Year: 2002

God Bless You, Mr Vonnegut…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 10, 2002

One of my favourite authors is Kurt Vonnegut. One of his favourite authors is Kilgore Trout. Kilgore Trout is what Kurt Vonnegut would be if life was a ludicrous joke and reality was one of Kurt Vonnegut books. Kilgore Trout writes stories. Mostly they’re quite short. And thanks to a link from a nice chap on Metafilter you can now read all of Kilgore Trout’s stories without the laborious time expenditure of reading Kurt Vonnegut’s short, devastating and brilliant novels. My favourite goes like this:

   In 2BR0TB [Kilgore Trout] hypothecated an America in which almost all of the work was done by machines, and the only people who could get work had three or more Ph.D’s. There was a serious overpopulation problem, too.

   All serious diseases had been conquered. So death was voluntary, and the government, to encourage volunteers for death, set up a purple-roofed Ethical Suicide Parlor at every major intersection, right next door to an orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s. There were pretty hostesses in the parlor, and Barca-Loungers, and Muzak, and a choice of fourteen painless ways to die. The suicide parlors were busy places, because so many people felt silly and pointless, and because it was supposed to be an unselfish, patriotic thing to do, to die. The suicides also got free last meals next door.

   And so on. Trout had a wonderful imagination.

   One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to Heaven, and she told him that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said, “Certainly, honey.”

   And he said, “I sure hope so. I want to ask Him something I never was able to find out down here.”

   “What’s that?” she said, strapping him in.

   “What the hell are people for?”

Random

Absolute Bottom 50 Urban Legends…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 10, 2002

The Absolute Bottom 50 Urban Legends (number 17): “This buddy of mine who works in San Francisco – he knows this guy who worked for a DotCom company that wrote a business plan, broke even, cut costs, and is on the road to profitability!” [via Mr Webb]

Random

The history of one of the main UK weblogging communities…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 9, 2002

I’ve just stumbled upon a fascinating piece by Dan Hon which goes into considerable detail about the way in which the UK weblogging scene evolved a community of sorts – a community that not every UK weblogger is a part of, but a community of and for webloggers anyway. To my knowledge, this is the first time this micro-history has been written down and published on a site and it may be of interest to anyone who cares about the ways in which stuff that happens online solidifies into matter and then collapses into real-life communities. One of the most interesting aspects of the article is that it posits that often the community (or the potentiality for community) radically predates the tool or forum used to facilitate it. Related posts: I talk about what it means to be part of a community | Meg writes about community versus community tools.

From Dan: “Would anyone say that a community existed? Possibly. Maybe not quite just yet. What you would be able to say, though, is that there existed an arbitrary set of people, say, people who write blogs and live in the UK, who were on the tentative cusp of actually starting to talk to each other on a regular basis – they hadn’t yet got organised.”

Random

On the simple joys of designing favicons…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 9, 2002

There’s no need for favicons. No need at all. They’re normally badly designed, they extend page design into the application itself (which I think is probably wrong) and they make your favourites menus all messy. Nonetheless, they are extraordinarily good fun to design – tiny little micro-branding-projects in 16×16 pixels that don’t take long and can be strangely satisfying. All this I discover years after everyone else of course. You can see the new favicons on this site, Barbelith and on the never-was-finally-build project, filmsoho.com…

Random

Suggestions for an application to auto ID3 things…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 9, 2002

You know what would be incredibly useful? A little application that you could run on a whole batch of MP3s that tried to work out what they are based on length and any text that was in the ID3 tags. So you’d grab all your MP3s that weren’t fully tagged up and you’d chuck em all in a folder. You’d get your ID3alizer and set it to work. It would have song length information and a set of search terms that it could run against each one of them (derived from whatever dysfunctional tags you had to work with, if any), starting with the artist. It would then present you with a screen that had the current ID3 tags on the left and the suggested replacements on the right with a simple ‘Is this correct? Yes / No’ set of functioning criteria. If it wasn’t correct, it’d just suggest the second alternative. Stick a track preview button on the same screen (to remind you what the track is if you’ve forgotten) and you’d have an incredibly useful little application.

Useful related links: CityofSound says: “Sounds like it might work nicely as a brute-force, lo-fi (cheap!) alternative (or precursor) to the collaborative-expert-based service I outlined previously.”

Social Software

The Awesome Clay Shirky…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 8, 2002

So Matt Webb and I went to a talk-followed-by-panel held by the iSociety people today. The feature performance was the awesome Clay Shirky, with support from a variety of charming panelists, including weblogging’s own Matt Jones.

The panel was essentially about the next level of community software and community sites online. Interestingly, though, the word “community” was almost totally unused through the whole occasion. Perhaps for reasons I don’t as yet understand, that word has become suddenly unfashionable. Instead we were talking about “social software”.

But the nomenclature is essentially trivial. Clay’s talk was extraordinarily fun for me, because he was working over areas that I’ve been thinking about and working around for the last couple of years now – how do we take community functionality and sites to the next level, what parts of our assumptions and utopian dreamings about online community must we give up, and what should we keep in mind while designing the interactions for the next five-ten years?

