letting things come to me

Since I've become more aware of the Web2.0 revolution, I've noticed more and more web technologies that I'd been thinking about years ago rising to the surface. A key example was an idea I had about online libraries where you list your books, and then other people can browse your library and if appropriate make requests to exchange or borrow books. It would be like an enormous communal, virtual bookshelf, except you'd get to read real books instead of reading off a computer screen (which despite what anyone says is still less comfortable than reading a book! at least to a majority of users...).
Well, now we have Listal, LibraryThing and AllConsuming. I'm not sure who owns them and whether I really want to commit my data to them, but the services are definitely there and doing what I thought such services should do years ago.
Which brings me to my main point. With services like these, I shouldn't have to think about committing my data. My data should reside where I want it to, and I should allow these services access to my data on my terms and conditions.
We need some sort of a platform for maintaining information, and then transforming it and submitting it. Preferably in a relatively extensible and/or standardized way. XML and XSLT style technologies seem to be screaming out to be used in this sort of position.
In addition, we need some sort of voluntary code of conduct whereby we can be reasonably assured that we can reliably dictate the terms under which such services can use our data. Maybe some open source datakeeper software modelled on recent digital rights management advances, so that as well as records companies being able to control our rights on the music we license from them, we can also revoke other organisation's rights on the data they license from us.
Digital rights management isn't necessarily a bad thing, but biased towards the goals of the powerful it is clearly not a good thing.
So the data landscape of the future? Data residing in multiple incarnations on various storage devices across the world, controlled by open source datakeeper software allowing only authorised people to access it, and transform it, using flexible tools. The owners of the data - you and me in addition to the organisations and corporations - empowered by our data's newfound mobility and flexibility.

some musings on data and interpretation

Some ideas that came out easily, on the 9th of June 2005. It feels like they're going somewhere, but not without some thought, and probably a lot of maths and programming.

• Data is inextricably linked to the methods that process it.

• Memories have a language of their own, do humans share the language of memories? Could a goal of humanity be the effective translation of our language of memories? Could imperfection in translation be a huge source of conflict too?

• Information is symbolic, without a means of interpreting the symbols the information conveys nothing.

• Once the symbols can be distinguished, patterns within the symbols can be accessed. However, the original meaning (intent) may be lost and will generally be distorted.

• Given a set of symbols and an interpretative mechanism for those symbols, to what extent are the patterns spotted a result of information within the interpretative mechanism, and to what extent are the patterns spotted a function of the information within the symbols? I rather suspect that this question also misses a point: It falls foul of the fallacies of subject/object metaphysics. Within any interaction there is participation from both sides. For an interpretative mechanism to detect patterns within symbols there will have to be a contribution of information from both sides, at some level.

• Interpretative mechanisms range in style: some seek to minimize their input of information while maximizing the effect of the external data, others use external data as a randomizing element or mixing agent for expression of their own internal data (maybe this is a good framework for interpreting the occult/astrology/science etc.?).

• An interpretative mechanism which includes the assumption that it does't affect the data it processes is ultimately flawed. (See subject/object metaphysics). Science often falls foul of this.

• Data with no obviously associated interpretative mechanism is worth less, all other things being equal, than data with an interpretative mechanism.

• High quality data may be restricted by a low quality interpretative mechanism, and vice versa etc.

• Data can be represented by a set of symbols. An interpretative mechanism can be represented by a processor for that set of symbols, which may generate another set of symbols in response, or may create some physical output or whatever.

• Data never exists as a set of symbols (except in the universe of platonic forms...). Instances of data almost always have some elements of the interpretative mechanism held locally. That is to say, the interpretative mechanism has a large influence on the manifestation of the data. Usually data and an interpretative mechanism co-evolve together, and are intimately interconnected, even if only at substrate levels (eg, dependence on ASCII, or spoken language or whatever).

• An interesting model of reality is merely a seething array of interdependent information. The extent of this information is phenomenal, and the levels of structure range across the orders of magnitude widely.

should we be suspicious of google?

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." - Google's mission statement

I would be a lot more comfortable if it was Google's mission to assist in creating the technologies that will free the world's information. As it is Google has simply asserted that it wishes to become the monopolistic broker for what is fast becoming planet earth's most valuable resource. Attached to the information Google wants to organise and serve to us is, potentially, almost all the value (of any kind) tied up on the planet. This isn't so hard to believe when you see the proliferation of gadgets, and monitoring gadgets, everywhere, and their increasing connectivity to open networks.

