trenchant.org

“You have to understand how important personal responsibility is in the future. You need to prepare yourself.”

“Ok, give me an example.”

“Like, say someone wearing augmented reality goggles has a virtual ad overlay obscure their vision while they walk into the street and then he gets hit by a car. Is the driver or pedestrian at fault?”

“Um. What about the ad-filled goggles?”

“Trick question! It’s a self-driving car.”

“Wait, what? How is that a trick question? Is the future stupid? Why are you wearing goggles with ads that obscure your vision? And wouldn’t the pedestrian sue the car owner? Or the company that made the car? Or the goggles?”

“Sure, but the entire legal system has been replaced by justice dispensing synthoids, which has made lawsuits much more common. I’m involved in like 9,093 lawsuits right now. No, wait, 9,094 as of just now, something about improper use of timestreaming. Anyway, it’s not a big deal. It’s a mild inconvenience — like a sneeze to you.”

“You haven’t solved sneezing yet?!”

“No, no, we have. I meant a sneeze in your time. In our time sneezing has been eliminated with genetic manipulation. That’s why we have these mucus emitting tails.”

“The future is gross.”

“Yeah, but, you don’t even notice with the goggles on.”

“I’m about to say something that people think is an exaggeration, but I think the evidence is pretty strong,” he tells me. “Every major company in the United States has already been penetrated by China.”

…

“My greatest fear,” Clarke says, “is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it’s always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China….After a while you can’t compete.”

— Richard Clarke on Who Was Behind the Stuxnet Attack

Due to what seems to be a prohibition in fully disclosing intrusions by many companies, there seems to be less external pressure than one might expect on this issue.

My guess is rational shareholders would be up in arms over this if there was real transparency and we knew the true extent of these things.

And, of course, there are all the intrusions and security failures the companies themselves may not even be aware of.

…

I anticipate a frame shift in discussing the movement of US manufacturing and industrial capacity to China, and our economic relation to the country overall — a shift from labor and human rights issues to concerns about challenges to the value of intellectual property long term national security.

It’s not that the labor or human rights issue don’t matter — they certainly do — just that things are much larger. It encompasses the self interests of corporations and our global economic competitiveness.

At the beginning of this year I resolved to return to proper blogging and began updating this site every weekday as I had intended to do many years ago when it began.

Part of the reasoning for this was that the content I really care about is here, and yet I was spreading myself thin and expending my energies on corporate owned tools instead. This has slowly changed how I published, what I wrote, and where it ended up.

Now that I have refocused and stabilized my efforts here, I decided to do a little more detailed analysis of how I have spent my time and efforts online over the past decade.

I wrote some scripts to download machine readable archives of all of my content across: this site, delicious, flickr, Google Reader (1), tumblr, twitter, and mlkshk.

I normalized the content put it into a document-oriented database (mongodb.) I ran some queries over it and eventually exported some aggregations to make charts.

These are far from the most exciting information visualizations you’ll see, but here’s some of the initial analysis I did.

trenchant daily’s rise, decline and rebirth

When I began writing this site in 2001, I intended to write one entry every weekday. Not more, not less. This shows how close I was to meeting that goal each month.

That goal had been slowly slipping over the years, and pretty much had fallen apart by 2011. But so far in 2012 I’ve met my goals.

While some of the changes in frequency over the years reflect life changes — for example, after graduating college things are less stable until I entered graduate school, sometimes work got in the way, I wanted to look at the larger sphere of contributions across the web to see how that impacted things.

Services Over Time

[Click for larger version]

So, there’s a lot going on here, though it’s probably a lot more interesting to me than anyone else.

Part of the context was changing my website in 2007 or so to be an integrated feed of all the various posts I made. By posting photos to Flickr, links to Delicious, and various “things” to Tumblr, trenchant daily posts declined.

This predated FriendFeed and large corporate (Facebook, Google Buzz, etc.) adoption of the “activity stream” as the next big thing.

I got rid of that a while ago when I soured on the concept, which I like a lot more in theory than practice. (A topic for another essay.)

More things to note:

• I quit using Delicious and links end up in my browser or elsewhere now (see next chart)
• I use mlkshk more than I realized
• twitter is a habit that is impossible to kick?
• I anticipated a more negative correlation between twitter and trenchant daily, but it looks stronger between tumblr and trenchant daily. (I should run real correlation numbers.)
• Google Reader starring (which let’s say is a proxy for “engaged reading” on my part) slowly fell off until I threw out all my subscriptions and started over with a more focused reading list
• The decline in Flickr usage surely correlates to my own photography habits in part, but is also likely due to the audience “leaving” Flickr and the web’s general distrust of Yahoo’s stewardship of the product

Link Sharing

These aren’t all equivalent, but it looks sort of like my activity on delicious migrated to tumblr, and over time mlkshk displaced tumblr.

Conclusion

Much of what I saw was anticipated, but a lot of it was not, and there’s more I think I can learn from the data.

