Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Scribd: docs on the web

YouTube for documents: that's how Scribd is being described.  The interface and user experience is certainly there, with items being displayed in a window occupying much of the left side of a browser window, web 2.0 functions layered around it (comments, Digg etc), and the ability to embed a streamed copy elsewhere, like so:

One angle I'm seeing is the emergence of a competitive field for web-based presentation tools.  I've been using Slideshare for a year, which is similar to Scribd, although focused on one single file format.  I've also used Thumbstacks, which is a fun, elegant tool for creating presentations, but doesn't import ppts (yet?).  So there are now three projects competing.

(via TechCrunch)

Lovely books from Daniel Essig

Today's book fetish is the work of Daniel Essig.  This is incredible work, including wooden bindings based on medieval Ethiopian design and books as sculptures.  Gorgeous, lovely craftwork:

The end of copyright: Bruce Lehman

Bruce Lehman, the man who led the development of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA, 1998) has now decided that that policy hasn't worked out well (link to another Bryan blog). But I wanted to quote this one other,  breathtaking observation, which speaks to the history of information:

"The cat's out of the bag... Our attempts at copyright control have not been successful... We are now in, if not entering, the post-copyright era... ."

Many of us have been making that argument for years, and it's still a controversial idea.  But it's amazing to her Bruce Lehman say that.

Lehman also thinks we're going back to patronage.  Meh, I'm not sure I see that as the dominant mode.  It is happening in some ways.

(via BoingBoing)

Stomping through Georgia

I'm in Savannah, Georgia for the next few days, to attend and address the delightfully-acronymed SIGUCCS conference.  In a few hours I'll be ranting about Web 2.0, trying to mix up description and provocation.

Travel notes:

• My two flights were nearly on time.  As in, not cancelled, not spending hours on tarmac, neither gushing fuel not deplaning.  No airport lost my luggage.  No agent misdirected me, refused to inform me, abused me, or caused me to miss a flight.  I wasn't sent to a motel to wait for tomorrow's flight.  I didn't have to fight my way through a crazed phone tree and surrealist voice recognition system on another lame airplane phone line. 

It says something about airlines in the US when having this sort of experience, of basic competence, is noteworthy.  Breathtakingly weird, in fact.

• At this hotel I witness another confirmation of Bryan's Iron Law of Hotel Internet Connectivity.  It's a fine place, so naturally... internet is only available for a fee, and isn't very fast.

Newspapers and the internet, the crisis continues

Some technology bloggers think the San Francisco Chronicle is in trouble, and reflect on newspaper in general.  Tim O'Reilly started the ball rolling.  Dave Winer thinks problems are connected to how journalism produces reporters, and how it responds to web 2.0. Doc Searls takes a different tack.

What's interesting about this discussion is how it repeats the past decade of history, then adds a current layer.  We've been seeing many of these arguments for years, now - registration is a pain, journalists aren't trained for the new world (like grad students becoming profs), etc.  The live web, citizen journalism, now that's more recent.

Every week we listen to a local public radio show on news media, called The Media Project.  I wonder if they'll catch this debate.

COPA smacked down, one step back from evil internet panic

A law stemming from fears of cyberculture, bred out of a mix of bad journalism and poor policy, was smacked down in federal court.  Concerning the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a judge ruled that the law violated First Amendment Constitutional guarantees of free speech.

In the ruling, the judge said parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the rights of others to free speech. "Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if (free speech) protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection," wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr., who presided over a four-week trial last fall.

Excellent news.

(thanks to Ladi for reminding me)

Casual games Kongregate

Has anyone poked around in Kongregate?  It's a casual games hub.  Users can find games, upload games they've made, compare notes, and win points for things.

(via TechCrunch)

NPR on the side of internet radio

National Public Radio, America's big nonprofit radio entity, is now fighting a good fight against excessive fees for internet radio.

Heaven's Gate, 10 years later

There's an article about the Heaven's Gate sect over at LA Weekly, focusing on one man who survived the group's suicides.  It's gripping stuff on its own terms, nicely weaving together strange, sad stories.

Hale-Bopp was ten years ago.  That's an awful lot of history crammed into a decade.

(via BoingBoing)

Yahoo Flickr snafu, day two

Update on the Yahoo-snafu-Flickr story from yesterday: first, thanks to everyone for your thoughts, stories, wishes, recommendations!

Good news: I managed to get back into my account, at last.  I had to give Yahoo some personal information, and it worked.  I tested it out by uploading some images and adding to sets, and am pleased to report success.  So, after spending hours of my life, I'm... back to where I started.  I dub this "paying the Yahoo tax."

Bad news: problems remain.

• Communication.  After getting tons of feedback from friends, colleagues, people I haven't heard of, I still haven't heard anything from Yahoo.  Not by email in any of three (3) accounts, phone, comments on two (2) posts here, comments on three (3) Flickr images, one bug report submitted, Twitter tweets, or IM.  So I'm not exactly playing coy.  At best Yahoo must be overwhelmed, as Laura suggests, which implies seriously poor planning.  Otherwise they either don't care what we think, or haven't figured out how to respond to customers.  Doesn't anyone at Yahoo trawl the web to see what people are saying?  What kind of company behaves like this? 
• Bad interface and experience design.  Nearly every step of the way the Flickr->Yahoo transition experience frustrates the user.  For example, following directions should not yield a response that the login you've spent time making up doesn't work, or that the account where your work lies is "not taken."  Yesterday I mentioned getting rewarded for filling in a bug report with a blank screen.  Better yet, sifting through help files and not finding an answer, telling the on-screen poll about this, and getting nothing back as a result doesn't exactly build confidence.  Yahoo's help site seems designed to ward off email or phone contact.  No sign of a wiki.
• (Bonus points: more than a few people have recommended using Flickr's help and contact service, rather than Yahoo's.  That doesn't speak well to the integration process.  Which has been going on for some time.)
• Punishing loyal customers.  I started off with a free Flickr account, then decided to pay for a Pro one because I liked the service.  I've stuck with Flickr for some time, now, and in a variety of ways: adding content in multiple ways (photos, metadata, comments); writing about the service; showing Flickr to many, many audiences.  Yahoo rewards this loyalty - heck, advocacy - pretty poorly.  At best, setting aside their customer relations failure, Yahoo now requires me to remember more account and login information, making me do more work to keep the same level of service.  That is, I have a userid, an account name (which is different), an email address, and pw.  As at least one other blogger notes, this could have been done a bit more subtly.  Instead I'm paying the Yahoo tax.

So, questions for discussion:

1. If Yahoo is trying to be the social competitor to Google's algorithmic empire, why are they so bad at it?
2. Is the idea is to nudge us towards Yahoo accounts in order to simplify things?
3. Speaking of Google, has anyone moved to Picasa from Flickr, and willing to share the experience?
4. Does this business-to-business integration problem signal problems with the Semantic Web, as Stephen Downes argues?