Posts Tagged ‘Internet’

Posted on July 28, 2008 - by deCadmus

Various and Sundry

• It was only a matter of time before Rupert Murdoch’s poisoned hand of glory made itself manifest on the pages of the Wall Street Journal. I shouldn’t have imagined, however,  it would appear so blatantly, so soon. Talking Squid takes ‘em on in a blog ditty entitled, Sanity Finally Snaps at Wall Street Journal.
• It’s clear to me the Internet has brought about changes in my own reading habits, and my reading habits go back, er…  a ways. (As I child I essentially started at one end of the local library and read my way to the other.) In one of the more thoughtful pieces I’ve seen on the intersection of the Internet and reading, and the resulting impact on literacy, the NY Times asks, Online: R U Really Reading?
  

  Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

  Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

  See also: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

• Finally, get thee to Subterranean Press for their irregularly offered Grab Bag Sale! It’s like Woot!, but with words!

Posted on September 14, 2007 - by deCadmus

Coffee Notes from All Over

• It’s gotta come from somewhere… To the surprise of nobody at all, Starbucks is looking to double its coffee imports from Africa by 2009.
  

  “People are looking for something different, and East African coffee is very exotic in terms of its flavors and characteristics,” says Philip Gitao, director of the Eastern African Fine Coffees Association. The fine Arabica varieties found in East African highlands currently provide 18% of the world’s coffee, the largest share from Ethiopia, which claims to be the birthplace of coffee although Yemen disputes that claim. Says Gitao, “Starbucks is now taking African coffees very seriously.”

• I don’t know just when it started but I’ve taken to calling the collective of Stumptown, Intelligentsia and Counter Culture the usual suspects. Not only are they consistently purchasing the top lots at auction, but they’re also on the ground at origin wherever great coffee is to be found. Or is it that great coffee is getting found because they are on the ground at origin? Hmmm. In any case, they’re all getting some great press this week in the NYTimes in the feature, To Burundi and Beyond for Coffee’s Holy Grail, a piece that highlights the nascent Direct Trade model of coffee sourcing.
  

  “Direct trade — which also means intensive communication between the buyer and the grower — stands in stark contrast to the old (but still prevalent) model, in which international conglomerates buy coffee by the steamer ship, through brokers, for the lowest price the commodity market will bear.

  It also represents, at least for many in the specialty coffee world, an improvement on labels like Fair Trade, bird-friendly or organic. Such labels relate to how the coffee is grown and may persuade consumers to pay a little extra for their beans, but offer no assurance about flavor or quality. Direct-trade coffee companies, on the other hand, see ecologically sound agriculture and prices above even the Fair Trade premium both as sound business practices and as a route to better-tasting coffee.

  By spending months every year visiting farms, these roasters seek to offer coffee that is produced as well as it can be, bought responsibly and roasted carefully. They aim, simply, to sell the best coffee possible.”

  Good stuff.

• You know you’ve always wanted one… Finally — and just because — the Internet-enabled coffee maker.

Posted on August 26, 2007 - by deCadmus

This Modern Life

It’s remarkable the ways the Internet has transformed us. We’ve been quietly beguiled by technology that doesn’t look or feel like, well… like technology. We’re connected — inexorably, insidiously connected — in ways that just a few years ago we might not have imagined, and yet today we take wholly for granted.

For your consideration, Roger Mummert’s slice of modern life via the NYTimes travel section — At a Family Gathering, an Internet Cafe Breaks Out.

“Do you mind,” one in-law asked, as I rounded up bedding and fretted over having enough milk in the fridge to fill 12 cereal bowls in the morning, “if I just pop onto the computer and check my e-mail?”

“Oh, yeah,” remarked another. “Maybe I could just track my son’s flight from D.C.”

“Ooh, perhaps you could print something out for me …”

That was my first inkling of how the vastly expanded electronic and informational needs of houseguests would flavor our time together.

Welcome, to this modern life.

