August 29, 2012
"Internet freedom is something I know you all care passionately about; I do too. We will fight hard to make sure that the internet remains the open forum for everybody - from those who are expressing an idea to those to want to start a business."

—

Come on. Whatever your politics, you have to admit that President Obama jumping into an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) on Reddit was pretty cool. The President hung out for half an hour, answering questions from how he feels about Internet freedom (above) to his intentions for space exploration (it’s a priority, apparently.) Ok, so it wasn’t exactly front page stuff, but at least Obama has *heard of* Reddit. I confess too that I rather cruelly enjoyed the Redditors correcting the President’s grammar (to his ‘a asteroid’ s0crates82 quickly corrected him, “*an* asteroid, Mr President.” And some of the Twitterati commentary was equally sharp and insightful. A few favorites: 

David Steven: Recommended to a British politician he do a reddit AMA a few years back. He looked as if I’d suggested he crapped live on breakfast TV.

Tim Maly: President makes new media appearance is a story. “We have seen your subculture and recognise it” is a core narrative.

Graham Linehan: Such a brilliant move by Obama and his people. Aligning himself with Reddit while the GOP travels further and further back in time.

Umair Haque: Forgive me for suggesting it, but internet chat is not a substitute for a working civil society, much less a democracy.

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(Notes: 8)
  
Filed under: President Obama politics reddit Internet communication media cool 
August 16, 2012

I loved this talk at this year’s TED Global. Michael Anti described his version of the digital world in China in a way that was lyrical, inspiring and at times quite hilarious. Debunking various myths that those of us in the west are often far too ready to believe, Anti shone new light on Chinese culture. Utterly fascinating and well worth taking the time to watch.

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(Notes: 14)
  
Filed under: digital media Michael Anti social media blogging China Internet 
August 8, 2012
Four Ways the Internet Might Let Us Down

As people wave their hands in agony at journalist Mat Honan’s unfortunate encounter with hackers who saw fit to delete his, well, everything, I’m randomly reminded of a piece by one of my favorite scientists, David Eagleman. Eagleman recently wrote a piece for CNN titled Four Ways The Internet Could Go Down, and he details some scary but apparently entirely possible ways in which we could all scoot back to the dark ages without so much as a by your leave. It’s compelling stuff:

1. Space Weather. Writes Eagleman: “A major solar event could theoretically melt down the whole Internet. What earthquakes, bombs, and terrorism cannot do might be accomplished in moments by a solar corona.”

2. Cyberwarfare. Writes Eagleman: “If you want to take down your enemy, start by shredding his Net.”

3. Political Mandate. Here Eagleman writes of the proposed Internet Kill Switch that would have given the President authority to “shut down private sector or government networks in the event of a cyber attack capable of causing massive damage or loss of life.” (This feels a little out of place given that this provision was removed from the bill that’s currently in front of Congress, but I suppose it could always be reinstated. Forewarned and forearmed and all that.)

4. Cable Cutting. Writes Eagleman: “More than 99 percent of global Web traffic is dependent on deep-sea networks of fiber-optic cables that blanket the ocean floor like a nervous system.” He then tells of undersea sabotage that should belong in a James Bond film but apparently belongs in real life.

It’s fascinating and provocative, and Eagleman’s conclusion, that as the generation lucky enough to witness the inception of the Internet and the web, we should darned well be responsible for its protection, is hard to argue with.

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(Notes: 7)
  
Filed under: David Eagleman Internet security web threats terrorism cyberwarfare 
July 19, 2012

Imagine, it’s not the Olympic Games that has me hankering after a trip to London, but this groovy new exhibition at the city’s Science Museum. A collaboration between the museum and Google, the Web Lab is “a groundbreaking, year-long exhibition, featuring a series of interactive Chrome Experiments that bring the extraordinary workings of the internet to life.” I absolutely love the look of the physical installations glimpsed in the video above, while I logged in online to play around with the Universal Orchestra, for which you can contribute sounds from both within the museum and virtually. It’s a concept I find positively delightful, though I confess I couldn’t make much sense of how to interact with it, which was a shame (and also doesn’t necessarily say much.) Still, if anyone gets to visit the real thing, please do let me know how it is. Design credits, meanwhile, go to the likes of Tellart, Universal Design Studio, MAP, b-reel, Karsten Schmidt and Fraser Randall.

