Mixing, Not Plagiarism

Helene Hegemann, first in line when they gave out the balls (or maybe she mixed in someone else's balls).

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/europe/12germany.html

"Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke."

I could comment on this, but I'll just mix in something from the web:

"He that readeth good writers and pickes out their flowres for his own nose, is lyke a foole."

No point in identifying the writer. He's long dead. It's the authenticity of the statement that's important.

Here's a picture of Helene that I took.

Well.... I took it from the web. But it accurately portrays the subject.

The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul - Really?

from ReadWriteWeb - The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul (via 9flights):

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

So,

First of all,
Facebook
does
not
have
a soul!!!!

Maybe Cocker Spaniels, Yellow Labs, Golden Retrievers. But not Facebook. Who better than a hacker to help you with group and self awareness! Jeez. Bad enough that Facebook is largely about trying to establish your image by plastering it on someone else's. Self awareness from an algorithm? That kind of thinking worries me.

When Search Engines Rank ( and other ambiguities )

Where are the ontologists when we need them!

Here's what happens when search engines rank by prevalence and popularity because they can't recognize features and prioritize multiple contexts.

I wanted to see a video of people dancing The Frug - never mind why. As some of you know, The Frug was a dance from the sixties. I was sure that I would find a video of people.... well just dancing The Frug.

Here's what Google's video search (which is, oddly, very similar to youtube search) provided for the search term "the frug" (quotes used here only):

1. Rilo Kiley singing "The Frug", a current, pleasant, made for an iPod ad song.

2. Someone unabashedly pretending to be Rilo Kiley. Apparently one of the principles of web 2.0 establishes equal value for doing and copying. . Anyhow, this copy is not so hot.

3. Rilo Kiley again.

4. "Rich Man's Frug", a Bob Fosse number from "Sweet Charity". A stylized interpretation. Nice but no cigar.

5. Rilo Kiley again.

6. And here's where it gets interesting, "Mexico's Drug War".

7. "The Pulse of Drug Development".

8. "Better Know a Lobby. The Drug Lobby".

9. "Meth: The World's Most Dangerous Drug 2 of 3".

I don't know why the avid tech press never mentions stuff like this. Guess they'll wait until Steve Jobs invents crappy search.

I'm sure that I'll eventually find a video of the plain old Frug. But it aint easy - or maybe "how to paint easy" - same difference.

Cutting Edge E Journalism Technology

This technology has been in production at Huffington Post for more than a year. Based on our observations, it appears that the NEWS-ICK (News on Weekends and Sundays Intelligent Content Keyboard) is now being tested at The New York Times.



At Huffington, the device has proven valuable and cost effective at times when aggregation was impossible and in cases for which conventional reporting would have involved some effort, unavailable skills and unnecessary expense.

The Emperor's New Tail

The "long tail"? Read this:

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/fashion/31apps.html

A survey of iPhones, iPod Touch and Android users conducted in July 2009 by AdMob, an advertising network that helps people promote their applications on smartphones, found that people discover apps most often by browsing app stores. And even though the iTunes store is bloated with offerings, people tend to gravitate to the most popular.

“For all the tens of thousands of apps out there, the odds of being exposed to more than a thousand are very small,” said Stewart Putney, the founder and chief executive of Moblyng, a company in Redwood City, Calif., that develops applications for mobile devices.

“The top apps featured at the store do change out,” Mr. Putney said. “But most users will never see more than 1 percent of the total apps available.”

Obama, Jobs, jobs and The Vision Thing Vision

Q: What's Just as Good as My White 13" MacBook?

A:Except for the smaller screen, the lack of hardware extensibility, the missing keyboard,  a pocket sized  operating system on an attache case sized device? Give up? You know.

I hope to Job we don't have to hear much more about this. At least not like the silly opinion piece in this morning's Washington Post - SOTU for CEOs: More like Jobs, less like Obama - (oh wait, it's not an opinion piece, it a "Guest Insight") in which Jobs' vision for iPad trumps Obama's vision for jobs (and presumably everything else).

Never mind that Obama's vision has to be implemented by people who are elected, polarized and sensitive to the whims of their constituents.

Never mind that Obama's vision has to be sold over the drone of conjecture from a host of media hosts who are almost universally shallow and often nasty, while Jobs' vision has been pre-sold by a host of fawning techie press gurus who are almost universally out of their environment when it comes both technology and business.

Never mind that Obama's vision is complex and, by necessity, intertwined with many issues while Job's vision is a retail product.

Never mind that Obama's vision and the change that it entails is scary to most people while Jobs' has delivered a vision of a status symbol that no one really needs and everyone must have.

Other than that, the guest insight is very.... insightful.

I do agree with the author's observation that corporate vision is essential for success. But I disagree about the nature of the success (and failure). Most CEOs neither have nor communicate effective vision. But it's usually the company, the employees and the stockholders who suffer. The CEOs usually ride on until the company goes under (or at least until the rats are packing their little fanny packs).  Corporate vision is essential for a company. But CEOs and their legions of loyal management seem to get by just fine without it.

The Google Event Horizon

You know that it's all "in there"  - assuming that  it's been digitized by Google or it's available on-line for crawling. But you will not find it unless you already know exactly what you're looking for. That's unlikely if it's not a personal memory or something that you learned in history class. And history is soooo yesterday.

As what people discover becomes more and more influenced by what most people have already been able to discover through search engines, the event horizon (or maybe the fact horizon) gets closer and closer to the present.

An example. If you're millenial (hate that) you probably think that the use of cute abbreviations is owned by SMS, IM and Twitter. Let's channel through the  horizon with the help of Kent Engineers, who have compiled a list of early radio abbreviations:

http://www.kent-engineers.com/abbreviations.htm
http://www.kent-engineers.com/prosigns.htm
http://www.kent-engineers.com/qcode.htm

Of course Kent seems to be in the UK, where history is still acknowledged (though perhaps only as a fetish). In addition to coveting several of Kent's Morse keys, I'm thinking about how Morse code is, by itself, neither analog nor digital. It's temporal (the dashes are longer, the dots are shorter).

Maybe Google or someone can find a way of opening the event horizon. One possibility, an algorithm that can correlate recent events with older ones and present results in an historical context. That still weights things towards the now. But it would be a start.