prototype of something almost world-changing. Certainly I’ll watch it with considerable interest and I recommend it to anyone interested in collaborating online…

Categories
Random

On an unsettling dream…

I had a weird dream last night. In the dream, something apocalyptically odd had happened. Pollen from space, perhaps. Or a Tipping-Point style collapse where an idea or a chemical or a radio wave or something finally hit such a level that it generated utterly pandemic effects – spreading throughout the entire human population in a matter of moments. About a third of all the people on the planet suddenly became utterly obedient and suggestible – satisfied simply to serve – all apparently good-natured and pliable. One by one they’d kind of imprint on unaffected people around them, doing basically whatever they said. Initially, all the non-obedient people were horrified. They wanted their friends back, their relatives. There was research and work to try and get them back to normal. But gradually the non-obedient began to get used to it. Newly obedient people were gradually stripped of their good jobs and started to happily help out the people they were imprinted on – doing smaller jobs, littler things, menial tasks. Gradually though, the non-obedient people started to feel darker temptations, secretly and shamefully relishing the power and the opportunities it afforded them. Gradually the obedient people came to be seen as less than human, and – because they didn’t fight back, and didn’t express pain – were gradually and regularly physically abused, sexually violated and essentially enslaved. Gradually the world fell into two castes – the mainstream of humanity who could express any desire they wanted on their human ‘pets’ but who had a dark hint of discomfort and shame to everything they did, and a submissive and willing underclass. No one knew whether inside each member of the underclass was a fully conscious human being screaming in protest or whether they were as they seemed – docile, placid, unfazed. One of the people I like most in the world had become an oppressor…

Categories
Random

Remaindered Links (after Kottke)…

Ok. So I’m back in London and I’m struggling to get back up to speed with what’s been going on in my absence. It’s terrifying how much can happen in a week. It’s terrifying how behind you can feel… Keeping hold of that sensation – where you’re actually riding the crest of the meme-stream is becoming an ever more difficult way of passing the time…

  • Debates of Artistic Value in Rock Music:
    A Case Study of the Band Weezer, 1994-2001
    A shameful confession – I haven’t read this yet. Normally I make it a bit of a point of honour to read everything that I post up here. I won’t post it unless I’ve read it. But this is really long…

  • What’s wrong with Dorian’s Eye?
    So I took a picture of my friend Dorian’s eye. He works next to me. He’d put in eye drops. I put the picture on my site. Ha! Ha! Very funny! Suddenly – months later – there’s a huge online discussion about why his eye’s all like that. Everyone’s taking it very seriously. Kind of strange.

  • The Weblog Revolution
    Meg Hourihan brings everyone up to speed on this whole “Weblog” thing in one of the most concise and clear introductions I’ve read.

  • Whitelabel.org / UpMyStreet.com
    After a discussion last week between lots of cool fun people at UMS, the people who are allowed near the code-base put Geo URL metatags into every page on the site. I’ve not really got a clear sense of what people out there might do with this information, but I’m quite looking forward to finding out…
Categories
Social Software

An Artisan in Social Software…

I’m going to take the unusual approach of linking through to a comment I’ve made on someone else’s site. The comment is flawed – it’s full of typos and errors and gets a bit over-excited every so often – but essentially I stand by most of it – particularly this part which is about the relationship between research/debate and hands-on experience running an online community:

From my response to ‘Falling in with the wrong crowd’
“There’s a pretension around our work that says that we’re scientists – but mostly weÔøΩre not – we’re artisans. We build things for people to use. We build things that extend the abilities of individuals in one way or another. As such people who work in this field should be doing apprenticeships as much as they should be doing research. They should be managing a community, understanding the tensions and the collapses, noticing the problems and the benefits, seeing where people get stuck and where they need to get stuck – where they need structure and where that structure will kill them.”

Categories
Random

Any minute now…

Any minute now I’m going to have to launch into a huge tract about social software – about the good things and the bad things, about the cult that’s emerging around the term (with all it’s requisite ecstasies and rites of initiation), about how much the way people write about it reminds me of how people used to write about the internet before it became saturated with hype and the companies came and grew and then exploded in shards and collapsed upon themselves taking many good people with them. At a certain point, I might even have to mention that there’s a tremendous power here, but that it’s an extension of / redevelopment of / repurposing of earlier insights made by people making MOOs, MUDs, bulletin boards, message-boards and wikis and how I love working in it but I’m scared of the way people are talking it up and I wish people would build more brilliant things rather than talking about it. And then inevitably – shortly afterwards – I’ll probably write something more about it myself… It’s not like it was with my other baby. Weblogging grew gradually and properly and organically through the interactions of real people. This one’s being increasingly owned by the wrong people.