GeekBox

Plain Layne's back

I could have guessed that blogging was an addiction for Layne that wouldn't be easily given up. Nice to see that she's back so soon.

Plain Layne Says Goodbye

One of my favorite bloggers has decided to quit. Real life is calling and she just doesn't have time anymore. While I understand, I will miss her stories. A number of her fans including myself have commented on how good her writing was. Like many personal blogs there are some undeniably dull spots, but the bulk of the past year has been a whirlwind of life changes. For me it has read like a serialized novel. Young girl goes on vacation to Europe, visits ex-husband, meets sexy go-go dancer, gets high tech job with large life-sucking multinational company, and tries to figure out what it all means. You'll laugh, you'll cry...

I wouldn't want to give too much away. While it's still up, go back and read it in chronological order. Start with this, and work forward through the archives. There are probably some interesting tidbits before that point, but if someone were making a movie, I'd say that is the start.

I really wish someone would edit it all together and turn it into a book.

Tribe Tips

With anything that grows at an exponential rate, there is a tipping point at which it takes off. Tribe.net hasn't quite gotten there yet, but I'm starting to see signs of something new and different. As I was trying to point out before, it comes down to subtleties.

In this particular case, I suddenly noticed the utility and novelty of the simple fact that you can see to which tribes other people belong. It may not seem like much, but it's actually a big deal. Part of what made Napster (and its successors) useful as a means of discovering new music was the ability to browse other people's music collections. Chances are, if someone's collection contained music that you really really liked and some that you'd never heard of before, the unknown stuff was worth checking out. (c.f. my post on Echocloud)

People on Tribe generally don't list enough musicians, authors, or films to make this sort of cross-pollination work as effectively as it does on a P2P network, but they do list every public tribe to which they belong. Tribes are growing in all different directions, with little centralized planning. The directory is becoming unwieldy, which at first seemed really irritating to me. However, if you poke around your friends and their friends' profiles, chances are you will discover some interesting sounding new tribes amongst ones you're familiar with.

I'm sure that there must be some prior art out there - after all people have been attacking the mailing list/newsgroup/forum/chat room taxonomy issue for a while - but it seems like Tribe has hit on one of the things that will make it special.

Back when I was in college, it was often possible to look at other people's .newsrc file which was a list of the Usenet newsgroups to which they subscribed. At the time, I think that many people would have been horrified if they realized that others could see their subscription to alt.sex.bondage (but then again I wasn't living in San Francisco). It was an unintentional byproduct of a wide-area file system (AFS) and lax unix permissions. It also wasn't useful in the way that Tribe's public group memberships are because a) you often had little idea whose account you were snooping around because you didn't have much context and b) Usenet had a rigidly controlled taxonomy (with the major exception of the alt.* groups) which was a little more self-explanatory.

The free-for-all creation of tribes is sometimes inefficient and duplicitous, but it really doesn't matter when you have your friends' interests to go by. Just like you can't devise a perfect taxonomy for music, you can't devise a perfect taxonomy for social groups or interests, especially when you're dealing with a lot of people who are trying very hard to not be mainstream.

The other part of this equation that I'm looking forward to is the "events" section. Many years ago, Craigslist's events section was a good source of interesting things to do, but it's gotten so big and general that it is too hard to sort the signal from the noise. I've also been subscribed to SFRaves, the Squidlist and Flavorpill. I have found good stuff through these in the past, but frankly I see more promise in the events part of Tribe. In a place like San Francisco where there are so many things to do, option paralysis often sets in.

On Tribe, individual tribe members can post events. Somehow, having a listing for something from someone that you know, or at least have some connection to, makes the event seem more like a party that you happened to hear about in class in college. It may end up being random, it may not be the optimum choice for the evening, but it has a better chance of being worth-while than something picked out of a list in the newspaper.

If I'm looking for a movie I'll probably stick with Moviefone.com or Yahoo. If I want to see all the bands coming to town in the next week, I'll stick with the SF Bay Guardian. At the same time, the Guardian listings are often overwhelming. Smaller more offbeat things are better handled by something like Tribe. If you're looking for a low-key weekly event at a club or bar, the Guardian or lists like SFRaves are often out of date. They publish the same weeklies all the time and don't have the bandwidth to check up on 100's of events that change all the time even though they're conceived of as ongoing concerns. As long as Tribe events aren't ever set up to repeat, real people will have to post them, and that makes it more likely that the events are real. Since you can see who posted the event and how they're connected to you, you also have more info to go on when planning your social calendar.

I'm not expecting Tribe to become perfectly omniscient but I can definitely see the opportunity to take advantage of your friends and their friends when it comes to finding new groups and things to do.

Blogger = DJ?

