Month: April 2007

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I Bought Votes on Digg

Interesting example of how what looks like a nice, friendly democratic socialism on the surface can be easily corrupted with an elixir of money and a non-critical voting populace.

For Wired, Annalee Newitz describes her social experiment in gaming social news ranking site digg.com by purchasing votes through an external service.

I spent several days creating a blog intended to be as random and boring as possible. Built from templates, My Pictures of Crowds exhibits all the worst aspects of blogging. There’s an obsessive theme — photographs of crowds — but no originality and absolutely no analysis. Each entry is simply an illogical, badly punctuated appreciation of a CC-licensed picture taken from Flickr. Also, there are a lot of unnecessary exclamation points!

Digg claims that its algorithms are able to detect patterns reflective of vote purchasing, and that it shouldn’t be possible for popularity to be bought and sold on the open market. But there was more at work here — only some of the diggs received were bought – many more came from non-bought diggers “jumping on the bandwagon” — digging the story just because others were doing so. Newitz was able to goose the site with purchased votes just enough for it to rise through the ratings until it hit the tipping point, at which point critical mass took over and the site became a minor hit.

So, the magic mixture seems to be a just-right blend of pimps and lemmings.

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savenetradio

The Copyright Royalty Board has recently decided to nearly triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora.

The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays, and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

savenetradio.org has been created to raise awareness and reverse the tide, before this vital medium is smothered in its crib. Please consider sending email to your congress-critter / reps, encouraging them to stop the madness.

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OpenID: The Missing Link

The OpenID light went on today, after a little setup and testing. I can now go to a blog or CMS or discussion board or other service that supports OpenID and type in “birdhouse.org” – no username, no password. Hit Return, and I’m in. If I’ve never been there before, I get standard user-level permissions. If I’ve been there before and an admin has escalated my privs, I’m in as admin. Securely. How is this possible?

Created an ID for myself at MyOpenID (though you could use any OpenID provider). Doing so gave me an identity URL through that provider. But here’s the dirty little OpenID secret that shouldn’t be a secret: The protocol supports “delegation” — by adding a couple of meta lines to the header of any URL you control (the birdhouse.org homepage, in my case), that URL can stand in as your identity URL. So when I typed “birdhouse.org” into a blog that supported OpenID earlier today, it fetched that URI and read its delegation headers. It then knew my “real” identity URL at the provider. The provider was able to determine that I was already logged into their service and pass “true” back to the blog I was trying to access. If I hadn’t been logged into MyOpenID at the time, I would have been prompted to log in there first, as a middle step in a seamless process.

Once authenticated to the blog, which had the WordPress OpenID plugin installed, a user-level account in that blog was created automatically for me. The admin could then escalate my privileges to admin or whatever, and I’d still only need to type “birdhouse.org” to log in there as admin. And you can’t. So there.

Distributed single sign-on works. Totally elegant.

A while back, Six Apart launched TypeKey, a single sign-on mechanism first made available for Movable Type blogs. TK never really took off, for a couple of reasons. First, most blog owners had already discovered that requiring any kind of sign-on had a chilling effect on blog conversation — any barrier to commenting was too high, and tended to stop casual “stopper-by” conversation dead. Second, a lot of people didn’t want to put all their identity eggs in the Six Apart basket, didn’t feel comfortable having a corporation behind the critical task of identity maintenance. That assumption was bogus – TypeKey was always an open API – but a lot of people didn’t feel comfortable with it. TypeKey isn’t dead, but there aren’t many sites using it.

Lots of identity conversation at SXSW this year, with OpenID emerging as the “final” solution to the distributed identity problem. Ended up not attending that panel, but did get to eat sushi with Kaliya “identity is a commons that no one can own” Hamlin, who (by some accounts) is single-handedly responsible for wrangling the monolithic corporate gargoyles (who all wanted to sell the world on their own proprietary silo identity systems and end up falling into the same hole that swallowed TypeKey), tying them up in a room and making them take mushrooms and hug until they agreed to adopt OpenID. Now even AOL is an OpenID provider.

Free love works!

