technology

How is "great content" found?

3 September 2011 - 12:08pm | Laura Scott

In a provocative assessment of Google’s Google+ strategy of launching a “recommended users” list (a topic of its own), Robert Scoble shared an assumption behind his conclusions:

If you have great content you will get found by one of the folks on this list.

It’s an interesting claim. I've heard this kind of thing for years, and always wondered: Is it true? My intuition always said it's not. So last night I questioned Robert's statement in a tweet, and he replied:

@lauras it's pretty rare that good content doesn't get shared with others.

How do we know that it's "rare" that good content doesn't get shared? We know only about the good content we've already found. We have no idea how much good content has not been found. So how can we lay any odds as to how common or rare it is for good content to be found?

And "found" ... by whom?

I thought I'd lay out some thoughts on this and see what people think.

What does it take?

The content must be "good".

We all know that there's a ton of bad content that gets much more attention than good content. But for good content to get found, the question assumes good content. What makes content "good"? That's a question that is addressed piecemeal in the following points.
The content must be on a viable platform, in a viable format.

The content must exist in a form that can be consumed if it is found. A book in Braille is not going to influence many. Your handwritten novel may be fabulous, but the single copy's being on yellow pads, with all the words scribbled in your poor penmanship ill serves your great novel.
The content must be findable.

If people can't get to it, you can't share it. For online content, it must be in a format to be indexed by search engines. For movie content, it must have distribution. Your painting that's viewable only from your livingroom is not findable by others except your house guests. (If only you had a gallery showing!)

A Confederacy of Dunces was eventually published posthumously and found by a delighted readership and a satisfied Pulitzer committee, but what if John Kennedy Toole's mother didn't champion his manuscript after his suicide and convince a publisher to publish it? How many John Kennedy Tooles have passed through the world, leaving behind great manuscripts that never will be read?
The content must be accessible.

How many provocative news articles languish behind a paywall, never to be accessed by the people who could most infuentially share it? How much great content in China is never found because it's censored? An Internet without Net Neutrality could render much content completely inaccessible due to preferential content mainstreaming deals by access providers.
The content must be understandable.

It must use a common language. It must use existing cultural references. We can love the music of Beethoven because he touches us in musical language still used today, but we are lost hearing Javanese gamelan, and modern avant-garde composers might speak in musical references too modern or obscure for us to grasp. How much ancient Greek poetry can be enjoyed when Greek is no longer taught in university?
The content must have some audience.

Here's the trick. Somebody must start the sharing chain. Likely it takes a lot of somebodies to achieve some sort of sharing critical mass. How many of the most interesting people you know don't have a popular blog, don't have a jillion Twitter followers, aren't in oodles of Google+ circles? I can't count them all on the fingers of both hands. There are simply too many to count.

My own blog has a small audience, but perhaps is on the radar of just enough people where good content fitting all the criteria listed here could break out and be "found". But if I tweet about my post, I can perhaps reach a slightly larger audience (via a fraction of my Twitter followers). On the other hand, if my post is Drupal-related and appears on Planet Drupal, my audience is suddenly and automatically increased by an order of magnitude, meaning so many more people can see and pass along my content if they deem it to be "good".

How many content creators have that kind of audience available, who in turn can share that content with yet other people? Yes, there are some popular thinkers out there really putting out good content. But let's face it, most of the popular stuff is pretty crappy.

Which leads us to:
The content must stand out in the noise.

And there's a lot of noise these days. In the above-referenced Google+ joint, Scoble states: "Most people can only follow 250 people. In fact, the average user follows far less than that." That's because of noise. How much great content passed right before your eyes on Twitter, flitting by before your attention was drawn? I probably see 1% of all the stuff that crosses my Twitter feed, and that's on a good day, and even then I actually read only a fraction of that. Most of what we see is noise. But I love the serendipity that comes from following too many people.

But if everyone is following only 250 people or fewer, how interconnected are we, really? Does your headline grab attention? Does your post have a striking image? Does your so-well-crafted jewelry look too much like discount store junk for anyone to notice its fine qualities? Has your essay topic been played so much that your most-insightful points aren't enough to gain anyone's attention?

This last leads us to:
The content must be timely.

This doesn't apply only to the insightful post on the latest political event can't be posted weeks after everyone has forgotten about the event. It also means that your content must fit the concept of what's "good" in that era. Vincent Van Gogh died a pauper; we can say his paintings were "found", but did he ever know it? Much of our filtering mechanisms are conscribed by popular culture – popular media culture, popular political culture, popular academic culture, you name it. The most-shared good content will fit within those contemporary frames – not "ahead of its time", not out of fashion, not when the event is forgotten, not when the moment has passed. Many a bon mot would have been more bon had they not been "esprit d'escalier".
The implied author must have an appropriate identity.

