antikoan

 |::| Monday, April 15, 2002

 |::|   9:56:18 PM 

From The "I Couldn't Make This Up" Department

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/specials/2002/it-anthems/

ZDNet UK has been tracking the chart success of corporate IT anthems.

Yes. That's right. Songs.

Somebody paid money for this. Kind of amazing. Kind of scary.

 |::|   9:08:40 PM 

Picky things to see to:

• Take the spaces and the brackets out of the permalink indicators. Put the brackets into the template.
• Experiment with other indicators for the Day link.
• Un-bold the item-level DT.

Less-picky things to see to:

• Figure out why Radio stopped posting after 11:30am. (I expect -- I hope -- that the VAIO just went to sleep...)

 |::|   9:06:16 PM 

Perhaps the core error in market-based theories of value can be put very simply: They confuse effects with explanations.

 |::|   9:05:03 PM 

OK, well, now we're getting somewhere!

Mail to weblog does not work if there is more than one message in the POP box.

Which strikes me as a little odd -- but hey, who am I to complain...

 |::| The Myth of Market-Determined Value, Part 020415  8:25:37 PM 

(See Google, directories, OPML , cited by Marc Barrott

"The only reason that place is so popular is because everybody goes there." -- Yogi Berra [poss. apocryphal]

"The world never changed the way the hype said it did" -- Dave Winer

Dave Winer remarks:

But there could be dozens of ways of viewing any given topic, and the Web (and Google's search engine) use page rank to give authority, and that's dynamic and valuable, but the DMOZ way freezes authority in time, and doesn't let the collective human intellect of the Web determine authority as the search engine does so well.

Let's unpack the assumptions:

The web uses page ranking to give authority.

Not sure what he means by this. Is he stating a corollary of Metcalfe's law? If he is, he's incorrect: What happens on the web is that popularity (i.e., frequency of linking) results from popularity (i.e., frequency of linking). In other words, there's no inherent connection between the fact that something gets a high Google page-rank and whether it's of high quality. The truth could be orthogonal, or even exactly the opposite.

Google uses "the collective human intellect of the Web [to] determine authority"

Again, that's not actually what happens. Setting aside for a moment the fact that whatever Google "determines" is clearly not "authority" per se, it's clear to me that whatever is doing that is in no way even approximately analogous to the "collective human intellect of the Web." In fact, it's merely the agglomeration of a bunch of human behaviors. Not even close to the same thing.

That which is "dynamic" is valuable by virtue of dynamism.

It may be unfair to unpack this from the quote above. Nevertheless, it does seem to be a common, un- challenged assumption among technophiles and post-humans. Often, paradoxically, it lurks, unseen, beneath discussions of such non- dynamic concepts as standards, locatability, and backward compatibility.

That which comes from "authorities" is inferior to the product of collective human intellect.

This is not so much untrue as it is just not very relevant to the subject at hand. I take it as obvious that page ranking a la Google is not a product of collective intellect, but rather of agglomerated behaviors. Now, if it were conceivable to give extra weight, say, Dave Winer's positive linkages to a page concerned with distributed knowledge management, in preference to those from, say, me, then you could begin to make a case for Google's page rank being something more than a tool to produce a statistical probability of success somewhat better than Go To's.

Winer goes on to say:

The power of the Web that Google's search engine taps so well is that it is totally decentralized. The same can and should and must happen with directories. We scatter them around the Internet, each CMS learns how to browse them, people choose which ones they want to contribute to, and if the editor is responsive and gives people what they need (without giving them too much), it rises through the ranks.

In a nutshell, this is the application of market theory to the web. And it entails the same conflation of evolutionary/ecological success and human-centered "value." As in economics and politics, the free-market theory of value that underlies statements like this is in turn based on the deeply flawed assumption that the market will "reward" the "best" solution. In evolutionary terms, it's tantamount to saying that evolution produces or favors the best design, which would be clearly wrong: evolution favors the most situationally successful design . Again, a very different thing.

The subject deserves more space and time. I'll try to get back to it later...

 |::|   8:18:39 PM 

Alright. I'm going to try to log in to addr and delete all the messages with incorrect "secret subjects", and see if that will un-confuse Radio.

 |::|   11:14:27 AM 

According to Paolo @ evectors (& via Scripting News), and assuming that the Windows version works in a similar fashion, I think it should be possible to simply move a Radio install from one box to another without reconfiguration. I need to poke into the registry to see what changes, if any, Radio makes; Paolo's note leads me to believe that it makes none of much consequence. Since Radio has its own object database, that would seem to be a reasonable thing to do.

It's getting very important that I figure out how to make Radio solid and reliable for business-class operations, which it does not seem to be at the moment. I believe it can be done; but out-of-"box", it's not operationally stable enough, at least on WinME. I have three people I'd like to turn onto this, all of whom would be actually using it to manage content on a business site. That also implies that I need to be able to figure out how to make Radio generate pages that will be scripted on the server. Tricky. I may yet discover that blogger or Moveable Type are better for that purpose. They'd both have the advantage of removing the dependency on a single client system. And they'd work around Radio's critical difficulty in re-importing old content when moving to a new server.

 |::|   10:13:47 AM 

The language that we use to describe the Palestinian conflict is very interesting.

A recent story, for example, describes Arafat as "rebuffing" Colin Powell's efforts to broker a cease-fire. Similarly, very few specific quotes are given from Palestinian sources; instead, we have paraphrases.

The bottom line that I keep coming back to is this: As long as there are soldiers in Palestinian territory, Palestinians will fight them. If Ariel Sharon thinks otherwise, he is an idiot. He may well be a fool, but he is not an idiot.

 |::|   9:13:08 AM 

Wrestling with Radio over the last few days has taught me something very important: Never change the format without making a full backup, first. Then, you can just wipe out the whole shooting match and start from a baseline.

Not something I ought to have to do. But it beats spending 45 minutes reinstalling and making sure that the configuration is still sound.

So, the next step: Get the entire site working, make a full backup, then try to get categories working. When I'm sure they work without "urllist undefined" errors, then move on to the next thing. Stepwise progression. The same thing I'd do if I were trying to sort out the vagaries of some ill-defined open-source software. Not something I typically have to do with the shareware I use most often.

 |::| Quote of the Moment  7:00:50 AM 

"Never cook with a wine you won't drink." -- Justin Wilson