Ten Reasons Why

Evan Kirchhoff responds to the Chronicle article, “Can Grand Theft Auto Inspire Professors?”
For all you ed bloggers out there, I highly recommend Ev’s blog, 101-280. He’s not always writing about education, but he’s a remarkably clear-headed thinker. Plus, I once had dinner with him at a Ukranian diner.* I don’t know why that’s relevant. I just like people to know I frequent Ukranian diners.
Interestingly, Evan was also someone I met on the listserv mentioned in the last post. It must be Future Culture week here on 10RW.
*For the record, it was in Manhattan, not Ukraine.

Education

Leslie Orchard, in a comment on the previous post, reminded me of the Future Culture mailing list, on which I used to be a very frequent participant, starting from around 1993. FC, as we abbreviated it, was a pretty critical component of my technology education, particularly in thinking of the sociological impacts of technology, but also in just introducing me to new technologies (Linux? What’s that?!?).
For a creative nonfiction workshop I took in 1995, I wrote a long piece that was rooted in my early experiences on the Future Culture listserv, particularly about my first meeting with an online acquaintance and the first death of someone I only knew online.
As you read it, remember the time it was written. This was before Netscape, Amazon, before eBay, before broadband. The Internet was email, IRC, Gopher, and Archie. The web was all text and we used Lynx to browse it.
My how things have changed. . . . and stayed the same.
Here it is: The Word and the Body.

Personal

I’m in the process of weeding out the detritus of my life, which includes digging through various files (Do I really need this 1996 phone bill from four phone numbers ago? What if the FBI decides I’m really an international terrorist, and I need to prove that I was living in a group house in Adams Morgan back then?!?), opening boxes that I packed four years ago (There’s the damn printer cable!), and deciding what to do with pictures of ex-girlfriends (no comment).
One of the more enjoyable parts of this has been scouring a bunch of ancient 3.5″ floppies discovered in a box and finding digital copies (in WordPerfect 5.1 for Unix format, no less!) of most of my creative and professional writing from the early- to mid-nineties.
Just to demonstrate I’ve been thinking about this computer stuff for quite some time now, I’ll share this one gem from my archeological dig: an essay I wrote back in 1994 on the impact of computers on writing and literacy titled “Hyperliteracy: Envisioning a Literacy for the Information Age.” Here’s a blurb:

Computer technologies provide a means to circumvent the linear limitations of the print medium when writing, but, for the most part, they have not been used in this fashion–either by writers or by teachers. On the contrary, most computer-based writing environments attempt to extend the conventions of the print medium into the electronic medium, imposing print standards on a non-print form.

I wish I could say that this is a brilliant piece of critical work in computers and composition, but it’s pretty much just a grad student essay (toward a second Master’s degree that I never finished), complete with the requisite Derrida reference.
Though it’s somewhat naive and over-researched, it’s not without merit (and was required reading in at least one graduate course). From a historical vantage, it’s interesting that the assumptions of that particular point in computers and writing research (which perhaps are not clear from the essay alone) were pretty far off. E.g. much of the buzz ten to fifteen years ago was about the heuristic possibilities of computers as writing tools, most of which never panned out. I remember using tools like Norton Connect (which appears to be defunct) and the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment (which is apparently still alive and released a new version a few months ago!) in my writing classrooms.
Instead, I believe today that computer technology is starting to, and likely will, revolutionize writing through erasure of the costs of reproduction and distribution, not through software that teaches us to be better writers. Provide a better medium for writing (i.e. cheaper, faster, wider in audience), and we’ll find ways to be better writers.
Besides, it’s kind of fun to look back and remember the excitement with which I was approaching the much more nascent field back then.
Read the whole thing: Hyperliteracy: Envisioning a Literacy for the Information Age

Books, Writing & Literature

I notice that whenever my aggregator (still SharpReader) grabs feeds from some blogs, the Date for each entry is represented as the time the feed was downloaded, while on other feeds the Date for each entry is represented as the time the entry was originally published (or perhaps last modified?….nope, checked my own feed, which falls into the latter category, and it’s definitely time of publication).
What’s causing this? It appears that almost all of the “Date = time the feed was grabbed” offenders (and it is offensive) are weblogs powered by Userland software, so I’m guessing this has something to do with RSS 2.0 (which is prefered by Userland) vs. RSS 1.0 (which is the default on Six Apart’s software, Movable Type and TypePad)? Or maybe it’s a finicky feature of SharpReader? Someone enlighten me.
Whatever the reason, the question remains: why in the world would I want the entry’s time/date stamp to be the time of download? How useless!