Your public image of you (as opposed to the "real" you – c.f., Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction) is how many will decide whether you're worth paying attention to. If they've decided yes, your content gets higher consideration. If they've decided no, your content is dismissed out of hand. If they don't know, well, then it depends on your perceived identity and how it "fits" into the context of things – or how it "fits in", period. Scoble points out that "Most content on social networks is developed by only 5% and most of the audience listens to the top 5% of that." The most popular bloggers link to each other, because they perceive each other as credible enough to read.

What about those not already in the echo chamber? They must have an identity that appeals. Despite all the public touting of how we live in an age of "tribes", we tend to vastly underestimate the value of having an identity appropriate and acceptable enough to influence others. And yet what is social networking but a way of forming tribes to filter out the noise? If you don't "fit in" the tribal filter, you're part of the noise as far as others are concerned.

Sometimes that's just by circumstance. Sometimes it's by preconceived stereotypes. For years, women have known that (many) guys don't link. In the tech world, a start-up with venture capital backing is taken much more seriously than a start-up with no backing; not only the venture capital PR muscle, but the very fact of having gotten venture backing at all helps start-ups stand out from the noise and be perceived as worth paying attention to. Joe Coder comes up with a fabulous new app and nobody pays attention, unless the app gets some sales traction; Pete Programmer with Acme Ventures backing gets buzz before the app is even approved by Apple.

I would argue that perhaps the biggest impact Acquia had on the success of Drupal came from nothing more than the fact that Acquia got venture backing, which put it and Drupal on the radar of tech bloggers and journalists, who then put Drupal on the radar of many who've since adopted Drupal for their projects. And yet some of the most profound and influential content about Drupal has happened outside of that paradigm. But those content creators didn't have the right identity to be found. (This is nothing against Acquia as a company. Acquia does much more than raise the visibility of Drupal, don't get me wrong. But seeing the rather sudden "discovery" of Drupal once Acquia announced funding was really hard for the rest of us to miss. [Disclosure: My business does business with Acquia. Many Acquians are my friends.]

In another example, in Google+, you must have the right kind of identity to even participate. If you have the "wrong" identity, how likely is it your "good" content will be found?
The content must last (long enough).

Paintings rot. Books dry up and blow away. Great movies of the 1930s and 1940s disintegrated or burned in vaults. The fire of Alexandria took away how much greatness from even the possibility of our discovering it? This challenge will never leave us, even in the digital age. How ironic that an essay noting the ephemeral nature of digital content can be found only via the Wayback Machine!

In a perfect world, there are fields of dreams

The success of good content (no matter how you define "good") depends upon each of these links. If one breaks, odds are that content will languish in obscurity. If everything lines up perfectly, then all you need to is build it and they will come. For those of us on the Internet, we have it pretty good – better than ever in history, perhaps. Content creators weren't so lucky thousands of years ago. Even a couple of decades ago.

And content creators aren't so lucky in media that doesn't happen entirely online. In Hollywood, for example, one of the old saws preached by the successful is, "If you write a great script, it will get made." They justify this by the fact that good scripts are extremely rare in their world – so rare that bad scripts have to be produced into movies because there are not enough good scripts to feed the production/distribution machine. (This perspective also validates their own sense of self-worth: If they "made it" in Hollywood, it's because they did good work, right?) Yes, the good scripts that actually get their attention have some chance of getting made. But do those good scripts tell stories that studio executives think people will pay to see? Do they have good roles to draw marketable stars? Do the stories tell a political message the executives are comfortable with?

And what about all those scripts that never get read by the Hollywood decisionmakers – the people who not only can say 'no' (of which there are many) but can also say 'yes' (of which there are very few)? One of the most common entry-level positions in Hollywood is that of "reader". The reader reads undiscovered scripts that are submitted (to the agency, to the production company, to the studio) and writes "coverage" that becomes the actual measure for assessment by others. Culling is done by the reader directly, and by others who don't read the script but only read the reader's coverage of the script. There are who-knows-how-many great scripts that never get past this stage.

How much good art that exists in your community do you know about? How many good white papers have been posted by authors you're not predisposed to find credible? How many good novels have a cover you find unappealing and never pick up?

If you're a content creator, so much of your success is out of your hands. You need some degree of luck or providence. Seneca wrote, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." Corollary: Luck cannot happen if you are not prepared. But you cannot make luck happen. All you can do is be prepared, and be persistent at that preparation, and not blink if the opportunity comes.

That is how great content is found.

What do you think?

[Photo by "Ken & Nyetta (Creative Commons)]

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The waste that doesn't go away

18 March 2011 - 1:56pm | Laura Scott

photo of an Advanced Test Reactor core, Idaho National Laboratory

This is not intended as a political post, but I'm sure it will be taken as such by some, because so much discussion about nuclear power seems to be wrapped up in political dogma.

Watching the horrors of the multiple tragedies in Japan has left me with a deep feeling that sometimes we really can be arrogant about our technology.

The power of the tsunami that wiped out so many towns just boggles my mind. Every new video of those few minutes that I see on tv or the web stuns me. Cars pushed along. Buildings torn loose, floating like rafts. Ships whipped around like toys. And the debris, all the debris, piling on itself. Tonight I saw footage of a village where its huge tsunami walls, intended to protect them, were ripped right out of the sea floor and toppled over. Entire towns missing. People gone by the thousands.

