Posts by Tim

Eli Pariser’s op-ed in the New York Times, When the Internet Thinks It Knows You:

Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other times that you see things that you don’t.

The Times had run an earlier story on Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You. It takes the easiest possible reading of this idea, applying it to media choices and political disagreement:

If you want to test your own views on personalization, you could try a party trick Mr. Pariser demonstrated earlier this year during a talk at the TED conference: ask some friends to simultaneously search Google for a controversial term like gun control or abortion. Then compare results…

With television, people can limit their exposure to dissenting opinions simply by flipping the channel, to, say, Fox from MSNBC. And, of course, viewers are aware they’re actively choosing shows. The concern with personalization algorithms is that many consumers don’t understand, or may not even be aware of, the filtering methodology.

Reading Pariser’s op-ed, though, I got the sense that he’s not nearly as concerned about narrowing of opinions on the web as he is about the narrowing of interests.

“[I]f algorithms are taking over the editing function and determining what we see,” he writes, “we need to make sure they weigh variables beyond a narrow ‘relevance.’ They need to show us Afghanistan and Libya as well as Apple and Kanye.”

If you spend much time on the Internet, you know that there’s clearly no shortage of disagreement. But it’s more likely that you spend most of your time and energy disagreeing with people who care deeply about the same things about which you already care deeply.

You’ll argue about whether LeBron James or Derrick Rose should have won the MVP, whether or not Mitt Romney has a shot in the Iowa caucuses, or why Apple decided to pre-release information about the WWDC keynote.

We dive deeply into a range of pre-defined topics, tied to our professions, hobbies, needs, and histories, and sharpen our swords with opponents who do the same.

And on the margins, maybe that’s okay. Mass culture throws a whole lot of stuff at its audience that I, like you, have no intrinsic interest in. The time, energy, and cognitive surplus we once devoted to those things we used to consume only because “they were on” are all much better put to use tackling subjects we actually care about.

But it does mean that we’re often unaware of what’s happening in the next room, where there is frequently plenty of useful stuff that we could port into our own special areas of interest. We need to make sure we’re taking advantage of the web’s built-in ability to move laterally.

More to the point: those of us who produce and share content that other people read — and at this point, that’s almost all of us — need to trust that our readers are lateral movers too, and encourage them to do so.

I’m reminded of this blog post from last year, predicting the death of the niche blog and the rise of the lens blog. The lens blog can tackle any subject, but always from the point of view of a subset of enthusiasms or perspectives that find clever ways to find the same in the different, and vice versa.

Hyper-specialization, like information overload, is an old, old problem. But exactly for that reason, we shouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up as a potential problem with our new tools and new media, too.

In short, if you’re really worried about search engines or social media overfiltering what you see, worry less about your reading being one-sided and more about it being one-dimensional.

(For more smart takes on Pariser’s argument, see also Mat Ingram at GigaOm, Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing)

From Robert Krulwich’s 2011 commencement speech at UC-Berkeley’s Journalism School:

Some people when they look for a job in journalism ask themselves, What do I like to do and Who can take me there? Who can get me to a war zone? To a ballpark? To Wall Street? To politicians, to movie stars? Who’s got the vehicle? And you send them your resume and you say, “I want a seat in your car.” … And you wait.

But there are some people, who don’t wait.

I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this… hunger. It’s almost like an ache.

Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.

So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

And when it comes to security, to protection, your friends may take better care of you than CBS took care of Charles Kuralt in the end. In every career, your job is to make and tell stories, of course. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.

And maybe that’s your way into Troy.

This speech makes me want to run around the entire internet, giving a million high-fives.

(via @edyong209, who gets high-five #001)

This is another quote that’s too good to be true. Joel Kotkin on the problem with the liveability index:

We need to ask, what makes a city great? If your idea of a great city is restful, orderly, clean, then that’s fine. You can go live in a gated community. These kinds of cities are what is called ‘productive resorts’. Descartes, writing about 17th-century Amsterdam, said that a great city should be ‘an inventory of the possible’. I like that description. [emphasis mine]

I like that description, too! Kotkin liked it so much, he put it in his book. I like it so much, I wanted to find out where it came from.

And it turns out Descartes didn’t say that. And the phrase doesn’t mean what Kotkin thinks it does. But there’s a reason both the philosopher and the new meaning got mixed into it.

Get the genealogical-detective lowdown in a Storify by my Twitter-co-archeologist Wilko von Hardenberg after the jump. (I really like his idea that this would make for a great game/exercise in the classroom.)

