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I just read a very thought-provoking post on narcissism by danah. It reminded me of lots of things bubbling around in my head before, such as Danny's essay on the death of privacy online and Chris Locke's ongoing documentation of the self-esteem virus (including this latest post). As for reality TV, I also see it as a grab for extreme power over a few instead of diffuse power over many by the broadcasters.

I'm also reading Publics and Counterpublics on danah's recommendation, which makes a distinction between the notion of the general public, and the different publics we are each addressing when blogging or making profiles on Social Network sites. In these activities we are performing to a public of our own, and we can feel invaded when a wider public pays attention, as in Danny's discussion above - danah has said that children's MySpace public includes 'everyone except parents and teachers'. Coping with fame becoming a smooth continuum rather than a sharp dichotomy is something else we need to work on in a power-law distributed long tail world.

Update: John Scalzi is grappling with simialr issues in his SFWA campaign.

Technorati Tags: long tail, power law, social, software, tagcamp

Technorati Tags: data formats, microformats, RDF, semantic web

Don Dodge, in saying Microsoft Will not Fall into the Innovators Dilemma, compares Google Apps for Your Domain to Office Live, but he misses Christensen's point on how successful businesses gets stuck making only incremental innovations.

The real technology disruption here is that Google Apps for Your Domain (and Google Docs, the free version) use HTML as their native format, not Microsoft's crufty legacy format, nor the equally crufty XML data-dump. Writers who use Word every day, like David Weinberger and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, get stuck trying to make it behave and judging by the comments on both those posts they aren't alone. When my friend Maf was working on Microsoft Office, he summed it up by saying "every time I tell someone I work on Word they tell me it's far too complicated, then ask for 3 more features".

Most people use Word because it is the default - they have to use it because others do too. They do not use its advanced features, they just type stuff in. Fifteen years ago, I was a keen Word user, and spent hours working out how to do well-laid out tables in it, and carefully constructing style sheets so that they behaved right. Nowadays I do those kinds of things with HTML and CSS, which are open technologies that anyone can implement and use.

HTML is now the default document format, and an easy wysiwyg editor for it is long overdue. GMail's automatic conversion of attachments to a hosted document with version control is just the kind of 'worse is better' disruption Christensen documented so well 10 years ago.

Oh, and by the way Don, Nintendo Wii is the disruptive innovator in consoles too.

Technorati Tags: HTML, Innovators Dilemma, Word, writing

When Rosie and I first came to the bay area in 1992, we visited San Francisco Zoo. One of the exhibits there were polar bears, and we watched one pace out a looping walk, his feet hitting the same spot each time through, one leg swinging out over the edge of the moat on each circuit. He was completely accustomed to his cage.

Reading Ars Technica's commentary on Airport Extreme's IPv6 support reminded me of this. Apparently, if you use this device, your computers can route across the world again; people can connect to them from anywhere, just as the internet was designed to behave. That's what the 'inter' part of the name is about.

That's right, if you enable password protected services that are off by default, like ssh and ftp, on your Mac, the new Airport base stations actually route them, instead of requiring further buggering about with port mapping and explicit protocol translation through packet sniffing to get them to behave as they were designed. This gives Iljitsch van Beijnum a fit of conniptions, because he'd apparently rather rely on the illusionary security of a firewall then actually securing his machines services. Lets hope he doesn't own any laptops.

Technorati Tags: Apple, internet, security, Wifi

I joined Google this week, and am busy getting my head round its fractal complexities. Rosie wondered if I was begoogled (somewhere between bedazzled, beguiled and besotted).

Then, naturally, she googled 'begoogled' and found this blogpost, which uses it to mean something else.

Rosie then clicked on Chalicechick's Buy me stuff, I'm cute wishlist link, and, as she scrolled through it, became rather concerned.

What Rosie saw was this list, and as she progressed, she was increasingly worried about how much this random blogger girl had in common with me.

"Glenn Gould? Homeschooling? Ealing comedies? Father Ted? Roger Waters? Groundhog Day? Extreme Programming? Who is this woman?"
"I'd better not tell Kevin about her, he might fancy her more!"

I had used Rosie's Mac to buy something from Amazon, so when Chalicechick bookmarked the link to edit her wishlist instead of the permalink to it, Rosie got mine instead...

Technorati Tags: Amazon, bego, geeky, Google, wishlist

Apple has long kept its new product secrets close, wary that details leaking of new hardware will reduce sales of current products, just at the point where they are most profitable. I've written before how this culture spread unnecessarily into Apple's overall culture, and why they have missed a lot of the social media effects because of it. However, something has changed - both with the iTV AppleTV and todays iPhone
announcement, Jobs is trumpeting new hardware months before it's available.

The difference here is that these are new categories for Apple, and the goal is to make customers wait for the Apple product instead of buying an alternative from someone else. By setting the price and broad features now, Jobs forces the competition's shipping product, based on last years technology and manufacturing costs to compete with what he will have in 6 months time. This is something that can only be done from a position of strength, which the iPod success gives him, but it is also a bit of a risk, as the product may disappoint.

I'm reserving judgment on the AppleTV until I see more details of what software it will run, in particular whether it can use Perian to play other video formats, and can use BitTorrent for HD podcasts, but it only having enough CPU oomph for 720p playback seems to be aiming low compared to a lot of existing Apple products, as well as the Xbox 360.

Update: Apple seems to understand the advantages of downloading media for later playback - these two new products both cache video locally in the great iPod tradition. So why on earth is the keynote up as a stream? I'd like to watch it on the train home tonight, so I want to download it, but no. Twits.

Update: Since I wrote this, it has shown up as a podcast on the iTunes store, so I will be able to watch it on the train on Monday. It's not linked from the Apple main page, so you may have missed this too; clearly there are still some internal Apple turf wars over this.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macworld , iPhone, AppleTV , HD, HDTV, Live TV is Dead, video