I'm an optimist, and I don't think Google can survive much longer behaving in the way it does. Just as I believe Microsoft is a dying monster, serving poorly crafted computing products to the illiterate computing masses out there, I believe Google will eventually go the same way, except I think Google will probably have left a much more valuable legacy in terms of experience, lessons learnt and contribution to the internet and activities undertaken thereon.

What we need is decentralized, open-source search. The days of concentrating this kind of resource in the hands of a single company really has to be over. If we stop kidding ourselves this is clearly the most sensible, and the only possible, way forward. One Google is a single point of failure for one of the most important resources on the internet.

Distributed search composed of hundreds of flavours of search engine scattered all over the planet, even on people's home computers and househouse appliances etc. would be a much stronger system, and would in my opinion have the potential to be a lot more trustworthy than our current centralized solutions.

Check out lucene/nutch. I will soon, it seems to have developed a little in the last few months.

Maybe we'll all be saved.

Google Maps and GMail and all the various Google-Wows are surely amazing, but not as scary as what they all inevitably point to.

So where does that leave all the big internet portals?

In my mind it has to be something along the lines of: decentralize-and-open-your-source or bust. There's no reason why one company can't produce a bulk of the technology and even benefit in a big way financially from it, but I think in this day and age it mustn't do it behind closed doors.

Security and trust demand it, and morality is begging for it.

Roll on the next few years!

the manchurian candidate

I just finished watching The Manchurian Candidate. It's quite an interesting film. And it was quite interesting to watch it. I was watching it on a video-on-demand service, I could pause, rewind and fastforward the movie. Everything was streaming into my living room through co-ax. My TV is now connected to Media Player running on a dedicated box, attached to the internet. Basically.

It doesn't seem so long ago that these sorts of technologies were pipedreams.

Now they're everyday, the preserve of the geographically particular, and they come complete with laggy update and slow loading. What happened to timed IP? It's coming I guess.

The film, that was interesting too. A fairly simple recombination of old themes and current media foci, proficiently brought together in a very easy to digest whole. The visuals were nice, the mood was just right, and the visual cues were perfect, there was no clubbing you over the head with the key plot points, but everything was present and correct. As far as I could tell.

It got me thinking. [minor spoiler ahead] The part where Shaw kills the senator and his daughter seems so out of place at the time, but then the revelation that his ambitious mother put him up to it [end of spoiler] serves as a timely reminder that human nature hasn't progressed in the same way that technology has. Visions of cavemen in shirts and ties, turning up to work with swish laptops and fancy watches spring to mind. Yay for caricatures. Then we watch those cavemen running the United States of America, and telling us what it means to be moral. EDIT: Not forgetting that in this instance 'caveman' refers to the common consciousness of caveman, not the less politically incorrect view of 'cavemen' that I prefer. Why oh why did I succumb to such prejudiced concept choice? Ho hum...

The film also seemed to be a veritable montage of idealistic political opinion and suggestion. It seemed to me that virtually all the background material had been carefully selected, including the news tickers on the various TV broadcasts and the contents of background TV broadcasts. Having one of the key characters walking through a school play fitted in well with the context, and the parallelism was very apt. The brainwashing in the film was clearly exaggeration for the sake of making a point, but the parallel with school kids provided a neat stepping stone onto some more down-to-earth problems.

The film clearly seemed to be a platform for peddling left-wing viewpoints, wrapped up in current issues and parlance. It makes me wonder to what extent 'meme-placement' in films is becoming commonplace. And to what extent it is moral or not.

An absolutely neutral film would be verging on impossible to produce, and would probably taste like the plastic food we're all getting accustomed to, so why not introduce all sorts of background elements that fit in with your message? I think the key point is that subtly choosing background elements smacks a lot of attempting to subliminally influence the audience. But even if you don't subtly choose anything choices are made, by people, and choices are never neutral, maybe especially when they aren't consciously considered. So which is better, being prey to the memes that propogate themselves under the radar or being aware of what you're transmitting and accepting it?

Nowadays I'm inclined to go down the road of awareness and acceptance, rather than ignorance and denial. (Although I admit the discussion is a lot more complicated than that, and that I've loaded the description badly... ho hum. Just my honest-memes going and making my writing clumsy and 'transparent') And I'm also inclined to say that the argument that proposes that this is unfair on people with insufficient capacity or attention to vet their senses is a dodgy argument. People adapt to their environments, and as long as we have unscrupulous people propogating dodgy self-serving content it's up to those with a conscience to outrace them as hard as possible. And we have a big advantage: we can work together much more, and much more transparently.