Also, if you missed it, see why Martin Luther King and Mark Twain didn’t say what you might think they did either. Similar psychology at work here, too. And it shows that it isn’t just the cut-and-pasters on the interwebs who make these mistakes.

Read more…

Hi gang. I’m spending the week in residence at kottke.org this week. Here’s what I’ve written so far:

• Napoleonic preproduction: On Stanley Kubrick’s never-filmed movie about Napoleon.
• The Beastie Boys, Annotated: A short guide to pop-culture references in the band’s lyrics.
• Fuck you, pay me (Simonides of Keos): The first Greek poet (probably) to write for money and to write poetry that was primarily intended to be read, not sung.

Join me throughout the week for more bunly blockquote goodness.

Plenty of things worth writing about Kevin Kelly’s post on “Techno Life Skills.” Kelly’s point of departure is that learning how to master any specific technology is less important than learning how to adapt to, use, and understand any technology that emerges (or that meets your newly emergent needs).

Here are a few notes about how technology frames us, how we think, and what we can do:

• Tools are metaphors that shape how you think. What embedded assumptions does the new tool make? Does it assume right-handedness, or literacy, or a password, or a place to throw it away? Where the defaults are set can reflect a tool’s bias.

• What do you give up? This one has taken me a long time to learn. The only way to take up a new technology is to reduce an old one in my life already. Twitter must come at the expense of something else I was doing — even if it just daydreaming.

• Every new technology will bite back. The more powerful its gifts, the more powerfully it can be abused. Look for its costs.

And a few more about accepting the limits of your own knowledge, and how your ignorance isn’t a defeat:

• Understanding how a technology works is not necessary to use it well. We don’t understand how biology works, but we still use wood well.

• Nobody has any idea of what a new invention will really be good for. To evaluate don’t think, try.

• Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

I think these last three observations might be both Kelly’s most powerful and the most true.

Update: I forgot maybe the number-one smart, accept-your-own-ignorance observation, which Alan Jacobs rightly pulled:

• You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, soliticting help, and helping others with what you learn (the best way to learn yourself).

Tim Young, curator at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, is on our team (wait for it):

“I grew up with a penchant for reading all the time, anything I could pick up. A lot of comic books. I was mad about comic books, mad about cartoon books,” Young shares with a sheepish grin. “But there was nobody looking down their nose saying ‘they’re not real.’”

Young’s childhood fascination never abated. The door to his office is plastered by miscellaneous placards, but the Marvel Comics poster dominates. Young’s mother was a nurse and his father worked as a mechanic for a national airline. They were Tulsa bourgeois — an earnest, lower middle-class family with four kids who went through the local public school system. Tim, the third boy, and his younger sister spent their free time and summers at the public library. He recalls being dropped off in the mornings and floating eagerly among the books until his wide-eyed presence became routine. In reading he found an unusual calm but a simultaneous torrent of new worlds and stimulation.

“The book that the librarian stopped me from checking out, because I’d read it so many times, was called the D’Aulaires’ Picture Book of Greek Myths. I was obsessed.”

See also:

• The secret society
• The Truth About the East Wind
• What are the new liberal arts? (comment thread)
• Of blogs and bridges

The original Snarkmarket post on D’Aulaires’, from 2006, is missing from our archives, leaving only broken links behind.

This can mean only one thing.

YOUUU-RUSSS.

MIT’s Media Lab recently tapped angel investor Joi Ito to be its next director. This was met with a ton of applause from my Twitter feed and folks in the tech press — and everyone zeroed in on the fact that Ito, rather unusually for head of a top university center, doesn’t have a college diploma.

Silicon Alley Insider’s response sorta sums it up:

It’s a brilliant move, because Ito is not an academic: he attended two colleges but dropped out both times. Instead, he’s an entrepreneur, angel investor (in companies like Flickr, Last.fm and Twitter), open source software activist and generally highly regarded tech visionary.

This is obviously a great career move for Ito — there are few more prestigious jobs in tech than the MIT Media Lab — but it’s also a brilliant move from MIT. It recognizes that you don’t have to be an academic, or even a college graduate, to be a great innovator and leaders of other innovators.

I’d definitely agree with the last sentence, and Ito might absolutely be the right pick to run Media Lab. Another story I read talked about his unique ability to enable other brilliant people, arguing that it was rare for people his age, who tend to be focused on their own career. I honestly don’t know enough about him to judge.

