infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

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Comparing the iPod to Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader, Nick Carr argues “The market for digital music players existed in 2001 because the content for the players – the digitally compressed music file – was already ubiquitous,” while “There is no big, readymade supply of content for the Kindle.” Leaving aside Web pages, I would have a use for a standalone device for reading PDFs. I’m reading more PDFs as the years go by; journal articles for grad school, technical manuals, and government documents are frequently packaged as PDFs, and it would be nice to have a separate device to read them without printing them on paper. Carr is right when he points out that Amazon charges a fee to convert PDFs to a Kindle-compatible format, which limits the appeal of the device.

His iPod comparison seems a bit strained since he bases it on an issue of content, but I think the stronger comparison is to the content business models. The iPod would play regular mp3s, but Kindle does not “play” regular PDFs or Web documents. I would be very interested in a Kindle if it were a PDF-display device, but a few other things leave me turned off.

• The price tag is too high. I might pay $200 for such a device, but twice that is too much.
• I can’t touch it. Amazon doesn’t have any retail outlets – at least near me – and I would want a sense of the fit-and-feel of the device before I slice off a chunk of my paycheck. Since one of the prime features is its e-ink display, Amazon is also losing an ability to sell because customers can see the cool new display technology.
• It’s also kind of ugly.

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Jon Gruber has an insightful post on default blog templates, and how they can undermine the branding work that goes on on blogs. He and Joe Trotter complain that default templates often look too standard, making it difficult to convey a sense of uniqueness. Gruber raises some important points disentangling the design of software like WordPress and Movable Type for the design of the presentation (i.e. the template.)

I’d add two things to this conversation comparing WordPress and Movable Type. First, WordPress’ templates (or “themes”) are very difficult to edit. Before someone jumps on me and insults my skills, I mean that the templates require too much literacy and investment for your average blogger, someone who’s made a Web page and may be wrapping her head around CSS. WordPress is very modular, so users need to hack up multiple PHP files, plus a stylesheet to make a substantial change. I haven’t used Movable Type in over a year, but the platform had relatively straightforward template files, and platform-specific tags, which didn’t require the user to parse PHP.

Secondly, the themes available for WordPress almost always use brittle CSS. They’re designed by people who want pixel-control over presentation, they often have weird leading and spacing issues. These themes look great “out of the box,” but if a user tries to tweak the typography or images, she often winds up dealing with broken presentation that requires more mucking about with CSS.

It’s no wonder so many WordPress blogs look like Kubrick or Hemingway with the colors and banner images changed. The templates are just too hard to edit. I’ve looked for a loose “wireframe” theme for WordPress to no avail. When I started banging on this theme, I thought I would create a theme, I could publish as a resource for other bloggers who want to get to know WordPress’ theme structure and be more creative with the platform, but I still haven’t found the time. I’m surprised I’ve found the time to write this.

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Twitter is a social Web app that encourages users to post status messages in real-time. In addition to posting through a Web interface, users can tell Twitter what they’re up to via SMS or through Jabber and IM chatbots. I often use LiveJournal’s Jabberbot to post to my Journal, because it allows quick postings of passing thoughts, so Jabber’s chat interface was an obvious draw for me. Unlike LiveJournal, users only respond to the question “What are you doing?”, which reminds me of an atypically funny Budweiser ad from a few years back. Like Adam, I think it would be nice if there were a way to propagate responses to instant-messaging accounts. Twitter generates RSS feeds; how hard would it be for Adium to scrape an RSS feed for setting user status?

I joined Twitter in November after the tool was used to embarrass Michael Arrington during a panel, but it only seems have hit critical mass in the last month or so. A few weeks ago, my usual crew of Austin-based blogger joined at once, and what was once a soliloquy became a conversation. After a woman in labor shared her status on Twitter this week., I was sure the service was snowballing. Right now, the site is running very slowly, which only confirms my suspicion.

Twitter leads users to use language interesting ways. Although you can just post a standard status message like “out to lunch,” the design of the aggregated pages encourages you to write about yourself in the third person, in complete sentences. I think each post used to include the word “is,” so every post started like “McChris is.” The presence of “is” sort of forced users to use language in specific ways, starting posts with either a participle (”McChris is going home”) or a location (”McChris is at TIPI”). Even without the “is,” I find myself straining to make grammatical sense with the current design.