[Story via Matt Jones]

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(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: Science Museum Google web experiments Web Lab internet design 
July 11, 2012
"Civility isn’t fancy-talk for “being nice.” It’s the essential quality we require to live together in complex social structures built on our jumpy, irrational primate brains. Online, where we increasingly live, we need it more than ever."

—

I came across How To Kill A Troll at just the right moment, after reading about a comedy show in which a comedian reportedly called for a female member of the audience to be gang-raped because she dared to suggest aloud that rape isn’t funny. Reading the various responses to this story raised all sorts of questions: just what is taboo these days, anyway? Isn’t crossing the line exactly what the best comedians do? I laugh at completely vile things all the time; is it just because I’m a woman that rape or sexual violence jokes are so utterly unfunny? It’s notable that Xeni Jardin posted a BoingBoing wrap-up of responses to the “rape comedy” story and then remarked, sadly, on Twitter: “Gah. If you are female, and write a blog post about rape jokes being uncool, expect to be told that you should be raped.”  

Then I read Erin Kissane’s beautifully thoughtful piece about trolling and the hate spewed at women and minorities of all forms, and was reminded that this is not an abstract issue, nor one that can be got around via critical thinking or philosophical theorizing alone. As Kissane writes: “Online threats derive their force from offline violence. A quarter of women in the US will experience domestic violence. One in five high school girls have been raped or sexually assaulted. By the time they finish college, that number goes up to one in four. And the people who hurt us take comfort and encouragement from a culture of violent threats. “Ignoring them” is not going to do the trick.”

This, in other words, is a real world matter that needs real world conversation and some serious mirror-gazing, as we contemplate attempting to build a society of which we can be proud. Kissane concludes, “Let’s start talking about what it’s going to take to fix this” with some beautiful thoughts about the place of civility and love in our lives and hearts. Designer Jason Santa Maria commented that the piece is “beautiful, sad, empowering, sobering… required reading for humans.” Couldn’t agree more.

[Erin Kissane story via Frank Chimero]

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(Notes: 13)
  
Filed under: Internet online offline culture society Erin Kissane Xeni Jardin rape jokes really are never funny 
July 6, 2012
"The internet is a transcendent idea. It is unequivocally not something a squirrel could chew on."

— Haven’t you always slightly wondered how the Internet, you know, actually works? (Horrible confession to make in public, given that you probably all have a deep understanding of everything to do with it. I’m asking that for a friend, obviously.) Thankfully, Andrew Blum can clearly be my friend’s best friend, because he devoted the past few years of his life to figuring out how the system on which we base so much of our lives actually works after his cable guy told him that a squirrel had chewed through his home Internet. His journey took him to huge, dark data centers and to beaches in Portugal to watch a pirate climb out of the sea with a wire between their teeth. (That last bit might be an exaggeration, but not much of one.) Read Andrew’s book, Tubes, and read my ineffectual live blog of the talk, which has some great pictures of said pirate.

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(Notes: 8)
  
Filed under: Andrew Blum TEDGlobal internet technology how things work 
July 5, 2012
Tracking the birth and life of Anonymous, anthropologist and academic Gabriella Coleman set out to explain the mysterious group in her talk at TEDGlobal. The answer was less than comprehensive, but given the nature of the beast, that’s not particularly surprising. She came up with four ways to describe the group’s makeup: Anonymous scales and is participatory; it is not just hackers.  Anonymous may seem chaotic, but most targets are not random.  They put on a good performance, obvious even to their detractors.  They are visible and invisible.  Read the full post here. For bonus points, read also Quinn Norton’s excellent Wired piece, How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down, which covers much of the same ground but in rather more detail than Coleman could include in a TEDTalk (or, for that matter, than I could capture in a live blog.) [Photo c/o James Duncan Davidson; Graphics c/o TED.]

