Blog stream

Published July 2002

I was bogged down writing this story until I came across a piece by Simon Tisdall in the Guardian about linking. I thought it was going to be another of many current stories on the great internet deep linking controversy. Having almost forgotten that there was such a thing as a non-hypertext link, I was almost shocked to read about another form of linking. The linking game described in the article, puts imaginary people together linking concepts and events to arrive at some crazy conclusions. David Eyke (remember the shell suit?) links magnificently when he tells all about the illuminati.

Thinking about linking brought me to thinking about lateral thinking and Edward de Bono. He's top of the de Bono list at google, above U2. His site description says

Edward de Bono is regarded by many as the leading authority in the
world in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking 

He's the daddy of lateral thinking and I think he has a pad on an island in west cork. Which might explain why his website has that ghostly gone away feeling. Back in the heady 90s he was going for it: touting for 5 million members for the Edward de Bono Creative Team - note the trade mark. He also started TOPP, a web-based political party - acronym can mean Tired Of Politics Party we're told. He had lots of specific projects on the go, including Bonto which publishes poems in a creative exercise set by de Bono. Copyright credit for each of the four line poems is Author and the Edward de Bono Creative Team. The team is the sole owner of emails on the TOPP project, which is quite a bizarre archive.

But the poems and the emails stopped in 1999. That's about the time when people started drifting from the party - ecommerce wasn't going according to plan and there was no plan b. The net was getting tacky with email spam and pop up adverts and viruses - and very cluttered. Surfing was harder work for less return and maintaining a site was costly and time-consuming.

The Napster movement kept some of the buzz alive while people shared music files with each other over the internet. The music industry fought back and it's now illegal to share your favourite sounds online. If you want to have a weep, visit the napster site - the day the music died. Be interesting to know where Don McLean stands on Napster.

Napster was silenced but they're finding it harder to stop the individual who flout the law and carry on regardless. So now the record companies are threatening to sue individuals. It seems they're going to hang out in chat rooms and newsgroups to flush these arch terrorists out. Creepy.

Today the bloggers are running with the baton of a free and independent web. In place of music, bloggers share web logs (hence blogs) of links and personal opinions. The logs generate a stream of consciousness flow of dynamic content that races around the web via a rapidly growing network of self-publishers. With the internet going bankrupt, blogging is growing at the speed of light. According to an article in The Economist, a year ago there were about 30,000 people at it, now it's estimated to be 500,000. I did the sums and they support the claim of a growth rate nearing 25% a month. Scary numbers.

Bloggers are re-inventing the web which was (maybe still is) on the brink of collapse. A vast body of knowledgable, articulate writers is creating and distributing a new channel of free dynamic content. Let's call this content the blog stream where stories flow as well as gossip, rumours, tech talk, medical talk, you name it. One recurring theme is about why we blog. Everybody describes it as addictive. Blogging is doing for the art of writing what the Harry Potter books did for the art of reading - reawakening people's delight in airing their views.

Every minute of the day, 24/7, hundreds, maybe thousands of writers are scouring the web for content and streaming it onwards, driving readers to stories through hypertext links. News sites gain traffic, but with advertising sales down, traffic doesn't translate into cash.

Big news sites are expensive to run and money is as tight there as elsewhere. Venture capital is gone, share issues are meaningless and nobody's buying advertising. The print trade has always been an economic litmus test. When times are tough printers are the first to go out of business. That being the case, those news sites that are online arms of paper publishers are under additional pressure, because sales are down across the media board.

News sites must increase revenue and they are trying different approaches. The Financial Times offers readers a mix of free and subscription material but all stories for the past week are open to all. Other newspapers require you to register and supply personal details before providing you with free access to information. This process can be adapted to gather payment information if the publisher opts to become a subscription only service. In most cases the switch to subscription brings about a sharp decrease in readership, with a limited increase in revenue, but less appeal to advertisers if they ever come back.

