Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Online

  • Social software again

    All the hooplah over Orkut last week got me thinking more about this “social software” phenomenom from sites like Orkut and Friendster. You may remember I’ve ranted about Friendster before. My conclusions at the time were that I could see some value to it, but didn’t know what I could actually do with it.

    Several months later, same results. What do I do with this type of software? I don’t need a date. I get bored with searching for people I don’t know when all I can do is search. They’re poor at facilitating communication compared to other technologies. I already have an address book—several, actually—of people that I do know and keep in touch with. So?

    So, all of these social networking sites seem to me to be half-baked: they’re a framework built upon an interesting idea, but they’re not done yet. Honestly, I’m not even sure I can tell what the end goal is—having an interesting idea doesn’t guarantee success.

    The interesting thing about Orkut is that it’s an invitation-only service—meaning, that every user is linked to every other user in one big network—unlike Friendster or the others where there are “pockets” of networks, existing independently. Having everyone linked in some way is inherently more valuable to me; stand-alone networks diminishes the value of the system.

    But what system? Still a problem. I suppose it would be interesting to be able to crawl or browse the network of people—the big one, like Orkut does—and be able to drill-down into user data to varying degrees, based on the proximity in the network that user is to you. But there would have to be more than just user data; I’d want to drill-down into their online presence/identity/platform—the blogs, the photo galleries, the web pages and XML files of metadata, their trail of public interactions across the web (like on forums, or weblog comments)… As an example, a user browsing/crawling me would be able to drill-down into chuggnutt.com, which is becoming more and more the platform which defines my online existence. From here they could read my weblog and the archives, follow the links to any projects I’m working on (that I choose to share), see what sites and blogs I read, play with any apps I develop, etc.

    (I realize as I write this I’m also envisioning some of the online experience David Brin wrote into his near-future novel, Earth. But I haven’t read it in a long time, so I may be way off.)

    But, I can accomplish a lot of that now anyway, why another service for it? As far as I’m concerned, the real social software has been around for quite awhile now: BBSes, email, IRC, Usenet, instant messaging, weblogs. There’s more, but you get the idea.

  • Social networking backlash

    The topic du jour this week in the weblogs I read seems to be backlash against social networking services, particularly Orkut, the new one from Google. Interesting, but it’s not like you couldn’t see it coming. I’ll have more to say on this soon.

  • Fontifier

    Here’s a cool site I found today: Fontifier. They will create a TrueType font based on your handwriting for free. I’ve printed out the template, but haven’t tried it out yet, so I can’t report on the quality of the service. But it sounds sweet.

  • RSS as Poor Man’s Copyright

    These ideas have been rolling around my brain for a while, fermenting, percolating, but bear with me if they might still be a little incoherent. It’s really the first time I’ve put words to them.

    Perhaps you’ve heard of the “poor man’s copyright.” The idea behind it is to provide yourself copyright protection without actually registering your work, typically by mailing yourself a copy of your work with the idea that the postmark on the envelope will be enough to prove the copyright. I rather like the idea behind this concept, although in reality there is no legal provision for the poor man’s copyright and holds no legal weight whatsoever. In practice it would be easy to fake a copyright in this way.

    But this idea of being able to prove and protect the copyright on your creative work (short of registering it) is a powerful one, so it’s natural to transfer the poor man’s copyright concept to the computer. The problem is, it’s even easier to fake a datestamp on an electronic file than on an envelope full of materials, so just relying on Word files on your computer is out.

    You could borrow the idea of the PMC more literally and email your work to yourself—or better yet, to someone else. That would provide a better claim to credibility than files on a disk, but it’s far from foolproof—dates can be altered and forged on emails too. But now we’re moving in the right direction. And that’s where RSS comes in.