This wasn't the strongest earthquake ever. It's not even the strongest in the past century. Who knows what kind of temblors have rocked the surface over the millennia? 9.0 is shockingly powerful, but maybe not so much when you look at the long-term picture.

As I write this, there's a lot of uncertainty about the status of the reactors and spent fuel rod pools at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The plant workers who are on site trying to contain the situation are amazing to me. Heroes. What kind of conditions are they facing inside? I think back on the men who fought to contain Chernobyl, dying horrific deaths. Is this similar? Given what they say on the press coverage, I think perhaps it's more controlled. But who knows?

In the past couple of days, I've heard, read and seen a lot of optimistic spin on nuclear power from various people, including nuclear engineers. I have no reason to doubt their knowledge or integrity. But I also notice something that none of them talks about.

The nuclear waste.

This is serious stuff. From Wikipedia:

Spent nuclear fuel is initially very highly radioactive and so must be handled with great care and forethought. However, it becomes significantly less radioactive over the course of thousands of years of time. After 40 years, the radiation flux is 99.9% lower than it was the moment the spent fuel was removed from operation, although the spent fuel is still dangerously radioactive at that time. After 10,000 years of radioactive decay, according to United States Environmental Protection Agency standards, the spent nuclear fuel will no longer pose a threat to public health and safety. [Emphasis added.]

Think on that a moment. This is material that is toxic for a hundred centuries, and we're storing it in buildings designed to last 25 years. What buildings do we know of that have lasted even 100 years? Even the Sphinx isn't 10 thousand years old.

The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last summer was immense. One well managed to destroy such a vast region. Just capping it turned out to be a huge technological challenge. Billions of dollars lost by local businesses. Mass deaths of wildlife.

But as bad as an oil spill is, nature has a way of recovering from it. In 100 years, will the Gulf still exhibit the devastating effects of that spill? My guess is probably not.

By comparison, all of the high-level radioactive fuel that has ever been used in any nuclear plant will be deadly toxic 100 years from now. And 1000 years from now. It's not something that cleans up easily. In fact, for all intents and purposes, we can't make it go away. It is dirty, about as dirty as things get. It requires special handling. You need to keep it cool. You need to keep it contained. You need to keep it out of the air, the soil, the water. And you need to do it for 10 thousand years.

That's a problem. We don't build things to last that long. We never have. How do you do it? Of course, as a civilization, we would never do it. Too expensive. Too not-my-problem. Too … politically loaded.

And when I see one of the most technologically advanced countries — a country that has seen its share of earthquakes and tsunami and takes them very seriously — knocked back onto its ass by a big-but-not-the-biggest earthquake and a tsunami that is big but not bigger than tsunami in evidence in the geological record, I wonder if there's not just a bit of hubris to be claiming that a technology that uses a fuel that is deadly for a timespan longer than our recorded history is not only safe but "clean."

Photo by Argonne National Laboratory, Creative Commons

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I pant, you pant, we all pant for iPad?

3 April 2010 - 9:32am | Laura Scott

Other devices such as the WePad will offer similar kinds of features. In the end, it's about the content.

There's a whiff of desperation in the air. The iPad is now supposed to be the white knight that can save publishing. Is it?

I wrote before how the iPad will define a new market for consumer technology. There's no question of the appeal of a simple, extremely portable device with a decent-sized screen to peruse news headlines and browse magazine articles. But the mainstream media hype seems perhaps overblown a bit.

Despite the restrictions, the iPad's full color touchscreen is seen as a game changer for media companies that have long struggled to make money off digital content, which most consumers expect to get for free or at a very low cost.

Book publishers see a new chance to get their electronic offering right -- and win more bargaining power if the iPad emerges as a viable rival to Amazon.com Inc's Kindle.

"We have all struggled in this industry to find an online model that works successfully in terms of content and the consumer's propensity to pay," Penguin Books Chief Executive John Makinson told a recent media conference in London.

And then there's the mild FUD, such as in USA Today, who claims to have "your questions answered":

Q: The iPad doesn't run Flash, popular software from Adobe that powers many Internet videos. Isn't that a huge oversight?

A: Consumers are likely to find the iPad's lack of Flash incredibly frustrating.

But Apple thinks Flash is buggy and prone to crashing computers. It wants media presented in the alternative HTML5 format. That's fine, but if you bring home the iPad this weekend, you'll find many sites urge you to "Download the latest Adobe Flash Player." If you try, it won't work.

"Incredibly frustrating"? That strikes me as a bizarre claim. I've been finding more and more that sites depending upon Flash tend to be a few years out of date. And when it comes to video, the iPad, like the iPhone and Android, has a native YouTube application to play those videos. The odd sites that have other Flash at work are sites I simply tend to ignore and move on from. It's only "incredibly frustrating" if you feel some deep need to get at content presented by a Flash widget on a site (or a site built entirely in Flash). Absence is Flash is nothing new to to anyone who has a phone with a web browser.