It goes against the grain for a publisher to turn away readers - reaching readers is their spiritual mission in life. Lose readers they will for sure, if the Danish Newspaper Association acts on its right to ban a search engine from deep linking to stories on its website. The publishing world watched last week while they took their case to the Danish courts, and won. Presumably, they intend to act on the verdict and force the search engine to point links to all pages on the site to the address of the top page. Just maybe, the search engine will prefer to remove all links, period. Either way, I guess there�ll be a lot less people reading their stories.

Continuing with the process of erasing their website, will the Danish group next turn their attention to bloggers. Like the record company police prowling in chat rooms, will Danish journalists be found lurking in the blog stream, pouncing on these dangerous criminals. So people will stop linking to them and, sooner or later, the job is done, the website is wiped from the web. Somewhere or other there's a server storing their content but it has no traffic because nobody knows they are there, or cares.

Hypertext links are the web, the core of HyperText Markup Language. A site that bans deep linking is defying the nature of HTML. At dotblog Richard Giles is running a list of sites to boycott because they are anti-deep linking. Dave Winer on Scripting News thinks it's an oxymoron to oppose deep links and is disgusted by the whole affair. He's also been blogging the Janice Ian story that's hitting the headlines. Here is Janice Ian's ripping attack on the music industry. After you read it, sign her guest book in support. I did and got a personal email in response. Now that's good marketing. I've never had an album of hers but now we're on personal terms maybe I'd like to know how she sounds.

Janis Ian isn't running a blog yet but she's ideal for it � I shall suggest it. Her opinions would be appreciated on the blog stream, where there's a strong music undercurrent. Adam Currie, a founder of MTV, runs a very active blog with a lot of music talk. Today Adam is plugging the Northsea Jazz Festival. He's prolific - probably comes from being a DJ.

Blogs are as much about reading as writing, and bloggers become increasingly well informed. I have no great interest in Microsoft's plans for the future � I resigned myself to their inevitable control some time ago - but the blogs are full of stories about Palladium. As a result, I know a lot more about it and have developed an opinion on the matter. And on the Palladium trail I discovered more interesting bloggers to get to know.

Can you remember how you communicated before email? Not only did you do less of it but you did it in a different, more formal, way. In a few years time you'll be asking yourself how you communicated before blogging and you'll find yourself to be better informed and more articulate.

Up and airborne

Published August 1996

Setting up a web site for the arts in rural Ireland

No matter how organised, imaginative and idealistic you may be, it seems there are always stumbling blocks to realising the simplest of dreams. There is a curious mentality which gets the grants, convinces the money folk, persuades the backers - this does not describe me, unfortunately. An inherited snobbery, perhaps, causes me to distance myself from the tedious demands of form-filling and small-minded, cautious penny pinchers. What masterpieces would Da Vinci have produced if he had spent his days producing business proposals? James Joyce's "Ulysses" would hardly have seen the light of day if the author had been constrained by feasibility studies. While I may not aspire to these levels of excellence, I subscribe to the view that creative endeavour has an intrinsic value that often suffers from too close an eye to the market economy.

As a returned immigrant, I chose to live in rural County Cork, relying on considerable experience of the ways and means of publishing, and the potential for remote working presented by modern technology. That was my first mistake. Technology there may be - getting your hands on it is another matter, and making it work for you is yet another hurdle.

Despite the fact that the warehouses of the world are full of mouldering Apple Macintosh computers, a seeming conspiracy prevails against the small purchaser. On my first shopping spree I went, armed with necessary financial arrangements, to a dealer or, in the euphemistic language of Mac world, an Authorised Apple Reseller.

Delivery took a couple of weeks, even though Cork is the European assembly centre for Macintosh computers. I tried to load lots of goodies from floppy disks - the disk drive didn't work! Many phone calls and a couple of afternoon long trips to the reseller, found me with a replacement computer.