Twitter has also had me thinking about speech-act theory, although mostly what I’ve been thinking is “I wish I knew more about speech-act theory.” I’ve been doing a lot of “thinking,” “explaining,” and “wondering” on Twitter, and my sense is that others are as well. I’m sure that the use of speech acts in this way is not new to Twitter; I was never a MOO user, but from what I know of MOOs, it seemed like they relied on speech-acts for their communication. Does anyone know of studies that have applied speech-act theory to MOOs or other online spaces? Sandy Stone is the obvious person to ask about this perhaps I’ll pose the question when I see her next. Still, speech-act theory could provide a useful analytical framework for understanding some Web 2.0 sites and CSCW applications.

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Network World has a story on the Blogger problems I discussed in my earlier post. I was perhaps a little too hasty in saying that no one else is complaining about Blogger’s problems, but I have been swamped the past few weeks, and clearing out my RSS reader is a low priority. However, this story was posted this morning, so I’m not that behind the curve.

The story says “Google says that most bugs are isolated incidents affecting relatively few people at a time and that Blogger’s stability will improve as the migration to the new platform progresses.” I know the reporter is only relaying the information he’s getting from Google, but this is pure BS. If I had one or two students out of forty bumping into these issues, I would nod my head and understand. but I have a dozen students who can’t access, let alone post to their blogs. This is a pretty widespread problem.

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Both of my readers probably know that Google’s Blogger service came out of beta in December, but, from my perspective, Blogger seems more beta than ever. This semester, I’m teaching a lower-division “Intro to Digital Media” class of about forty students. I require them to keep blogs to post reading responses and projects. The class is directed toward Web-based media – which irks some of the wannabe Scorseses – and it’s frankly easier for me to manage that many projects online than on paper and DVD.

I direct the students to use Blogger, which generally seems to be the most stable blogging platform, but my students are running into all kinds of problems! Blogs that students created are disappearing, students cannot retrieve passwords or even usernames, and students are running into problems with merging Google and Blogger user accounts. It’s a real mess, and I really do feel for the 18-20 year olds who come up with a clever name and URI to find that they can’t use it because their account has disappeared. I’ve drilled through their dashboards and user accounts, and I’m having the same experience they’re having: their blogs seem to have disappeared down some Blogger black hole. (I’m really impressed with the level of technical savvy these kids show. I did a lab where they were required to create an entirely hand-coded HTML page, and, while a handful acted like I was crazy, no one had any substantial problems.) Moreover, I’ve added these blogs to the Bloglines RSS reader, and I’m not seeing any updates in their feeds. Blogger has some substantial stability problems, and I’m not seeing anyone talk about it elsewhere.

I know Google isn’t in the education business, and I would rather have my students blog in another venue for privacy and political reasons, but Blogger seems to be the best solution I have. I thought about trying to get an installation of WordPress MU on a College of Communication server, but a few issues have stopped me. The bureaucracy of the College’s tech team is daunting, but the pedagogical issue is really what drives me to Blogger. I really, really think CSS is a core digital media skill in this era, and I need a project where students can apply CSS to a dynamic Web site. The template system in WordPress is too complex for intro-level communication students, and I can’t really think of anything but a blog that would make sense for this kind of project. Does anyone have any suggestions? Can students create individual subsites in Moodle or Drupal? Am I lacking in imagination for this project?

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Yikes, I just upgraded WordPress to the 2.1 version, and things are looking weird. In particular, I’m unhappy with the way that the “linkdump” posts are displaying. I need to tweak the stylesheets on this site anyway, so I guess the upgrade puts it on my to-do list. A few months ago, I started messing around with link colors and other CSS, and I never really finished. I never meant for the current stylesheet to be in use for so long, so I apologize if the weird palette has made you ill.

Apart from weird list formatting, the only other new feature I’ve noticed in 2.1 is gradient backgrounds for buttons, which give it more of that that Web 2.0 je ne sais quoi.

In other news, I upgraded Adium this morning to the 1.0 version, which I think was released on Friday. If you don’t know, Adium is the multi-protocol chat client for OS X all the cool kids (read Mac dorks) are using. My old install was pretty hacked up with customizations, so I was a little shocked by the multi-colored buttons in the new version. I almost immediately installed this icon set for more tasteful chatting.

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Here are two sites that look really interesting, and I’d like to explore, but I don’t have the time to really check out.

