i don't believe in a technological generation gap.

The assumption of a generation gap when it comes to using technology bothers me, because it almost always actually comes down to one issue: Is the user willing to play with it?

Every single piece of software I can use in a valuable manner, I have learned to use by playing with it until it did what I wanted it to do.  Playing can involve rules, obviously, and in these cases my rule books are manuals, tutorials, blog posts and conversations with others who are comfortable with the tool in question.  But when it comes to learning how to use tools on a computer, the first step, for me, has always been play.

The only real generation gap that I've seen, is a worry that play is either unproductive, or potentially damaging to the tools.  Because comfort is built over time, people who are older, are often less comfortable with some of these tools.  Hence, fear of play.

But calling this generational bothers me.  There are plenty of people twice my age with a greater willingness to play with computers and softwear than I will ever develop.  Some of them, like me, keep their play mostly relegated to the user interface.  Many of them continue to play with modifications, with source code, with plug-ins and widgets.

It's not based on generation.  It's comfort and willingness to play.  Do these traits cluster a certain way demographically?  Of course.  But the assumption that these tools are for the young is dangerous.

twitter-lepathy.

Twitter, hashtags, and mobile devices more or less equate to telepathy. No, seriously, hear me out on this.

This is something I realized at PodCamp Toronto. Searching tweets by hashtag or by location let me know what people were thinking in the sessions I was in, sessions across the venue, and the thoughts of people who couldn't make it to the site.

Twitter enforces brevity, sure. But it's also just about the right size to encapsulate a single thought. I find I only clash with the limit when I actually have several related thoughts that I want to express.

Most people think telepathy would be a curse. I've always disagreed, assuming that we could develop a half-decent filtering mechanism. Twitter deals with a few of those problems naturally; people don't tweet things they are uncomfortable with sharing, and you are only exposed to that you opt in to / search for. Telepathy via Twitter is easily sorted, and more noise only equates to more potential signal.

Telepathy would me mostly mundane. People's thoughts aren't always useful. But this is how we understand people - through the collection of their inanities. Sound familiar?

The big lesson regarding telepathy that I've gleaned from Twitter is just that - there's no such thing as noise, as long as it's coherent. People aren't being inane. They are giving you context and backstory. You don't learn anything about people from seeing them in their edited, presentable best. You learn about them when they are being stream of consciousness, being unedited.

Being people.

Enjoy your faux-telepathy while it lasts. I know I will.

the big changes.

As far as I’ve seen, the internet makes a few major changes to human culture, and extrapolating from those tells us where the future is going.

Time and space bias are becoming less and less important.  When and where no longer limit information, entertainment, communication or conversation.  Any business model based on exploiting time and space bias, or enforcing time and space bias, is officially on deathwatch.  Business based on making time and space bias entirely irrelevant will probably find an audience, and success.

Potentially everyone can publish.  This doesn’t mean that everyone has an equal voice, but it does mean that people will learn the responsibility of their works.  If your words, your ideas, are put in front of the world, you become responsible for them in a way you can’t be without an audience.  People fear an audience because it forces evolution and improvement.  People cherish an audience for the same reason.

Knowing about something is going to become less and less valuable, as information is rapidly becoming accessible from everyone, from everywhere.  Knowing how to do something is going to remain essential, because skill requires more than information.  Discovering information about something will always remain valuable.

If something exists, there is less and less resistance against it becoming ubiquitous.  This is currently true of information, and will likely be true of physical creations in the coming decades.

These are all fairly obvious at this point; I’m not breaking any new ground by writing this.  But I’m finding it next to impossible to come up with a recent world-changing development that isn’t explained by the logical progression of one of these factors. 

If I’m doing something that doesn’t address or leverage one of these issues, I can usually do it better by asking myself why.

 

how we deal with real change.

I  never shut up about my beloved iPhone, but it's one of the few things I've owned in the last 5 years that has actually changed anything.  Clearly, this is more about the rise of smartphones in general, than a specific gushing about Apple's current gadget du jour.

