a thaumaturgical compendium

Steve Rubel suggests that the reason that RSS and newsreaders haven’t caught on is a lack of “mass adoption by b-to-b and b-to-c e-commerce sites.” He turns to the history of Amazon and ebay and the explosion of the web to suggest a historical analogy. But he has fallen into the trap that many commentators on communication technologies do: ignoring the primary factor moving many such technologies from the innovators to the early adopters. Porn.

Yeah, sure, Amazon and ebay were popular, but online porn was making money way before either were breaking even. From VCRs to cable to Usenet to IM and video streaming—what moved it out of the lab was porn. The private nature of pornography (at least from the consumers’ perspective) makes it relatively invisible. Once people realize that a “newsreader” can support pictorials, and especially as the combination of RSS and bittorrent grows, we will see a rush to newsreaders. When that happens, many people will also begin subscribing to “legitimate” news and entertainment feeds, and we will once again get collective amnesia about the prime mover.

What is the state of Porn RSS? A quick googling of “RSS porn” calls up some interesting musings that suggest I am not alone in seeing the connection here, but few actual feeds. One exception is the evocatively named Channel of Filth, which is dedicated to “servicing the teaching and learning community’s needs for accurate, timely and quality-assured descriptions of kinky amateur fruit session videos…” (link is rated PG). Syndic8 scares up 77 feeds with “porn” in them, many moribund or ill-formed. Right now, there are a number of pornographic blogs with feeds (most famously Fleshbot), but most are in fact “meta-porn” blogs. Nonetheless, if we are to use history as a guide, this is where the RSS killer app is to be found.

So, the primary factor limiting the rapid diffusion of RSS is a lack of porn feeds. Conscientious educators and public intellectuals should mount an effort to create high-quality RSS porn. If we look to some of the literature on diffusion, we see that the technology itself is not as likely to diffuse as rapidly as, say, blogs. The major reason for this is that they lack the ability to be easily observed. If someone asks you “what is a blog” you can point them to several examples (indeed, this usually is easier than trying to define them). The same may be possible if you happen to have a newsreader on your laptop, but it remains a far more “hidden” technology. When you go over to a friend’s house, it’s easy to see their new Tivo unit, and see how it works, but his newsreader is less likely to be on display.

Until recently, many newsreaders also lacked good “trialability.” That is, trying out a newsreader meant downloading and configuring sometimes finicky pieces of software. I think Bloglines has largely obviated this latter concern, and somewhat dissipated the former.

(Any double-entendre in this post was indeed recognized and enjoyed by its author, but I am trying to avoid the whole giggle-giggle-porn thing since I’ll have to be teaching about it for 15 weeks.)

Finn and I are on our own for the summer. As a result, I’ve been talking to myself a lot lately. It’s not so bad in the house, but out in the yard I have to wear an ear-nub so that the neighbors don’t start to talk. Given this practice, I present a self-interview on the website overhaul.

Interviewer: So the web site is new. Haven’t you gotten the memo? Weblogs are a fad. Time has done a feature on the “trend,” thus indicating that it has completely jumped the shark. Would you say you are “with it”?

Alex: No, I’ve never been quite with it. I came to a point where I was ready to throw in the towel with the blog, and it seems like I’m not alone in this. A surprising number of bloggers have either abandoned blogging or shifted their attention. But when I looked at it, I found—to no one’s greater surprise than my own—that I have become a true believer. I am a professional skeptic, but it’s no longer risky to call weblogs a revolution. The impact they have already had is enormous, and even if everything stopped today, the effects of blogging are likely to shape the future of media for some time to come.

So, instead of quitting, I’m going “all in.” Much more of my professional life will show up on this blog. And rather than creating separate class blogs for each of my courses, I am going to include those in my personal blog as well. That kind of integration (research, teaching, and private life) may be a bit strange, but I think it’s worth a shot. I don’t have a definite plan in this regard, everything will show up in this site, and we’ll see how things work out.

Besides, the site design was something like three years old, and I used to change it at least every six months just to play with new technologies.

Interviewer: Speaking of the design… A bit of a throwback to the 90s, no? Especially the textured background that makes it difficult to read.

Alex: Yes, the two themes I was working with were “1997” and “anti-usability.” An early draft included a <blink> tag as well, but it got cut by reviewers.

I: That would explain the lack of some of the things readers expect, like a column with navigation and related items.

Alex: Now, there is a nav bar up there at the top, pointing to an about page and the wiki. But yes, things are pretty stripped down. The thing is, bloggers expect all the little buttons and whistles, but those who are not hard-core bloggers find them to be extraneous and confusing. I do have some of those do-dads down at the bottom (archives, search), and I don’t think anyone will have any difficulty finding them there. As for the hardcore crowd, they’re probably reading the RSS feed instead, anyway.

I: And where have you put the blogroll. Does it pop up somewhere? Is it hiding behind something?