Paper publishing was the game and I began to tout for business. Very soon the shoe string budget had to stretch to a fax/modem, as the nearest accessible fax machine was some miles away. These things cost a lot more here than in the USA - a 14,400 model costing me over $500. I was delighted with the immediacy of communication, despite the fact that most fax machines I was dealing with seemed to be of the hand-cranked variety.

Electricity supply in Ireland is in the hands of a monopoly, whose high-quality engineers are regularly on contract outside the country, while local supply is left in the hands of an ageing and top-heavy management. We have a notoriously dirty power supply, a situation exacerbated in rural areas by sharing lines with large farms, with regular drops and surges at milking times. A few weeks after the fax/modem arrived, down it went in a power surge, Act of God (what a helpful guy!) and we're back where we started.

Thanks to a Taurean streak of stubborness, I persisted in the face of this setback and things progressed on a one step forward, two steps backwards pace. The first major project was a fortnightly, tabloid newspaper that carried arts, literature, technology, environment and entertainment features, and comprehensive listings of music and other events.

Distributed free we developed great reader loyalty, but advertisers, our sole source of income, were slow to depart from safe (some might say boring) media. We poured every penny and ounce of energy into the project for almost a year and a half, always with the carrot of acceptance by advertisers just around the corner. The money got tighter, the advertisers remained, largely, intransigent, so we abandoned the exercise and turned our attention to the world wide web.

In the meantime, due to a small smile of fortune in the guise of a modest legacy, I upgraded equipment, adding a power macintosh, 600dpi printer a scanner to the hardware spec. The Authorised Apple Reseller couldn't arrange print samples, despite regular reminders, over a three month period. I approached an unauthorised wheeler dealer, who promised the earth and delivered computer minus ram upgrade, a hard disk weighed down with unsolicited games, extensions and unwanted clutter, corrupt scanner software and a delay on the printer. Various hiccups but the Taurean streak came to my aid again, and we got operational.

Hooking up to a service provider was easy, getting what you want from them is another story! There is fierce competition among service providers in Ireland at present and I opted for a company that offered free service until the end of the year for the payment of a small set-up fee. Enter my partner, Kevin, who had entered the world of publishing with little experience but great enthusiasm. Having mastered the niceties of cut and paste artwork and preparing photographs for the smudgy, murky world of cheap printing techniques, he was finally realising his dream of dragging us into the 1990s and a global medium. He had a little programming experience and took to the keyboard to self-learn HTML

In the meantime my education was more concerned with unlearning all of the wonderful capabilities and typographical refinements of Quark Xpress, returning to the far cruder capabilities afforded by HTML. We browsed, downloaded guides and tutorials, bookmarked, sent some email and prepared for lift off.

The few web sites based locally had virtually closed the door to advertising revenue - a curious misapprehension prevails that to advertise on the web is a one off exercise - matters such as reach, penetration and relevance haven't emerged yet. The content of these sites focused on selling Cork as a tourism destination, portraying a conventional image of 'leprechaun' Ireland.

We designed a format based on the LIST, our abandoned newspaper, focusing on the cultural wave that is surging through Ireland at present, but not ignoring some of the more obvious barriers to our emerging 'Age of Enlightenment'. Rather than seeking to fund our site through advertising, we looked to direct marketing of quality goods that are being produced in the area.

In the midst of a cultural renaissance, every bush and hill hides a creative talent, beavering away at making things, doing things. Many of these artists, writers and musicians produce extremely desirable material, but the local economy cannot sustain them. Most cannot afford to market themselves beyond the locality, where their unique vision and output is more likely to find a market. The internet is a cheap medium and we embarked on a plan to offer free access to suppliers, working on a commission basis on orders received.

A simple idea, works well for everyone, you say. Not so. More hurdles. The international banking community is no great lover of innovation, and credit card suppliers here are cautious about entering into financial agreements with us when we aren't putting major investment into stock. While home shopping may be a young child in North America, it hasn't even reached the stage of infancy here.