Posted on July 24, 2007 - by deCadmus

Coffee Notes from All Over

• National Geographic News reports that — as if Uganda didn’t have enough to worry about, already — Uganda’s coffee crop is under threat of collapse due to global climate change. I find this report extraordinarily worrying, as I suspect it’s merely the tip of the proverbial (and ironic) iceberg. Ugandan coffee has the capacity to be really remarkable stuff… more about that here.)
  

  …Even a slight increase in temperature could wipe out Uganda’s entire coffee crop, which brings in more than half of the East African country’s revenue.

  “Climate change has affected coffee production already,” said Philip Gitao, executive director of the East African Fine Coffees Association.

• Starbucks is raising prices. Again. Despite having switched from whole milk to 2% across the board, its dairy prices are beginning to hurt. Moo.
• It’s the new, new way to office… WiFi-powered cafes are fast becoming mobile sales departments. And some cafes are happy about that.
  

  Of Panera’s 1,056 locations in the country, 940 are equipped with free WiFi, said spokeswoman Liz Scales.

  “We’re the largest provider of free WiFi in the country,”Â? Scales said. “There are people that are there and don’t want to buy anything and that’s all right. But most people do and we have had nothing but positive remarks about this.”Â?

• Six years ago this week Bloggle was recognized as a Blog of Note by the nice folks at Blogger.com. It’s been all downhill from there. ;)

Posted on July 19, 2007 - by deCadmus

Simple Cyphers Every Muggle Should Know

If you’re a fan of the Harry Potter series — and I am — this last run-up to a book release has you sort of twitchy. Spoilers — or potential spoilers — lurk around most every corner, and sometimes in seemingly innocuous places. (more…)

Posted on July 14, 2007 - by deCadmus

From the Bloggle Archives: Mediums Writ Large

I’ve recently been asked whether this essay — a Bloggle classic, originally offered in three parts in July, 2001 — might be used as part of the coursework in a new media studies program.¹ Before I replied I gave it a quick read — it’s been a while after all — and was gratified to find it holds up pretty well. Hope you enjoy it…

When Thug the caveman first scrawled an image of himself on a wall of stone, we can imagine the prehistoric critics — “Arg! Ick dannae throg!” Which, roughly translated, imparts that the cave art lacked passion, and what’s more Thug would be better off spearing dinner. Little did the critics know that someday we might define the dawn of recorded history by Thug’s efforts.

When, in the Middle Ages Gutenberg created the printing press, the voices of his critics echo still… “What’s the use! The people cannot read! And if they could they would not understand without us to tell them what it means!” Which suggests that Johannes’ critics may have had some idea how the printed page would usurp their power, though even they could not know how profoundly it would change the world to come.

When Bell uttered his first words through his electrical speech machine, his critics were dumbfounded… “Who would you talk to? And won’t you disturb their dinner?!” True enough, dinner would never be the same. What’s more, dinner would never be the same wherever you might go, as one day everyone over the age of 12 would have a phone in his or her pocket.

When Zworykin [or Philo T. Farnsworth] patented his kinescope, his critics were confused. They argued amongst themselves whether the thrust of their criticism would be the tried and true, “It’ll never work” or the more obscure, “Mid-season replacements will confuse your audience.” In either case, they surely couldn’t imagine a live broadcast of man taking his first steps on the moon, or Ally McBeal’s dancing baby.

When Berners-Lee made the Internet accessible to everyone, the critics on Wall Street were frantic. “Buy!” they screamed. And then, “Sell! Sell!” Which suggests that critics haven’t changed all that much through the ages… they still don’t understand the creation of a medium any more today than they understood it in Thug’s time. Or Gutenberg’s. Or Bell’s. Or Zworykin’s.

A medium has the capacity to not only change our thinking, but to change how we think… how we communicate, experience, and understand. And to tell the truth, we still don’t know what the implications of the Internet and the Web really are. This much is fairly certain, though — we’re not finished. We’re only just begun.

So what is this invention, this medium, that has evidently caused us fits throughout the ages? Is it a tool? A toy? A myth?