    Post your work into an RSS feed that has a decent number of subscribers, the more the better. Their aggregators regularly ping and download your RSS feed, and your work is suddenly distributed among dozens—hundreds—thousands of computers and users, each instance of your work (ideally) stamped with the date and time it was downloaded (important note here: an item in an RSS feed can claim any arbitrary creation date, so that’s why it’s important to disinguish the download date at the aggregator level). There would be a standard deviation of several hours to several days, perhaps, of these datestamps. But what would you have? A distributed, decentralized, and dated web of your copyrighted work, collectively becoming a digital postmark on the proverbial envelope.

    Fakeable? Sure, if you had access to a small number of controlled computers. But the larger the audience, especially a well-distributed one, the less able you would be to pull this off. That’s the beauty of this system: for a large enough set, the likelihood of faking or gaming the system approaches zero. There’s no single point of failure or vulnerability.

    Other drawbacks? Well, you’d have to have a fairly large audience downloading your RSS feed regularly. That’s a bit of a trick. RSS aggregators would have to be sure to accurately record the download date of the feed. Also, anytime you wanted to back up a claim, you’d somehow have to mobilize enough of this audience to check their aggregator archives and confirm your claim in a timely manner and communicate this assertion to the other party securely and independently. Details, details. :-)

    Would RSS PMC be any more legal and provide real protection over regular old PMC? In practice, I doubt it. Again, it’s the idea that’s powerful here and takes us to the next step. You’d have a peer-reviewed network where the group could at anytime confirm or deny the validity of what you claim. An online archived record distributed among thousands of computers of everything you created and loaded into your RSS feed.

    It’s a double-edged sword, too. If you tried to plagiarize someone else’s work and claim it as your own, you’d have the community calling foul and moving against you. And the community has a long memory.

    Suddenly, this sounds a lot like an online reputation system, doesn’t it? Once you get started thinking about this stuff, the ideas just start rolling out. That’s the beauty of this RSS thing—the possibilities and potential it creates.

  • Mazda Autobot

    Something cool this morning: a Flash animation from Mazda showing one of their cars transorming into an Autobot. The only thing missing, though, is the Transformer sound effects.

    Found via Boing Boing.

  • CafePress.com

    Started playing around with CafePress.com at work today (setting up a basic store for the company), and I’m fairly impressed with it. I’ve been toying with the idea for a while now of setting myself up with an account and opening a chuggnutt.com store (and play around with others); now I see how things operate, I think I’ll do just that. Stay tuned.

  • NetOffice Fix

    This is a follow-up to last month’s post about NetOffice. I’ve gotten several emails from people wanting to know specifically what I changed to fix the session error I was running into.

    First of all, these fixes apply to version 2.5.3 of NetOffice only. Other versions, you’re on your own.

    In the file includes/library.php:

    Comment out line 23: ini_set('session.save_handler', 'user');
    Comment out lines 61-63: session_set_save_handler() stuff
    Comment out line 1088, in _sess_mysql_read() function: _sess_mysql_destroy($session_id);
    …and add this line instead: session_destroy();

    This all kills the custom session handling, instead letting PHP use the default (temp files).

    In the file general/login.php:

    Comment out line 37: _sess_mysql_destroy($session_id);
    …and add this line instead: session_destroy();

    In the file projects_site/index.php:

    Comment out line 22: _sess_mysql_destroy($session_id);
    …and add this line instead: session_destroy();

    After that, you should be able to get things working.

  • TrackBack?

    Jeremy Zawodny had a post imagining a corporate worst-case scenario involving that ubiquitous Movable Type-developed technology, TrackBack. I’d been musing over TrackBack for awhile, and two things yesterday got me looking deeper into it: Zawodny’s blog entry, and the link to my site from Ensight that I detailed in my previous entry.

    I’ll admit, before yesterday what I knew about TrackBack was fairly minimal: it was a way to let sites know when other sites were linking to them (by sites, I suppose it should be clarified I mean blogs)—which to me is basically the equivalent of scanning the webserver’s referrer logs. Hence, I’ve more-or-less ignored implementing it in my own software.