Q: Can you run Adobe's Photoshop image-editing software on the iPad?

A: No.

Actually that's not true. The iTunes store has had the Photoshop app up for quite some time now. [iTunes Photoshop app link] In fact, many software companies have developed lightweight apps that integrate with their more powerful desktop and/or web-based apps.

That's not to say that the iPad is going to thrill anybody as a computer. It's really an enlarged iPhone ... without the phone (and I'd say even the iPhone doesn't really have a phone). And I could see using it around the house as a magazine "e-reader". Maybe even for reading books, though on that score I'm not so sure.

John Erianne has an interesting take on why book publishing won't exactly be saved by the iPad/Apple store model:

Most readers are casual readers. Your average reader reads maybe two books per year. I’m not talking about voracious readers like yours truly — I’m talking about those people that might read the latest Twilight novel or maybe a Stephen King. These people will read a book once and then they are done with it. These people don’t spend a lot of money on books. Ironically, the more prolific the reader, the more esoteric their tastes in books so they may not go for the latest bestseller as gleefully as a casual reader. For perhaps different reasons, both of these groups aren’t going to be overly eager to spend $16.99 on a eBook and, unlike with music downloads, they are not likely to be downloading ten books at a time. Amazon has the advantage in that they’ve pretty much written the book on the selling of online books both the hardcopy and digital variety. Publishers fear Amazon the way brick ‘n’ mortar retailers fear Wal-Mart. And for good reason. Think about this: Amazon still has a virtual monopoly on selling hardcopy books online. They control the lion’s share of this market. As such, is it smart for a publisher to play hardball with Amazon over the Kindle? I’m not saying Amazon shouldn’t be taken down a peg or two, but when consumers are at stake, you’ve really got to pick your battles. And quibbling over a few dollars in price point is stupid.

While the Kindle may eventually go the way of the buffalo, Amazon is in a better position to turn the Kindle into device similar to an iPod Touch than Apple is to duplicate Amazon’s online marketplace for books. Which is not to say people won’t buy the iPad. Apple-o-philes will undoubtedly shell-out the $500 for this new toy just because it’s from Apple as well as other techies and gizmo-lovers who just have to have it because it’s the new thing. Just don’t bet on it as a game-changer the way the iPod and the iPhone were. It-is-not-going-to-happen.

And yet, I think we'll see more than just Apple fanboys snapping up iPads. Who else? Gizmodo has a funny post profiling 6 types of iPad fans and critics in which lot of it rings true — although I don't see myself in one category, but rather see bits of myself in all of them.

Still, while iPad represents at least a small inflection point in how people consume information, it remains to be seen how this will change publishing — let alone, whether it will be "revolutionary" in any way. It really depends upon the market. And on that score, maybe John Etienne is right: Apple is reaching out of its zone of competence and challenging Amazon's core business. And my bet is Amazon isn't going to take it lying down.

My sense, though, is that it's not entirely up to Apple. We have open source Android-powered touchpad devices coming soon, and they likely won't be constrained by Apple's walled market castle business model. How will content producers adapt to these new consumer behaviors? And will the consumers truly view a touchpad as profoundly different than the computer experience to the point of being more willing to open their wallets, as publishing prognosticators are predicting? The market will decide.

Personally I feel we need a new banking system where online transactions can operate in the fractions of a cent, rather than accommodating the roughly 30-cent floor on credit card-based transactions. (But that's a topic for another blog post.)

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how much of a breakout success the iPad will be, especially when even geeks run into the challenge of finding content. Dave Winer shared his experience this morning:

Okay so the iPad has a problem that lots of software has, when you finish the basic setup -- now what? There are no movies, newspapers or books on the device, and no clue as to how to get them on there. Those are the first things I want to do, see how it plays stuff. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I should disconnect and see what I get....

...Where can I get a book to try out for $0?

I also have to get Netflix. And the NY Times. What else?

Okay I want to copy bigLebowski.avi onto the iPad. How?

How to find good content. Hasn't that always been the challenge?

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Ada Lovelace was a Drupalchick

24 March 2010 - 1:41pm | Laura Scott

Okay, it's a whimsical title. But on this Ada Lovelace Day, I was thinking about how, if Ada Lovelace were alive today, she no doubt would be in technology. After all, the creator of the first "computer" wouldn't stop there, would she?

In my daily life I get to work with some amazing women who are working in, with or on Drupal. I wrote an appreciation over at PINGV Creative.

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Are you wanting an iPad?

14 February 2010 - 6:59pm | Laura Scott

I find myself wanting an iPad to read the news in the morning. It would be nice for magazines, too, I think. Of course I'm assuming that the usability will be very good. Maybe I'm wrong.

But I think the iPad will be a big success.

What do you think? Is the iPad a must-have device for you?