A medium is vehicle for communication. It’s a transport for the expression of ideas… a means for transmitting a message from the sender — the person who wants to express something — to an audience, those who might receive that message. This could be an audience of one, or an audience of thousands, or even millions.

Even as a medium transports a message, it also shapes it, and manifests in that message properties that are unique to that given medium. Likewise a medium lends the message its own limitations. The stark lines of a rock chip scratched against a cave wall, the gilded manuscripts of the thirteenth century, an analog broadcast beamed through the airwaves — each has its strengths and its limitations. To master a given medium it’s critical to learn what those strengths and limitations are. Which is precisely why the Internet — and in particular, the Web — is such a mess today.²

It’s not immediately apparent how a new medium is best used. If our early cave artist were given a paintbrush would he paint a prehistoric Mona Lisa? More likely he’d try to use the handle to scratch on the walls. It’s no surprise, then, that early television broadcasts were little more than televised radio plays, or that today’s web sites try so hard to look like television screens with hyperlinks. We’ve got a new set of tools, but we’ve yet to master the techniques required for the medium. For that matter, we’re still trying to discover what they are.

So what do we know about this medium–this Internet? We know that there are three laws that govern the Internet, and none was penned by a legislator. The first of these is Moore’s Law — a nifty bit of insight offered by Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel. Moore’s Law states that every 18 months, processing power will double, while costs remain constant. It’s the principle on which Gordon Moore built his business, and it’s proved remarkably accurate. Moore’s law has been essential not only in terms of how it has driven innovation, but in how it’s made basic computing capability more affordable for a mass audience.

That brings us to the second law that governs the Internet. Metcalfe’s Law, offered by Bob Metcalfe — a guy who knows quite a lot about networks — he invented Ethernet, and founded 3Com. Metcalfe’s Law states that the utility of a network equals the square of the number of its users. Consider the computer you’re looking at now. Imagine it unplugged from the network. Alone. Isolated. It’s still a computer. You can run a spreadsheet, edit a document, play a game. But once you connect that computer to even just one more, the power of your own computer increases dramatically. You can now share those documents, or send messages to the other computer on your network. The utility of your computer continues to increase — geometrically — with each additional node that is introduced to your network.

And that brings us to the third law that governs the Internet. At a certain point — critical mass — the power of the computing network is so great that it extends beyond the realm of technology alone, and affects the social, economic and political worlds in which it operates. This is the Law of Disruption, described by Chunka Mui in Unleashing the Killer App. Between the accelerated curve of technological change and the incremental curve of human change there is a widening gap — a vacuum — and a vacuum is a powerful force. I believe that both the fundamental cause for that gap, and the vehicle that will fill it–the agent of change–are one and the same… the Internet.

And so we are where we began, with the birth of a new medium — the invention of a vehicle for communication that disrupts as it transforms. The effects of this particular medium will be especially powerful, and likely unusually disruptive. While other mediums have empowered the individual to communicate with the masses, to do so on a large scale has always required an intermediary — an art gallery, a publisher, a theatre or broadcast company. These are powerful organizations, groups that are rarely content merely to replicate a message, when they can edit and augment it as well.³

The Internet, however, is inherently a many-to-many medium. Virtually anyone who has the ability to browse the web has the capability to publish on the web, without the services — or the editorial predilections — of any intermediary whatsoever. It’s interesting to imagine what might have transpired if Thug’s cave art were instantly transported to every cave that chose to tune in. Or if there had been a printing press in every kitchen.

It’s just as interesting to imagine where the Internet will lead us. I don’t claim to know. But I expect it’ll be a helluva ride.

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Notes and Links

1. Yes… I imagine they are desperate. But it wouldn’t be the first time this has occurred. ↩
2. It’s worth noting, six years on, that despite our progress — and the Web 2.0 mantra — the Web is still pretty messy. ↩
3. Never has this proved more true than in our “post-911″ world of political spin-doctors and bold-faced propagandists that pose as analysts and news organizations. ↩

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