Inventing the Future:
A Great Miracle Happened There

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One of the really great things about the WWW, as opposed to the Internet in general, is that the Web separates the concept of naming from everything else. A URL is bit of text that names a resource. You can type it. Except for some long URLs used by banks and in ecommerce, you can often even remember it. But most importantly, you can include the text in some other technology such as an email, an instant message, a calendar invite, a Web page, or even in a book or piece of paper. It can be sent and stored. The URL can be transmitted through this separate non-WWW media, and it still works on the other end.

When you name something, you have power over it. Like the dreidel mnemonic of the title, names help you to remember stuff. You can speak clearly about places and objects instead of just using misunderstood pronouns and long descriptions. And best of all, if you know something’s name, you can use it in casting a spell. (We call them programs.)

So a big part being able to work with virtual worlds, talk about them with other people, and use them in programs is to have a name – a URL that corresponds to each interesting thing about a virtual world.

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Inventing the Future:
Subsumption Assumption

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Ack, this was sitting in my drafts folder for nearly a year. At the time I started it, someone had asked about how one might use Croquet virtual worlds to subsume other technical functions in the same way that the World Wide Web has incorporated other resources and functions. I did five minutes on the taxonomy of the problem-space.

I should have just answered with this video of Intel’s John David Miller demoing the use of Twitter from within a Qwaq Forum. He fills in the stuff on the Twitter Web page (crappy hand-held video, below) and then I love how the audience guy asks, “And then you can bring the result in to the world?” JDM answers that it already is, and dollies back to show that the whole interaction has been in world the whole time.

Reminds me of this from way back when.

Inventing the Future:
Hanging Out in the Lobby

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A lot of us like to run Forums all day, like an IM client. In the new version, you can log in to your organization without actually entering any of its forums(1). We think of it as hanging out in the lobby of that organization. You can watch people going in and out, text chat with them, and join them in whatever forum they are working in(2).

The idea is that if virtual world technology is a meta-medium that subsumes, for example, instant messaging, then it ought to do IM as well as dedicated IM clients while retaining the benefits of the virtual world technology. In the case of Forums, that means secure communication.

  1. In Forums, each user is a member of one or more organizations.

  2. People tend to have one forum per project at work.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Do it yourself publlishing — R.W. Ridley style

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Last week this fellow R.W. Ridley started following me on twitter after I tweeted about kindlizing The Pains. He’s a writer with a horror series called The Takers aimed at young adults. Turns out that like me, he’s a self-publisher. Like me, he’s won the Self-Published Book Award from Writer’s Digest magazine. Like me, he’s got a blog & is experimenting with kindle and various other ways of getting the word out. Unlike me, he seems to have good portions of his act together. For example his blog is streamed to his author page on Amazon. (How do he do that?) And he has a couple of other neat things, like a youtube video for his books. I have never met the fellow and haven’t read his books & so have no idea of how well he’s doing sales-wise and whether the books are any good. But I was impressed by this little audio book sample. It’s well read and well written and creepy, with nice sound effects. Check it out. And check out his website, there’s some other cool stuff there.

I also note with interest his blog posting about how this year print-on-demand titles outnumbered traditionally published titles. Wow. And then consider, there are lots of self-published books, like mine, that are not POD. (Mine are traditional offset books.) Things sure are changing in the publishing world. And so it goes and so it goes and so it goes, as the man said, but where it’s going, no one knows. . .

Inventing the Future:
Sounds Good

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One of the general internal themes of Croquet is that everything ought to just work, and work well. Most practicing software developers aren’t fortunate enough to be able to create artifacts like this because the software is aimed at addressing a very specific problem. That tends to lead to tools of limited scope and interaction.

Consider sound. If you only want to make voice chat work, you can use a low fidelity encoding on a lossy transport. It will do what it does well, but only that. Now suppose you and someone else are watching a movie and discussing it, using separate programs for the movie and VoIP. Either program might work well, but use them together and everything is likely to go to hell.

