Older blog entries for mako (starting at number 313)

Wiki Conferencing

I am in Berlin for the Wikipedia Academy, a very cool hybrid free culture community plus refereed academic conference organized, in part, by Wikimedia Deutschland. On Friday, I was very excited to have been invited to give the conference's opening keynote based on my own hybrid take on learning from failures in peer production and incorporating a bunch of my own research. Today, I was on a panel at the conference about free culture and sharing practices. I'll post talks materials and videos when the conference puts them online.

I will be in Berlin for the next week or so before I head to directly to Washington, DC for Wikimania between the 11th and 15th. I'll be giving three talks there:

Between then and now, I'm taking the next week in Berlin to catch up on work, and with friends. If you're in either place and want to meet up, please get in touch and lets try to arrange something.

Syndicated 2012-07-09 10:49:30 from Benjamin Mako Hill

The Global Iron Blogger Network

Since last November, I've been participating in and coordinating Iron Blogger: a drinking club where you pay $5 to a "beer" pool if you fail to blog weekly.

The revival of Iron Blogger in Boston has been a big success. Even more exciting, however, is that Iron Blogger concept has spread. There are now two other Iron Blogger instances: in San Francisco coordinated by Parker Higgens, and in Berlin run by Nicole Ebber and Michelle Thorne.

Yesterday, we convened a virtual meeting of the Global Iron Blogger Council (i.e., an email thread) and we all agreed a new on iron blogger rule that might sweeten the deal for jet-setting prospective Iron Bloggers: any paid-up member of any Iron Blogger club can attend meet-ups in any other Iron Blogger cities if they happen to be in town for one. Because We Are One.

If you want to join us in Boston, we have some room through attrition. Rust bloggers, perhaps? If you'd like to join, you should contact me.

And if you'd like to set up your own in a different city, the code is in git. One warning, however. As those of us that have set it up have figured out, the documentation for the software to run Iron Blogger is between poor and non-existent. If you do want to set up your own instance, please get in touch. I'm happy to give you some pointers that you'll probably need but, more importantly, I'd like to work with the next brave soul to put together documentation of the setup process along the way.

Syndicated 2012-07-09 09:49:30 from Benjamin Mako Hill

Wiki Conferencing

I am in Berlin for the Wikipedia Academy, a very cool hybrid free culture community plus refereed academic conference organized, in part, by Wikimedia Deutschland. On Friday, I was very excited to have been invited to give the conference's opening keynote based on my own hybrid take on learning from failures in peer production and incorporating a bunch of my own research. Today, I was on a panel at the conference about free culture and sharing practices. I'll post talks materials and videos when the conference puts them online.

I will be in Berlin for the next week or so before I head to directly to Washington, DC for Wikimania between the 11th and 15th. I'll be giving three talks there:

Between then and now, I'm taking the next week in Berlin to catch up on work, and with friends. If you're in either place and want to meet up, please get in touch and lets try to arrange something.

Syndicated 2012-07-02 01:48:36 from Benjamin Mako Hill

Why Facebook's Network Effects are Overrated

A lot of people interested in free software, and user autonomy and network services are very worried about Facebook. Folks are worried for the same reason that so many investors are interested: the networks effects brought by hundreds of millions of folks signed up to use the service.

Network effects -- the concept that a good or service increases in value as more people use it -- are not a new problem for free software. Software developers target Microsoft Windows because that is where the large majority of users are. Users with no love for Microsoft and who are otherwise sympathetic to free software use Windows because programs they need will only run there.

Folks worried about Facebook are afraid for similar reasons. Sure, you can close down your Facebook account and move to Diaspora. But who will you talk to there? You can already hear people complaining about Facebook the same way they've been complaining about Windows or Office for years. People feel that their hands are tied and that their software, and their social network, will be determined by what everybody is doing.

I'm worried about Facebook. But I'm not too intimidated by Facebook's network effects for two reasons.

First, using Facebook doesn't preclude using anything else.

Twitter has enormous overlapping functionality with Facebook. Sure, people use the systems very differently. But they both ask you to create lists of friends and followers and are designed around sending and receiving short status messages. Millions of people do both and both systems are thriving. For the millions of people who use both Facebook and Twitter, the two services have had to negotiate their marginal utility in a world they share with the other one. People decide that Twitter is for certain types of short messages and Facebook is for others. But these arrangements shift over time.

And the relationships between services aren't always peaceful coexistence. Remember Friendster? Remember Orkut? Remember Tribe? Remember MySpace? MySpace, and all the others, are great examples of how social networks die. They very slowly fade away. MySpace users signed up for Facebook accounts and used both. They almost never just switched. Over time, as one platform became more attractive than the other, for many complicated reasons, attention and activity shifted. People logged in on MySpace less and Facebook more and, eventually, realized they were effectively no longer MySpace users. Anyone that has been on the Internet long enough to watch a few of these shifts from one platform to another knows that they're not abrupt -- even if they can be set in motion by a particular event or action. Users of social networking sites simply don't have to choose in the way that a person choosing to boot Windows and GNU/Linux does.

