Can we solve the spam problem?
Sorting e-mail friends from foes: Identifying networks of mutual friends helps filter out spam is another project that uses networks of friends to filter mail. This project, in effect, acknowledges that we may have to give up on the anonymous and democratic Internet and go back to other types of networks to decide who we correspond with.
What do I mean by this? Another post.
Can we bypass censorship on the Internet?
The story was that the Internet was designed to bypass censorship (in the sense of reroute around disruptions) and that the technology was therefore inherently democratic. Now we worry this won’t stay true as we discover that countries can censor the net and commercial interests (RIAA) can scare beharior. We are discovering what political activists have always known, you can’t count on systems by themselves – you have to pay attention to achieve values. The Freenet Project (thanks to Matt for this) is an example of paying attention – building the human and technical network to support redundant distribution of information.
My memory of Freenet was of something different – local free internet ISPs in the days when there were few affordable options for those outside the university – hmmm is this the same org morphed?
Anyway, they are doing what James Chartrand and I imagined and called the Beacon project. (As always, if you have a good idea that just helps you recognize that someone else had it before.)
Continue reading Freenet Project
Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is an online Ruby book full of cartoons and commentary suitable for people wondering about languages. Looks great, but I’ve just started it.
What strikes me about the Ruby community is that many of its books are online – the so-far best guide Programming Ruby is also online and, despite having it there, I bought it. I like having things in both print and online for when the book isn’t at hand. (And now they have added a convenient table of contents and jump targets to the online one.) For programming online publication can only help. Anyone serious needs to carefully read to get programming and hence print is still best. The online version helps with looking up and as a preview.
Now I need to think about the poignant side of this e-book. Does its style work?
Can we misuse computer assisted text analysis to say what a document is about. Of course!
I sent the MLA about page through the HTML List Words TAPoRware tool. This gave me a frequency sorted list of words which I have used to come up with this synopsis:
The “PMLA interests more journals (than) other humanities articles” and proceedings. The MLA runs “groups (of) international profession activities (and) bulletins”. (This helps graduate students learn to be pros at fessing.) Due to “divisions” they have two “discussion programs”, but healing is an ongoing process for the “membership”. Their “membership executive (has lots of) meetings” (see below about ruling the members) and they have “modern committees”. (Postmodern committees are coming.) There is a “bibliography (of) annual literature (around) scholarly teaching convention(s)”. This also helps us profess in a conventional fashion. In short, the “MLA (rules) over language association members”. Which is as it should be.
See below for the list of words that prove this true.
Continue reading What the MLA is about
How can one capture the folklore around a topic?
Andy Hertzfeld (of Mac fame) has developed a set of python scripts to run Folklore.org: About Folklore. The scripts allow for projects where teams of authors/historians can create a web of testimony – “oral” history. There is, at present, only one project supported and that is on the original Macintosh. The site, in principle, will support many such projects.
Continue reading Making Lore
Will spam kill the net as we know it?
In a previous entry (Overcome with Spam) I commented on spam/sporn is changing what we can do. Here is a scary dissection of a spam greeting card e-mail: Ecard-hijack spam.
It stuck me back in December that e-cards were dead when I began to get spam claiming to be e-cards. Now I wonder if this is not sweeping net culture. Any bright idea or service that depends on people trying out (and trusting) unknown others becomes a trojan horse for viruses. At what point do we basically stop doing anything except with trusted entities? When that happens the Internet as a democratizing (in the sense of connecting people laterally outside of exising hierarchies) force dies. At that point we lose the global “inter”net and move to forms of intra/extra nets that are limited gated communities.
Continue reading Spam and Greeting Cards
Can we find patterns in large networked groups?
Roland Piquepaille has a column in his Technology Trends blog on Detecting Patterns in Complex Social Networks which talks about new ways of “uncovering patterns in complicated networks”. (Note: blog now discontinued.)
Anytime I have done significant visualizations it becomes clear that we need types of MVA to help simplify. The simweb project John Bradley and I did used Correspondance Analysis to reduce the n dimensional space to dimensions that captured most of the variation and which therefore could be graphed and understood. Hmmm… I wonder what statistical techniques (and I assume that it is forms of MVA) are used?
Continue reading Clumps of Communities
Can we track culture on the web?
With Skip Poehlman in Computing and Software here at Mac we did a project on culture tracking on the net. The idea was to track keywords by checking search engines every night. The data was recorded so you could graph the ups and downs of keywords.
The idea came from a conversation with a friend about whether it was possible to create a cultural stock market so people could bet on items like “Madonna”, “XML” or “James Bond”. Since then I have found sites doing things like that. Here is a site that explicitly lets you play a stock market game on blogs. BlogShares – Fantasy Blog Share Market.
Continue reading Blogshares
How can we share texts?
textz.com is a refreshing ascii simple project for sharing texts. They seem to be against everything including encoded texts and copyright. textz is the antidote to complex and expensive e-books and xml texts. See textz.com – we are the & in copy & paste. Authors like Douglas Adams, Neil Stephenson, and Slavoj Zizek have works posted.
Their interface is interesting, but doesn’t seem to work reliably. There is an annoying scrolling news feed at the bottom (while a cute hack, it doesn’t seem to add to the site unless one considers the feed more textz.)
Could we hook this into TAPoR to give analysis features? Probably.
Continue reading textz: the anti gnutenberg
Will blogs go the way of all media? Will a few dominate?
Well, it has already happened. So called “power laws” seem to apply to blogs where a small number blogs get lots of attention and most very little. See Clay Shirky’s (soon to be a LOTR character) Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, a short paper on the subject. He suggests that the very success of a few may change things – they may be percieved eventually as mainstream and cease to be considered blogs.
CBC radio today also had a thing on DNTO (Definitely Not The Opera – one of Peigi’s favorite shows so I hear it too) on blogs. They pointed out how marketers are creating blogs to promote products. The death of blogs! (Mind you, calling the death is getting to me – is anything left alive?)
Continue reading Blogs and Power Laws