Archive for the 'Web 2.0' Category

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It’s The Technology, Stupid!

Published by Jarred on January 27, 2009 in Politics, Social Networks and Web 2.0. View Comments

Wordle of President Obama's Inaugural Address

There was a lot of press last week about the horrid conditions in which the new administration found the White House. Of course, all the floors were mopped and clean, the windows sparkling, the gardens perfectly maintained, the Oval Office tidy and ready for its new occupant. There is one part of the White House, however, that was left in utter disarray. To the naked eye it is invisible and mostly buried under the floors, hidden inside the walls, or tucked away in closets. Yet it is decrepit, neglected to the point of near disfunction. I’m talking about (surprise!) the technology.

Now don’t get me wrong — I didn’t expect very much. A Washington Post article describes the surprise of incoming White House staffers who seem to have been expecting to show up with their MacBook Air laptops, hop on a wireless network, and update their Facebook status to “OMFG I’m at my desk in the West Wing, feeling like such a n00b, LOL! Top secret clearance, FTW!” That would just be silly.

Yet while I had low expectations, the conditions still managed to shock me. New members of the administration showed up to find no computers at all. No loaner laptops. On the few computers that were there and worked, the e-mail system was broken to the point of forcing staffers to route messages through their personal Gmail accounts. Maybe it was because they were using Windows 2000. Even some of the phone lines were down. I mean, really? I wouldn’t have expected this in 2001, let alone in 2009.

But as I mentioned, there’s been a lot of press and blogging done about this already. What I want to talk about is how this situation is symptomatic of a much larger problem — and, as with any large problem, a very large opportunity as well.

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Will The Personalized Web Filter Out Diversity?

Published by Jarred on January 14, 2009 in Book Reviews, Consumer Behavior, Culture, Search, Social Networks, Sociology and Web 2.0. View Comments

About a year ago, I wrote that I had received a book for Christmas called The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr. I’m a little embarrassed to say that it was only two weeks ago, on my post-holiday flight back to California, that I finally finished it after ten months of letting it collect dust.

Carr’s attitude about the rise of cloud computing, social networking, and all the other web 2.0 buzztrends caught me off guard. While he seems to marvel at and mostly celebrate the speed and scale at which this phenomenon has grown and subsequently become integral to modern life, he does so with a very cautionary and sometimes pessimistic tone. I guess I should have expected as much after reading his piece in the Atlantic last summer (hat tip to Joel for passing it along) called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”. Though I don’t share all of his concerns, it is refreshing to find a voice like his among the generally over-enthusiastic technorati (myself included).

Carr highlights a particularly interesting threat in the chapter he titles “The Great Unbundling.” While granting that the jubilation over the democratizing and barrier-lowering nature of the Internet is mostly well deserved, he also warns that these characteristics come with potential harm. What harm? In short, Carr argues that the speed and personalization offered by the Internet facilitate our natural human tendency to cluster into isolated groups that can deafen and blind us to differing opinions.

Carr’s main evidence is an experiment conducted in 1971 by a Nobel Prize winning economist named Thomas Schelling. The experiment consisted of a grid of squares and a set of white and black markers. After randomly distributing these markers to represent an “integrated” community, he moved the markers around based on the rule that no one marker could have more than 50% of its immediate neighbors be of the opposite color. This rule, Schelling posited, mirrored a natural instinct that humans possess: to be closer to people similar to ourselves than we are to those who are different. After moving pieces one at a time based on this rule, he ended up with one all-white cluster and one all-black cluster. Self-segregation, Schelling concluded, is the natural result of our instinctual preference to be closer to those that resemble us than to those who differ from us.

Extrapolating from these results, Carr hypothesizes that because the Internet removes so much friction from the market for information, self-segregation will happen much more quickly and completely online than, say, in a once-integrated neighborhood that slowly segregates over many years into two or more distinct socioeconomic or racial groups. In my opinion, however, his interpretation of Schelling’s experiment, and his application of it to the Web, is flawed from the start.

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New to Me in ’08: Web Services and Software

Published by Taylor on December 30, 2008 in Computing, Lifestyle and Web 2.0. View Comments

This is a continuation of year-end posts. As a I said in my music post, I wanted to reflect on (in this case) programs and services that I couldn’t live without in 2008. Some of these debuted in ’08, while others are simply new to me.