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Inventing the Future:
Time Shifting

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I don’t remember hearing the phrase “time shifting” before VCRs and DVRs. I now appreciate the value in being able to capture something while I’m doing something else and then view the capture later when I think I’ll have more time. With digital photography I can easily and sloppily capture my world and shift the difficult task of composition and editing to a later time. (Like, after I’m dead maybe.) I thought I learned in economics that land was the one universally limited resource, but I think that finite time is far more significant. Any tool that helps me shift time is valuable.

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My Thoughts Exactly:
Painful Kindlization

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Well, with the help of my esteemed collaborator and amanuensis the bon vivant man-about-town Gary Gray, I’ve put up a kindle book version of The Pains over on the website of the borg Amazon.com. IMHO the kindle version is not as cool as the paper version–among other lossage, the illustrations are all gray scale, not luminous color (or colour, as Sir Cheeseburge Brown, the illustrator, would have it) but on the other hand, at $4 a pop it’s not a bad deal.

If you have a kindle and are feeling flush, why not buy a copy? You’ll help a struggling (and I do mean struggling) genius, and also get a fun book, for less than the price of whatever you can get for $4.01.

Check it out here.

Tales of the Sausage Factory:
FCC Begins Inquiry Into Arbitron Portable People Meter

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Sometime back back, I noted the flap over the Arbitron Portable People Meter and the Petition by the Minority Media Telecommunications Council (MMTC) for the FCC to take action. The FCC put the Petition out on public notice last September, and has now issued a Notice of Inquiry on the matter.

As always, the questions are (a) why do we care about this? and (b) Even if we care, does the Commission have authority to do anything? In answering this last time, I observed: (a) we care because the entire economics of the radio industry are driven by ratings, and the FCC’s own rules rely on Arbitron ratings for a number of purposes, and (b) the FCC can always investigate anything related to its areas of jurisdiction. At worst, it provides a good forum for debate and an opportunity to tell Congress “Yo! this is important, somebody needs to do something about this for these reasons.” these are pretty much the conclusions the FCC comes to in its Notice. After observing in footnote 1 that it has broad powers to investigate, the Commission frames the questions as:

This NOI investigates the impact of PPM methodology on the broadcast industry as well as whether the audience ratings data is sufficiently accurate and reliable to merit the Commission’s own reliance on it in its rules, policies and procedures.

I am hopeful that we see a good, robust debate here although I don’t expect anything in the way of Earth-shattering revelations. There is an interesting problem of what information Arbitron will reveal about its processes, and whether the Commission will provide some assurances that it will keep proprietary information out of the public record. If it does, it makes it much harder for those who say the process is unfair to respond. But if it doesn’t, it’s analysis is going to be incomplete.

Mind you, it’s not at all clear what authority the FCC has over Arbitron directly. But the FCC can take certain actions if it doesn’t like what it sees, giving Arbitron incentive to play and try to resolve concerns. The FCC can declare Arbitron unreliable and no longer rely on it for regulatory determinations. That’s not exactly the kind of publicity you want if you make your living based on the accuracy of your ratings system. Alternatively, if the FCC doesn’t see anything wrong, it can always conclude that Arbitron remains acceptable for the FCC’s purposes. That will be of enormous assistance to Arbitron in removing any cloud over its rating system.

Bottom line, the NOI is a smart move by the Copps FCC on multiple levels. It doesn’t assert any authority, it doesn’t prejudge, and it services an important Democratic constituency. Hopefully, Arbitron and its critics will use the FCC as a neutral forum to develop an mutually acceptable solution.

Stay tuned . . . .

Inventing the Future:
True and False

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The world as we know it is a fictionalized version.

Today’s papers carry the obituary of Hubert Van Es. Apparently, after shooting the famous photo of the last helicopter out of Saigon, this van-dyke wearing Dutch photojournalist was a fixture in the Hong Kong press-club bar for the next 30 years, complete with Hawaiian shirt and floppy press-corp hat, cursing away in accented English. It seems the most clichéd of what we consider fiction really does capture something true. But what of the things we consider fact? The photo of the throngs lined up to board the helicopter is remembered as being on the roof of the US embassy. According to the Washington Post obituary, an editor mis-captioned what was actually an apartment building. But dig some more and it is said that the building was the home of the CIA station chief and his officers, and that the people turned away were employed by the US. So reality is close to the truth. Maybe close enough, maybe correct in a way but not precisely accurate.

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