Syndication & Aggregation

Inspired by the thunderstorm that drowned my afternoon outdoors plans, I geeked out indoors and switched over to Mozilla Thunderbird, the open source, stand-alone email client from the Mozilla Foundation. Though it’s only a 0.1 release, it’s a fully featured mail client as it is based on the core technology of the mail component of the Mozilla 1.x Browser Suite.
I jettisoned Internet Explorer last fall and switched over to Mozilla 1.2.1 for web browsing and email (at home — Outlook is required at work). Mozilla was designed as the replacement for the Netscape 4.x generation, and, as such, it had some requirements to match features in that clunky old browser. Mozilla 1.x was overkill, as Netscape products are.
Earlier this year, though, the Mozilla Foundation released Mozilla Firebird, the first post-Netscape browser from Mozilla. It is sweet! Amazingly better than IE.
I’ve been using Firebird exclusively, at work and home, for about six to eight weeks now, and haven’t had a single problem with it. The availability of extensions means that there’s no end to the customizability of this browser.
Today, I finally got around to it’s sister application, the Thunderbird mail client. I hung onto the Mozilla suite’s mail client at home because when I had previously tried to migrate my mail profiles (by hand — it’s a 0.1 release, so there’s no automated migration), I couldn’t get it to work. Today I came across some more recent directions for migrating mail folders apart from the profile that worked smashingly. I’ll have to re-train its Bayesian junk mail folders, but since I switched ISPs a few months back, my new address isn’t on as many spam target lists so that’s not a big problem.
By the way, I also highly recommend Sebastian Delahaye’s Firebird and Thunderbird installers. Since these aren’t 1.x releases, the downloads from Mozilla.org are notfull installation packages. Makes upgrading hard. [Update 10:09pm -- forgot the "not" italicized a sentence or two back. That statement was inaccurate without the negator. In the words of the prophet: D'oh!. Though the installers take care of install and upgrade issues, I should probably also mention they are 'unofficial,' FWIW.]
So now, at home, I’m using an open source browser (Mozilla Firebird), an open source email client (Mozilla Thunderbird), an open source office suite (OpenOffice), and an open source graphics program (Gimp) . . . which accounts for the majority of the time I spend on my computer at home.
The only thing keeping me from totalling geeking out and switching to GNU/Linux as my operating system is Madden NFL 2003!
[By the way, I'm on vacation until after Labor Day, so postings will be slim to non-existent.]

Technology & Internet

Evan’s analysis of file-sharing legalities starts out with consideration of whether Canadian copyright law makes file-sharing through peer-to-peer networks legal, but Evan goes on to provide an excellent (as usual) analysis of alternative financial models for the recording industry. Good reading.

Intellectual Property

Pito’s Weblog [link via Scripting News]:

I don’t think that whether Necho, RSS 2.0 or what-not is easy to use for the end user matters a wit. If we do our jobs right they will never ever see or talk about any of those.

Pito goes on to describe several phases of technological development: evangelical, tipping point, and standardization. Good analysis.

Syndication & Aggregation

Dave Winer on types of aggregators:

There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you’re done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio’s aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something.

Dave’s right about the broad schools of thought, but wrong about the value of what he calls the “weblog-style” aggregators.
The best aggregators allow the user the flexibility to read a feed individually, as part of a group of feeds (defined by the user), or the entire collection of feeds. Not to mention filtering, searching, etc. For many (and probably overwhelmingly most) people, “weblog-style” isn’t very efficient for filtering through or scanning thousands of posts from hundreds of subscriptions. There’s a reason most aggregators use an email-like approach: it’s an interface that has proven effective at managing large amounts of information for billions of users.
There were many reasons I abandoned Radio, not the least of them being the utter un-usability of its aggregator component for managing information. Locking the user into that one mode of information presentation is one reason (among several) that Radio Userland is not one of the best aggregators.

Syndication & Aggregation

Jim Howard (in Chris Pirillo’s excellent Lockergnome’s RSS Resource) writes about the obstacles posed to the mainstream by RSS:

We toss about terms like XML, RSS, Aggregator, Blog, and MovableType with ease, because they are the tools of our trade. We embrace them, we understand them. But for the AOL minded masses, these terms are too vague, too complicated, too boring. For these people, instant messages and email are their primary tools. Google is useful to them, because it’s simple. Email is useful for them because it allows them to forward amusing things to their friends and family, and because it is nearly omnipresent. Everyone has an email address.

Jim is absolutely right. I’ve written about this several times in recent weeks [chronologically: 1, 2, 3, 4]
The vendors of blogs and aggregators are caught up in personality wars over syndication and aggregation specs and technology, and no one is focusing on making the interfaces for syndication and aggregation appealing to the mainstream.
The somewhat arbitrary threshold I hold in the back of my mind for when I’ll know the vendors are concerned about mainstream acceptance of syndication/aggregation is when the orange XML box ceases to be the primary interface to syndication feeds. It would be difficult to think of a symbol that is more meaningless and off-putting to the non-technical user than a blaze orange acronym for a mark-up language. :-/

Syndication & Aggregation

Someone emailed to ask if DC was affected by the blackouts. We were spared, of course.
In fact, as I sat at home yesterday evening, after riding the Metro home, reclining on my couch drinking a cold beer from an icy mug, air conditioner going full-blast against the 95-degree, 80% humidity sauna outside, watching those poor NYers schlep home across the Queensborough bridge on my 35″ TV, with my laptop plugged in and resting on my belly, fat from just having microwaved leftovers for dinner, I thought “Holy crap, I’d bloody well kill myself if the power went out right now.”
Then I turned on all the lights in the apartment and danced with the running vacuum cleaner to revel in my freely-flowing electrical power. Thank you, Edison, my hero!!
Clearly, I live alone.

Personal