Weis Words

The North Carolina Senate is debating a bill that will prohibit cities and counties from establishing municipal broadband services. It has, lamentably, already passed the House, which does not bode well for broadband customers in the Tar Heel State. Major ISPs tend to neglect rural areas, as the customer base is not profitable enough to lay in the infrastructure for broadband access. When this happens, what else is a town to do but sit in the dark? Moreover, consumer choice is often a Hobson’s choice in the areas which free-market advocates claim have multiple ISPs, as DSL is quirky in where links can be made. Being out of range of a DSLAM will leave you with only the cable company to choose. James Boyle and Paul Jones were on the State of Things podcast to talk about Net Neutrality, but a quote from Boyle best summarizes the shortcomings of a free market in a practical monopoly, as Internet access is currently structured.

…the idea of [the government] just enforcing contracts is also enforcing oligopolistic or monopolistic contracts. It’s enforcing restrictions that … undermine. Normally I agree with Mr. Radia, I want the market to just work and have the government to interfere as minimally as necessary. Where do we not find that? Where we have monopoly or near-monopoly, where we have natural monopolies, or where consumers don’t even know what they’re not getting.

Chapel Hill has already voiced its opposition to the bill, especially after it was in the running for Google broadband last year. This measure will not promote business; it will promote racketeering.

These are tumultuous times for technology policy, between web sites adding transparency to government and web sites making policy
more populist. The aforementioned web sites, WikiLeaks and YouCut, are two sides of the same coin. Much has been made about WikiLeaks, which publicizes classified and secret documents from governments and businesses around the globe, so I will focus more on YouCut. YouCut is a Republican Party web site that allows visitors to vote on whether federal funding for programs should be slashed. Unfortunately, the matter of which programs are put on the chopping block is not put to a vote.

The first citizen’s review will be the National Science Foundation, and this particular choice gives me mixed feelings. I am sure that waste does occur with NSF grants, but I am not comfortable with the idea that lay site visitors will be able to make an informed decision just because a grant proposal isn’t sexy enough, or the research’s practicality is questionable. Once things are out of the lab, inventions take a mind of their own, anyway. Just look at the Slinky, Auto-Tune, and Post-its for products that take a completely different direction from the researchers’ intentions. For this particular instance, maybe crowdsourcing is not the best way to approach tightening the NSF’s belt.

For some ways in which community involvement can be successfully marshalled in a civic planning sense, take a look at this video where designer Emily Pilloton partners with a local public high school in Bertie County, North Carolina to implement a project-based curriculum to revitalize the town’s economy. There is also Betaville, which functions as a digital charette. This software can be used to revamp the ghost of a downtown many areas have by showing what the populace may find suitable to have in a given location. There is the matter of a digital divide, though, so Betaville may be a better idea than real-world urban planning tool.

The UNC football team is no longer letting players put their tar-covered feet in their mouths, but will the players merely look for loopholes in bans on social network sites (SNS). Twitter is off-limits, but can they use FriendFeed, Buzz, diaspora? What happens if one of the players sets up a Drupal site with the SNS features enabled? It has become a significant enough issue that it forms a Homecoming candidate’s platform, and a pillar of the MAKN at Duke I mentioned in my last post. It’s certainly been an about-face from when I last wrote about the athletics department’s approach to social media.

Then again, you don’t have to be the one to post the footage to gain notoriety. Tyler Hansbrough learned this with his infamous stunt a few years back.

And of course, the situation with SNS pales in comparison to the scandal at Duke caused by a viral PowerPoint presentation. I also can’t discern why this situation is so different from another Dookie’s tell-all.

It just goes to show, the millennial generation is feeling out norms with SNS just as much as everyone else.

I recently enrolled in a reading course on digital humanities, so I’m primed to pick up on articles pertaining to the emerging discipline. First Monday put out an article from Oya Rieger, who succinctly sums up the differences of interpretation in what exactly constitutes “digital humanities.” Is it the use of digital media to help scholarly communication, or is it the application of humanities methods to digital culture, or is it the construction and criticism of born-digital artifacts? Should a separate term exist for each of these approaches, or is the tent big enough to encompass all three?

At any rate, Duke University has proposed a new graduate program in the MA in Knowledge and Networks, and I like the program’s approach in updating both pedagogical methods and materials, especially in a time when the return on investment of higher education is being called into doubt, especially in the humanities. Also, when universities are continuing to shunt their courses online or convert them into OpenCourseWare, the value proposition of attending a school continues to decrease. The MAKN is a step in the right direction for revamping curricula, increasing departmental collaboration, and preparing a workforce adaptable enough for the challenges and changes that social media represent in humanities and businesses.

A couple of features stick out for me, among which:

• Students are required to contribute to a larger knowledge base, tagging and uploading information about projects, speakers, and other events related to MAKN to the program’s webspace.
• Entering students have to step out of their comfort zones. Arts-oriented students need to beef up their technical skills, while techies have to become better poetry writers, philosophers, or historians. If anything, this alone can help a resume pop.
• Its community-based resident practicum teams up students with organizations to help adapt social media to the organization’s mission. Practical experience is a plus, and it encourages students to consider whether social media is appropriate, and if so, which ones best suit the organization.
• Finally, students produce a digital team project instead of a master’s paper. This better reflects work “in the real world” than a thesis. While the paper demonstrates expertise, the project shows the expertise put to use.

Pretty intriguing stuff, Dookies. Perhaps after settling our differences in court (the basketball court), you can come visit our CHAT Festival.

