I recommend the same essays about the web over and over again. Essays like 1000 True Fans or The Next Economy of Ideas are both informative and inspiring, and convey fundamental ideas about how the web works.
When I say “how the web works”, I’m not talking about DNS or HTTP. I’m referring to the profound impact that the web is having on community, commerce, communications and so many other parts of our lives. It’s these big ideas that are difficult to absorb, and I find the essays help.
James does the same thing, and he came up with the idea of curating a book (maybe it’s electronic, maybe hard copy, maybe both) that showcases a bunch of the best essays. In short, a toolkit for getting the web.
We were at a business retreat up in Tofino this weekend, and we hashed out the idea a little. Following the best advice of Ze Frank (rude words ahead), we started implementing the idea on the spot. Hence, GettheWeb.org. For now it’s just a Google Sites page with a Google Docs form and a YouTube video (owned by Google) explaining the project.
At this stage, we’re just looking for recommendations for “great essays about how the web works–socially, behaviorally, philosophically”. Plus we made a 78-second video discussing the project (thanks to Jay from Giant Ant for being our two-elbow duopod):
Have you got an essay about the web that you love? Submit it.
James was recently in Manitoba, and he tried to access this site. I presume there isn’t some anti-west coast censor in Winnipeg, so I guess my site was down or otherwise unreachable. Instead of an “Address Not Found” message or status notice from my web host, he saw this page from Manitoba Telecom Services (click for embiggenness):
First off, what kind of index or algorithm are they using to generate those categories? They’re very peculiar, and, at least in this particular case, useless to the user.
Is this sort of thing a good idea? From a user experience perspective, my answer is ‘maybe’. If MTS presented the user with, say, a set of search results for “www.darrenbarefoot.com” and pointed them to the cached version of the site, then that’s plausibly useful.
From a privacy perspective, this is not cool. I don’t want my ISP highjacking my web connection, even to be helpful. They’re a utility, and should act like one. I don’t want the City of Victoria offering me flavoured water from my taps, and I don’t want my ISP volunteering to help with my web browsing.
I was doing some rewrites on the video chapter in our book, and discovered that this unremarkable clip was the first ever video posted to YouTube. It features YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim making a bad joke:
It’s interesting how much this video predicts the vast majority of YouTube videos: a young person speaking in direct address to the camera. He’s not in his bedroom, but otherwise it’s utterly typical.
I tried to write this post a couple of times, but faltered. So, I figured I’d try to articulate myself using video. The result, I’m afraid, is really no better. Remember–that’s four minutes of your life you can’t have back.
Building on what I ramble about in the video, consider the example of somebody receiving 1000 tweets a day. Let’s imagine that they actually read 200 of those. The other 800 just float by in the endless Twitter river while they’re working, interacting with other humans and so forth.
If each person in their Twitter network posts 10 times per day, then, on average, 2 out of 10 of each person’s tweets get seen.
Now imagine that the size of the average network doubles, to 200. That means 2000 tweets a day. The user still only sees an average of 200, so only 1 out of 10 tweets get seen.
Everything increases but our attention bandwidth. Is there some kind of threshold where the river o’ Twitter becomes too diluted? If the average follower count continues to go up, will we someday rely almost exclusively on DMs and @ messages? Or, as I speculate about in the video, will we just get better at filtering and personalization?
Over at Capulet, we do a fair bit of business writing. It’s mostly for our technology clients, and usually white papers, web content and so forth. We regularly do case studies, which are short documents describing how our client’s customers happily used their products or services.
This involves interviewing our client’s customers, which is harder than it sounds. The customers are busy, and random interviews with service providers are often a low priority.
I was trying to think of a way to make the process simpler, and wondered if there would be a market for a site that facilitated interviews:
It might offer similar functionality to When Is Good, enabling the interviewer and interviewees to agree to a time.
There would be some kind of form-creation service, so that interviewers could create interview templates for interviewees to complete.
Interviewees could type in their answers, record an audio answer using their computer’s microphone, or maybe call a number where they’re asked each question by a creepy computer voice and their answers are recorded.
Maybe there’s a kind of sign-off or approval process which enables interviewees to review the final interview text.
Even as I write this it seems like nail in search of a hammer, but I’m curious what you think. Is this a stupid idea, or just marginally idiotic?
