blog.mignault.net

“Email is for old people.”

More on the oversimplicity of “Digital Natives” etc. (The Googlization of Everything):

As Henry Jenkins writes, there is so much interesting stuff going one out there among age groups, among members of communities, and across oceans that flattening out everyone into “generations” or “natives” and “immigrants” is just false and useless.

It also has real-world implications. Once we assume that the kids out there love certain forms of interaction and hate others, we forge policies and design systems and devices that meet our presumptions. By doing so, we either pander to some marketing cliche or force an otherwise diverse group of potential users into a one-size-fits-all system that might not meet their needs.

Also see the first comment for the predictable “it is TOO” take on things, replete with the usual ageist assumptions and based mainly on hypotheticals and anecdotal evidence.

Technorati Tags: culture, digitization, geek, libraries

More on the Kindle and privacy

Snoop-friendly Kindle e-reader highlights privacy issues raised by feds’ attempts to get list of p-book buyers | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home:

Just when the Kindle is appearing with its own Trust Us approach—Amazon stores everything for itself and maybe unwittingly for Washington—D.C. comes along to remind us of the risk of Big Bro even without the Kindle. Via an AP story, we learn that federal prosecutors sought “the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc.”

No word on how far they got in the used books. But some other highlights from the post:

Meanwhile Jeff Bezos and friend will be playing do-it-yourself snoops through a TOS specifically authorizing them to poke around your machine to see if you’ve been a good boy or girl. Naughty, naughty, naughty you’ll be if Jeff somehow finds you’ve been bypassing the DRM, and I doubt the punishment will be just a lump of coal. Away could go your Kindle service and book access—just read Amazon’s Terms of Use: “In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees.”

And since that Kindle’s got no other use but reading e-books that you get from Amazon, you then have a brick. An ugly, beige, $400 brick. But wait, there’s more:

Meanwhile here’s another gem from Jeff’s snoop-friendly terms of service: “The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to the content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device). Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make in your Device are backed up through the Service. Information we receive is subject to the Amazon.com Privacy Notice.”

Which privacy policy is then quoted, vague enough that you could easily get sold out to the feds. One thing you can say for the paper book, Amazon can’t turn it off. As much as we might want to get over the pesky inconvenience that privacy poses to the growth of social marketing by denying it exists, there are real and serious consequences to doing so. Relabeling it “identity management” in order to productize it and reduce it to a purely technological problem won’t help either. Just because you might not care who knows what you read doesn’t mean they should find out.

Technorati Tags: amazon, books, ebooks, kindle, libraries, privacy, politics, rss

Quick linkdump

No Tenure for Technorati: Science and the social web

So the problem is that people with common knowledge don’t share it with each other, simply because of social competition (and time constraints, but that’s for another post). It’s not a matter of “web 2.0 technology will trump old ways of sharing stuff” (a statement I tend to believe is true) but a matter of “stuff that doesn’t get shared anyway isn’t likely to get shared simply because the technology exists to share it.”

Put simply, if a scientist isn’t going to say it to her colleagues at a conference, she probably isn’t going to blog it.

What Are Information Resources Good For?

It’s hard to understand what benefit the introduction of information resources has to the Web architecture. It definitely has drawbacks. For a start it forces all non-information resources off of the web entirely – they’re not allowed to respond with 200 status codes to GET requests. It encourages non-information resources to use of URIs containing fragment identifiers which, as I’ve pointed out, are a very broken piece of architecture and are leading to the formation of a sort of shadow web.

100 Notable Books of 2007
No word on which were read halfway through at the beach.

Social metadata

What I Learned Today… » Blog Archive » The Return of Everything is Miscellaneous:

…Weinberger touches on the future of the ebook. He talked about how we could collect data from how people read books, the passages they highlight, where people read books and so much more using wireless enabled ebook readers (p.222) – and while it sounds like science fiction – we’re almost there. Kindle has the power of wireless technology – meaning that in theory, Amazon could connect to our readers and collect data. While this sounds scary and like a huge invasion of privacy – imagine the power that this data could provide. Some examples Weinberger has is that you could create a list of books that people most often read at the beach or a list of books people stopped reading 1/2 way through – how cool would that be?

Well, because the only people I can think of who would find that data valuable would be marketers. So I don’t think it would be that cool. And it is scary and a huge invasion of privacy. When the government starts asking Amazon for tracking data on where you and your Kindle were last Tuesday, you probably won’t think it’s very cool either. Especially if you can’t turn it off.