Alex: Actually, you’re pretty close to the mark there. While a blogroll is definitely part of the genre of weblogs, I have a feeling they are becoming an anachronism. No longer is it difficult to find other blogs, so it’s not as necessary to create a private list of the good ones. I do have a link to my Bloglines aggregator down at the bottom, and I hope folks will take a look at that page. It serves as a “blogroll plus,” since you also get some feel for the kind of content on those other blogs.

I: Isn’t this kind of a slight to the community to whom you linked? What about the “link gift economy”?

Alex: In fact, the links are still there, invisible. I don’t know whether Google or Technorati will continue to index them (since this is an attempt to manipulate those indexes), but we’ll see. If they don’t, I’ll yank the blogroll entirely to speed up the load time slightly.

I: So the pages are now dynamically created in PHP, via the WordPress back end. Is that going to mean longer load times?

Alex: Normally, it wouldn’t, I think. But my web service is not the fastest at the best of times. I’m on a shared server, so it just depends how busy the other domains are. Generally, I haven’t found that it takes that much longer. The background graphic is a bit large, so that takes some time. I’d have made it smaller, but I wanted to avoid repeats as much as possible.

I: Where did you get the graphics? And what font is this?

Alex: The main background is a scanned sheet of washi I bought in Kyoto some years ago, on the top of a gray cardboard shoebox. At the bottom, the red stamp is an approximation of my name in Japanese (hara-be), and was carved by a friend. The font is probably Trebuchet, if you are on a PC. If you are on a Mac, hopefully Avant Garde. Note that I haven’t yet seen the site on a Mac, so I would appreciate any feedback. I had to muddle through a bit to make the design semi-liquid on Internet Explorer, and that may have blown it up for Macs/Safari—I don’t know. I am still tweaking a bit (e.g., the nav-bar is bad on wide browsers), and would be eternally grateful for any feedback, however small. A big “thank you” to Barbara and Michelle for their quick critiques today.

I: So, the question that’s on everyone’s minds, why the switch to WordPress? Just keeping up with the Joneses?

Alex: No, I had decided to move to a different system a while ago. The only reason I switched over the personal blog is to get familiar with the software I’ll be using on the school blog. But now that it is said and done, I’m really glad to have made the switch. WordPress is, basically, a better system. And it’s open source: free as in speech and beer. The only reason not to switch is if you are already happily entrenched in Moveable Type—and that isn’t an inconsequential reason. I suspect WordPress, with it’s newly expanded user base, will the tool to beat for some time.

I: Problems?

Alex: I ran into a particular bug that may affect my users. WordPress and WakkaWiki both set a cookie on the user’s machine, and these conflict. If you sign on in the wiki, and then try to go back to the blog, nothing will show up. This is not a good one, but I have a feeling that the number of people using both pieces of software are small enough that I am going to have to hack a fix myself.

Because I set up Textile II on the new blog, I ended up with a lot of the em-dashes in old entries turning into strike-outs. I’m fixing these when I see them, but I am sure there is a bit of a mess in the deep archives. Also, it looks like a lot of these old ones came in with “TrackBack pings allowed” turned off by default. That’s an easy SQL command to fix, though. All-in-all, I would say that the WordPress install was considerably less difficult than the Moveable Type install.

I: So, what’s still left to do?

Alex: A lot of tweaking. I also need to rethink the categories a bit. Do something about the nav buttons for people with cinema or multi-screen displays. But mostly, it’s back up and working.

I: Thank you for spending some of your valuable time chatting with yourself.

Alex: The pleasure really is all mine.

(Next week: Blogging and narcissism?)

I’ve been thinking of putting together a booklet of advice for new graduate students. To that end, I’ve been collecting similar efforts on a wiki page. If you know of other good examples, please add them. This is what I have so far:

Scattered suggestions on reading in college
Modest advice for graduate students
How to be a good graduate student
How to be a terrible graduate student
Networking on the Network
How to be a Leader in your Field
Hosting a speaker
How to do research at the MIT AI Lab
Research essays in the US academic environment
How to survive your Ph.D.
How to succeed in publishing…
How to organize your thesis
How to write a Ph.D. thesis
ABD Survival Guide

Update: Several more have been added to the wiki page, I had some bookmarked I hadn’t added.

Perhaps following up on a distributed conversation on citation indexing among academic blogs (me, David Brake, Seb Paquet), Thomson ISI has announced a new scholarly index of web publications, largely based on the CiteSeer project. I see this as a major positive move, in part because it means that publishing your work to the web no longer carries quite as many disincentives, from the perspective of the tenure process, as it has in the past.

Both Seb and David raise the issue that citation is a good measure of popularity, and that is helpful for some things and not for others. In general, this is a view that I am sympathetic to. Seb suggests that someone would do well to collect both from the core of the elite blogs and from the periphery of lesser-known ones.