I think analyzing this data and these trends will help me be more mindful of how I spend my time online and happier with my output, which was my real goal.

(1) At various points my Google Reader Starred items were aggregated and shared when my site was primarily an integrated feed of all my activities across the web. I never used the built-in suggested Google Reader sharing tools, which I thought were an abomination. I am not linking to my starred items because Google has deprecated the publicly accessible version of those feeds as far as I can tell.

I would always know what record was playing by the spinning colors and patterns in the center of the player.

— Paul Octavious, Grandpas Records [via]

Artridges.

This isn’t Amelia Earhart or the Bermuda Triangle we’re talking about here: this is one of the highest grossing consumer entertainment products in history, introduced less than 30 years ago, and we can’t seem to get the date right. I decided recently to try to set this right. I wanted to prove, once and for all, exactly when Super Mario Bros. invaded North America.

— Frank Cifaldi, Sad But True: We Can’t Prove When Super Mario Bros. Came Out

Fascinating look at the introduction of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the US, and just how scarcely documented a critical event in video game history is.

Tara “Tiger” Brown is worried about fake geek girls. Tara, you are a woman now, okay?

— Leigh Alexander, About That ‘Fake Geek Girls’ Article

Skills.to is a new website from Joshua Schachter, creator of delicious and the godfather of tagging and folksonomies on the web, and tasty labs.

A million years ago in web terms I used to run a dating/social network/thing/web site with Ben that allowed people to tag each other called Consumating, and before that I studied folksonomies in graduate school so it’s a topic I’ve spent a bit of time on.

Here are my initial thoughts on skills.to:

The foundational assumption of the site is that tagging forms a sort of collaborative “endorsement” of people’s skills, and that this can be useful for finding people with specific skills.

Is that actually true? Will that be more or less useful than self-describing skills on LinkedIn if enough people use it? Is it as useful as specialized reputation gleaned from github or other sources? Will be interesting to see how it pans out.

Some critiques:

Professionalism and Context

Is professional networking right for Twitter? Probably for a subset, but I find that the gestalt of Twitter is more of a party than a business casual networking event. I may just be behind the times on this one, but it feels off to me.

Initial Motivation

What’s the motivating factor to tag yourself or others? With delicious, Flickr, and other services the motivation for early users is organizing their own collections. This use case (organizing your twitter contacts) seemed to be the basis behind Twitter lists, which does not seem to have been broadly used.

On Consumating, tagging was a form of flirtation and communication - the incentives were a little clearer.

The “find someone with x skills” or “be someone who has x skills to be found” use cases doesn’t seem to quite address this.

Proxy Profiles are Creepy

You don’t have to a member of skills.to to have someone tag you, you just have to be on Twitter. This is nice for adoption but these sort of “proxy profiles” that make it unclear whether someone is on the system or not seem skeezy to me. Making it very obvious when someone is or is not a member of the site could address some of this.

But if someone writes nasty things about me, do I have to join your service to remove them? Seems… ugh. In general using someone’s likeness on your site without their explicit permission doesn’t sit well with me.

Handling spam, abuse, etc. seems like it could get out of hand pretty quickly with controversial figures.

…

But overall, it’s really nice to see a pioneer in folksonomies starting something like this and I look forward to seeing how it develops.

pixodes.com · @pixodes

“I have thrown out like a ton of half-written articles this week because they are just too negative. That one about Pinterest, and I mean, like, how can someone write articles about search engines without knowing the first thing about information retrieval just because they are editor of the A…”

“Yeah it doesn’t count if you start listing them like that.”

“Oh.”

“Be positive.”

“I like the new iPad.”

“Yeah, I know. Everybody knows. You already wrote that.”

“Really like that new iPad.”

I’ve always taken my time with ideas because I didn’t have the resources to do it any other way.

— Matt Haughey, My Webstock Talk: Lessons from a 40 year old (now with transcript)

There’s just so much that’s wonderful and inspiring in Matt’s Webstock talk.

I’m the President!

— Thomas Jefferson concluding the Young Person’s Guide To History while Cheeseburger covers Alice Cooper’s Elected.

All too much internet drivel.

A brief review of the new iPad for decommodify:

the new iPad is the most impressive high resolution display in the world, and you can hold it in your hands and take it with you.

It’s like holding the future.

I wanted to love Journey.

Instead, I disconnected my PS3 from the network to avoid the multiplayer because the presence of other players annoyed me to no end.

It is a tremendously beautiful game.

But the vastness you can see compared to the linearity of the game (and the “find the shiny thing” challenges) made it all seem superficial.

It didn’t connect with me emotionally. As the credits rolled I felt nothing.

I was so disengaged from the experience I stopped playing at night, thinking I was perhaps halfway through. The next day I completed it — I was merely 20-30 minutes from the end.

(And I realize that my refusal to engage in the multiplayer is a huge factor, so perhaps I’ll come back to it later and try again.)