I'm sure the vast majority of people with Diaspora accounts use Facebook actively. This is not a problem for Diaspora. It is how Diaspora -- or whatever else eventually achieves what many of us hoped Diaspora would -- could win.

Second, Facebook is for the ephemeral.

Facebook is primarily used for information that was produced very recently. This week if not today. If not this hour. Facebook has an enormous amount of data that users have fed it that may be hard to get out and move somewhere else. But most people don't care very much about having any regular access to the large majority of this information. What people care deeply about is having access to the data that they and their friends created today. And that data can just as easily be created somewhere else tomorrow. Or, with the right tools, created just as easily in both places.

Compare this to something like Windows where moving away would require learning, converting, and perhaps even writing, new software. Perhaps even in new programming languages that most developers don't know yet. Compared to Windows, a migration away from Facebook will be easy.

Facebook's photo galleries are an example of an important place where this holds less well. Social network information -- i.e., the list of who is friends with who -- is another example of something that is persistently valuable. That said, people really enjoy the act of finding and friending. Indeed, this process was part of the initial draw of Facebook and other social networks.

None of this means that Facebook is over. It doesn't even mean that its ascendancy will be slowed. What it does mean is that Facebook is vulnerable to the next thing more than many technology firms that have benefited from network effects in the past. If users are given compelling reasons to switch to something else, they can with less trouble and they will.

That compelling reason might be a new social network with better features or an awesome distributed architecture that allows freedom for users and the ability of those users to benefit from new and fantastic things that Facebook's overseers would never let them have and without the things Facebook's users suffer through today. Or it might be a sexier proprietary box to store users' private information. It doesn't mean that I'm not worried about Facebook. I remain deeply worried. It's just not very hard for me to imagine the end.

Syndicated 2012-06-04 01:44:48 from Benjamin Mako Hill

Date Arithmetic

When I set an alarm, my clock, now running on the computer in my pocket, is smart enough to tell me how much time will pass until the alarm is scheduled to sound. This has eliminated the old problem of sleeping past meetings before being surprised by an alarm precisely half a day after I had originally planned to wake.

The price has been having to know exactly how little I will sleep: a usually depressing fact that had previously been obscured by my difficulty doing time arithmetic in my most somnolent moments.

Syndicated 2012-05-14 01:18:44 from Benjamin Mako Hill

Diamond Clarity

I3→I2→I1→SI2→SI1→VS2→VS1→VVS2→VVS1→IF→FL

The GIA diamond clarity scale, shown above, is rather opaque.

Syndicated 2012-05-14 00:57:48 from Benjamin Mako Hill

My Setup

The Setup is an awesome blog that posts of interviews with nerdy people that ask the same four questions:

  1. Who are you, and what do you do?
  2. What hardware are you using?
  3. And what software?
  4. What would be your dream setup?

I really care about my setup so I am excited, and honored, that they just posted an interview with me!

I answer questions about my setup often so I tried to be comprehensive with the hope that I will be able to point people to it in the future.

Syndicated 2012-04-12 15:33:16 from Benjamin Mako Hill

OH Man!

Since installing a whiteboard in our kitchen, conversations at the Acetarium have been moving in new and interesting directions.

For example, Mika and I recently noticed that, when rotated correctly, the skeletal formula for 2,3-dimethyl-2-butanol looks pretty friendly!

/copyrighteous/images/2,3-dimethyl-2-butanol-clean.png

Syndicated 2012-04-05 23:36:04 from Benjamin Mako Hill

A Manhattan Project for Cliché Collection

This weekend, I launched an extremely ambitious effort to collect evidence of extremely ambitious efforts. The result was a short program that searched the web and revealed the:

  • Manhattan Project for the 21st century
  • Manhattan Project for Advanced Batteries
  • Manhattan PRoject for AI
  • Manhattan Project for AIDS
  • Manhattan Project for Alzheimer's
  • Manhattan Project for autism research and treatment
  • Manhattan Project for Big Cats
  • Manhattan Project For Bio-Defense
  • Manhattan Project for Biomedicine
  • Manhattan Project for Bioterrorism
  • Manhattan Project for cancer
  • Manhattan Project for Cellulases
  • Manhattan Project for chemists
  • Manhattan Project for climate change
  • Manhattan Project for Cold Fusion
  • Manhattan Project for computers
  • Manhattan Project for creativity
  • Manhattan Project for Cyber-defenses
  • Manhattan project for Detroit
  • Manhattan Project for the development of post-nuclear superweapons in seven fields
  • Manhattan Project For Economics
  • Manhattan Project for the economy
  • Manhattan Project for ending the prostate cancer as a socio-economic crisis in our country and a public health disaster among African American men
  • Manhattan Project for Energy
  • Manhattan Project for Energy Independence
  • Manhattan Project for the Environment
  • Manhattan Project for Excellence in Radiochemistry
  • Manhattan Project for exploiting extraterrestrial technologies and communication
  • Manhattan Project for Finance
  • Manhattan Project for fluoride damage
  • Manhattan Project for fuel
  • Manhattan Project for Fuel Cell Manufacturing
  • Manhattan Project for future generations
  • Manhattan Project for genetics
  • Manhattan project for global hunger
  • Manhattan Project for Global Peace, Prosperity and Stability
  • Manhattan Project for Green Innovation
  • Manhattan Project for Guitar Exercise
  • Manhattan project for Hawkeyes
  • Manhattan Project for a healthy nation
  • Manhattan Project for Homeland Security
  • Manhattan Project for Iowa
  • Manhattan Project for IT
  • Manhattan Project for Legal Education
  • Manhattan Project for life
  • Manhattan Project for Maine,
  • Manhattan Project for materials that could resist corrosion by fluorine or its compounds
  • Manhattan Project for medical treatment in the field of obesity
  • Manhattan Project for Michael
  • Manhattan Project for Miracles
  • Manhattan Project for modular instruments
  • Manhattan Project for National IDs
  • Manhattan Project For Natural Disasters
  • Manhattan Project for the NES
  • Manhattan Project for Network Computing
  • Manhattan Project for network security
  • Manhattan Project for the Next Generation of Bionic Arms
  • Manhattan Project for online identity
  • Manhattan Project for Our Time
  • Manhattan Project for Pb-Free Electronics
  • Manhattan Project for Public Diplomacy
  • Manhattan Project for Racial Achievement Gap
  • Manhattan Project for real time biomedical research on human populations
  • Manhattan Project for the restoration of motor function
  • Manhattan Project for a revival of the Sacrament of Penance
  • Manhattan Project for simulation with pseudo-random numbers
  • Manhattan Project for the social and behavioral sciences
  • Manhattan Project for stove testing and design
  • Manhattan Project for systems engineering
  • Manhattan Project for Texas Water
  • Manhattan Project for transforming patient care for men and ending prostate cancer
  • Manhattan Project for the war on terror
  • Manhattan Project for Wildcat Service Corp
  • Manhattan project for wind, electric, solar, geothermal, hydro and other renewable sources of enengy we've not even thought of yet
  • Manhattan Project for XBLA
  • Manhattan Project for yourself
  • Manhattan Project for Zinnias

[Previously in this series: frailty, the invisible hand, science as dance.]

Syndicated 2012-03-19 17:14:43 from Benjamin Mako Hill

Half the Battle Against DRM

As the free software and free culture movements have sat quietly by, DRM is now well on its way to becoming the norm in the electronic book publishing industry.

The free culture movement has failed to communicate the reality of DRM and, as a result, millions of people are buying books that they won't be able to read when they switch to a different model of ebook reader in the future. They are buying books that will become inaccessible when the DRM system that supports them is shut down -- as we've already seen with music from companies including Wal*Mart, Yahoo, and Microsoft. They are buying books that require that readers use proprietary tools that lock them out from doing basic things that have always been the right of a book owner.

Some anti-DRM advocates are, indirectly, part of this problem as they buy these books and turn to shady methods of stripping the DRM. Buying DRMed books is voting with your wallet for a system that criminalizes those that insist on living in freedom and will screw us all in the long run when DRM is the only choice we are offered and removing the DRM is difficult, unsafe, and illegal.

Buying non-DRMed e-books is a more freedom-friendly alternative for those that, like me, are excited about not lugging kilograms of paper around our cities and the world. We can do this at "non-mainstream" publishers like Smashwords who explicitly reject DRM. Of course, the big ebook sellers like Amazon, and Barnes and Nobel, and Google all offer non-DRMed books. But none of the major ebook retailers explicitly reveal the DRM status of locked down books before purchase.

On Amazon, there are some cryptic signs and signals that, if you understand them, suggest the absence of DRM. Google and Barnes and Nobel currently offer no way to know if a book is DRMed without buying it first and questions in their support forums go unanswered.

It's hard to support non-DRM alternatives when we can't recognize them. It's hard to tell people to not buy DRM ebooks if we can't even tell them apart. Getting this message through to book buyers -- and perhaps even to ebook retailers -- seems like a critical first step.

Syndicated 2012-03-06 18:26:14 from Benjamin Mako Hill

304 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!