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Whither Twitter? Silicon Valley businesses pressured to do business

12 November 2008 - 6:23pm | Laura Scott

Every morning I reach for my iPhone to get the latest news from Bloomberg. (I'd probably go to the NY Times first, but their app is still far too unstable and slow to be of much use.) This morning, one headline jumped out at me:

Twitter Shuns Venture-Capital Money as Startup Values Plunge

Well I had to read that article. And it seems to hint at the piercing of the Silicon Valley Bubble -- not a floating bubble leading to a crash, but rather the isolation bubble, like Bubble Boy. What? Silicon Valley is Bubble Boy?

Evan Williams raised $22 million in funding for Twitter Inc., a Web site used by everyone from Britney Spears to Starbucks Corp. to Barack Obama. Sales? Those could come later -- that was, until the economy tanked.

Twitter may charge companies for access to its users so it doesn't have to ask venture capitalists for more cash, said Williams, the company's chief executive officer. As the value of Internet companies plunges this year, investors are asking for a bigger chunk of the startups they invest in.

"The VCs have the money, but they'll just negotiate harder," said Williams, who sold his previous venture, Blogger, to Google Inc. in 2003. "I want to manage things so I don't have to raise money in 2009."

In the rest of the tech world, and in the business world in general, making money is the first goal. No matter what else you are trying to achieve with your business, you need to make money so you can do the other things you want to do.

Which brings me to the Bubble. Silicon Valley has been this odd duck in the business world: An entire metropolitan region driven largely by R&D. In the Silicon Valley Bubble, the demands upon most businesses regarding sales revenues are largely removed from the environment. The dominant business model? Raise capital, then burn that capital in development of the FooBar Widget (as an imaginary example), hoping you get bought by Google or Microsoft before you run out of money. The real product is not the FooBar Widget, it's the company itself, and the targeted buyer is a new media or tech corporation with deep pockets and a hunger for new ideas.

It's a wonderful sub-economy, this Bubble, if you think about it. And necessary to cultivate many kinds of innovation.

Matt Marshall is blunt:

Last time, circa 2001, the entire VC industry got a “get-out-jail-free card” after the Internet bubble burst. That’s because the scores of new firms created in the late 1990s argued they should be forgiven for any poor performance — it was the bubble’s fault, and everyone was affected. Their investors — chief among them, the elite university endowments –agreed, and gave the VC firms more money to invest again. With most VC funds lasting for ten years, this ensured the VCs a very long life indeed.

He predicts that half the VCs will go under in the current economic turndown.

Barak Rabinowitz has an interesting post on how this paradigm shift is happening in the face of an un-tapped market.

There’s an elephant in the room of online advertising. An elephant in the shape of 400 million social networkers creating and consuming content, clustering around shared interests and activities — all who have yet to be tapped in any major way by web marketers.

Determining how to best reach these people is an ongoing struggle, one complicated by the soaring rate of user-generated content. For the first time, advertisers accustomed to the leading edge are now running to catch up. The conversation is no longer about display ads vs. text ads. Rather, the burning question has become: Who is going to profit from the opportunity presented by social networks, and how are they going to do it?

Some people will perhaps disagree, but my sense is that there hasn't been nearly enough thought put into this aspect as there might of been had the venture-backed Valley economy not been so comfortable in its Bubble. (Call it my reality-based bias as an entrepreneur whose company and clients always need to look to the bottom line.)

The challenge now, Barak points out, is that the end-users of these social network ventures aren't likely to take kindly to big changes to their user experiences, especially when those changes are motivated by revenue generation strategies. What's more:

The bad news for all social networking sites — video portals especially — is that users generally don’t have the mentality to view and click on ads when they are on these platforms. This is why search continues to be the most lucrative advertising strategy. Users are specifically seeking information in that arena. On social networks, people are primarily concerned with communicating with their friends, not looking to buy items or services.

Now with the Bubble deflating under the pressure of the bursting of that bubble of another kind, the investment banking bubble, maybe we'll start to see more innovation in ways to monetize social networks.

The case of Twitter is a good example of that challenge. Whither Twitter now?

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Brave new world? The creepy "clowd" and the loss of privacy

7 June 2008 - 9:47am | Laura Scott

I got a chill reading this post from Seth Godin:

So, very soon, you will own a cell phone that has a very good camera and knows where you are within ten or fifteen feet. And the web will know who you are and who your friends are.

What happens?

What happens is that you have no privacy. Seth sees a big upside.

See a dangerous driver? Send a video snippet to the clowd. The clowd collates that with a bunch of other shots of the same driver... busted.

And the clowd also knows where you are, camera or no camera. So it can tell you when your old friend is just two gates away from you, also wasting time at the airport waiting for her flight. Or it can do Zagats to the ten thousandth power by not only suggesting the best nearby restaurant (based on your food circle of friends) but can also integrate with Open Table and only recommend restaurants that actually have room for you. Or it can let restaurant owners do yield management and find you a table at a good enough restaurant at the best possible price...