Tracking the birth and life of Anonymous, anthropologist and academic Gabriella Coleman set out to explain the mysterious group in her talk at TEDGlobal. The answer was less than comprehensive, but given the nature of the beast, that’s not particularly surprising. She came up with four ways to describe the group’s makeup:

  1. Anonymous scales and is participatory; it is not just hackers. 
  2. Anonymous may seem chaotic, but most targets are not random. 
  3. They put on a good performance, obvious even to their detractors. 
  4. They are visible and invisible. 
Read the full post here. For bonus points, read also Quinn Norton’s excellent Wired piece, How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down, which covers much of the same ground but in rather more detail than Coleman could include in a TEDTalk (or, for that matter, than I could capture in a live blog.)
[Photo c/o James Duncan Davidson; Graphics c/o TED.]

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(Notes: 34)
  
Filed under: Anonymous hacking Internet TEDGlobal Gabriella Coleman Quinn Norton scale 
January 30, 2012
"One morning last week, Christopher J. Dodd, the former senator from Connecticut who is now the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, and John Fithian, the head of the National Association of Theater Owners, both spent time on a panel bemoaning the fact that the Web had enabled piracy of filmed content. But elsewhere in Sundance, it was obvious that Web-enabled fund-raising was helping to produce a fair amount of original films."

— Love this piece by David Carr: At Sundance, Kickstarter Resembled a Movie Studio, But Without The Egos. Carr looks at the success of the crowdfunding site, Kickstarter, which helped finance 17 films on view at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival—a whopping ten percent of the entire festival’s slate. He has some good comments from Kickstarter co-founder, Yancey Strickler, who describes the “agnostic” platform he and his team have created: “The people are the curators — they decide what is going to get made.” And that is exactly what has Hollywood executives quaking in their boots.

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(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: Hollywood film movies Kickstarter Sundance crowdfunding curation web Internet piracy fundraising 
January 19, 2012
What The SOPA/PIPA Blackout Says About Internet Companies’ Attitude Toward Design (Hint: Not Much)

Lots of excitement and analysis about yesterday’s U.S.-based blackout of many major websites, including Google, Wikipedia and Wordpress. I already posted a link to Clay Shirky’s analysis of PIPA and SOPA, and unsurprisingly, other opinions have emerged in the meantime, including John Gapper’s Financial Times piece, Halt The Silicon Valley Histrionics, Jaron Lanier’s op ed in The New York Times, The False Ideals of the Web and tech writer David Pogue’s blog post, Put Down the Pitchforks on SOPA.

As I moseyed around the web yesterday to check out the protesting sites, a thought struck me: the way in which the sites chose to indicate their position against the acts perhaps also, even unwittingly, spoke volumes about that company’s wider approach to design. Did it seem like the blackout was the responsibility of an engineer who had found him or herself in charge of visual design? How seriously does it seem like design is being taken in these businesses? You know, the businesses that promise to represent the brightest hope for our economy. What hope for design therein?

So I collected a bunch of screengrabs and decided to canvas the opinion of a host of design experts. Admittedly this was more of a fun exercise than anything else, but nonetheless, their feedback was pretty telling: Many of them were supporters of the instinct and the gesture, but saddened at the quality of the design on show. As Adrian Shaughnessy, designer, writer, visiting professor at the Royal College of Art and founder of Unit Editions in London wrote, tartly:

One of the most interesting features of the “Occupy” movement has been the graphic and verbal flair of the protest banners. In comparison, the anti-SOPA/PIPA blackout screens are po-faced and ponderous. Where’s the razor sharp wit? And don’t get me started on the typography—it looks like the IT department stayed late to do it. 

