Solipsism Gradient

x AKA M. wrote:

I had missed the point being to communicate with spiders. It became more clear due to Kevins patient explanation at Joi Ito’s blog in this thread. I thought it was so people could vote on links, not spiders.

Yes, Kevin’s explanations are great. However, just for whoever else’s reading this, I’d like to make clear that people (or at least whoever puts the links on the site) do vote on the links, but it’s the spiders (not other people) who count the votes.

I had not thought about, spiders, bots, and engines out there secretly logging your activities and words and generating Whuffie points. Cool thought.

Exactly, having an attribute would make all that much easier; see how TechnoRati and Google have to jump through hoops to do their rankings, and still they have no clue whether my links are meant to be positive or negative. Also, votes will not depend on anything whatsoever being installed on the site being voted on, which is extremely important.

Posted by x AKA M.:
I had missed the point being to communicate with spiders. It became more clear due to Kevins patient explanation at Joi Ito’s blog in this thread. I thought it was so people could vote on links, not spiders. My bad. It does bring up a thought closer to the heart of the Whuffie concept: Automated Whuffie. Though Doctorow’s book is not that clear on how one’s Whuffie is built, (or torn down for that matter), thus far the discussions I have had (OK I admit they are with myself most of the time) have pointed to merit being added by people. I had not thought about, spiders, bots, and engines out there secretly logging your activities and words and generating Whuffie points. Cool thought.

Ciao

Here’s more from John Perry Barlow, talking at ilaw in Rio:

It’s time to re-envision how we should get paid for the works of our minds. I believe that Brazil has a unique opportunity to help us all re-imagine this. I’ve observed that Brazilians have a strong sense that music is shared property… It is the joint property of Brazilian society. So I propose that this is a good place to take a stand against the corporate copyright holders.

…Giving music away does work… I have suggested to Minister [Gilberto] Gil that Brazilian music be put on the Internet; this would create a worldwide flowering of creatvity inspired by this music.

And earlier, talking about the Digital Divide:

Brazil is the greatest inside joke that I’ve ever seen. This creates a kind of digital divide between Brazil and the rest of the world. This is a unique problem that has to be addressed.

I used to think that the use of English on the Internet was no big deal; after my experiences here, especially, I’ve changed my mind. I spent a month here feeling like a stroke victim. It’s a good thing that many of you are very good at communicating with body language.

An interchange with Charles Nesson and an audience member:

Charlie: Audience–why isn’t deregulating telecom more important to this audience than other things on the list?

Audience: It’s funny when we talk about IP and protection–the fight against piracy. This is the view of the company, of the US. We are a poor country; our priorities are different. It surprises me that the US is surprised that we have a problem with piracy. Of course we do: people want access to the software; they simply cannot buy it.

The discussion of this piracy is therefore empty, useless.

Curiously enough, the cost of participating in the next ILAW at Stanford makes it so no one from Brazil will come.

I’m following Donna Wentworth’s reports from the conference, at Copyfight, with great interest. Let’s hope that full transcripts will be available later.

Update: Here’s Lawrence Lessig‘s comment on the encounter between Barlow and Gilberto Gil.

Still catching up to e-mail and unread RSS items. Here are some that look interesting and/or important:

The ever-interesting and well-informed folks at Boing Boing alert me to John Perry Barlow‘s post about his month in Brazil:

Brazil is the world’s largest Inside Joke. It is, to those who get it, sufficiently involving to render even such external considerations as the possible outbreak of Armageddon slightly irrelevant.

Besides, it seems to have an instinct for peace that runs the length of its history and is wisely aware that even opposing the bellicose behavior of less enlightened cultures adds energy to the cyclone of war. Brazil doesn’t study war no more. The only organized conflict Brazil is likely to enter involves no weapon more lethal than a soccer ball.

…As you might expect, I have much more to report from down here, where I’ve now spent an utterly transforming month. Until now, I’ve been having too much fun having adventures to spend my energies on turning them into information.

Extremely well put, and a must read. I’m looking forward to his forthcoming reports.

Still on Boing Boing, a link to an extremely interesting NYTimes article about inventor Woody Norris. Apparently, Norris invented the medical ultrasonogram, the Jabra earphone, a soon-to-be-available personal helicopter, and countless other things – among which the focused loudspeaker which is the article’s theme is one of the most interesting.

Mark Pilgrim admits to being the Raging Platypus. Hopefully he’ll continue posting platypus stuff… I’m searching in my stored books for Arthur Byron Cover‘s 1976 story collection “The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists” (sadly out of print). The book’s cover should be a nice addition to the site… IIRC, the title story involved the protagonist playing table tennis for his life with the P.o.D. Other stories are called “The Aardvark of Despair”, “The Clam of Catastrophe”, and “The Armadillo of Destruction”; perhaps someone will put up a “Raging Aardvark” site?

Back from São Paulo. The trip’s highlight was a visit to the Chinese exhibition, which included a dozen members of the Xi’an Terracotta Army in individual display cases, the largest number so far shown outside China. This alone was worth the trip.

Besides several other interesting museum visits we managed to see Deborah Colker‘s new dance, 4×4. We’d seen her previously in the wildly innovative MIX. Highly recommended.

In between, I visited Macmania Magazine‘s offices, to play with a 12″ PowerBook G4 they’d just gotten for review. I found it noticeably faster than the iBook/600 I’m posting this on, and the left handrest isn’t all that much hotter. If I find someone to buy my old one, I’ll switch in a minute.

Tomorrow I’ll be off to São Paulo for a short trip; updates until Sunday (March 23) will be few or even nonexistent.

