Category: Internet

As a subscriber of the service formerly known as AT&T Wireless, I have to give Cingular props for not fumbling the technical changeover; my service is just as good (or, at my house, as bad) as it was before. The same, sadly, can’t be said for their marketing.

My plan was a promotional deal through Microsoft, my former employer. I have a Nokia 3650 camera phone and a plan that provides me with data minutes, most of which I use in a given month. So how is it that Cingular has decided that I’d be interested in “upgrading” to a free Nokia 6010 that has a tenth of the capabilities of the phone I have now—no “M-Life,” no camera, no Symbian OS?

Either Cingular doesn’t have access to the data about me which would tell them how to market more effectively to me—unlikely, as my bill now carries their logo—or else they’re just choosing not to exploit it. Dumb, Cingular.

Here’s how to get my business as a cell phone customer: stop sending me condescending direct mail pieces that are based on the premise that my phone is a five year old piece of crap. Show me some cool technology that I don’t know about yet. Tell me how to use the phone I have to better integrate with my life. Direct mail is OK—better than marketing email pitches—but it would be better if you did it in an unobtrusive way, say a blog. Just a thought.

bbum’s rants, code & references: Lego Store!. And the company’s site says there’s one in Burlington, MA. The wall of parts has to be the best aspect of the whole thing, though.

Upon reading about Google’s plans to digitize and make searchable the research libraries of UMich, Stanford, Harvard, the New York Public Library of Oxford (coverage, among other places: The New York Times, Boston Globe, Boing Boing, Joi Ito), I thought about my former coworkers at the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia. I wondered about their not being part of this announcement; the center has been involved for a long time with making public domain works available. In fact, I helped convert some texts to the center’s custom SGML format myself when I worked there ten years ago.

And many of the texts we worked with came from Project Gutenberg, the often discussed and more often ignored project to make out-of-copyright books electronically available to the public domain. I wonder, too, why their name isn’t on the announcement. And why none of the newspaper accounts even mentioned them.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. After all, Gutenberg’s texts are already searchable by Google. But why wouldn’t they hop into this project?

librarian.net : steal my stylesheet. The redoubtable Jessamyn West shows how HTML + CSS can be used to make a pretty decent set of slides for a talk, and releases the stylesheet she uses for this purpose under a Creative Commons license.

There’s definitely something to be said for authoring content in forms that are easily consumed across multiple platforms.

Newsweek: The Alpha Bloggers. When a publication as mainstream as Newsweek runs an article that talks about the influence of the “alpha bloggers” (whom they don’t exhaustively list but who they say (and I agree) include Doc Searls, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, and Dan Gillmor) and they mean technology pundits, not political pundits, you know the press is waking up to the fact that bloggers write about more than the war. Nice to see, and props to Steven Levy for a good article. Too bad it took years for someone in the press to write this story.

Other mentions of the article: Steve Rubel, Donna Wentworth.

Coming in late to Global Voices, one of the tracks for Saturday’s part of the VBB conference. Sitting in the tools session. The backchannel is still active, but is fragmented since (I believe) it’s picking up backchannel from all four simultaneous sessions.

There’s a wiki for the Global Voices track on Hoder’s blog. And a fantastic set of transcripts on The Longest Now.

I actually had to leave the VBB conference just now, but for a good reason—I have a phone interview in half an hour. I should be back for some of tomorrow’s sessions.

In the meantime, look to these folks for conference coverage: Doc Weinberger, Dave, Rebecca, EthanZ, Jeff Jarvis.

A questioner points out that the Republican meetups are used to identify local candidates at the grass roots at least in New York.

Another questioner points out there are existing social institutions for conservatives (e.g. churches)—might that explain skew in MeetUp results?

Jeff jarvis asks Hoder what we should be doing to support international efforts. Hoder replies: localize blogging software! Blogger isn’t available in Chinese or other languages (true?) and this is a problem. Mixed blessing, I think. On the one hand this might mean that more people in these countries might be encouraged to write in English so we non-Chinese-speaking readers might get their perspectives. On the other hand, the ability to do blogs in double-byte characters—let alone what the text on the UI says—was the biggest complaint internally about the various ad hoc solutions available for Microsoft bloggers.