But I think it’s weird that the lack of credentials are, paradoxically, being seen as a credential. Universities are freaky places. They don’t work like startups or big businesses, for good or for ill. Maybe MIT Media Lab needs to work more like that. But then it’s helpful to have somebody who knows and is comfortable with university culture to run interference and camouflage what’s happening in terms that the people who still are products of universities (and who, you know, completely outnumber you) will understand.

I’m surprised nobody writing about Ito’s appointment to MIT has referenced John Maeda’s appointment a few years ago as President of the Rhode Island School of Design. Maeda also came from the tech world, outside the academy. He had a PhD, although that wasn’t his selling credential. In fact, he actually came from MIT’s Media Lab!

Maeda, too, was super-admired by working tech and creative people all over the place. But since taking over at RISD, he’s had a supremely difficult time trying to push change or even handle ordinary business, facing votes of no confidence from faculty, and generally trying to find the right balance between innovating and respecting the existing balance.

President of a college is a much more closed, university-admin-style position than director of a semi-autonomous technology lab within a college setting. Maybe the difference between the two positions will make all the difference. But I’m not sure. Nobody is.

And even if Ito turns out to be a smashing success, we should be careful about assuming that this is universally generalizable — that talented VCs can just run everything through the sheer power of their awesomeness. It’s not so simple. It depends on the institution, the personality of the new person brought in, and what the leader and institution are able to build together.

Likewise — (COUGH) — it would be nice if this whole “hey, the skills you need to be successful in the technology world and the skills you need to work really well in the academic world aren’t so different!” sentiment worked the other way, too. People who got those credentials weren’t just wasting their time when they “should have been starting companies.”

Instead of spending their twenties doing body shots, chasing money, or trying to find themselves, people with PhDs were busting their ass working sixty-hour weeks, learning multiple languages, mastering research tools, and learning how to write, edit, and think.

Just sayin’.

Barnes & Noble dropped a software update today for Nook Color, adding apps and support for Flash and a whole bunch of other features that give it more parity with tablets than e-readers. I got an early briefing and interview with some of the development team.

I took it even though I’m not a full-time gadget blogger any more because I thought I could sell the story, and I was interested. I thought at different points that four different sites would run the story, but eventually they all passed.

It turns out that selling a story that’s under embargo is very very hard, because you can’t tip very much of what you know without breaking the embargo. Also, the relative advantage of early publication just doesn’t mean that much when the exclusive information you have isn’t world-shaking. It was a huge headache, ate up the better part of a week that I really needed to use to do other things, and I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. That’s on me, though.

Anyways, at one point, I said, if all else fails, I’ll publish the damn story on Snarkmarket. This morning, before the embargo broke, I still had an outside shot (a stupid outside shot, but that’s on me, not anybody else) of getting another site to run it.

But now, finally 1) I want to be done with it and 2) I think it’s a good story! I think the update actually means a lot more than 100% of the other people writing about it thinks it does. But everyone in the tech press has always underestimated Barnes & Noble, E-Readers, and the demographic that the Nook Color appeals to. Partly because it’s not really their readership. But that’s another story.

Anyways, here it is.

Nook Update Adds Apps, Flash, Games, Built-In Email, Interactive Books and Magazines, A New Book-Sharing Social Network and More

We always knew that the Nook Color would eventually get full-fledged apps to go with its color e-books. But the e-reader’s customized build of Android 2.2 – available for download today — adds a lot more. Barnes & Noble is definitely aiming to pack more “tablet” into its “reader’s tablet.”

New Built-In Apps

Right now, the only way to get the software update is to download it from http://www.nookcolor.com/update onto a computer and install it on the e-reader using the USB cable. Next week, it will be available as an over-the-air update using Wi-Fi.

After updating the Nook Color’s software to 1.2, you get two new built-in applications: Nook EMail and Nook Friends.

Nook Email provides a local client app for popular webmail services: Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL, and Hotmail. It manages multiple accounts in a single inbox. It can’t manage corporate email from an Exchange server – for that, there are third-party Android apps available like NitroDesk’s Touchdown – but it fits with the Nook Color’s overall mobile, casual-reading approach.

Nook Friends is intriguing. One of the features that distinguished Nook from other e-readers and e-bookstores at launch was its incorporation of book-lending from account to account, device to device. Friends is a mini- or micro- social network primarily devoted to managing book-lending.

You can select which items from your library you wish to make available for browsing or lending to your friends, and request books from your friends based on what they’ve made available. You can also share comments about or highlighted passages from your books.