Another Londoner, designer and director, Johnny Hardstaff commented rather sorrowfully:

I love the act of witholding data. In itself it’s such a simple and effective solution to the problem, and it both expertly and childishly asserts a freedom that I strongly believe in… but, the visual languages that these designers have each invoked in their individual blackouts strikes me as unimportant. I’d hate to critique or “unpack” their somewhat lackluster individual design solutions, when what’s important is the gesture itself, and the fact that they made a stand.

As I’ve written before, there’s a growing movement to promote the value of design within internet-focused companies, but it’s clear from even this brief scan that for all the rhetoric, “good design” is not a central part of the currently dominant internet companies. There were exceptions—most of the experts applauded the efforts of both Google and Wordpress—but here’s the deeper issue. When even designers say that design is beside the point and what matters most is the content of the message, it seems like there’s still a long way to go before we figure out where design truly fits into all those business equations.

Here, then, are screenshots from twelve of the high profile protesting websites. My sincere thanks to Adrian Shaughnessy and Johnny Hardstaff along with the other four design(er) critics: Michael C Place, creative director of London-based design agency, Build; Jan Wilker, of New York-based design agency, karlssonwilker inc.; Liz Danzico, chair of the MFA Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York and Timothy O’Donnell, author of Sketchbook and creative director at Philadelphia-based design agency, 160over90. And apologies, I do realize some of this is super inside design-ball, but I like that the comments also show the depth at which designers agonize over the types of issues so many people don’t even know to notice.

Boing Boing

Michael C Place: ”Utilitarian, no-nonsense. Ranged-left type, a nod to the modernists out there.”

Jan Wilker: “This is simple and to the point, with a fitting error message. I do wonder if anyone actually read it.”

Liz Danzico: “This has the potential to subtly and effectively piss people off—in all the right ways.”


I Can Has Cheezburger

Michael C Place: ”I bet the designer of the Cheezburger logo didn’t include a note for ‘If logo is to be used for a serious cause’ in the brand guidelines!”

Liz Danzico: “In which Cheezburger gets involved in prospect theory.”

Timothy O’Donnell: “How did they not feature a LOLcat bemoaning the potential loss of our online freedoms? Seems a missed opportunity. With any luck, that fork lift will drop the flagburger and rescue the orphan in the call to action.


Craigslist

Michael C Place: “Centered layout, plenty of leading, multiple type sizes, mixture of upper and lowercase… This looks like it was done in a hurry.”

Jan Wilker: “Love the postscript.”

Liz Danzico: “Effective. But more confounding than not having craigslist at all? Craigslist with colors.”


Electronic Frontier Foundation

Michael C Place: ”Centered and ranged-left? Come on, this is serious!”

Jan Wilker: “Given the topic, it’s a little strange that they use the crumbled-xeroxed-flyer-with-distressed-type as the basis of the headline.” 

Timothy O’Donnell: “Distressed or not, Kabel is not the font to inspire a public uprising. Those rigatoni-esque ‘s’es  and sloping ‘e’s are perfect for 70’s funk compilations, but do little to symbolize jackboots stamping on people’s faces.” 


Google

Michael C Place: ”Jaunty angle, and, not quite covering the lowercase ‘g’, an eye on the brand still.”

Adrian Shaughnessy: “Collectively, all of these confirm the suspicion that the internet is run by geeks rather than by people who understand how to communicate with a mass audience. At least Google’s blacked-out logo suggests a modicum of wit and panache.”

Liz Danzico: “Lovely, if not just for the rare and correct usage distinction between ‘Internet’ and ‘web’.”

Timothy O’Donnell: “Equal parts Heidegger and the cover of AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, Google had the simplest and most impactful response.”


MoveOn

Michael C Place: ”No bullshit. Looks like Helvetica is the typeface of protest.”

Liz Danzico: “Spot on. SpotOn.”


Mozilla

Michael C Place: ”At least they are on-brand with the ‘Protect the Internet’ headline.”

Liz Danzico: “A review of the language would suggest that the copy is all about them. “Help us,” for instance. “Today Mozilla,” and “Join us.” What about me?”