Web Services and Software

lala–JRod and I haven’t been bashful in our adoration of this site. There’s a reason: this is an amazing service for music lovers. DRM-free MP3 downloads (note to non-techies: that means you can burn, share, trade, etc at will) for $.89 (paging $.99 iTunes Music Store…), or unlimited streams for $.10 a song. It communicates flawlessly with iTunes, automatically loading newly-downloaded tunes into your library. It also uses Music Mover (a free-standing program) to find the music you already own and make it available anywhere there’s a web connection. My workday is now filled with the joyous sounds of Fleet Foxes and Sigur Ros, and I’m more productive because of it. Amen. (PS–as evidenced in my music post, lala also boasts a simple and great embed tool)

Mint–A great one stop shop for tracking multiple bank accounts, credit cards, and investments. I tried a similar site (Wesabe) for a while, and ultimately brought my personal finances home to roost at Mint. This site has improved remarkably throughout the year, adding much-needed features like the ability to customize categories of purchases, the inclusion of stocks, and student loan tracking. I don’t know that I could live without Mint at this point.

TripIt–Another indispensable addition to my life in 2008. Being in a long-distance relationship necessarily means lots of travel plans. On top of that, my work requires fairly regular time on the road. With TripIt, I simply forward every e-ticket, hotel reservation, and rental car arrangement from my email account to TripIt, and it’s automatically imported into a comprehensive itinerary that I can pull up quickly or print out for reference. I love this site.

GoodReads–Were niche social networks a trend of 2008 or was that “like soooo 2007″ already? In any case, I started using GoodReads in earnest in 2008 and it’s one of the few non-Facebook social networks [did anybody try that Doostang thing?] that holds my attention. GoodReads does one thing (tracks the books you and your friends have read/are reading/want to read) and does it well with a simple interface.

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Lala: Send Your Music To The Cloud

Published by Jarred on December 9, 2008 in Apple, Business, Music, Social Networks and Web 2.0. View Comments

There are a whole lot of companies and products trying to be “The Next Big Thing” in digital music. Apple’s iTunes is clearly dominant these days, a combined result of its deep (and sometimes exclusive) catalog offerings, easy-to-use software, and killer hardware lineup. Add to that the tight integration between those three, and you truly have a killer combo. Amazon seems to have posed the biggest challenge to the Apple machine so far, competing agressively with lower prices (around $0.79/track and $5.00/album as opposed to $0.99 and $9.99 respectively for Apple) as well as DRM-free tracks. One area in which both Apple and Amazon have failed to innovate, however, is universal accessibility to your music.

The Problem

First, let me describe my music set-up and listening habits:

My music, currently totaling 4,415 tracks, lives on my laptop’s hard drive. That corpus of music is duplicated in its entirety in two other places: my backup hard drive, and on my iPod. I use my iPod primarily to play along with music on the drums, but also in the car through an audio-in jack.
Using a playlist, I’ve designated a subset of that music (right now, 850 tracks, or about 20% of my total collection) to sync onto my iPhone; when I walked/bused/metroed for an hour every day in D.C., this came in handy. Now that I bike to work most days in about 15 minutes, I have a no-music commute.
While I could take my iPod to work and have all my music on hand, I know that inevitably I’ll leave it there one night and want it for the drums, or it’ll run out of juice and I won’t have a cord, or something. And given that there seems to have been a rash of disappearing devices at work recently — including my G1 and a coworker’s iPod — I try to minimize the gadgetry I have (and perhaps accidentally leave) at the office. So, until recently, I would just fire up Pandora.

So the biggest question I’ve faced with regards to music is this: “How do I access my entire collection of music remotely without having to bring along a separate device?” Earlier this year, I tried a product from SimplifyMedia that let you listen remotely through iTunes (or the iPhone), but I encountered too much lag. For the past month or two, however, I’ve been trying out a new service called Lala. Lala is a completely web-based music jukebox and storefront. While that’s pretty standard, the real beauty of Lala can be found in two key offerings: the Lala Music Mover and web-only purchases.

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A Sign of the Times: “Extra” Lets You Really Read All About It

Published by Jarred on December 5, 2008 in Business, News and Web 2.0. View Comments

Too much wordplay in that title? Nah.

Times Extra associates articles from across the web with NYT headlines

In an interesting move, the New York Times has started to beta test a feature called “Times Extra” on their homepage (to try it out, click “Try Our Extra Homepage” to the right of the search box). Once enabled, each headline will be accompanied by a box full of links to related stories across the web — be they from blogs or even rival newspapers.

The service is powered by Blogrunner, a service bought by the NYT sometime in 2005 (I briefly gushed about it in the opening paragraph of this post on the social graph back in January, but haven’t used it regularly since). Blogrunner runs as its own service at blogrunner.com, but it has also been providing links on the NYT tech page since November 2007. It uses a mix of computer algorithms and human editorial oversight to match and organize articles based on topic and theme. For example, check out this clustering based on a NYT article about the Big Three, or this one based on the Official Google Blog post announcing the general availability of Friend Connect.

The step from geeky sidebar widget to a fairly prominent beta test on the latest and most important headlines is large and bold — and the management is fully aware of it, too.

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