I’ve got my own theories about a lot of this stuff – much of which I’m going to try and assemble into ‘publishable’ form over the weekend. In the meantime, here’s a micro-summary of Clay’s piece:

We live at the beginning of a third golden age of social software.
1. E-mail
2. IRC / MUDs / MOOs / Usenet
  (The Web erupts here, but is primarily a publishing medium rather than an interactive one)
3. Now Weblogs / Wikis / Trackback / Jabber & Groove / Slashdot-style collaborative filtering
But where will we be in 5-7 years time?
Blocks to the development of next-stage communities
1. We have the wrong historical models and exotic “extremist” ideologies:
  1. The suggestion that the web should represent a shift or collapse in “identity”
  2. The need to prove purity of ‘online culture’ by foregrounding immersive MUDs and MOOs
  3. Assumption (because of scarcity of humans online) that we would be using this technology to meet people we didn’t know offline
2. We have the wrong assumptions about real-life groups:
  1. We assume that a group is the same as a collection of individuals
  2. We assume (utopian) that membership should be totally open
  3. We assume that a group should be able to function the same with ten people or ten million people in it
We are ill-served by the current metaphor of architecture and space, instead we should consider the construction of social software as like building a ship:
1. Ships are places where people come together
2. … but they come together in order to get somewhere
Groups tend towards self-sabotage, they do so because behind every “sophisticated” workgroup ostensibly designed to accomplish a specific goal, “basic” group strategies are secretly persuing very different ones. These are
1. helping people to find mates
2. identifying and uniting against enemies
3. venerating or idolising a figure, institution or ideology.
Clay’s suggestion for improving social software:
1. Design social software that is half-space and half-tool (help people figure out when they’ve run aground or accomplished something).
2. Make the formation of a constitution a fundamental part of creating a community space.

This concept of “constitutions” is something that’s very close to my own concept of the politics of social software – something that I’m working on writing up at this very moment and the first part of which is apparent in the way Barbelith hangs together…

More: Matt Webb i) writes about the day and ii) publishes his plain-text notes.

Random

On Americans and America…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 7, 2002

So we wake up to a world in which G.W. Bush has more power than ever, which is not a world that feels any safer to me. Across the world the rather resigned expectation is that the USA will be even less interested in the views of the international community than before – even as a new book is published that aims to explain to Americans why the world isn’t entirely thrilled by the behaviour of their government:

How the world sees Americans
“I was surprised that people were really able — and I heard this repeatedly — to distinguish between America and Americans. There’s America in the sense of the official government and the military. That official face of America in the world is not very well liked. And then there’s Americans — the people of the country, the ideals of the country, our popular culture. It was quite a sophisticated view, I thought, considering that they are very far away. Yes, America is in their face all the time, but the part of America that is in their face is that official part. They were able to still say, but you know, we love Americans and we love what you stand for. I heard that over and over again from all different walks of life and all different parts of the world.”

Random

Apple news, oh Apple news, oh sweet sexy Apple news…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 7, 2002

I’ve been thinking of buying an iBook for well over a year now. Well over. Maybe like two years or something. And now Apple have announced that they’re dropping the prices (substantially) and upping the specs a bit. And the lust is overwhelming. I genuinely need one now. It’s like a craving. It’s beyond a craving. It’s like a biological urge. I’m like a salmon being pulled upstream by an instinct so strong that I’m prepared to risk being pulled out of the river on a small piece of string, be gutted, coated in breadcrumbs and fed to some over-bited inbred Appallachian teen hairdresser-wannabe. That’s how much I need one.

In related news, Anakin Skywalker tired of the Jedi’s blue-sword-of-death and decided to switch to a more idiosyncratic and stylish brand, Apple have released a Powerbook that could outrace Superman and also burns DVDs, and I really really want an iBook.

Location Social Software

Introducing… UpMyStreet Conversations…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date November 6, 2002

So I can finally tell the world what I’ve been working on for the last few months – and in fact, more to the point, I can finally try and get some of you people to try it out.

UpMyStreet Conversations is a new kind of online community site for the UK. In some ways it’s almost anti-web. Where the web has “traditionally” been about uniting people on the basis of shared interests no matter where they live in the world, this site takes as its first assumption that people who live nea one another already have at least one shared interest – their local environment… But this interest is increasingly not catered for – people in cities are talking less and less to one another. In fact most of us barely communicate with our neighbours at all. And the vasy majority of the social spaces that we all used to share have been dismantled or evaporated. So how can we expect communities self-organise? And how are they expected to join together politically? How can they protest about problems where they live?

So this is the cool bit – it works on a really simple principle that scales and adapts really well to changes in posting. And while it’s geographically based, it’s not based on legislative or government boundaries. And a lack of population density doesn’t mean you’ll be sitting in an empty board with no one to talk to, either, because the posts you see reflects your local population density…

Well anyway… I’m not going to go into too much detail at the moment, because it should be pretty self-explanatory and i want to see how people engage with it… Let me know what you think…