June 2006 Archives
Mog is a web-based social app for sharing musical tastes. Think Last.FM, MySpace, community blog, blah blah blah. Honestly, I don't like it at all. Why? Stupid name, Bad user interface, lackluster and unintuitive profiling, and really, not a robust or substantial enough concept.
After registering, the first thing a new user sees is a god-aweful group of blocks. Like the old New York Times, but poorly designed, with no reason behind the placement I could see. A good many of the blocks seemed like filler, and the entire concept hedges on the downloaded player. The attempt at transparent interfaces (hollar at you AJAX) is crap, not at all what it could be.
Registering was as far as I got. Is as far as I will ever go. The greatest thing about Mog, for my intents and purposes, is that the whole mess provides a bad example... A positive negative. WRNYC will not be like this. I promise.
John Battelle's article that spits on ex cable-player Leo Hindrey's statement has been making much deserved rounds today. Hindrey's drivel is full of holes that Battelle had no choice but to attack.
But, in all seriousness, content is only useful if it is both interesting and accessible. This is where the internet companies [yahoo, google...] come into play. More, Battelle brings up the issues of participatory media, community, and search.
It's only natural that a man who made it in cable throws the cable-tv paradigm on the web. Sorry, buddy - square peg, octogonal hole.
I was pleasantly surprised to find a decent article on Net-Neutrality in todays Washington Post. The article looks at both sides of the issue, recognizing and calling out the doublespeak and rhetoric. Key points:
°The government is involved either way
°Consumers will end up paying no matter what
°Internet sites already pay for their traffic
°Both sides talk a lot of garbage
Sometimes it's good to be inconclusive in an article.
An article in todays New York Times reports on more of the AT&T nonsense—touching on the data-mining, and going into the NSA gateway center. A room is purported to exist inside of AT&T in which intelligence agents have access to all data flowing through their networks. This brings forth ghosts of Big Brother and other such terrifying metaphors in the apoca-futurist sense. Of course, these operations merely 'bore the markings of' NSA. Really, I'd rather it be the government than the private sector.
The New York Times published another painful article today, titled Waiting for the Dough on the Web. Richard Siklos meanders along a path of media profit gleaning in the internet. One paragraph really struck my eye:
The less-cheerful view of the traditional media companies is that all their online efforts will not translate directly into more revenue or fatter profits. Thanks to aggregators, file sharers, pirates and other disruptors, more value will leak away or be stolen than will be gained by these companies.
Siklos portrays the internet as a marketing tool, a big billboard park. Disgusting.
A new technique for luring people to maliscious sites has been going around—via SMS. Cnet reports that the scam is reasonably sophisticated: robots send out an SMS (using the email/SMS gateway) to the effect of "you will be charged $2/message through your phone bill unless you go to this website and cancel the service."
Well, it was only a matter of time before things like this started popping up. I fear for the Email/SMS gateway, on which many innovative developers are forced to rely. Yes, this method of reaching users is a hack, but one developers are forced to use, as there are no reasonable alternatives—short codes are extremely difficult to obtain, and incredibly expensive, especially for start-ups without exhorbitant financial backing.
Hopefully this won't piss off the carriers enough to lock down the gateways. Hopefully the repurcussions won't inadvertantly filter out all the interesting SMS- and MMS-based applications out there—Gumspots, Radar... But really, I've developed a pretty strong cynicism with all things related to the mobile telcos.
SmartMobs had it first.
Google Blogoscoped blogged a list of 9 ways to misunderstand web standards, throwing light on some good points. Some of the issues are pretty basic, obvious, but the use of !important is news to me. Might solve a few common browser rendering problems that seem to befall so many sites.
Rocketboom posted a great segment on Net-Neutrality yesterday. Honestly, I've never liked RB, but the aformentioned piece was evocative, informative, and much needed. The telcos' arguments against net-neutrality are emtpy and misleading, targeted at an uninformed public. They want to eat the sandwich from both ends—getting money from consumers and content providers. The internet is a great thing because it provides a means for any Tom, Dick, and Harry to publish what they want. When access to the delivery of content is regulated by controlling entities concerned only with profit margins... well, something huge is lost.