I recently read Cory Doctorow's 'Little Brother'* on my iPhone, through Stanza.  Last night, I read several comics released in an iPhone application format, from iVerse media.  Both of these experiences got me thinking.

We deal with new technology in one of two ways, generally.  These are both examples of the first way, which is usually the most successful and the majority of uses; taking something we already do well and finding a way to emulate that on the new platform.  Taking content created for one form (print media) and finding a way to make it work reasonably well in another form.

The second way we deal with new technology is to think about the essence of things we currently do (in this case, text narrative, graphic fiction, etc), and then devise a new way to do them based on the abilities and limits of the new technology.  This is substantially more rare, because it's very easy to do poorly, and very difficult to do if new technology isn't standardized.  Also, in comparison, written text has centuries of R&D behind it, any new form is pre-Alpha, by comparison.

That said, the second method, creating a wholly new way to do something important or interesting, is where the massive transformational power is.  It's at least worth spending some time considering this approach whenever you're tasked with reconfiguring content from one medium to another.

*It's good enough that not only will I recommend it (and probably blog about ways in which it inspired me later on), but that I'm planning on giving it to the majority of YA fiction readers in my extended family, who I've always worried weren't geeky enough. 

you can't copy innovation.

I read an article, not too long ago, about the creation of a Chevrolet plug-in hybrid, and how the major goal was to actually create innovation.  I can't remember where I read it, but the major thing I took away (other than the project probably being doomed) was Toyota announcing a similar product later on, with a more restricted schedule and numbers, and a GM exec feeling accomplishment and delight, even awe, in the fact that this fearsome, dominant competitor was being a 'follower'

The BlackBerry Storm, the first touchscreen phone from RIM, is available in the next few days (I believe starting Nov 21st).

Just saying.

different types of instant.

Everything on the internet happens fast.  Blogging is a demonstration of the power of instant publishing, RSS is speedy content distribution, News online makes the idea of a daily update seem quaint, and so on.  But when everything is fast on a technological level, the playing field changes, and speed on a human behaviour, or an interaction level.

The best example I can use is the mixture of Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader.

I inevitably find out about things through Twitter first, mostly because it encourages many small updates, and many visits to find out what people are up to.  As the content isn't identical, I usually have my favourite bloggers on Twitter as well, expanding the data shadow.

I end up clicking the Twitter links for that lead me to blog posts.  That I see later in the day in Google reader.  And that pop up again later on in Facebook, having been shared by other friends who have the same interests.

Repetition is unavoidable in social media, but the difference in speed is what interests me.  Twitter is absurdly fast, faster than email, or SMS, or blogging, faster than nearly any major way I communicate with others.  And it's not a technology issue - it's based entirely on the behaviour the service inspires.

Instant is relative.  Plan accordingly.

lessons in human failings.

The main thing I learned in the last month is that no matter what I am dependent on a mixture of my memory and my hearing.  This is one of the reasons my preference is for email, or another form of written communication.

I am addicted to having a paper trail.

The problem is, that having a paper trail in many cases demands repetition.  And people (myself included) have very little tolerance for repetition, especially in cases where technology is involved.

The solution is fairly simple - I would pay through the nose for a service that delivered automated transcripts of my phone conversations, or even of face to face conversations, to my email inbox.  Being able to point to the exact moment of communication breakdown would be essential, especially since it has become unavoidable that I conduct fairly important conversations over several media.

An increased dependence on technology means an increased demand for accuracy.  unfortunately, the rust between the gears is always human falliability.  Plan accordingly.

ranking my screens.

Many communications and business blogs have talked at length about the importance of the 'Third Screen', the informational / communications / internet device that lives in your pocket.  Inherent in the title they've worked with is the question of ranking.  I'm realizing my third screen is quickly becoming my first screen, because it's where I do the majority of my hybrid (work and personal) communications.  And now it's actually dictating which platforms I use for my communications.

