Listing entries tagged with web_2.0

hmmm... online word processing   11.21.2005, 6:18 PM

Not quite sure what I think of this new web-based word processor, Writely. Cute Web 2.0ish name, "beta" to the hilt. It's free and quite easy to get started. I guess it falls into that weird zone of transitional unease between desktop computing and the wide open web, where more and more of our identity and information resides. Some of the tech specifics: Writely saves documents in Word and (as of today) Open Office formats, outputs as RSS and to some blogging platforms (not ours), and can also be saved as a simple web page (here's the Writely version of this post). A key feature is that Writely documents can be written and edited by multiple authors, like SubEthaEdit only totally net-based. It feels more or less like a disembodied text editor for a wiki.

I'm trying to think about what's different about writing online. Movable Type, our blogging software, is essentially an ultra-stripped-down text editor -- web-based -- and it's no fun to work in. That's partly because the text field is about the size of a mail slot, but writing online can be annoying for other reasons, chief among them the fact that you have to be online to work, and second that you are susceptible to the chance mishaps of the browser (accidentally backing up and losing everything, it crashes, you forgot to pay Time Warner and they turn off the web etc.). But with a conventional word processor you're vulnerable to the mishaps of the machine (hard drive dies and you didn't back it up, it crashes and you didn't save, coffee spills...). Writely saves everything automatically as you go, maintaining a revision history and tracking changes -- a very nice feature.

They say this is the future of software, at least for the simple everyday kind of stuff: web-based tool suites and tons of online data storage. I guess it's nice not having to be tied to one machine. Your work is just out there, waiting for you to log in. But then again, your work is just out there...

Posted by ben vershbow at 06:18 PM | Comments (2)
tags: Social Software , Web2.0 , document , ebook , open_office , openoffice , social_software , web_2.0 , word , word_processing , word_processor , writely , writing

transliterature: can humanism transform the web?   10.25.2005, 3:03 PM

For decades now, hypertext guru Ted Nelson has slipped in and out of public awareness, often left for dead or permanently exiled in Xanadu, only to re-emerge suddenly in a wonderful burst of curmudgeonly dissent. A recent Slashdot thread discusses his latest project, or more accurately, the latest stage in his ongoing quest: transliterature, "a humanist format for re-usable documents and media," or, an alternative to the constricting protocols of the world wide web. What exactly will this new format entail? It's hard to tell. But Nelson's plea is worth heeding:

The tekkies have hijacked literature- with the best intentions, of course!-) - but now the humanists have to get it back. Nearly every form of electronic document- Word, Acrobat, HTML, XML- represents some business or ideological agenda. Many believe Word and Acrobat are out to entrap users; HTML and XML enact a very limited kind of hypertext with great internal complexity. All imitate paper and (internally) hierarchy. I propose a different document agenda: I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper. In that case they can be far more powerful, with deep and rich new interconnections and properties- able to quote dynamically from other documents and buckle sideways to other documents, such as comments or successive versions; able to present third-party links; and much more. Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm, where everything can be freely and legally quoted and remixed in any amount without negotiation.

Nelson is always given a nod as the coiner of "hypertext", but his other concepts -- "transclusion", "virtual rearrangement", "clinks," for example -- are largely dismissed, or simply unknown to most people. But elements of his thinking can be observed far and wide in some of the emerging practices -- blogging, wikis, APIs -- of what people are calling "Web 2.0", or, the web as operating system. Over the past few years, the web has transformed from an interlinked series of brochures into a massive hypertext conversation, a platform in which we are increasingly able to weave, quote and track back to other documents. This is at least in the neighborhood of what Nelson is talking about.

Granted, the microeconomy of quotation (transclusion) that Nelson envisions has not yet materialized, but that may only be because he is thinking so far ahead of his time. Staying focused on the present, it's worth taking a look at what is developing with online advertising. Keyword ads, Google's "AdSense", Amazon's web services, and even voluntary donation models like PayPal tip jars -- couldn't you say these are the humble foundations of an online micropayment economy? The explosion of electronic self-publishing has not as yet produced an equivelant commercial rigging, but with blogging now accepted as an important medium, that could soon change.

The next generation of publishing software may include a more robust infrastructure that could support some kind of quotation or cross-referencing economy. Right now, the few blogs that make money do so by encrusting themselves with ads. Advertisers will buy space if the site can demonstrate impressive traffic stats. But doesn't this all sort of skirt around the edge of what makes blogging exciting and influential? What if talented bloggers could earn money when significant portions of their writing were quoted?

You can already quote images, video and sound in the way Nelson dreams of quoting text: by loading it remotely, i.e. from another location on the internet. Of course, there is no microtransaction infrastructure in place. It's much more roughshod than that. You simply pull html from the source site, or embed the file's address in a media player, and plug it in your page. That's how I've transcluded John Ashbery reading his poem "The Tennis Court Oath" (source - ubuweb):

There's still a long way to go, but the points of contact with Nelson's theories are many. For me, it's his humanist philosophy, more than the fuzzy mechanics of his proposed system, that is most inspiring. There's a generosity, an understanding of the interdependency of form and content, that is conspicuously absent in the prevailing tekkie culture. Perhaps the thinker closest of kin to Nelson was Jef Raskin, whose work on the humane interface is founded on many of the same convictions about usability and connectedness. I also find there's a kind of poetry in Nelson's dream of a literary hypertext economy, captured not only in his writings but in his frayed, manic illustrations (transquoted here):

I think he's a kindred spirit of the institute too. Here's Nelson on electronic literature (sadly, not transquoted, just cut-and-paste):

What is literature? Literature is (among other things) the study and design of documents, their structure and connections. Therefore today's electronic documents are literature, electronic literature, and the question is what electronic literature people really need.