Check out Google's stand
Ran across this cartoon promoting the defeat of Net-Neutrality. What a load of tripe.
Thanks to Tomas C. Greene's article as published in theRegister.co.uk for the ref. and some brilliant wit.
To extend the previous post on AT&T's new policy on data ownership... I feel as though events and conventions such as these are increasingly archaic - rooted in the paper-based paradigm of yesterday. This [policies such as these] are what should be instantly noticed as 'not good at all' and rejected by an increasingly informed and empowered public. Parallels can be drawn in the [quickly changing] media publishing world—as giants controlling artists—content creators—output. Strict seperation is necessary between the pipelines and what flows through them. Obviously, the pipeline daemons [read: carriers] are a: scared of being sued, b: want more control and power [as gained from a certain ammount of ownership in what goes on in 'their system']. If anything, government access should not be something the carriers and gatekeepers should be able to give—but something inherent, transparent, and dumb.
AT&T's new privacy policy is pretty frightening, stating that AT&T owns their customers' data. This change is, of course directly influenced by the recent events involving the Government. I really hope customers read this issuance carefully and make an informed decision on whether to remain a customer. I know that there's no way in Hell I'll be switching over to AT&T.
Read about GSM Location on 7.5th Floor, one of my 'dailies'. The project looks interesting, as a new viral location-aware tech. One of these days I'll build that Python app...
I've recently been developing in JSP/EJB/Java with AJAX (all pulling from MySQL), and have to say, I really like it. Tough to get a handle on at first, the framework has proved to be super powerful. I find the JSP scripting is complimented nicely by Java. Will definately get more projects going with this toolset in the future.
Wish there was something close to this at the UMD HCIL Conference...
Lots of cool stuff in the mix over at GumSpots.com. Check it out - the PicPass and 2cents services are super cool, and GSPS (GumSpots positioning system) is well on its way. Big ups to Kaufman for presenting at the Where Conference next week.
Net neutrality—the bill... Very unfortunate. If you don't know what I'm talking about, do a little research.
Last Thursday, June 1, I attended the UMD Human Computer Interaction Labs Annual Symposium. Students presented a number of really interesting projects on subjects ranging from data-vis to network analysis to interface design. The day was divided into Visual Interfaces, Public Access, and Interaction & Devices.
The presentations opened with a talk by Ben Schneiderman on creativity. I thought the address was pretty dull and academic, though some interesting areas were touched upon. I've always found any kind of studied tool to enhance creativity to be... well... bullshit. But what's an opinion worth...
Another dissapointing talk came soon after, on the topic of search catagorization. I found this obtuse and outmoded, completely uninformed by all the recent positive developments in internet tech and culture. Kules and Schneiderman argued for 'meaningful and stable categories' — which is a hugely silly notion. There was no question of the authority imposing said categories, and how said categories can evolve, morph, change with the context.
James Rose, Catherine Plaisant, Matt Kirschenbaum, and others presented a body of work on data mining and visual interfaces that I found intelligent and enjoyable. The students took the body of Emily Dickenson's letters and studied the erotic content utilizing bayesian filtering. I was dissapointed at the weak metric used for classification—basically the hot-or-not interface—I found it weak. Would have been interesting to see some biometrics at work, or something with more sophistication.
Adam Perer presented a visually intense network-vis project. The rank-by-feature framework seemed a little goofy, and had quite a number of visible holes, but the filtering and aggregation made up a bulk of the slack.
NetLens really stood out in my eyes, an 'Iterative Exploration of Content-Actor Network Data.' This presented the first really great interface of the day (aside from the previous presentation—Balancing Systematic and Flexible Exploration of Social Networks). The presentation was not overly crowded, and the interaction was rich. Really, the amount of possibilities this interface provided was stunning. Definately worth checking out.