I followed a link from Beth’s blog to The Stranger’s site (somewhat unsafe for work), where Dan Savage is soliciting new definitions for the term ’saddleback’. I scrolled down to the comments section, and spotted this:
There’s an old, silly online tradition of posting ‘First!’ (or some variation) to popular forums or blogs. This is a particularly poor execution of that practice.
I wonder where this ‘first’ business started. Slashdot, maybe?
The thing about Mark’s death: I did not know him, but I do know everything that was “last” in his too short life. I know the last song he listened to was Instant Death by the Beastie Boys. I know that Last.fm last saw him Monday evening. He has a cat, whom I hope is taken care of. Five days ago he posted a picture of a Cisco Aironet he got from Ebay. He has nephews.
This sad news reminded me of a resource that, as far as I know, the web is missing. What happens when a social media creator dies? What do his or her less web-savvy friends and family do about the online portion of the deceased’s life? There are two kinds of questions that need answering:
What do we do with all of the social media assets–blogs, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Facebook pages, and so forth–that are left behind? Do we keep them online, archive them offline or just delete everything?
Once we’ve figured that out, how do we make that plan happen? What are the postmortem policies of sites like Facebook or MySpace? How do we realize our plans for these assets? Who do we contact?
Someone ought to build a site (or even just host a wiki) that helps people answer these questions. It would be a guide to thinking about posthumous social media stuff, and a centralized catalog for the relevant policies of social media sites. Does such a website exist already?
Curating Digital Resources of the Deceased
It doesn’t need one, but there’s probably a business model for such a site. It would involving consulting for grieving families as a kind of digital mortician. I first wrote about that idea back in 2003, but the ubiquity of social media makes it a lot more urgent and widespread today.
I know that there are a bunch of memorializing sites out there (here’s an Irish one I recently heard about), but I don’t know how well they handle distributed blogs, videos, photos and so forth. I imagine that they’re mostly built after the fact. Likewise, I know certain sites enable a kind of permanent remembrance setting for accounts. Facebook faced some controversy about this before implementing this approach.
On a related note, bloggers, podcasters and other social media creators should include digital assets in their wills.
On Mark’s site, a friend has posted this message:
With Marks passing away, the future of this site has become uncertain. While we are sure the site will remain online for a considerable time to come, we are looking for a proper way to honour Mark and his assembled works.
I’d like to end this sombre post on an upbeat note, so here’s a charming song about the potential longevity of your MySpace account:
Click on the top results and you’ll find that every one has a pop-up window, plus lots of other advertising jive. Of course, you can block those in your browser; but still, pop-up windows suck. They break the Web’s social contract, which says (among other things) that the publisher should not abuse the reader’s intentions. Nobody goes to a page saying “I want a pop-up window”.
These lyrics pages exist for a good (though bad) reason: most artists don’t publish their own lyrics. People want to see lyrics, however, so the advertising baiters publish the lyrics anyway. Copyright be damned.
Indeed, every third-party lyrics site is a nightmare of pop-ups and blaring banner ads. Doc doesn’t mention the other downside of all these lyric sites–incorrect lyrics and misspellings. I see them all the time. It’s conceivable that, because these sites copy each other, an incorrect lyric could eventually become the canonized version.
Interestingly, Bob Dylan has followed Doc’s advice, and his site owns the top spot for Dylan lyric searches both common and obscure.
What do I miss most from Vancouver? One thing is the super high-speed, reliable web access.
Here in Morocco, the Internet access has been dependable, but desperately slow. I’m surfing like it’s 1997 over here.
Three times over the past week, I’ve been unable to access sections of the web. This morning, for example, I could get to Shaw.ca and UVic.ca, but not to my own site or Jen’s. When I did a search on Flickr, only about half the photos loaded. I assume this is because their data centers are spread across the country (or world).
I’ve seen this before, but it was extremely rare in Canada. I assume it has to do with some temporary router (or whatever) failure in the network.
If you’ve been alive and on the web over the last year, you’ve probably discovered the joy and weirdness of LOLCats (Anil had a good explanatory roundup a while back).
That, of course, is a reference to a cousin of LOL Cats–thebucket-obsessedwalrus. This is all profoundly weird.
Speaking of new blog discoveries, I found an awesome new one courtesy of Metafilter. It’s entitled Stuff White People Like, and features short, anthropological studies of, well, things that Caucasians dig. You know, like bicycles, recycling and co-ed sports.