An Irish solution to an Irish problem emerged (i.e. work around things rather than taking them on), and we are now negotiating Associate Gallery and Store Membership for outlets with existing mail order facilities. It may not be the ideal solution - the works of the small craftworker or the self-published author can only be paid for by cheque - but it will get us up and running and, who knows, with a trading track record, the financial institutions may be more considerate to our proposals.

We prepared some test material and contacted our service provider to arrange FTP access. Despite three phone calls over a period of two weeks, when we came to launch time, the server didn't recognise us. Why? Because the webteam, who don't work on weekends, hadn't made the necessary arrangements. Spending an entire weekend on the phone to technical support, who were frequently one page ahead of us in the manual, we got our access and up we went. With a most peculiar URL address, and the discovery that two servers were in operation and we were being shunted over to the 'B server'.

This couldn't be rectified until the webteam came in on Monday. Transfer to the 'A server', which allows easier accessibility, required payment of regular fees - so much for a free service - so the cheque was paid and the order form faxed with instructions to complete necessary transfer arrangements prior to the weekend. You'll never guess, come Saturday, what do we find? The web team has gone home and the arrangements haven't been made. Here we are on Tuesday, our access is now arranged, but we can't afford to launch the site proper until the weekend.

The final, and least surmountable hurdle, is telecom charges. Living in the land of free local calls, and fast, efficient telephone lines, the scenario that exists here is, perhaps, unimaginable. Because Ireland upgraded its telecommunications so late our technology is world class, our engineers are among the best in the world. But the telecom providers are another monopoly, although European legislation is set to change this in the next few years. Like the electricity providers, the management hasn't moved forward, still operating on the basis of turning the handle, picking up the headset and waiting for the operator to answer.

Although I am less than 5 miles from Cork City local zone, I pay trunk rates to call there. Off peak charges, on weekdays, see me paying almost 10 times as much to call my service provider as people living in Cork. A cybercafe in Cork can offer commercial access to the internet cheaper than I can receive it. Only at weekends do rates fall sufficiently to allow me to go online for longer than the momentary sprints I make to collect and post email.

I contacted Telecom to see if I could negotiate reductions - it took three days to get a number for customer relations and I may as well not have bothered. Billing analyses have encouraged various employees to sympathise with my situation, recognising the anomalies, but not offering any resolution.

I emailed every politician I could find online - most of my post was returned, undelivered, something about sites being upgraded! The one response I got was from a member of the Green Party who sympathised but, basically, it's none of his business. We are due a general election here next year and I am now pinning my hopes on it becoming a platform issue - a long shot but the best I can hope for. In the meantime there are reports of frightening population shifts of businesses moving back into overcrowded cities in an effort to overcome the commercial imbalance created by telecom charges.

In the light of the bumps and ruts on the road to the superhighway, it is sometimes all too easy to lose sight of the goal. The buzz of getting pages up first day, only to realise that few, if any, would ever find them. The buckets of stories, information, ideas just waiting to be aired, only to find online time bogged down with server inadequacy. If we can survive long enough to streamline and overcome the difficulties it will be such fun and so rewarding to carry discussion of how we live, and why, to an infinite forum.

The most real concerns of people, the issues of quality of life, are global as much as parochial, and I believe we can all learn from other communities. The World Wide Web has the potential to empower and transform the lives of the meek, the humble, the disenfranchised and we will persist in our efforts to participate in that transformation.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - August 5, 1996.

Pushing the limits ... of our credibility

Published June 1997

Push Technology, Free Speech, and the World Wide Web

Big money and big resources are being devoted to the development of server push. If you have managed to avoid the countless column inches devoted to it, server push is the means whereby information gatherers push content out to subscribers, rather than waiting for them to visit. A number of large newscasters are interested in the concept which dominates development discussion at major trade shows.