Reddit

Michael C Place: ”Highlighted typography? Come on. It’s not the 90’s.”

Jan Wilker: “‘Today’ needs an upper case ‘T.’ Thank you.”

Timothy O’Donnell: “Turning the Reddit logo’s smile into a frown is a nice, subtle touch. Less convinced with the color scheme: black, grey and salmon hardly seems the Palette of Dissent.”


Tumblr

Michael C Place: ”Love the ‘You can toggle this on your blog’s Settings page’. Shows the site is ever mindful of the user.”

Liz Danzico: “Leave it to Tumblr to make the “blacking out” of blogs on the Tumblr platform as easy as checking a box. Usability: check. Comprehensibility: check. The three short paragraphs here are chock full of useful links. And further, when the House put the brakes on SOPA, Tumblr updated its content. Nicely done.”


Vimeo

Michael C Place: ”It’s all a bit Neville Brody.”

Liz Danzico: “While the red and white graphics are pretty, harking back to the showbiz floodlights of Hollywood, a video may have been more on brand even. If fact, a video was just the thing that made the potential impact of SOPA/PIPA unspeakably clear.”

Timothy O’Donnell: “The architects of these protection acts were diabolically clever in naming them. I’m dead-set against censorship but find it hard to feel outrage at what sounds like Hello Kitty’s cousins from Sweden.”


Wikipedia

Michael C Place: ”The theme tune from The X-Files would fit nicely here.”

Jan Wilker: “Classy, in the Wikipedia sense.”

Liz Danzico: “One of the few sites that spoke of a post-SOPA/PIPA world from the user point of view. The haunted-house-drop-shadow-effect the cast over the screen by the “W” chilled spirits as we considered a world “without free knowledge.” Cheers to them, though, for making a page eerily consistent with the brand.”

Timothy O’Donnell: “I don’t know — something about this had me looking over my shoulder and reaching for the Victory gin. It seems more focused on demonstrating Wikipedia’s far-reaching influence — which I can’t deny, as 15 minutes later I forgot it was blacked out and tried to discover who directed The Goonies.”


WordPress

Michael C Place: ”No BS. The Full Monty. Perfect.”

Jan Wilker: “A designer did this!”

Liz Danzico: “Proof that the shape of information does not always, and rarely, stand for the information itself.”

Timothy O’Donnell: What Google did successfully with one stroke has less impact here, but I can’t deny it makes a nice visual. Reminds me of some of Muller+Hess’ work with strikethroughs.”

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(Notes: 53)
  
Filed under: internet design SOPA PIPA web design design crit 
January 18, 2012

As the anti-SOPA/PIPA-prompted blackout affects many part of the web today, do take the 13 minutes it takes to watch media commentator Clay Shirky explain why SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) are a “nuclear” assault on the average citizen’s democratic rights. As Shirky puts it:

The real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another. What PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal concept—innocent until proven guilty—and reversing it—guilty until proven innocent. “You can’t share until you show us that you are not sharing something we don’t like.” Suddenly the burden of proof for legal vs illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities. And if it costs even a dime to police a user, that will crush a service with a hundred million users.

This is a cogent, clear, well-reasoned version of the argument from the anti-SOPA movement, and it’s one that we need to understand and act upon. As Shirky concludes,

Time Warner has called. They want us all back on the couch, just consuming, not producing, not sharing. We should say no.

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(Notes: 33)
  
Filed under: SOPA PIPA TED technology policy innovation Internet sharing Clay Shirky 
December 16, 2011
"I am shocked that our lawmakers would contemplate such measures that would put us on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world."

— Google co-founder, Sergey Brin weighs in (in a post on Google+, natch) on the Stop Online Piracy Act, the controversial proposal that many Internet entrepreneurs believe will “undermine entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.” Read an open letter sent to Washington “to protect Internet innovation”, signed by Brin and other heavyweights,  including Reid Hoffman, Jack Dorsey and Marc Andreesen.