Netvibes’ Universal Widget API allows developers to compose a single, simple widget

Dev.Netvibes.com

Some things to note

1. You cannot reference external JavaScripts; the client-side processing needs to be done in the simple XHTML page that the widget consists of.
2. How to test it standalone

The Harrisburg University of Science and Technology made a splash in the news a few weeks ago when it implemented a blackout of social networking sites in its campus network. I think it’s more of a publicity ploy than an effort to induce reflection about how students are using such technologies. Just look at research by Nicole Ellison, danah boyd, or Fred Stutzman to see what college kids and adolescents are really up to on SNS.

Luis Suarez showed up on a recent episode of net@night to talk about his efforts to reduce e-mail’s role in his communication routines. Instead, he opts for IBM’s collaboration tools and articulates what he intends to use e-mail for: confidential conversations and scheduling meetings. So did Harrisburg UST shunt conversations better suited for social networking sites into hapless students’ inboxes?

A smack of student group webmasters met to discuss how to possibly consolidate their events calendars, and the role of the SILS-students’ listserv in publicizing events, soliciting help, selling textbooks, and myriad other uses. Suarez argues that there are better tools for carrying out such conversations, transacting such transactions, and archiving the knowledge that results from the listserv scuttlebutt. There was an aborted attempt at a SILS wiki, but its obscure location made it obsolete from the get-go. Moreover, I think that the editing interface of a wiki is clunkier than, say, a bulletin board system. I would like fewer inbox interruptions, so hopefully we could implement some phpbb forum or other, and soon.

Circling back to the Harrisburg experiment, what I learned from Suarez is that we have to revise the norms of using a particular technology socially, not necessarily technologically. If it comes to that, I’d prefer to start such a movement at the individual level, using something like anti-social. Better yet, I’d prefer not to cut out options.

I don’t think Google Wave got a fair shake. That’s all I’m saying.

This post is a repository of useful links about the Google BigTable database structure.

• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data:The paper
• BigTable: A Distributed Structured Storage System: A video from University of Washington
• Google BigTable: A Slideshare Presentation
• Understanding HBase and BigTable:Useful blog post that breaks down the process

Digg rolled out version 4.0, and, as with any new site design, there will be pushback, but it’s gotten particularly vitriolic in digg’s case. Some of the ire comes from the many “broken wagon wheels” that going public will uncover in a very popular site, like the overzealous vulgarity filter the post title alludes to, but something fundamental about the site seems to have been lost since the redesign.

Kevin Rose notes the changes on episode 263 of This Week in Tech (about 55 minutes in), the two most apparent being the death of the bury button and the emphasis on friends’ social curation, similar to looking at specific tags of a specific user on delicious. Kevin notes these similarities in functionality, as well as Reddit’s similarity to (the older version, at least) of digg. He thinks the tent is big enough for all of these sites to flourish, but he may not have taken into account what happens to sites that have heavy-handedly tried to dictate the culture of the site.

Twigger -- I mean digg

I have been underwhelmed by the new digg, especially with the front page content. On the other hand, I was more of a lurker, not friending anyone and not commenting. Perhaps the more gregarious and vocal diggers benefited more from the redesign. At any rate, I already had delicious to provide the functionality that Kevin is pushing digg toward.

A little over a week ago I wrote about my adventures with the nookfeed service, which offers an interface for RSS reading specifically designed for the nook. The limitation to this is that for best results I had to do some hacking with Yahoo Pipes to display the printer-friendly versions of the articles, and many sites do not provide an easy way to do this.

The site instapaper.com, however, has mitigated a lot of this problem. By way of a Twitter contact, I found out about Longform.org, which promotes interesting articles that are better suited for in-depth reading than the short skimming that our eyes are accustomed to when reading the Web. Longform’s “About” page referenced a service called Instapaper, which also serves as a forum of long-form articles, but with the capability of creating one’s own RSS feed of things to read. The synergy is perfect with nookfeed, although I also have the option of exporting it in Kindle or ePub format. It has a convenient little bookmarklet that sends what you wish to your instapaper feed, and it features a good little API for anyone who feels like cURLing.

Kudos to @alexwmerritt

Dr. Julian Warner gave a talk about the implications of Feist v. Rural twenty years after its ruling. Specifically, he semantically broke down what constitutes “a modicum of creativity” and, concerning compilations, the phrase “that the selection and arrangement of facts cannot be so mechanical or routine as to require no creativity whatsoever.”

The trouble is, what does something “mechanical or routine” mean in the 21st century? Warner noted that technology follows a path where something eventually becomes routine, so something like search engine results listings would probably have a hard time being copyrighted now. This example could blur the line, however, if we were comparing human-curated results against machine-processed results. Appropriately, I found two comic artists’ takes on the intellectual property implications of RSS scraping and aggregation.

Courtesy of XKCD

Scott Adams cheers on the aggregator Newser, whose human-moderated stories give him a euphoric boost every time he visits. Adams calls it “your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing.”

Kris Straub, meanwhile, points out some of the ethical concerns that site scrapers raise. Straub admits that most of the time, the developers are well-meaning, trying to extend some functionality of an existing site (I’m guilty of this on a couple of counts myself). However, Straub’s main issues against it are that they undermine the cohesive whole of the site, especially the commercial support the artist may rely on. Scrapers also are redundant when a site already provides RSS feeds, feeds which have content that the site owner has already vetted and approved for distribution. Finally, the scraper is almost never run by the site owner, instead being brought to their attention second or third-hand. A few weeks ago, the podcast This Week in Law discussed the Pulse iPad app and the implicit licensing issues of RSS feeds.

I think that content creators and content remixers need to have a better relationship. Creators should welcome the increased popularity that a suitable mashup may provide, perhaps explicitly licensing what can be done to a site and its feeds. Remixers should respect content creators’ licensing, and ask permission before undertaking a project, or at least launching it publicly.