This is going to happen. The only question is whether you are one of the people who will make it happen. I guess there's an even bigger question: will we do it right?

If you do what he describes, can it be "right"?

Imagine the feeling of going to the doctor for that private medical condition, and everybody knows. Imagine being stalked by an admirer or resentful ex while you go about your day. Imagine broadcast spam being pushed at you via phone where ever you go. This adds a whole new meaning to the term "cyberbullying."

The drunk driver scenario? On one level, it's a description of being guilty until proven innocent. Everything you do is under scrutiny.

And of course, not all scrutinizers are equal. It's quite obvious that the government and big business will have more scrutinizing power than your snoopy neighbor. Is that the life we want in a free society?

There at least should be a toggle-able opt-in/opt-out, yes? Or are we to live in the Matrix, plugged in with no option, doing our duty by exposing our entire lives to the machine?

To me, the real possibility of this new age is the empowerment of the individual. That's the power of free (as in freedom) exchange of information. That's the power of open source. That's the power of collaboration, mash-ups, crowdsourcing. Empowerment, not simply a cooler, sexier sublimation to the System. Isn't that the real dream? Isn't that the un-tapped economic and cultural goldmine?

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Yet another Top 100 list! Cue the crickets!

20 April 2008 - 4:37pm | Laura Scott

Now that we mere tech plebes have been blessed with yet another definitive "Top 100" list of bloggers, I can rest and relax, knowing that order has been imposed upon the universe.

...below are the top 100 tech bloggers/authors, based on the total number of headlines they have had on TechMeme from January 1, 2008 to today....Since a lot of the top leaderboard blogs are multi-author, this helps to shake out who’s actually writing the popular stories.

Am I alone in feeling that anybody who claims to be in a position to declare a "Top [capital 'T'] 100" list of bloggers somehow is denying the incredibly diverse reality of the intertubes? Surely there are many ways to measure a "top 100" list besides mentions on a single SV/SHR-centric tech site, no matter how popular. Certainly my list would be different than yours, or TechMeme's. Especially when it comes to tech blogging. Really, most of the really interesting tech stuff is not happening under VC funding -- which I feel renders it all but invisible to most of the SV blogmedia world. Isn't most of what is called "tech blogging" really blogging about venture-financed tech? That's quite a subset of all of technology, and "Top" only in a rather narrow sense.

Maybe they should call it "Top 100 Industry Bloggers"?

/rant

/yawn

No doubt many on this list are very interesting bloggers. For the most part, they haven't crossed my path. Precious few are among the 500 blogs in my RSS reader. I guess I'm just too geeky.

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Pogue's Imponderables -- Answered!

18 October 2007 - 6:19pm | Laura Scott

Some answers to David Pogue's questions about the technological universe:

* Why is Wi-Fi free at cheap hotels, but $14 a night at expensive ones?

Because you can afford it.

* What happens to software programs when their publishers go out of business?

They persevere on individual computers, in denial of extinction. Sometimes they're just so right you cannot improve upon them.

* Would the record companies sell more music online if it weren't copy-protected?

Of course. I'd start buying and downloading if they stopped treating me like a criminal.

* Do cellphones cause brain cancer?

No I don't know, but they do cause traffic accidents.

* What's the real reason you have to turn off your laptop for takeoff?

To annoy you.

* Why can't a digital S.L.R. camera record video?

Mine can. Yours can't?

* Wi-Fi on airplanes. What's taking so long?

You assume that it is actually going to happen.

* Who are the morons who respond to junk-mail offers, thereby keeping spammers in business?

Your grandparents.

* I'm told that they could make a shirt-pocket digital camera that takes pictures like an S.L.R., but it would cost a lot. So why don't they make one for people who can afford it?

They do. But you have to work for the government to see it.

* How come there are still no viruses for Mac OS X? If it has 6 percent of the market, shouldn't it have 6 percent of the viruses?

As Apple closes up open standards, watch and see.

* Do shareware programmers pay taxes on all those $20 contributions?

Some do, probably.

* How are we going to preserve all of our digital photos and videos for future generations?

I don't know, but it won't be by using Flickr.

* Why are there no federal rebates or tax credits for solar power?

Because President Ronald Reagan killed them.

* Why do you have to take tape camcorders out of your carry-on at airport security, but not the tapeless kind? Couldn't you hide a bomb equally well in either one? (Actually, I have about 500 more logic questions about the rules at airport security, but I have a feeling they'll remain answerless for a very long time.)

Probably something to do with the x-ray image they have.

* Laptops, cameras and cellphones have improved by a thousand percent in the last ten years. Why not their batteries?

Maybe the laptops, cameras and cellphones have improved in the wrong ways. Remember, transistors were considered worthless because they couldn't handle the power for home "hi-fi" consoles. Then along came Sony to make small transistor radios. The transistors were the same, the radios changed.

* SmartDisplay, Spot Watch, U.M.P.C., Zune… when will Microsoft realize that it's not a hardware company?

Sometime after Apple does.