    I’m rethinking that decision now, largely because of the Ensight link. You know how I found that link to me? Technorati. (I would’ve seen it in the Apache logs, sooner or later, but I’ve been behind on those lately.) It occurred to me, though, that if I hadn’t checked Technorati, or if the post containing the link to me had scrolled off of Ensight’s front page and off Technorati, then I might never have known that I had been linked to.

    TrackBack might change that. I say “might” because I’m still on the fence, as far as it goes. I can’t deny that if I had a TrackBack implementation in place, I would have gotten a notification of linkage in this case—Ensight runs Movable Type, which of course runs TrackBack. So I looked into the TrackBack specs yesterday to educate myself.

    Here’s my official “from the fence” opinion:

    TrackBack is a rather ugly kludge, albeit somewhat clever.

    It has its good points, and its bad points. Here’s the good points:

    • The concept. It’s good, I admit it. However, it took a close reading of the technical spec to get it across to me. The most important thing about the concept is that it can transcend the weblog world; done right, this could be a powerful tool for all sorts of Web applications.
    • It uses plain-vanilla HTTP calls to ping other sites. Simple, easy to implement, firewall-friendly.
    • The autodiscovery concept—having your client try to automagically retrieve and ping a site based on the link you give it is neat.
    • Adoption. Almost all Movable Type and TypePad blogs I’ve seen use it, and a good number of other blog tools use it too. It’s got the inertia.

    Now, the bad:

    • It’s too vague and confusing. Prior to yesterday, I only had an inkling of how it worked and what it did, and I’m pretty savvy at this stuff; I just couldn’t grok what exactly was going on when viewing sites that use it.
    • Related to the previous point, the name itself doesn’t work for me, it makes me want to only look in one direction for links (back) while the spec several times emphasizes it’s a peer-to-peer technology (ie., two-way). Too much confusion and vague imagery doesn’t breed a good market presence.
    • The execution leaves me a bit cold. That’s tough to quantify, I know, but it just seems to me to be too Movable Type-centric, and hence too limited to be the real-world peer-to-peer communication framework it wants to be.
    • The autodiscovery solution, while clever, is an ugly hack: embedding RDF into the HTML of a page? Worse, having to surround it with HTML comment tags to avoid breakage? Ick, ick, ick. Seems to me a better solution would have been to embed the autodiscovery stuff in HTML meta tags, like the RSS autodiscovery link you’ll find in many sites (including my own). Even something simple along these lines, like:<meta name="trackback" content="http://www.example.com/tb.cgi?id=1">

      would do. And it would play nicely. I’ve noticed more than once that sites with that embedded RDF cause script errors in my browser.

    So while TrackBack, conceptually, is good, its execution is kludgy and ugly. Because of this, I probably wouldn’t give serious consideration to implementing it on my site… except for the fact that it’s being highly adopted, and as a community-building tool it’s better than nothing at all. Do I want to miss the boat? I don’t know, yet.

    Other thoughts? What do you all think? Is TrackBack good enough? Or could it be better?

  • A Little Ensight

    Jeremy Wright over on Ensight has wrote up some good commentary to my Thoughts on Content Management post from a few days back. He’s hit on the exact points that prompted me to explore this topic: “most CMS’s are piss poorly designed” (which is exactly right; most are piss-poorly designed, I’m just as guilty of this as anybody), and “there is no need to choose how you are managing your content until it is actually time to manage it.” (Emphasis mine.) Right on.

    And, here’s some kudos from Jeremy that caught me entirely off-guard:

    Jon, over at Chuggnut.com, is one of my favourite writers. Balanced, fair and most importantly, intelligent.

    Wow. That’s a damn nice thing to say, Jeremy—thank you! (To everyone else, sorry for the ego-stroking; I’ll try not to let it go to my head… too much.)

  • RSS Comics Feeds

    “Tapestry is a series of RSS feeds for online comics.” Very cool. I’ve just subscribed to a bunch of them, now I’ll get the day’s comics delivered right to my computer automagically!

    Update: Forgot to give credit to Jake at UtterlyBoring.com for the link.