Currently, Nook Friends is completely sandboxed from Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, or any other social network. On the one hand, it’s good that B&N is taking a deliberate approach – making links with your contacts and decisions to share your books opt-in, rather than exposing your library to everyone in your contact list. In this form, it could work well for families, close friends, or book groups.

Longtime social networkers, on the other hand, with hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of relatively casual contacts online might flinch at having to reconstruct those networks from scratch or taking their social activity somewhere else. (Nook Color already offers pretty good integration with Facebook and Twitter). The network’s currently in beta; it’s worth watching to see how this develops.

Web Browsing: Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR, and better switching from Mobile to Desktop Browsing

The update also brings the Nook Color into the fairly rarified air of Android tablets with full support for Adobe Flash AND Adobe AIR. This is a modest surprise — word of Flash support had leaked after the Nook Color’s appearance on the Home Shopping Network in late March, but hadn’t been officially confirmed. Now it is.

We’ll have to wait to see how Flash-based sites and AIR-based applications perform on the Nook Color. This has been problematic for nearly every mobile implementation of Flash, with some sites crashing at launch and others turning into gigantic power hogs.

But I think Flash support adds something very different to Nook Color than it does to, say, RIM’s Playbook. Nook Color is a family tablet, with particular appeal to parents with small children. Popular kids’ sites on the web are overwhelmingly built in Flash. Greater ability to use online video, interactive games, and legacy content is a tangible upside for the market Barnes & Noble’s looking to retain & attract.

Support for AIR is less immediately exciting, but does make cross-platform application building immensely easier. AIR support was a big selling point for Blackberry’s Tablet OS, and Adobe’s leaning on it for its publishing tools for future development of interactive books and magazines. It only makes sense that Nook would jump into bed with AIR now.

Finally, there’s one little tweak to Nook Color’s new web browser that many people won’t notice, but which thoroughly delights me: a single toolbar button that allows you to switch back and forth between the mobile and desktop version of a site. Also, you can select whether you want the default browser setting to be mobile or desktop.

Opinions differ here. I firmly believe that the seven-inch screen is a mobile-sized screen, and that the mobile web is mature and rich enough to handle the vast majority of what a user wants and needs to do using that form factor. Just give me the one finger to scroll up and down. That’s all I need

But sometimes it really is useful to load up the full website, using pinch-and-zoom (that’s new here too), Flash video, the whole thing. And it’s VERY nice to be able to switch back and forth between the two without having to muck about with the URL address.

The Apps! Tell Us About the Apps!

There are 125 new applications at the B&N storefront ready to go today for Nook Color. The overwhelming focus is reading and reading-related applications – think cookbooks, education/reference apps, heavy-duty mail and calendar applications like Touchdown (mentioned above) and casual games.

Big names include Angry Birds – the casual birds-flinging-into-pigs game that is now just about everywhere, the Super Mario Brothers of this generation of mobile games. Also Goodreads, the top book-driven social network – which already is what Nook Friends may some day want to be, minus the book lending. The popular Pulse feed reader, which started out on iPad, then migrated to Android and Mac. There are Lonely Planet tourist guides, and Kids’ applications that straddle between games and enhanced e-books. All of these are natural fits for Nook.

B&N is also adding a handful of free utility applications, including a calendar and note-taking application. Basic stuff, but smart additions – and a useful enticement to get users to cross the threshold into the new App store.

Apps will have their own section of the Nook shop, and will in turn be grouped under categories like “Play,” “Organize,” “Learn,” “Explore,” “Lifestyle,” “News,” and “Kids.” The “Extras” section of the home screen, which was home to Chess and a few of the other first-generation in-house Nook apps, has been renamed “Apps.”

Barnes & Noble’s Claudia Romanini walked me through how she’s worked with developers to bring apps to Nook Color. In most cases, the apps have been ported from already-existing Android versions, then tested to make sure that they’ve been optimized for the Nook’s screen size and look and feel.

In a few cases, though, B&N has worked with developers new to Android who wanted to build something specifically for Nook Color. These include Drawing Pad, a drawing and coloring app, and Cheese Plate, an encyclopedia and food pairing app from Chronicle Books, both of which were first developed for iOS.

The Big Picture

It’s worth saying again: Barnes & Noble is doubling down on the mom and dad, middle-class suburban household demographic – the same readers who come to Barnes & Noble stores, drink Barnes & Noble coffee, and buy books and toys and games for their children. These are applications for the kitchen, the car, and the living room.

