Category: Internet Culture and Technology

TheStar.com | Federal Election | Web outrage marks shift in Canadian politics

Alex Sévingy drew my attention to an article by Linda Diebel for the Toronto Star, Web outrage marks shift in Canadian politics (Sept. 12, 2008) that argues that Green leader Elizabeth May owes here inclusion in the upcoming debates to rapid voter reaction over the Internet.

Suddenly, in a very public way, ordinary citizens were empowered through their blogs, vlogs (videos) and online comment to the mainstream media, and they got what they wanted.

Alex himself is quoted in the article suggesting that it was Stephane Dion who broke the impasse.

“For the first time in Canadian election history, a grassroots activism influenced a leader to take a stand against the others,” he said. “As a result, the traditional media regulators had to concede that the populist approach was right.”

Adds Sévigny: “An authority figure opened the door. But, in my view, this is one of the last times the blogosphere needs validation of someone in authority.”

Given how short Canadian elections are one wonders if the speed of the Internet is the only way for voters to participate in the process, rather than just the vote.

Appropriation Art: 51st State Comic

Image of Comic CoverOnce I notice one comic being used to introduce computing issues I’m told of another. Google commissioned the Chrome comic, Gordon Duncan of Appropriation Art has released an interactive comic book 51st State that is about copyright reform in Canada and freedom of expression. It appropriates images and words from the internet and has links back out to information. A remarkable demonstration of how graphic arts can be political and provocative.

Thanks to Erika for this.

Comic Book on Google Chrome

Drawing of BrowserThe blog, Google Blogoscoped has a scan of Scott McCloud’s comic book to explain the new Google Browser called Chrome, see Google on Google Chrome – comic book or Google’s version. It is interesting that Google used the comic book format to explain what is special about Chrome (see Scott’s FAQ), but Chrome itself, and how it is being presented, is also important. A few random thoughts:

  • The comic presents Chrome as designed for running applications. This strikes me as an Andreessen move where you alert Microsoft to the fact that you want to make a browser that replaces the OS thereby making Windows unnecessary and Microsoft poorer. Maybe Google will fare better than Netscape.
  • Google is simplifying the interface to the browser. It will be interesting to see if their tab-oriented interface will work. Perhaps the comic book is to explain to people who like snazzy interfaces why a simple browser is better even if you can’t see the improvements in features.
  • I like their idea of the OMNIBOX – a location box and Google search box with autocompletion all in one. Google is really pushing the idea of a single field into which you can type anything and you get some sort of intelligent response. Will we eventually get an AI box of sorts that tries to respond to natural language (or, to be more exact, the emergent Googlese that we all learn to type using Googles Omnibox.) Is this the route to the natural language interface of pre-GUI days when we though typing text was the way to interact with the computer? Is this the return of the command line?

Supercomputing: World Community Grid

I got an announcement about a A Workshop on Humanities Applications for the World Community Grid (WCG) being hosted by IBM. The WCG is a volunteer grid that uses the BOINC platform and is “powered” by IBM. These volunteer projects fascinate me – they are not our father’s computing where the danger was computers getting smarter than us and taking over and the paradigm was AI. Now the symbiosis of humans and computing is on a social scale – grids of processors and teams of people. Here is what the WCG says about their project:

World Community Grid’s mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals – like you – collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.

What sorts of humanities problems could we run on a grid like this? Do humanities projects “benefit humanity” or is medicine (curing cancer) the last human research left? My instinct tells me we could do internet mining for concepts where we gather, clean and analyze large numbers of documents on concepts like “dialogue”. Perhaps someone wants to submit a proposal with me.

Cyberattack on Georgia

The New York Times has a disturbing story, Before the Gunfire, Cyberattacks that suggests the Russians may have practiced cyberattack techniques against Georgia before the surface attack in what is the first case of a “known cyberattack had coincided with a shooting war.”

the attacks against Georgia’s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests — known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks — that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.

Georgia, however, doesn’t seem to have noticed as they don’t have that many internet sites and don’t use it much in everyday life/business. One wonders how a successful shutdown of the Internet in Canada would affect us … what would break down?

What are the digital humanities? DHSI video clips

Screen capture of two video boxes

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute this summer took a number of us aside and asked us to answer four questions about the digital humanities on video. The collection of streaming video clips makes interesting viewing as they chose a representative sample of people from myself to a software architect. You can stack the rows of video clips and compare different answers, which is nice.

Bubbles, Fluid and Prism: Site Specific Browsers

Bridging Desktop And Web Applications, Part 2 is a longish post about Site Specific Browser technologies like Prism, Bubbles and Fluid. I blogged Prism before – Peter O sent me this new link and one to Why We Need Web Apps on the Desktop.

It would seem that will always-on networking it becomes feasible to create applications that combine a customized browser with a server application.

Prism and XUL

My favorite underappreciated XML language XUL (XML User Interface Language) could become more than a Mozilla utility with Prism. To quote the Prism site:

Prism is a simple XULRunner based browser that hosts web applications without the normal web browser user interface. Prism is based on a concept called Site Specific Browsers (SSB). An SSB is an application with an embedded browser designed to work exclusively with a single web application. It doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and accoutrements of a normal web browser. Some people have called it a “distraction free browser” because none of the typical browser chrome is used. An SSB also has a tighter integration with the OS and desktop than a typical web application running through a web browser.

In other words, with Prism you can write your own interface in XUL that shows and hides what you want. You can then use it, in theory, to create network applications without all the interface overhead of a browser. How far are we from the browser as OS?

Thanks to Peter for this.

Michael Geist: iOptOut

Tired of getting unsolicted phone calls? Michael Geist has set up a web site, iOptOut to allow people to opt out of organizations that are exempted from the do-not-call registry. The site lets you specifically ask exempted organizations to not call you. We need more useful social sites like this.

Michael Geist explains iOptOut thus on his (excellent) blog:

I began to develop the site soon after the do-not-call bill became law. The premise is simple – under the law, exempted organizations (which include charities, political parties, polling companies, newspapers, and companies with a prior business relationship) are permitted to make unsolicited telephone calls despite the inclusion of a number in the do-not-call registry. However, organizations must remove numbers from their lists if specifically requested to do so.