Lazy Man's Load

The push concept appeals to the busy executive, who wants up-to-date information but can't spare the browsing time to seek it out. S/he can visit a large push site, such as the Pointcast service, and subscribe to have various categories of information delivered directly to the client computer. The service has its attractions but is of limited value to users who aren't online all the time, and subscribers often report dissatisfaction with the level of useless information that travels in with key items. Like the lazy man's load, information overload can be the result of this bid to cut on browsing time.

Pushing Push

Given the hype, it is reasonable to assume that there is strong vested interest in pushing push. The technology to deliver the service is not cheap -- estimates put it as high as half a million dollars - so there must be significant promise to entice developers. Pushers can offer guarantees on circulation and usage statistics. This in turn makes their services attractive to advertisers and content generators, who will pay willingly to be carried by the service. There is also a potential market for paid subscription to push services, particularly in specialist categories. So, for commercial information providers push offers a pathway to guaranteed circulation which has, until now, been lacking on the internet. This is what the marketing wizards and the admen want - to revert to what some might regard as outmoded marketing classifications. (That is another story and another day's work).

Of, perhaps, greater concern is the appeal of push to the media moghuls. Until now, the real delight of the internet for many has been its freedom and equality. A guy with a story in Small Town, Nowheresville, armed with the basics of html, had as direct an access route to readers as Mr. Big Editor from the Global Planet Controller. The increasingly homogenous face and voice of international media was pleasantly disturbed with the onset of online communications. Now cheque book journalism has within its grasp the potential for controlling content in yet another media frontier. Whence free speech and politically unpopular opinion. Are push services poised to present another face of mainstream media, while the remainder of the web is sidelined as a limited interest alternative, with low readership and revenues? Or will we be optimistic like James Gleick, and assume that the spirit of independence that underlies the internet will overcome and bear fruit?

Side by side with push push is shove shove, with the proliferation of dynamic news pages on many smaller sites (such as my own!). This simple, cost-effective method of news publishing offers a small voice response to the roar of the giant pushers. But here, also, there are inherent dangers. I recently was drawn to a small news site which offers a ticker tape news service, nicely presented with quite a lot of up-to-date information. But one of its sources was pulled in from another site, also offering ticker tape journalism. There is a danger that we will lose sight of the source of information, in an increasingly complex route from publisher to reader.

Somebody once told me that the consummate liar cloaks his lies in a vast armature of truths. The more complex the route the information takes, the less likely it is that we will identify its source. And we know what happens with gossip, rumours and hearsay.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - June 9, 1997.

The worldwide classroom

Published August 1997

We should be ensuring that our educational system takes full advantage of the learning potential of the new technologies

Whither education on the superhighway? The internet is a huge information resource, an infinite pool for learning, but is it being welcomed into educational institutions? I fear that, in Ireland, where there is no stated government policy on adoption of internet technologies in schools, that progress is being made in a sadly piecemeal fashion. Developments are subject to the whims and vagaries of commercial sponsorship and individual teacher enthusiasm.

This is a sorry state of affairs, where no central leadership is being given to educational establishments whose members are frequently confused and bemused in the face of rapid change. We pride ourselves on the quality of our educational system, and often hark back to our traditional self-image of the island of saints and scholars. Yet many of our educators have never sat at a computer terminal or manipulated a mouse, let alone explored the global learning resource at the end of a modem. Like many key figures in our community, too many educators are being allowed to hide their ignorance of the medium behind luddite expressions of distaste or indifference. Meanwhile the "online" world races into the next millennium with a different vision of the future, laying the foundations for new and deep social divisions.

Education is the key to the future, is the future. If we are to believe any of our own platitudes about making the world a better place for children, we should be ensuring that our educational system takes full advantage of the learning potential of the new technologies. While preparing an introductory seminar on the internet for teachers I researched a number of educational web sites. Some were exciting, some were not, but most were built for educators, not for learners.