* Why don't public sinks have foot pedals?

It costs more.

* Why don't all hotels have check-in kiosks like airlines do?

You want to make hotels more like airlines? What? Are you f---ing crazy?!!!!

* Five billion dollars a year spent on ringtones? What the?

The summoning to sacrifice is sacred.

* How come cellphone signal-strength bars are so often wrong?

They're on cell phones.

* Do P.R. people really expect anyone to believe that the standard, stilted, second-paragraph C.E.O. quote was really uttered by a human being?

Of course. It was. By the PR people.

* Why aren't there recycling bins for bottles and cans where they're most obviously needed, like food courts and cafeterias?

Because that would cost more.

* Why doesn't someone start a cellphone company that bills you only for what you use? That model works O.K. for the electricity, gas and water companies —and people would beat a path to its door.

Because they don't have to ... yet.

* Why doesn't everyone have lights that turn off automatically when the room is empty?

Creepy!!!

* What's the deal with Palm?

Well, someone has to come in at the bottom.

* Why are so many people rude on the Internet?

...because they are rude people?

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Being the change

5 September 2007 - 9:12am | Laura Scott

I blogged the following on BlogHer , about the new O'Reilly series on Women in Technology....

If you just casually glance around tech departments in companies and tech-oriented conferences, it's easy to get the impression that there aren't many women in technology these days. Yet it's undeniable that women are making a big impact on the technology world. (If you think it is deniable, then please keep reading.) Exploring this subject is a special series this month on O'Reilly: Women in Technology. Every day this month, an accomplished woman in technology shares her thoughts.*

If you've seen O'Reilly books, you know that each topic area gets its own animal. Tatiana Apandi perhaps hints at a theme of the series by explaining why the O'Reilly animal chosen for this series is the lioness:

Although the lion is often called the King of the Jungle, lion society is actually ruled by its females. Lionesses are the ones primarily responsible for providing sustenance for their entire pride. She is a natural leader. When hunting, each lioness plays to her strengths. She even adjusts her individual role in the hunt depending on the prey to ensure capture for the pride. She can adapt to suit the task at hand. A lioness also will nurse any cub, indiscriminate of whether that cub is her own. She will give with the greater good in mind.

So who are these lionesses in technology? Open technology evangelist (and Jive Software's Director of Developer Relations) Dawn Foster informs us that:

I will be appearing somewhere in this series along with Anna Martelli, Audrey Eschright, CJ Rayhill, Dru Lavigne, Gabrielle Roth, Jeni Tennison, Jill Dyche, Juliet Kemp, Julia Lerman, Kaliya Hamlin, Kirsten Jones, Lauren Wood, Leslie Hawthorn, Selena Deckelmann, and Shelley Powers.

If you don't recognize all of these names ... and I certainly don't ... the first installment hints that maybe we all should.

Leslie Hawthorne, formerly of Google and currently with the Open Source Programs Office, leads off the series with some thoughts on what leadership is -- and can be -- whether it's "female" or not.

I've never thought of my role in the technical community as being the result of or in any way inextricably tied to my femininity. If anything, in an effort to be the change I wish to see in the world, I've distanced myself from questions of gender roles in my work. If we are all (to be) equal, it seems counter-intuitive to look at my work as informed by my being a woman. I do and I make, I listen and I advise, I lead and I follow, and none of these things are the exclusive purview of women. While others might, I would not argue that either sex has a particular aptitude for any of these things. Still, when I look at what I do and what I make, I far more often than not find women playing a similar role and doing similar tasks: building communities, creating space for creativity and connection to manifest, taking care of mundane and arcane details so that others can focus on executing to a grander vision.

Like everyone else, I've been called many things in my day, and often the word used is mother – “a mother of open source” or “geek mama.” I usually hear these words after organizing a particularly effective conference, reviewing a Summer of Code student's slide deck before the big presentation, or posting a particularly insightful piece of advice to a mailing list. It's not a compliment I accept without reservation. It brands me as feminine in a masculine world, it implies difference where the optimal outcome is equality and, by extension, sameness.

Certainly, this designation means that people see me as someone who will solve problems effectively on the fly, provide reassurance and support, and impart accumulated wisdom and help when needed. Given that these are all things I strive to do, it's satisfying that I'm perceived this way. On the other hand, at its core the reality of that compliment can be wholly unrewarding; a woman is a mother by virtue of her having children, a powerful role, to be certain, but one by nature subservient to the desires and needs of others. While the role I play has a service-oriented capacity to it – and I personally feel a great responsibility to be of service to the various individuals and communities with whom I interact – it can, at times, feel as though my accomplishments are regarded as having no intrinsic value, that my actions have merit only insofar as they are a vehicle for helping others accomplish their goals.

This series looks like something to watch (and maybe to add to your feed reader).

Someone who won't be in that feed, but perhaps should be, is Addison Berry, one of the few female developers in the active Drupal community. I had the pleasure of meeting "Addi" in March at the OSCMS, where in a roomful of Drupal developers she was walking the walk that Leslie Hawthorne describes -- helping others do better. It's a small wonder she's so admired and respected in that do-ocracy.