I’ll fall back on a homology that I use fairly consistently: the city as an information-processing machine. We like to think that innovation happens at the city core, while the hinterlands remain a kind of social memory, a more conservative force. This is true to an extent, but it discounts the nature of the flow of innovation. Invention is more observable at the core of a city, because it is at this core where the greatest amount of fusion, translation, and reconfiguration takes place. The city center acts as a solvent, reducing the temporal and spatial barriers to interaction that permeate the rest of the society.

However, the hinterlands (and this is not a binary opposition: the “hinterlands” here means anything from Harlem to Peoria to Vladivostok) provide the framework for innovation, for the development of inventions into something more permanent, sustained, and ultimately more influential.

So, some kids come to town with their pants hanging a bit lower than usual. In the maelstrom of interactions in the city, this becomes a trope. It is reified and replicated on a small scale. Others—either for commercial gain or search of social currency—take these trends, concretize them into mass media depictions or commercial products, and redistribute them in a more or less stable way to the broader culture. And this broader culture provides the friction and isolation needed to allow ideas to mutate and incubate. The city, left to itself, eats itself. It needs to draw on young ideas from the surrounding hinterlands.

It’s both true that you need to pay attention to the concentration, and that you need to pay attention to the periphery: both are of value.

Now the question is whether concentrations of citations are really analogous to concentrations of communication and transportation that happen in cities. New York is the center of FedEx packages, telephone calls, and web links in the world. Does it follow that in-links indicate centers of invention? Clearly not.

The A-list bloggers represent the broadcasters of today, and as such bore me. That is, while every journalist is most interested in the handful of blogs that seem to be supplanting journalists, I find this to be the least interesting effect of blogging. Most interesting to me is the possibility that blogs are taking on more local seats of opinion and innovation leadership.

The process of drawing ideas and practices from the hinterlands and spewing back translations is repeated at every bracketed level—that is, it is fractal. I am talking not just about the world city (the concentration of between 8 and 20 global centers), but about neighborhoods and groups that draw on the isolated and process this into something that can be understood widely.

Katz & Lazardsfeld’s work on 2-step and multi-step flow got at some of this, perhaps. The interesting step is no so much from the mass to opinion leaders, but to and from opinion leaders and their constituency. This is still largely an invisible, interpersonal process, but I think that is changing with blogs, and I think that change will be much more interesting.

This is all, in some way, a defense for the Scholarati stuff I talked about below. What is interesting in the power law family of distributions of web links is that they seem to be self-similar at scale. I think looking at ways of bracketing off subnets is a valuable process. For me, this centers on how scholars use their blogs, but it could just as easily be Buffy fans or chicken farmers. The question is whether there is some relationship between a subnetwork and the composition of that network? Is there some network structure of hyperlinks (admittedly an estimate, but an available measure) that correlates to topical or other cohesiveness?

• Find Your Inner Republican – Since a bi-partisan group of high-level diplomats and military commanders has come forward to promote “regime change” at home due to the incompetence (their word) of the current administration, it may be worth noting that Republicans can promote good policies. (via Gothamist)

• Life Switch is a very compelling, and very strange website from Christian Aid. (via MF)

• While many Americans still support our effort in Iraq, 80% of Iraqis want us to go home. Given that we are “fighting for democracy” in Iraq (WMD as a cause for a just war is so 2003), such a poll introduces something of a paradox.

• The Genisis Pathfinder Program, run by Budget Suites multi-millionaire Rober Bigalow, is an affort to create inflatable Budget Suites in space. (via /.)

• Senate approved Bush administration’s new program to expand baby nukes. They pooh-pooh the idea that this could cause an arms race. What other country would be stupid enough to create tactical nukes: we’d attack them.

• In case you are shopping for a wiki, here’s a nice features comparison.

• Open Textbook is an effort to create just that, though it seems not as far along as WikiBooks.

• DIY amp for your iTrip.

• Moveable Type has released their much more reasonable educational licensing numbers. Nonetheless, I’m going with Wordpress because it is (a) free and (b) better. Seems like a no-brainer. The smarter mover would be to offer MT free to educational institutions, thus hooking students on MT while they are in school. But I had made the decision to switch well before licensing costs were announced, and I see nothing here to convince me to change my mind. It will be interesting to see MT go head-to-head against Blackboard, assuming the latter gets into the blog business.

• People look like their dogs: it’s a scientific fact. I think the Finn might be insulted by this.

Gmail (or should this be the more appropriate link?) seems to be rapidly expanding its beta. If anyone wants an account, I have several invites available. Drop me a note if interested. Oh, and in case you are wondering, it actually is money and power that are my secret, the invites are just icing.

I’ve had a couple songs from The Streets rotating through my mp3s for a while, but in the last week, I’ve heard their CD playing in two different coffee shops. I guess they don’t fit neatly into a genre, which means they end up in coffee shops. Anyway, James Farmer points to a flash preview of their album, which lets you listen to nearly the whole thing. In case the record companies are reading my blog: this is the way to sell CDs.