Electronic literature should belong to all the world, not just be hoarded by a priesthood, and it should do what people need in order to organize and present human ideas with the least difficulty in the richest possible form.

A document is not necessarily a simulation of paper. In the most general sense, a document is a package of ideas created by human minds and addressed to human minds, intended for the furtherance of those ideas and those minds. Human ideas manifest as text, connections, diagrams and more: thus how to store them and present them is a crucial issue for civilization.

The furtherance of the ideas, and the furtherance of the minds that present them and take them in, are the real objectives. And so what is important in documents is the expression, reception and re-use of ideas. Connections, annotations, and most especially re-use-- the traceable flow of content among documents and their versions-- must be our central objectives, not the simulation of paper.

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:03 PM | Comments (2)
tags: Transliteracies , design_curmudgeonry , digital_literature , ebooks , history_of_interactive_media , html , hypertext , internet , literature , ted_nelson , transclusion , transliterature , web , web_2.0 , xanadu

questions and answers   10.25.2005, 10:16 AM

in 1980 and 81 i had a dream job — charlie van doren, the editorial director of Encyclopedia Britannica, hired me to think about the future of encyclopedias in the digital era. i parlayed that gig into an eighteen-month stint with Alan Kay when he was the chief scientist at Atari. Alan had read the paper i wrote for britannica — EB and the Intellectual Tools of the Future — and in his enthusiastic impulsive style, said, "this is just the sort of thing i want to work on, why not join me at Atari."

while we figured that the future encyclopedia should at the least be able to answer most any factual question someone might have, we really didn't have any idea of the range of questions people would ask. we reasoned that while people are curious by nature, they fall out of the childhood habit of asking questions about anything and everything because they get used to the fact that no one in their immediate vicinity actually knows or can explain the answer and the likelihood of finding the answer in a readily available book isn't much greater.

so, as an experiment we gave a bunch of people tape recorders and asked them to record any question that came to mind during the day — anything. we started collecting question journals in which people whispered their wonderings — both the mundane and the profound. michael naimark, a colleague at Atari was particularly fascinated by this project and he went to the philippines to gather questions from a mountain tribe.

anyway, this is a long intro to the realization that between wikipedia and google, alan's and my dream of a universal question/answer machine is actually coming into being. although we could imagine what it would be like to have the ability to get answers to most any question, we assumed that the foundation would be a bunch of editors responsible for the collecting and organizing vast amounts of information. we didnt' imagine the world wide web as a magnet which would motivate people collectively to store a remarkable range of human knowledge in a searchable database.

on the other hand we assumed that the encylopedia of the future would be intelligent enough to enter into conversation with individual users, helping them through rough spots like a patient tutor. looks like we'll have to wait awhile for that.

Posted by bob stein at 10:16 AM | Comments (0)
tags: alan_kay , atari , britannica , encyclopedia , history_of_interactive_media , multimedia , web , web_2.0 , wikipedia

nicholas carr on "the amorality of web 2.0"   10.17.2005, 9:00 AM

Nicholas Carr, who writes about business and technology and formerly was an editor of the Harvard Business Review, has published an interesting though problematic piece on "the amorality of web 2.0". I was drawn to the piece because it seemed to be questioning the giddy optimism surrounding "web 2.0", specifically Kevin Kelly's rapturous late-summer retrospective on ten years of the world wide web, from Netscape IPO to now. While he does poke some much-needed holes in the carnival floats, Carr fails to adequately address the new media practices on their own terms and ends up bashing Wikipedia with some highly selective quotes.

Carr is skeptical that the collectivist paradigms of the web can lead to the creation of high-quality, authoritative work (encyclopedias, journalism etc.). Forced to choose, he'd take the professionals over the amateurs. But put this way it's a Hobson's choice. Flawed as it is, Wikipedia is in its infancy and is probably not going away. Whereas the future of Britannica is less sure. And it's not just amateurs that are participating in new forms of discourse (take as an example the new law faculty blog at U. Chicago). Anyway, here's Carr:

The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

He then has a nice follow-up in which he republishes a letter from an administrator at Wikipedia, which responds to the above.

Encyclopedia Britannica is an amazing work. It's of consistent high quality, it's one of the great books in the English language and it's doomed. Brilliant but pricey has difficulty competing economically with free and apparently adequate....

...So if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia. So those who care about getting a good encyclopedia are going to have to work out how to make Wikipedia better, or there won't be anything.

Let's discuss.

Posted by ben vershbow at 09:00 AM | Comments (5)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , OS , Online , Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , Social Software , Web2.0 , amateur , blog , blogging , blogs , book , books , britannica , collective , encyclopedia , encyclopedia_britannica , internet , journalism , mainstream_media , media , msm , open_content , open_source , publishing , web , web_2.0 , wiki , wikipedia