The traffic around WoE seems to have quieted down a little. Nevertheless, here are some more links to my translation: Caio at 42, Maurício at Blog4Blues, e-fuzion at Where’s My Head At?, Ovelha Elétrica (no permalink!), and Mateus Reis at canal perdido. A full copy has also been published on the Palindromo mailing list.

As often happens, the really interesting comments are starting to come in after a week. Michael O’Connor Clarke has a post and several follow-up comments called World of Ands:

There is a necessary AND logic to the value growing at the Ends of the Net that is completely misunderstood by most of the legislators, regulators, CEOs and other clue-challenged entities at which the WoE piece is evidently directed.

Look at even the most viable Web-based businesses ? how many of them have actually succeeded in putting bricks and mortar companies out of business? How many of them even thought, honestly, that they would?

…A store that exists only in a browser simply can not replace browsing in a store.

I buy MORE books now that Amazon exists, but I’ll still spend hours mooching in bookstores ? and I’m certainly not alone in this view.

AND logic is at work here ? not OR. The two things are different, can co-exist, can even complement one another to their mutual benefit.

and later:

So I think my World of Ands message to business gets re-focused into this:

a. If you make your money selling physical stuff, embrace the AND of the Net to your, and your customers’ benefit.

b. If you make your money selling digital stuff, grab you ankles and see if the rush of blood to your head shakes loose a clue. OR, if it doesn’t, you’re still in the best position for what’s coming next. (btw, you CAN still make money, but only if you submit to a hearty beating with the cluestick now, before it’s too late. A tip: you will probably have to let go of EVERYTHING that currently defines your idea of a business model. And people will lose their jobs. Sorry).

c. If you make your money selling services, I want to see your timesheets.

Arnold Kling posted Five Clues for Geeks:

(1). Intermediaries add value…

(2). Property is not evil…

(3). Computer animation is not a killer application…

(4). Bashing Microsoft does not make you smart…

(5). Markets are not exploitative…

…My goal is to see ignorance reduced on both sides of the Suit-Geek divide. Suits who are ignorant of the Internet ultimately do a disservice to the businesses whose outmoded practices they try to protect with misguided legal weapons. Geeks who are ignorant of markets do less harm, because they tend to limit their activities to applauding one another’s manifestos. However, if the anti-market prejudice that they promote becomes more widespread, they ultimately will do a disservice to their vision of the future. That vision will arrive soonest if market forces are allowed to operate.

Frank Field comments on this:

I really am only worried about “Intermediaries add value.” I think a more correct assertion is that “Intermediaries may add value;” but markets should be allowed to reveal whether consumers want what the intermediaries added – and consumers should be given appropriate opportunities to disintermediate. Without that guarantee, it may very well be that then Arnold’s 5th point would be wrong – such markets could indeed be quite exploitative.

Meanwhile, David Weinberger explains more about “ends”:

A few of the bloggers writing so well about the role of individual and community take Doc and me to task (or, better, to school) for portraying the Internet as a world of ends when in fact those ends are joined in webs of personal connection.

Of course that’s right…

First, that’s the language in the paper from which we took the article’s main insight: “End-to-End Arguments...” Second, Doc and I wanted to talk about the Internet’s architecture so that we could make the quasi-factual claim that boneheaded businesses and regulators are just plain wrong in their understanding; we didn’t want to focus in this article on all the good things that come out of that architecture. Third, we liked the echo of “ends” vs. “means” as in Kant’s Kingdom of Ends.

But, yes, absolutely and definitely, the value of the Internet is the groups it allows…

He also responds to another of Arnold Kling’s comments, regarding spam:

But the World of Ends principle… doesn’t say that no services can ever be built into a network, only that it’s generally better to move services closer to the edge. So, as Arnold suggests, perhaps that means that spam needs to be trapped by the ISPs. I don’t know if that’s the case, but it could be.

Betsy Devine worries about current threats to the WoE vision:

If we could find a way to work together, we’d have a much better chance of fending off attacks on the Internet commons – or at least giving warning when such attacks get underway. Let’s not end up like the goose in the nursery rhyme, looking longingly back on the “rights” we used to enjoy. Let’s get together like the Roman geese who cackled and squawked and woke up the sleeping Romans when Gauls tried to sneak inside the Capitol.

Maybe we could start by thinking about the web-degrading mistakes described in World of Ends. When we spot someone trying one of these ugly tricks, we could try to get our weblogs squawking together – scare off the attacker!

M. (or is it X?) at Whuffie comments:

Kevin Marks and Rainer Brokerhoff blogs are ‘abuzz with talk of adding a value system to your html links. That way when you create a link you can assign a value to it to show how much you “approve” or “disapprove” of what you are linking to. While this seems to create a quick and easy Whuffie like system, it is not at all comprehensive, and I have to question if it would really be worth the trouble. Why not just put a header above the link: “I hate this blog, I don’t trust them, they suck, but check them out to mock their very existance” Same effect, no?

I don’t think this is the same effect at all. The proposed link value system is to have a simple way to tell spiders (and similar robots) that scan the HTML for links whether you approve or disapprove of that link. Of course, as Kevin points out, one often will complement this by user-visible styling (or even a header).

While it of course is a “Whuffie”-like system, the effects are not exactly the same – since valued links will usually point at individual posts or news items, the resulting values will not necessarily apply to the whole site. They may not even apply to the item’s author. I agree that it isn’t comprehensive – by design. Rating systems that are installed on a particular site solve other problems entirely, but I’d like a way to say to search engines “here’s a link to this item, but I disagree with it; don’t tally my link on the same list with people who agreed with it”.