But I think this shows us the evolution of both the e-reader and mobile applications markets. In 2006, Apple would never have touted Uno for iPhone. But it makes perfect sense in 2011 that you can play Uno on the Nook Color. We’ve extended beyond the hard-core reader and high-volume mobile demographics into a zone that’s more casual, more utilitarian, more pluralistic. Frankly, it’s more middlebrow, and maybe a little more boring. But it’s a little tablet you can use to read books and magazines, then slip in your pocket and take it home, where you can play with your kids. It doesn’t need to be rockets and fireworks.

The Nook Color has managed to radically expand its feature set, yet continue to exude calm. That’s impressive.

Last night, I caught “Silly Little Game,” the ESPN “30 for 30” documentary about the origin of Rotisserie League baseball / the fantasy sports industry. I’ve also been reading Bill James’s Historical Baseball Abstract on the Kindle and watching Ken Burns’s Baseball documentary on Netflix — which happens to feature (among many other notables) Daniel Okrent, who invented Rotisserie Baseball along with his other media-writer baseball junkie friends in New York.

So, okay, big deal: it’s April, and I’m geeking out about baseball. What else is new? Really, though, what all this baseball bingeing is making me do is think about GAMES — how we play them, all the levels at which we interact with them, and especially how they’re invented and go on to take a life of their own.

Some of the best parts of James’s book and Burns’s documentary are about the very early years of baseball. You might think we don’t know very much about baseball at all in the nineteenth century, but we actually know a ton. We’re even able to reconstruct individual players’ statistics going back practically to the Civil War.

And every difference between early baseball and the game today which you might point to that seems huge — fielders didn’t use gloves? Batters got to tell pitchers where they wanted a pitch? Baserunners would run into the outfield and across the middle of the infield to avoid tags? — doesn’t change that baseball 150 years ago looked almost exactly like the game you probably played in a yard or park or the middle of a street with your friends and brothers and sisters. The differences seem weird only because baseball is so unchanged.

Once the game is there — in its basic shape, its speciation — it’s there.

Another paradox: once the game is good enough that it can’t be killed, that means it’s too good to be controlled either.

This is what happened with rotisserie baseball — Okrent et al came up with the basic idea of the thing at their meetings at the Rotisserie Française restaurant pretty much as it exists now, but then it metastasized into dozens and hundreds of leagues, each offering slightly different rules, and then into football. Any control the original inventors tried to exert over the thing just led to people ditching the name “rotisserie” and calling it “fantasy.” And now these totally virtual, second-order games do billions of dollars of business every year.

Fantasy sports shows that all games, too — and maybe especially baseball — can be read closely or distantly. Close-reading a game like baseball — watching players play, or playing yourself — gives you the experiential feel of the game, its textures, its nuances, the color of the grass, the smell of the chalk. Everything that doesn’t translate into a rule book or a box score.

Even with a game as structured as chess, there’s still that reality of sitting at a table, competing against another player who’s sitting across from you — your mind and will against theirs, where the state of the pieces on the board is just a momentary expression of that fact.

On the other hand, distant reading offers you a completely different perspective on a game. You can deconstruct it, formalize it, break it into pieces and recombine it. That’s Moneyball. That’s text-mining. It’s the telescope, not the magnifying glass.

Can any game be looked at this way? I kind of think it can.

Last idea. I would love to be able to invent a game. Something as conceptually simple and detailed and fun as baseball, or rotisserie baseball, or Diplomacy, or even the weird balloon volleyball game my sister made up when we were kids.

I don’t know how I would do it. But if I could, I know I’d want to do it with the people in this room.

It’s harder than you might think to use Google Ngrams to actually chart trends in cultural history — or do “culturomics,” as the Science article authors would have it — because of well-known problems with the data set.

Here, Matthew Battles tries (on more or less a lark) to see some history play out, Bethany Nowviskie spots a trend (maybe true, maybe false), and Sarah Werner flags the problem.

Aw, man — that fhit Seriously Pucks.

You know what would actually be pretty cool, though? If it were easier to go one level deeper and use Ngrams to do Google Instant Regression. You could graph trends against well-known noise (other s-words misread as f) AND other trends — or instantly find similar graphs.

Let’s say the curve of the graph for the f–word in the 1860s is similar to that for other words and phrases — like “ass”* or “confederacy”* — you could correlate language with other language, individual words with stock phrases, and even (using language as an index/proxy) extralinguistic cultural trends or historical events.

Single-variable analysis just doesn’t tell you very much, even on a data set as problematic as print/language. You need systematic data, and better comparison and control capacity between variables, before you can start to do real science.

(* Ignore for the purposes of this example ascribing contemporary historical meanings to these two ambiguous terms.)