Blogger isn't cutting it.  The lack of actual iPhone compatibility has become a real deal breaker.  I've tried the options available, including emailing posts, but the formatting is broken, or the presentation is messy, or the experience is generally unfulfilling.  My options are basically to either give up using the iPhone to blog, or to change my blogging platform to something that lets me work with my third screen, which is quickly becoming my first screen.

I've been on blogger for far longer than the month and a half I've been an iPhone user.  And despite the long (long) list of complaints people have about blogger, I've generally not considered switching platforms.

But here we are, and now I'm thinking WordPress might be a rational option, considering they at least consider the idea of letting what I consider an important and influential market play too.

digital conscription and the potential for nationalised botnets.

I accidentally listened to CBC radio one this morning, and the topic of discussion was the denial of service attacks that made up a portion of the Russian attacks on Georgia.

This is going to become standard operating procedure in a major conflict, I think.

In terms of basic background, the DDoS attacks started before the physical invasion, and seem to have been conducted not by the Russian Military, but by a criminal syndicate, either for patriotic, or financial reasons.

This is interesting as a means of disrupting communication – you no longer have to just worry about mainstream media outlets, when you are trying to enforce a media blackout, which is why the attacks also attempted to take down the Georgian internet access altogether.  Citizen media has more or less made it essential to take down the internet first.  You can’t silence people as long as the internet exists as an option to them.

What I’m wondering about, is how long it takes before some nations more or less mandate every computer in the country being ‘subscribed’ to a botnet controlled by the government agency responsible for online communications, or the military.

What happens when governments and military leaders realize that conscription is a viable option in building their capacity for cyberwarfare?  Is this option better, or worse than contracting out the dirty work to organized crime?

So, that was my morning.

metrics that matter.

I was thinking about this before I went to sleep last night, and I thought it was important enough to post.

In terms of web traffic, I don’t really care about unique hits. My number one criteria for success is simple: how many people have the site in the bookmarks bar of their browser. How many people love this site enough that it requires one click, no menus, to get there.

Obviously, if the average visitor spends 20 minutes on your site, visiting 10 pages, that’s wonderful. But I’m more interested in how habitual their patronage is. How incorporated into their daily life a site is.

The most important thing for a person, a product, or an outlet to be, is habit-forming. So, unless people are reading your RSS feed, and making visiting your site as simple as possible, I don’t know that they really care about what you do.

I should note that I can guarantee no one has my site in their bookmarks bar. I don’t. But I have notcot.org, and ilovenewwork, and digg. And you can bet those are three of the sites I evangelize most.

democratic panopticon

[This is a work in progress, and it will be either heavily edited (when I am less sleepy), or re-written and re-posted (possibly with better defined arguments). Let's just consider this one workshopping online.]

This post is heavily thematically linked with a previous one, titled Paparazzi Panopticism.

Thing one: Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein includes a character who discusses the idea of cellular phones with cameras as a weapon. Any they are, because it allows anyone to create content, news content, information content, disruptive content. If you want the speech, buy the book. Seriously. It's brilliant.

Thing two: My father, who has, over the years, gone from the kind of guy who buys a 286 and convinces his wife that it's good for the kids (which it shockingly was), to the kind of guy who dislikes that blogging gives anyone a platform to say anything, made a compelling comment over dinner. That a world where people have cell phone cameras is a world where corruption is harder to get away with.

These things got me thinking. The effect of everyone being about to record anything isn't the us vs them issue that so many people think it is. The Panoptic reality this creates isn't binary, there is a more complex dynamic than authority vs people. What we're left with instead is a democratised panopticon, where interpretation and evidence can come from all sides, and from all agendas.

The intriguing part of this, for me, is the subversion of the original theory. Panoptic realities are about people policing themselves in fear of an authority who may or may not be watching at any given time. But the current situation isn't just about authority. Now there is reasonable need to fear that any action that would offend a reasonably sized community will be shown, and you will be penalized socially for it, by that group, and groups affiliated.