• dotherightthing.com is a bubbler with a social-justice focus, which Jason Kottke compares to Digg.
• NewsTrust is a reputation system where users evaluate what they perceive to be a story’s accuracy. The site features both stories from the mainstream media, and “Independent Sources” like blogs and lefty journals.

I suppose it makes sense that “crowdsourcing” designs would enter the political sphere, but I’m skeptical of how useful voting and mobbing will be in addressing political issues on the Web. The latent Habermasian in me thinks these site don’t promote reasoned discourse as much as gaming and competition. If anyone has seen any insightful articles or blog posts on these sites, please post them in the comments.

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Over on his blog, Jon Lebkowsky discusses the new concept of the “sock mob.” In online parlance, a “sock-puppet” is a user-account created to post bogus messages of support or disagreement with another online author. For example, a blogger could create a sock-puppet account to rebut critical comments on a post. The fake account would make it appear that someone else is defending the blogger, while in reality it’s the same author. “Sock mobs” are teams of users who advocate a particular viewpoint in a similarly dishonest way.

Jon says, “This is why we need a netwide standard identity framework with strong and meaningful authentication.” While I agree that sock mobs are a nascent problem and a standardized identity system would be usefule, I disagree with Jon. In order for a standardized identity system to be effective against a problem like sock mobs it would first need to be mandatory (either at the blog level or across the Internet) and, secondly, it would need to be verified through some kind of governmental identification system like driver’s licenses or social-security numbers. (I imagine that you could use credit-reporting agencies, but that would be even worse.) A universal identity system would introduce privacy problems that would exceed the value of eliminating sock mobs. There are privacy problems on a high level, where social institutions could store, share, and retrieve comments and content posted by an individual, but the lower-level privacy problems would be worse. Do we want prospective employers or dates to be able access and verify everything we post online? Most users post different information about themselves on a site like MySpace than they would on LinkedIn, would we want these tied together? Do you want a troll to be able to see each comment you leave to a blog? I don’t think so. Identity systems would allow society to police mass actions like sock mobs, but they would also police users at an individual level.

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Typowiki seems like one of the better applications of a wiki I’ve seen. Typography may be one topic that’s too obscure for comprehensive treatment in Wikipedia, and Wikipedia’s Neutral-Point-of-View and style rules can also hamper the treatment of a topic that’s as subjective as type. (For example, contributors would be unable to offer ideas on how a face should be used.) The wiki isn’t quite populated enough to really be a useful resource, but, given Typophile’s user base, it certainly has potential.

Poking around Typowiki, I found an interesting article. Users are encouraged to offer suggestions for a list of essential typefaces. It’s worth nothing there are no “web-safe” faces listed, but I’m a little tempted to troll and add Arial and perhaps Comic Sans to the list.

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Yesterday, Ars Technica posted a long and interesting article that offers a case study of AT&T rollout of fiber in affluent Chicago suburbs. AT&T, Verizon, and whatever other ILECs might remain want to enter the landline television business, but are hampered by local franchise agreements which were developed for cable systems. In particular, cable franchise agreements generally require system operators to build out to an entire community within a given timeframe, to prevent differents service being offered to wealthy areas and poorer areas. Because of telco network topology, it is difficult to completely cover an area with digital access, so the telcos have been pressuring the FCC to re-classify their digital TV systems to avoid these restrictions and Congress to establish national TV franchises.

In the case Ars describes, AT&T just began rolling out services without the consent of the communities or the FCC. Instead, they simply started installing equipment on public rights-of-way, irking property owners and raising the ire of community activists.

While I encourage you to read the story, I thought it glossed over two issues I think are importanto to this debate. First, national cable franchises or unilateral efforts like AT&T’s will provide no allowance for public access systems. While franchises at the local level often include provisions that require operators to fund local public-access systems. It’s unlikely that media-access activists could pressure telcos and MSOs at the national level, eliminating the sometimes enlightening and sometimes frightening world of public-access TV. Secondly, I do worry about issues of the digital divide and institutional racism. When I lived in West Philly, my largely black neighborhood was one of the last in the area to get DSL access, and if there is not build-out requirement, I could see the telcos never investing in a fiber build-out to the inner-city. The ILECs enjoyed a century-long monopoly, which saw Jim Crow laws and redlinling. Since they were able to profit during this era, telco policy should address the racism of the past.

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