Thanks Milan

Music: Linton Kwesi Johnson :: Brain Smashing Dub
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Buzzword Enabled

BeOS used to market itself as the “Buzzword Enabled Operating System.”

Got a call from someone recently who was going to be speaking at a public event, wanting to make sure I could set them up with a “Web 2.0-capable laptop.” And so I did. Wasn’t hard, neither.

Music: Nick Drake :: Saturday Sun
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Peanut Butter: Atheist’s Nightmare

The fact that life has never spontaneously emerged from a jar of supermarket peanut butter is apparently all the proof we need that evolutionists are off their rocker.

What, Chuck Missler never heard of preservatives (added specifically to prevent life from spontaneously erupting from food?) Or that billions of years of planetary soup-making isn’t quite comparable to a cup of goo sitting on a supermarket shelf for two years?

And then there’s the other atheist’s nightmare: The banana, so clearly designed to fit in the human hand and mouth that it’s clear evidence of God’s handiwork. Never mind that bananas weren’t quite so well-engineered to fit human hands and mouths before we evolved them to do so.

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If The Earth Were a Sandwich

Last year’s meme, but I missed it — Ze Frank’s If the Earth Were a Sandwich:

Never before have two pieces of bread been placed on the ground directly opposite each other on the globe, thus making an earth sandwich. The fact that the earth has never been a sandwich is probably why things are so f***’d up.

Use the find opposite tool so you can discover what point on earth is diametrically opposite your own back yard. Like Ze Frank, diametrically opposite my house is the middle of the Indian Ocean. In fact, it looks like the entire U.S. is SOL on this one, exceptin’ Hawaii and a tiny sliver of northern Alaska. But I strongly encourage all of you reading from Mongolia to hook up with your antimatter cousins in Argentina.

Music: Tom Waits :: Grapefruit moon
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The Great Turtle Race

For the past 100 million years, 6-foot long leatherback turtles have been crawling onto a beach in Costa Rica to lay their eggs, then sprinting back to their feeding grounds in The Galapagos to re-fill their bellies. But 90 percent of the leatherbacks have disappeared in recent decades, victims of human pressures. The turtles’ epic history may only have 10 years left – they’re on their way out.

This year, researchers attached satellite transponders to the turtles’ shells as they laid their eggs, and were able to track routes back to The Galapagos. The resulting wealth of GPS data means their race home can be plotted, full of educational opportunities. The trip will be re-played as a 14-day journey starting tomorrow. Amy, Miles, and I have all picked a turtle to cheer on, and will be watching the trip for the next two weeks.

At first I bristled to see the names of corporate sponsors attached to the animals, but that was a knee-jerk reaction. Corporations are exactly the entities that should be chipping in to raise awareness and change the world. Away we go.

The site is being produced by J-School multimedia journalism instructor Jane Stevens.

Music: Tom Waits :: Earth Died Screaming
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New York To London

London-Directions 1. Go to www.google.com
2. Click on “maps”
3. Click on “get directions”
4. Type “New York” in the “from” box
5. Type “London” in the “to” box
6. Click on “get directions”
7. Scroll down to step #23

Music: The Fiery Furnaces :: Spaniolated
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Fly On, Little Wing

M Trapeze 1     M Trapeze 2    M Trapeze 3

Miles and I trekked up to the Physics of the Circus exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science recently — he was just big enough to be allowed on the trapeze. Talk about one of those days when I wished I had a proper camera on me. This cell phone business doesn’t cut it. He wasn’t heavy enough to bounce it himself, so they had to “fly” him manually by tugging rhythmically on the elastic stays. Then I got a turn to get harnessed up and try some flip-dee-doos (which was exhausting). In mid-twist, I heard a small voice calling to me from the ground: “You’re doing great, Daddy!” Wanted to jump down and hug him.

Yesterday, zookeepers from the East Bay Vivarium came to Miles’ preschool. When they asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to let a tarantula walk on their head, M’s hand shot up. No shots of that, but he apparently wasn’t scared a bit.

Fly on, little wing.

Music: Toots & The Maytals, Bootsy Collins & The Roots :: Funky Kingston