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(Notes: 23)
  
Filed under: SOPA piracy Sergey Brin Google internet innovation government policy law-making entrepreneurship 
December 14, 2011
"

We pay some people to be Big Thinkers for us, but mostly they just say things that please people with money. It pleases the money folk to think that the wild and crazy and unregulated world of the web is no longer threatening them. That users are happy to live in a highly regulated, Disneyfied app space, without all that messy freedom.

I’ll stay with the web.

"

—

Tech world evangelist, Dave Winer writes a smart post about Why Apps Are Not The Future. Publishers are gaga about the potential of apps to control their users, and as Winer writes, that’s fine, only:

The great thing about the web is linking. I don’t care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can’t link in and out of your world, it’s not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don’t need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent around it if you want to get my point.

Winer certainly strikes a chord, and the question for me is: who is really being served here? With apps, the publishers get to control the experience and make some money. Neither of these are inherently evil, but if the app ends up being more focused on serving the publisher’s needs than on providing an enjoyable experience for readers/users/viewers, they will simply tune out. A lose-lose.

Meanwhile, Winer’s cynicism about “big thinkers” in the quote at top is alarming. It’d be great to write this off as overblown but, given how many stories we’ve read recently about the corruption at the heart of our culture, it would be naive to dismiss him out of hand. Sigh. Read, too, his more detailed follow-up post on this topic: Enough With the Apps Already.

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(Notes: 11)
  
Filed under: Dave Winer technology Internet innovation web apps publishing digital media 
September 29, 2011
"Tech is just a loop. First we organize, then we disrupt, then it gets organized again, then that gets disrupted."

—

After yesterday’s post about the implications of Amazon’s Kindle Fire introduction, tech veteran Dave Winer pipes up with his vision of What Comes After The Cloud. Worth a read, as is this amazing piece by Douglas Rushkoff: In The Next Net, the author outlines the reality of the Internet as he sees it, and provides a stark reminder for those yearning to live in merry oblivion and see it as somehow magically neutral. He concludes:

I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest.

[Rushkoff story via Bert Aldridge.]

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(Notes: 39)
  
Filed under: Amazon Dave Winer Douglas Rushkoff Internet Kindle Next Net centralized authority corporate interests net neutrality revolution what's next? Kindle Fire 
September 28, 2011
Lots of breathless excitement and hoopla around Amazon’s introduction of a new series of Kindles. Here’s an interesting take that gets past the fact that there’s a new competitor to the iPad in town. Longtime Apple employee, Chris Espinosa, writes: In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence. Eat your hearts out, Facebook and Google. Espinosa also has warnings for the giant search engine, on whom he says Amazon is performing “astonishing jujitsu”: Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network. Is that a phrase to bring a tear to the eye of Tim Berners-Lee, or what? [Story via Nilofer Merchant. Image c/o Amazon.]

Lots of breathless excitement and hoopla around Amazon’s introduction of a new series of Kindles. Here’s an interesting take that gets past the fact that there’s a new competitor to the iPad in town. Longtime Apple employee, Chris Espinosa, writes:

In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

Eat your hearts out, Facebook and Google.

Espinosa also has warnings for the giant search engine, on whom he says Amazon is performing “astonishing jujitsu”:

Fire isn’t a noun, it’s a verb, and it’s what Amazon has done in the targeted direction of Google. This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network.

Is that a phrase to bring a tear to the eye of Tim Berners-Lee, or what?

[Story via Nilofer Merchant. Image c/o Amazon.]

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(Notes: 15)
  
Filed under: Amazon Apple Google Facebook Internet innovation design Kindle Kindle Fire Chris Espinosa Web 
July 12, 2011

“Every time a new medium comes along, it takes people 20 or 30 years to figure out what to do with it,” says Frank Rose, author of the new book, The Art of Immersion. This video gives a snapshot of some of his ideas along with his description of a “new grammar of storytelling” that’s native to the internet and the networked world. 

(Video via Rita J King.)

4:39pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZLv7dx71jLWH
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(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: Frank Rose The Art of Immersion story telling narrative internet networks