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| Monday, June 2, 2003 |
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Making change 
Where do we stand?
| | Hmmmm....I know where Doc is going -- hell, I agree with 98% of where Doc is going, but (and this isn't just for Doc) I'm starting to see an awful lotta what I'll call "cannonical" thinking in the blogosphere lately. And it worries me. |
| | What do I mean by "cannonical thinking"? Take the example of Jesus. Believe it or not, people really do disagree about what he meant when he said and did things. Throw in some Gnostic texts, some Dead Sea Scrolls, etc -- and, well, it can get ugly. BUT -- there is definitely a "cannonical" school of thought. I don't just mean the fundamentalists. I mean your every day lutheran, methodist and catholic (for example). |
| | Cannonical thought says just what Doc seemed to say above -- "we know what was meant -- and we know exactly how it *should* be thought about, even if that's not the way its thought about today...." |
| | yeah, i know i'm stretching what Doc's saying, but I think you get my drift. There's a mythology (yes, it is a damn good story) that has formed about the "early days of the Net" and the "founding of the Net" and the "intentions of the founders of the Net"......and whether the facts are right or wrong (there is still some debate there), the fact is that the *story* is becoming more powerful than any fact. And that worries me (as i've said). |
| | Bottom line: yes, the web *is* a certain way....especially in its ideals (plato). But just because we're reading plato, doesn't mean heraclitus has been revoked.....ie, you can never step in the same river twice......ie, the web is changing. |
| | What makes me cringe is the changes I fear Eric endorses, because they are clearly where the Net is headed in the current climate of big business, legislative and regulatory opinion: A might-makes-right system by which big suppliers (particularly including the Net's carriers) gradually turn the Net from an inherently egalitarian and uncontrolled World of Ends to an inherently hegemonistic World of Means that's understood as a distribution system for content, and yet another way that the few control the many. |
| | He's right that this is about ideals, not canon. What I want to know is what Eric's ideals are here. |
| | The particulars are arguable. The generalities go deeper than argument. They are where we stand, and why we stand there. |
| | I'm standing for the Net as a place: as a commons, as a market space that is built to support any form of business people choose to build on it, and not to favor those with the means to throttle it, or to bias it into yet another machine that exists primarily for the distribution of "content" and secondarily for everything else. |
| | On regulation, my sentiments are basically libertarian. Yet I would, with Larry Lessig, like to see some kind of federal recognition of the end-to-end nature of the Net's environment. Given the obvious biasses of the both legislators and regulators today, the chance for that is zero. Worse, the chances for nasty legislation and regulation remain high. |
| | So we're left with speech. Let's carry on. |
Live from the FCC
| | Diversity, localism and competition... Modern rules that take into account for proliferations... striking a careful balance... |
| | Retaining rules on network ownership, tightening radio ownership... |
| | Ah, now Michael Copps is up. Hitting hard. This path places into the hands of a few giant corporations unprecedented control... Clear Channelization of the rest of American media... The (commission) majority instead chooses radical deregulation. |
| | Are the new rules up somewhere? (Lou points here.) |
| | Based on these rules, a single company could own virtually all the commercial outlets in a market and for some reason this is described as "localism," when most media companies are non-resident owners. |
Search sports
| | You're not going to believe this, but a new search engine has just appeared and, well, it may be better than Google. |
| | Obviously, that sounds slightly ridiculous but after having spent a day devising weird and wonderful searches and comparisons, not only has it stood up to the test but it's so good that you realise how much of an effect Google has had on your thinking when it comes to searching the Net. |
| | You can go try it now - it's at Turbo10.com - but for God's sake, before you start emailing and ranting and raving, read the rest of this story as it will probably cover what you're going to say. |
| | The site, unfortunately, is disabled. We are experiencing a very high load. Please try again later. |
| | Elwin Jenkins at Microdoc News asks What Will It Take To Topple Google? and points out that Turbo10.com doesn't compete as a search engine, but rather as a meta site that aggregates or otherwise represents the contents and facilities of other search services. |
| | I think Google's chances of being "toppled" in the short term are approximately zero. What Google needs is real competition, which would give the rest of us a choice. Right now it's not there. Alltheweb is the best of the rest, but still a far cry. No cached results. No similar pages. No searches of .pdf, .doc and other text files. Picture searches that are often useless. |
| | I'm looking forward to seeing what Turbo10 is up to. But I don't think we're going to see anything really interesting until we deal with the Net's own directory problem, which is the absence of innate directory services any deeper than DNS. |
| | Until we solve that problem, commercial edge-services like Google's will have to serve as de facto infrastructure. |
The Dean Dream
| | Still, the guy must have some kind of mojo, or he wouldn't have earned his own satire site. Can you imagine the same for Dick Gephardt? |
| | So I promise to start giving a shit and looking at what Dean and the rest of the crowd, Bush included, are up to. |
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