Technorati Tags: amazon, digitization, kindle, ebooks, writing

A very small Wacom

Colors:

Colors! is a simplistic digital application for Nintendo DS based on modern painting-

techniques developed for drawing tablets in programs like Photoshop. By taking

advantage of the pressure sensitivity of the DS touch-screen it becomes a perfect

portable digital sketch-book.

A reason I might want a DS, though apparently it requires some hacking to get this to run on a DS. I’d been idly thinking about getting one for things like Brain Age and the new “visual training” game Flash Focus. I’m not really a gamer, but Nintendo really seems to know how to get people like me to play their games.

Technorati Tags: nintendo, ds, puppy, puppy

Humane ba-da BUMP

via Albion Cooks:

Why did the tofurkey cross the road?

To prove he wasn’t chicken.

Thank you, thank you verr mush.

Technorati Tags: stupid, vegan, vegetarian

Simulacra of engagement

dot unplanned » The Things Make Us Stupid:

I used to make a distinction between warm and cool voices … engaged vs. detached, involved vs. analytical. But both those entries struck me as entrants in a third category … warm, cool, and now “warmed over.” Compelled to appear engaged, but not. Interested to the extent a quota demands significations of interest at the rate of n per day, but not deeply involved or engaged, except perhaps on the level of knowing someting about a thing that others might not: That thing is popular, that thing is not popular, that thing is selling well, that thing is not selling well. Consumers like it. Observers do not like it.

Go read this right now. Mike’s “significations of interest” directly nails a bunch of what’s wrong with online right now, up to and including how words like “love” and “friend” have been co-opted by online business. When all you have a hammer, everything may seem like a nail; but it turns out to be much more efficient to call screws nails. Fuzzy thinking on my part, but go read the post.

Technorati Tags: blogging, folksonomies

Oh PLEASE, no

Fleen: Your Favorite Faux-Muckrakers Since 2005 » Oh HELL, Yes:

Weirdly, BoaSaS [Boy on a Stick and Slither] used to run in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which would indicate that it’s slowly making its way north from Florida (creator Steven Cloud’s point of origin), past Georgia, and now the Carolinas. Presumably, like other southern invaders, BoaSaS will continue to spread and dominate its environment due to a lack of natural predators. Best to just accept it, and welcome your new webcomics master now.

I don’t get this at all. This is in my daily mix of comics (at least for now) and it rarely rises above lame. Then again, I think it’s significant that the guy who “draws” Diesel Sweeties only gives the characters smirks for facial expressions.

Technorati Tags: comics, webcomics

Yellow jerseys and everything else

Color Blindess and Cycling Visibility:

My preliminary conclusion is that yellow and royal blue work well, whereas red and some shades of bright green don’t work well at all. Royal blue has the additional advantage that it would also stand out against fall leaf colors; yellow would not. However, yellow is generally considered a more highly visible color, and one color-blind cyclist wrote to tell me that bright yellows work better for him than bright blues. Perhaps a contrasting combination of yellow and blue is best, but it would seem that one could be much more confident of yellow than of blue.

I have a yellow rain cape and a yellow helmet cover, so I guess I’m covered in the rain. Most of my other stuff tends to be dark with reflective piping, though.

Technorati Tags: bicycling, commuting, cycling

Tracking the wily changes

I was one of those Mac greybeards (though I lost the Classic fetish, natch; I don’t enjoy spectacular crashes) whose formative word processing time was spent using Microsoft Word 3.1, maybe the best Mac word processor ever made. Mac Word has gone the usual MS application route of feature bloat, making the easy excruciating, and Total World Format Domination (including what appears to be the deliberate trashing of backwards compat in the newest Windows versions; is this actually true?)

So I was an early convert to Nisus Writer, which in its Classic versions offered some heady geek-level features (Perl for macros! Regexp!) but still could just straight-up open up a vein. I’ve followed them over to Express and now Pro, but there is one goddamn feature that’s keeping me from ditching the Big Bankcode Font W for good.

That is Track Changes. I desperately need Track Changes. We collaborate the living hell out of a document here at MPOW, and that means we TRACK CHANGES. To within an inch of a file’s life.

Nisus has been promising this feature, or least acknowledging the lack thereof, for a good couple years now at least, by my reading of their support forums. I’d like to see it move up on their priority list. I don’t want to have to buy YET ANOTHER Mac wp. Mellel didn’t do it for me, NeoOffice does some nice stuff but is heir to the death by a million small cuts that is OpenOffice on the Mac, and I don’t want to spend my sucker early adopter iPhone Apple Store credit for iWork (or is it iHardlyWorking?) Come on, Nisus, move it up.

Technorati Tags: mac, ms office, Nisus, office, word