Last week Addi posted some thoughts after on the developers' IRC channel "a conversation erupted about sexism":

The classic way that sexism rears its head in the community channels is when someone says something that is offensive or could be taken as a sexist statement. Now, if it is really just blatantly sexist and offensive, odds are that the community (or at least some individual(s)) will call the person out and reprimand them in some way. The other scenario is that a guy will say something that he may not "intend" to be offensive or was "just joking." This is where things can go very, very wrong depending on the reaction.

One of the most frustrating things about reactions is when someone says something to call it out and men in the channel come to the defense of the original person (or the behavior in general) by pointing out that they didn't mean it that way or that "that's what guys do." It is all the more annoying when these guys (and nice, well-meaning guys sometimes) distance themselves from their statements by saying "I'm not like that, but some guys are" and yet, they still end up either outright defending or playing Devil's advocate rather than trying to help the situation. The reasons this is infuriating is because 1) people are missing the crux of the problem and 2) it belittles the original objection. It adds insult to injury.

I don't want to devolve into the way men are or what social norms they have been exposed to. I also understand that men may not "realize" what they say or how they say it may be taken as offensive. But if someone points out that it is offensive, then that needs to be looked at and acknowledged, not only by the person who said it by but others in the community as well. Intention or reason is not the focus. Sexism is harmful whether someone meant it to be or not and that is what needs to be addressed. Excusing sexist behavior will not help it go away but acknowledging it and being more aware of it in our interactions with others will minimize it and that is a good thing for everyone involved.

The Drupal community has all kinds of social norms and ways of interacting. I mean for goodness' sake the crux of the Open Source community is this little thing called karma. I'm not saying that everyone will suddenly decide this is important and the sexism will just stop. We won't stop sexism. But we can be more aware and better attuned to its impact. We can react in a much more constructive and positive way. Honestly, in particular, we need men to not leave women hanging out on a limb by themselves.

Leslie sounds similar notes, in the broader context.

If anything, men tend to be passionate advocates for helping women have a broader involvement in the technical conversation and the shaping of our respective futures. I find myself spending time with individuals from many open source projects with wildly divergent aims and methodologies, but without exception the healthiest ones are those who place a high value on contribution of any kind, not just in the creation of code. Among these folks, I find my efforts are accorded the highest of respect and I am treated as an equal, if not as a goddess, for the simple things I do each day: bringing people together, providing structure and organization, understanding pragmatic but often overlooked details, communicating effectively with people from diverse backgrounds and helping them to work most effectively with one another. Some may call that mothering. I'd call it social engineering.

In other words, be the change.

In the second post in the series, the president of Harvey Mudd College, Maria Klawe, notes that the change is already happening in the schools.

As a child of the 1950s, I have spent my life being part of the wave of change for women in math, science, and engineering. While I was in high school, my teachers routinely said that girls couldn't do math or physics. While I was in college, some professors would ask me why I wanted to be a mathematician since "there are no good women mathematicians." Despite such comments, most of my teachers and professors were delighted to have a female student who loved mathematics, and they encouraged and supported me. They also got me started in K–12 outreach activities to convince girls, teachers, and parents that girls can excel in math and science and that doing well in high school math is essential for success in any professional career.

Today, about 45 percent of undergrad math majors and about 30 percent of the Ph.D. recipients are female. And it's much rarer to hear someone say, "Girls can't do math." Similar changes have been happening to differing degrees in almost every area of science and engineering. It's exciting to see dramatic increases in the number of women in this year's entering classes at the top science and engineering schools. Caltech's class of 2011 is 37 percent female, a huge increase over previous years. At Harvey Mudd College, the class of 2011 is almost 43 percent female, again a huge increase for Mudd, but still less than at MIT with 46 percent of its entering class female. Princeton's engineering class of 2011 is almost 40 percent female. Such large numbers of female students dramatically change the culture inside and outside the classroom, and both male and female students appreciate the difference.

In many ways, this is the best time ever to be a female student in a technical area.

It's not all rosy, though, especially in computer science ... which happens to be closely related to my own field. As an employer, let me tell you, it can be extremely difficult to find and retain talented women in programming. In our own experience, very few women even apply for such positions. It's not like talented female programmers and developers are not out there, but as a percentage there aren't many.

Maria reports that "the percentage of CS bachelor's degrees granted in research universities to women is at 14 percent, its lowest ever (see http://www.cra.org/info/taulbee/women.html)" and that barriers still exist for women in the male-dominated world of technology.

But this is all changing. We are the change.

What are the ways you see to be the change? Post a comment here. Join the Deeply Geeky email list. Blog it. Talk it. Be it. Let's hear you roar.

* Disclosure: After writing this, I was informed that BlogHer.org has been approached to contribute to the O'Reilly series. I am a Contributing Editor for BlogHer.org, for which I get paid a modest stipend.

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