To put it simply, this isn't just about being caught standing against the whims of authority, now. It's about the possibility of being caught, at any time, for any act deemed against society, or even peace in society. This is more involved than fighting authority, for one simple reason - a democratised panopticon is inescapable.

In terms of fighting authority, it's marvelous that someone can't be tasered needlessly without it being caught on film. Authorities should be held responsible for their actions, because they have power. The same can be said for celebrities, which justifies, to an extent, the concept of the paparazzi panopticon. But a democratic panopticon seems to bring with it a need to better define the limitations of acceptable behaviour, of what acts, statements or opinions are anti-social in a strong enough sense to require response.

Or will the standard reply be something to the tune of 'live like no one's watching'?

kindle-ing.

I've been reading a lot about Kindle, Amazon's exciting new e-reader type device, and the same thing comes to mind every time a new e-book type device hits the market. Who cares?

I've read several books in electronic format. On a PDA, or on my laptop or (on one occasion) on the screen of an ipod nano, broken into chapters. The major reason any of these things happened? They only required a device I already owned, that did something else useful.

Am I going to pay 400 bucks to read blogs (only some blogs) in black and white on something that looks more or less like a speak and spell spray-painted white? Not when, for the same price, I can get something (still unforgivably restricted but) able to do substantially more (ipod touch anyone?)

I get that the idea of an e-reader is attractive. I understand the appeal. But if something is supposed to supplant the physical book, it should probably be a cross-over device. If carrying the book is too much hassle for someone, carrying a heavier electronic version is probably unlikely. [EDIT: I was wrong, it's actually pretty light]

The display technology has a lot of applications, but not in multi-media. It's more or less only functional for print.

No one wants to carry a device that can only deal with print, when you consider the other options available.

music is already free

Dear Music Industry,

There's something you need to understand, and you don't seem to be getting it. Someone has to tell you, and they have to say it in no uncertain terms.

Stop arguing that music cannot be free. Stop it. It doesn't matter what your justification is, whether it's that the Radiohead model (as it is apparently now known) devalues music for other, less wealthy bands, or whether it's just plain thievery, and nothing else should matter, it's irrelevant.

I'll say it slowly, because I'm obviously not talking to the smart kids: MUSIC. IS. ALREADY. FREE.

We can't go back in time. Bandwidth and Compression made Apple a force in it's industry again. These technological changes made file sharing reasonable. And it made free plausible, not as a business model, but as a reality that cannot be ignored.

It doesn't matter if you can't work your old business model in a world where music is free. It doesn't matter if you feel it devalues your work. It doesn't matter if you think this paradigm only rewards the ultra rich, or those with a dedicated fan base who will spend money without needing to, or whether it just plain bothers you.

Music is already free. The genie is not going back in the bottle, because the holy triumvirate of bittorrent, bandwidth, and compression all have legitimate uses. And not in the NRA style 'guns are for protection, too' legitimate use, but there are entire business models that are only viable due to these innovations.

Music is free. You can't change that, you have to work with it. Radiohead decided that might be an idea - ACCEPTING REALITY - and hoping that, considering it would leak anyway, a portion of fans would be willing to give them a couple of bucks for something that, within minutes of release, WAS FREE ANYWAY.

I'm sorry that a lot of people, Music Industry, are caught in a transitional period where old ways are failing and new ways are undefined. I'm sorry that old revenue streams are falling by the wayside. I'm sorry that so many of you equate changing sources of money with doom.

But it doesn't matter if I'm sorry.

Because music is already free, and you can't change that will anything, even an endless parade of frivolous lawsuits.

With more than a modicum of disappointment,

The Broken Gentleman

ipod touch.

Oh god I played with an iPod touch for 10 mins at the Eaton Centre yesterday.

I know it's first gen, I know it's overpriced, I know no sane person browses the internet on a 3 inch screen.

I Want One. Desperately.

(For extra geek points, first think I did with it? Surfed to BrokenGent and saw how it was navigated via multi-touch.)