In this entry, William Abraham Blaze comments on a meme that is bubbling around the net. The idea is that the blogger is like a DJ in that they combine and recontextualize other original sources of media and present them to an audience. Certainly many fascinating parallels can be drawn, but what's left out is that many bloggers are creating more from scratch than most DJs. I say this as a former DJ and someone who appreciates DJing and turntablism as an art. Depending on which ends of the spectrum of bloggers and DJs that you compare, you may end up with more differences than similarities.

There are bloggers that don't do much more than present links ad nauseum, which while the mere act of associating them together is perhaps creative, maybe it isn't quite as impressive as say the Invisibl Skratch Piklz. On the other end there are bloggers that rarely link to any outside material and largely write about their own personal experiences. DJs don't create from scratch (no pun intended) like that unless they really become musicians or producers.

Turntablists and DJs like Richie Hawtin straddle the line because they break existing recorded music down to its molecular parts (beats and measures) and sometimes add atomic flavorings in the form of original synth lines or drum beats. Still they may have more in common with cut-up artists like Burroughs, who created work by taking existing texts and cutting it down to individual words and throwing them back together.

Another way of looking at it: if you take away a DJ's turntables and hand them an acoustic guitar, most of them would be completely lost (myself included despite a brief attempt at learning to play when I was a kid). If you take a blogger's net connection away and hand them a pen, more of them can still write something worth reading.

All of this is not to say that I don't enjoy thinking about the comparison. As much as I like to create from nothing, I find that my best work in any media is based on existing material. I'm not incapable of starting with a blank page or tape but I like my raw materials to give me hints.

Six Degrees Away

With any given subject, it is usual that most of the news articles you read will be largely a rehash of ones you've read before. This article isn't one of those, at least for me. While some of it is a rehash about Friendster, Fakesters, and 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon, the connections to a mathematician named Paul Erdös are new to me, and explained in an entertaining non-academic way.

[via waxy.org]

Amazing factory for a dull car

I've toured automotive factories in the US, and VW's new factory for its Phaeton is nothing at all like that. If anything, it belongs in a movie about the near future like Gattaca. Some of the pictures shown are of an architectural model so I kept on telling myself that this thing can't be real. I need to see it in real life. Too bad the Phaeton is so damn boring.

See Car and Driver Magazine : Virtual Tour of VW's Transparent Factory : September 2003 for details.

[via fimoculous]

Oscar?

Too funny: You birds, always cracking foxy...: I Smell Oscar!

Lick Me, I'm A Macintosh

In a strange coincidence Mark Morford at the San Francisco Chronicle manages to beautifully sum up some of what both John Gruber and I were saying about Apple. In Lick Me, I'm A Macintosh / What the hell is wrong with Apple that they still give a damn about design and packaging and "feel"? he tries again to explain why Apple is successful, at least with certain types of people who care.

Of course people who drink Steve Jobs' Kool-Aid will be nodding their heads and people who don't will be shaking theirs.

No one posts pages of photos of the process of opening up the box and setting up their new PC. With every new Mac, there is usually some soul out there that does this as though they were posting pictures of their newborn child. I also don't think there would be quite so many geeks out there into case-modding their PCs if PCs weren't so fucking ugly in general.

Dell's Dud?

Daring Fireball's John Gruber has a very thoughtful and effective analysis of why Dell's upcoming MP3 player and music service won't be as successful as Apple's iPod and iTunes Music Store. In general I think he's right on.

One real hole that I seen in the article is that Apple has to get their Windows version of the iTunes Music Store up and running soon to fend off the competition. It is hard to deny that the installed base of PCs vastly outnumbers Macs running OS X by an order of magnitude. Also while I agree with his assessment of Apple's superior UI, product design, and branding, I'm not sure that there aren't a lot of people that can be easily fooled by a lower price. Too many people look at simple comparison charts with specifications and see (hypothetically) 20GB for $300 versus 20GB for $400, and they want the cheaper one, never mind that the cheaper one is 10 times harder to use and ends up in a drawer. The US is full of people who buy quantity over quality.

Unfortunately for Apple, they often succeed at the things that can't easily be quantified. There is never a statistic for how attractive the fonts or dialog boxes are in Mac OS X. Nor is there a measure of how simple it is to only ever use sleep on a powerbook and easily connect to a wide variety of networks without rebooting. Nor is there a basic acknowledgment of how nice it is to be able to create a PDF from any application without installing any third party utilities. No, we're still measuring GHz of processors.

Apple also succeed by redefining the marketplace. When the iPod first came out it seemed crazy that it was so expensive in comparison to just about any other portable music player. However the iPod succeeded because it was small enough to fit in a pocket, and it could carry not just some songs, but most people's whole music collection. That sort of paradigm shift is hard for some people to understand, and luckily for Apple it is often hard for people to copy.