This, perhaps, is the crux of the matter. While the world wide web is a welcome forum for educators to explore questions of policy, direction and philosophy, education has more to gain from the medium than academic discourse. The internet, in its very essence as a global information resource, is an educational tool. Its true pedagogic worth is in its ability to lead learners out from narrow physical confines, to traverse new and ever-branching paths to knowledge - true distance learning.

In the '70s a great debate raged in education on whether or not to stream. It was argued that children in low streams were discriminated against in terms of quality of teachers and facilities, and that it encouraged labelling and poor self-image. In favour of streaming were many teachers who found it difficult to raise the level of learning beyond that within the grasp of slower learners - the principle of the lowest common denominator. Related issues such as class sizes, better facilities and a review of the examination system were largely ignored - these were the given circumstances, the unchanging picture of the educational establishment. Reformers often address symptoms, not causes.

What harm - streaming may become a non-issue. In the classroom of the future, children of mixed abilities, and with varied interests will benefit from a more fluid type of learning. New technologies will liberate students to explore what inspires them, at their own pace, and teachers will be freer to spend time with students who need individual attention. There is limitless scope for collaborative, interdisciplinary projects in the worldwide classroom, fostering cultural links, team abilities and eclecticism. We learn with our children - parents know this intimately, some teachers do. The internet is a hub for life-long learning, less like going to the library, more like a window shopping trip to a shopping mall - where you can find designer info, cheap tack, plastic relaxation areas, green zones . . . the whole panoply of life - we need never be bored at school again.

In some societies the classroom of the future is very close, and many innovative Irish schools are on the road (there's even a planetarium at the community college near the remote Mizen Head). The Irish are adept communicators with a vast, dispersed community - we have lots of friends in the world to meet and greet. Our children are poised to become pioneers on an endless trail of friendship and knowledge, they should fly with our blessings.

Published in Essays from Ireland in In Motion Magazine - August 27, 1997.

Outspacing MySpace

In a world where every two-bit geek plans global domination by outspacing MySpace, you have to wonder how many social networks does the world need. Remember when venture capital poured good money after bad into a bottomless pit of portals. Are we witnessing another bubble in the making or do social networks have some staying power?

On GigaOM, Robert Young writes "For social networks, 2007 is about money" and continues to use the dastardly 'monetization' word not once, but three times! Let's forgive him because, this abomination aside, he makes some interesting points. The main problem is that it's really cheap to advertise on these sites - which is fine if you are MySpace with millions and millions of page views but not so good if you are a network of mummers and morris dancers with a handful of loyal fans. And it seems that social networkers don't like ads which results in a poor responses. All in all, a pretty grim prospect on the revenue front.

But there's hope lurking in the very nature of social networks - at their core they are about people, not about products. Young proposes that brand communication must include these people, use them to amplify and extend messaging - "So just don’t advertise at them, advertise with and through them." As the social network space gets cluttered and crowded, more niche networks are emerging which can provide attractive brand channels for advertisers. If social networks get the business model right, this emerging medium will take the web to new reaches.

The early web had a top down approach to content because:

• With the possible exception of karaoke, the concept of a self-expressive medium was unknown.
• Tools were crude.
• Users lacked skills and expectations.

Self-expression got an early start in chat rooms but unless you invested some time and money in HTML skills and tools, you couldn't do much more than chat. It wasn't until blogs came along that the real fun began and internet users became an unstoppable force. Despite the worst excesses of SPAM blogs and the most saccharine sins of corporate blogs, the blogosphere holds its own as a medium for individual self-expression. As the tools have matured, so have the bloggers - to a point where they are the first place we go for breaking news and opinions, and where corporate PR campaigns ignore them at their peril.

Now tech-savvy users with fat broadband connections can express like never before to communities of people with similar interests. It's early days yet and lots of the content and network concepts clearly reflect this, but as long as there is a chance that YouTube hides the next Stephen Spielberg, social networks will engage and absorb us.


Wikipedia has a list of "significant" social networking sites that includes some 90 sites.