Apple has developed a severely customer unfriendly business model in it's non-pc business, and yet they continue to grow based on an unmatched ability to create pure consumer lust.

I am Steve Jobs' bitch, and I have a problem.

i know, i know...

I am a terrible blogger. I've been working on a post on Helio's latest campaign for about 3 weeks, but I just haven't had the time what with renovations at home, and work, and upcoming crazy media event season type stuff.

But I have to make a simple comment on the new iPod touch - they are going to make a pile of money.

Things that sucked about the iPhone: U.S. only, AT&T only, no 3G, apparently unimpressive phone features.

Things that are still an issue on the iPod touch: no 3G, but it's a wi-fi iPod, not a goddamn phone, quit bitching.

Does it replace an iPod classic? Not in the least. First off, I can't imagine it'll be easy to use blind, and second, anyone with a 16 GB music / movie collection is not taking advantage of their hard drive space effectively. This is an additive product, and it speaks directly to the reptile brain of everyone who 1) really, really wanted an iPhone and 2) didn't care so much about the phone part.

I have a feeling this is a sector even larger than the people who were counting on Stevie J to save them from the tyrrany of Nokia, or whatever.

Time to start saving. Time to figure out what 16 GB of content is most essential for me to have at all times.

Time to swear to never, ever buy music at a Starbucks, just because it's the album or single of the month.

yeah, the respected ones never lie.

I'm not going to read Keen's Cult of the Amateur. There are a lot of potential excuses I could use here, but the pertinent ones are that a) the basic premise is so wrong I can rarely make it through skimming an article covering the book, and b) I'm to busy to waste that time.

This comes up because two rather new pairs of jeans have been stained. not just like, regular use dirt stained, but (through different circumstances) the kind of stains that require effort. After struggling to get grease out (and potentially trashing the pants), I googled it. The experience was worth noting, because my normal pattern for searching for how-to's relates mostly to techy stuff. The most recent example of this was the attempt to get non-DRM ringtones to play on my Nokia 6300; it didn't go well.

Searching for stain removal tips was painless. I typed in grease stain, and clicked on the least spammy looking result. Quick, painless. The interface of the page was hideous, it wasn't supremely functional, but I got the advice I wanted. all sounds good to me.

I thought later, in the shower, how one of Keen's points (as far as I understand) is that the internet and it's ability to give equal access and weight to amateurs will result in a technocracy, where only the internet savvy will be able to find access to the good content. Well, looking for technology related stuff, people who are somewhere in-between in terms of tech savvy (I'm theory, not practice), need to parse dialogue they may not natively understand, and usually accept the need to dig through a lot of 'I know guy, MSFT suxx0rs' when trying to find drivers for an old scanner.

The internet is filled with information put forth by amateurs, and, unshockingly, the most accessible information in terms of content is usually the most accessible information in terms of accessibility.

The assumption that one needs to be tech savvy to get useful content via an internet connection has to come from someone who is either somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of the internet (such as my mother) or someone who forgets that anything needs a skill set to use it -- reading everything in the NYT as though it was gospel is just as stupid as reading everything online without suspicion -- and the assumption that less modern media are somehow easier to use forgets that the technology in play was not always invisible.

The cult of the amateur is another little thing in this society; at time we refer to it as democracy. Everyone gets an opinion, everyone has a RIGHT to that opinion, and each individual needs to decide for themselves. We go with the will of the crowd from time to time. What's enshrining old media as the high point in cultural representation is the exact thing that's presenting the internet as a better way.

If you're afraid that too many individual voices will drown out the 'respectable' ones, than the question is more about the power and validity of that assumed credible source, rather than an invading, more popular option.

i've been busy.

I attempted to explain the simplest truth of modern technology to my father recently. Here goes,

The easiest way to change the world is to take something people like to do, and remove either the time-, or space-bias from that activity.

In other words, take something static in time or location, and make it movable in one or more ways.

This isn't necessarily huge innovation, but it accounts for most of the new technology that people obsess over.