Q: Why are some voting technologies trusted and not others? A: (Pippa)—it’s not necessarily all about trust; there may be other factors.

Good comment about the influence of the campaigns on the liberal skew on Meetup.

Pippa Norris: e-voting. She’s talking about remote voting, not Diebold, thank God. Compare with all-postal voting, which also eliminates polling stations. Advantage: convenience, reach immobiles, reduce costs, streamline administration… (really???) Problems: security, data protection, secrecy, integrity, accuracy, equality, reliability; social barriers including equality of access.

In the UK e-voting was done side by side with postal voting in a controlled experiment. Postal voting showed strong returns, an average of 10% increase; e-voting actually drove some declines, apparently. Young disinclined voters weren’t encouraged to vote by the new technology, but older voters were driven by the availability of postal ballots because the mail is a familiar technology.

So the internet is an enabler of these transactions, but it doesn’t necessarily encourage them. That shouldn’t be new to anyone except die hard technologists. This is an important case study, not just for e-voting buffs but also for anyone who wants to look at technology adoption.

Hoder talks about the influence of the Internet and blogging in Iran being largely social rather than political right now. But the former VP of Iran is a blogger—trilingual. Blogging can also route around media censorship. Interesting discussion—I’m going to have to go back and read his blog to catch up.

Tom Sander on MeetUp: 1. Meetup.com is succeeding in building social ties despite being in unsociable environment. 2. It attracted different users than expected. 3. Political meetups, which are relatively rare would be better if they focused more on social ties, and in the future we may get to the point where they’re not an automatic part of the process but a considered part. Is technology part of the problem or part of the answer to helping individuals build social capital (trust and reciprocity)?

Meetup has grown from 0 to over a million members, driven largely by political meetups (though that segment is now declining). Interesting prospect because expected to attract younger unengaged folks and has low barrier to entry. BUT—not a young person’s phenomenon—young people were represented approximately proportionately. It is attracting highly educated, engaged folks, and not attracting newcomers—and there appears to be a lot of turnover from meetup to meetup. How do you build real social bonds there?

Aside: I think the value of meetups is what happens outside them. Once a month isn’t enough to get anything done anyway—look at the networks that people build, the new blogs they follow.

Doc Weinberger is sitting in front of me, btw, and says he doesn’t know if there will be a backchannel. Anyone know?

Update: asked and answered.

Joho the Blog: [VBB] Votes, Bits and Bytes: Will the Internet Draft the Next President?.

I didn’t make it to last night’s kick-off but Doc Weinberger does a killer job of summarizing the opening panel, with some real eye openers, including Joe Trippi weighing in on the importance of the net allowing people to connect vs. just “message passing”; and his statement that “one party—probably the Democrats—will go the way of the Whigs.”

Charles Ogilvy hits the first note—making sure that we don’t leave society, and the unwired, behind with technology. Are we creating bloggers or lurkers? Are we exposing candidates or constructs? What role does the Internet play in society?

Look at e-voting. Sometimes the pundits get it (i.e. predicting the vote) wrong (Dewey defeats Truman, e.g.). Haste in rushing to judge leads to things like Bush v. Gore, and creates problems for society—such as lack of confidence in state government and the judiciary (see dissenting opinion in Bush v. Gore). What about Dean, and the Internet and the press turning on him after the scream? Venezuela, where pundits miscalled the election of Chavez; this election, with leaked election polls; South Africa; the Ukraine…

And what about the impact of black box voting? Cue the Florida voting machine movie…

I’m here at the Harvard Law School for the Internet and Society 2004 conference. So far it’s “quiet… almost too quiet.” Most participants were shocked to learn that there would be no Internet access provided; I however seem to be able to get on the wireless LAN, probably from being registered at the first BloggerCon.

So far Jeff Jarvis and Dan Gillmor are among those most affected by the outage. It looks like everyone is slowly getting on line, though, somehow.

I got to congratulate Dan on his new gig—he’s leaving the Mercury to work on af citizen journalism venture that’s so new, he says, he doesn’t even know what it’s going to be yet.