Internet Category Archives
here be dragons
1 September 2010 | Geography, Internet, The Great Game | 2 Comments
если раньше говорили про войну, то теперь у нас есть и соответствуюшая карта:
Tim O’Reilly: In my blog post State of the Internet Operating System a few months ago (and the followup Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars), I used the analogy of “the Great Game” played out between England and Russia in the late Victorian era for control of access to India through what is now Afghanistan. In our planning for this year’s Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle and I have expanded on this metaphor, exploring the many ways that Internet companies at all levels of the stack are looking for points of control that will give them competitive advantage in the years to come.
Now, John has developed that idea even further, with a super-cool interactive map that shows the Internet platform wars in a kind of fantasy landscape, highlighting each of the players and some of the moves they might make against each other. Click on the link at the top of the image below to get to the full interactive version. You might also want to read John Battelle’s description of the points of control map and how to use it.
в самом деле, уже давно пора расширить собственное определение.
изменить мир
18 August 2010 | Internet, Lifeform, Literature, Software | No Comments
замечательная статья о книге Стивена Леви “Хакеры: герои компьютерной революции”, приуроченная к очередному переизданию — на этот раз, очевидно, электронному в O’Reilly Media.
вот, например:
The popular view of computing in its early years was eroding as personal computers popped up more and more in homes and offices following the release of “Hackers.” People were realizing that computers could be fun. They could start to see how the computers could make our lives easier.
And Levy helped take people to the next step. He showed them that computers could alter the relationships between people, and even cause us to view the world in new ways.
<...>
It was the second part of the book that struck home the most. This section discussed Community Memory and other idealistic experiments to give a voice to masses of people through computers.
так и вышло: дружба в Facebook изменила человечекие взаимоотношения (будут ли они когда-нибудь прежними?), Twitter позволил заговорить, а WikiLeaks сломали окружающие барьеры:
Hacker culture has proven to be the motor behind new thinking and group effort in technology. The double-pronged genius of hackerism — sharing freely while creating conditions for the unfettered exploration of each individual’s talents — has nurtured the advancements of our age.
от взломанного телефона до прозрачной политики, от несуществующих миллиардных “прибылей” до координированных акций взаимопомощи, от реформ здравоохранения до новых искусства, науки и производства – именно так и нужно продигаться дальше.
разбор полетов
12 August 2010 | Economics, Internet, Lifeform | No Comments
помнится, во времена оне, году в 99-ом, что ли, перед самой развязкой dot-com bubble один из деятелей Рунета в каком-то интервью вскользь заметил, что, будь у него машина времени, он отправился бы назад и сам бы придумал Yahoo.
что ж, эволюция расставила все по местам — и придуманная другими людьми компания Yahoo! Inc. оказалась далеко не самым лучшим примером:
When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.
What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn’t: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company
по ссылке увлекательнейшая статья Пола Грэхема о Yahoo, и о том, что же именно все-таки пошло не так.
ведь вы помните те времена?
распределение обязанностей
2 August 2010 | Internet, Lifeform, Personal | No Comments
по ссылке от Алана — вот они, непересекающиеся социальные круги:
Facebook is the people you went to high school with. Twitter is the people you wish you went to high school with.
именно.
потребление
23 July 2010 | Design, Hardware, Internet, Software | 1 Comment
похоже, iPad все-таки неизбежен[1]:
Flipboard creates a magazine that is customized just for you, based on content from your Twitter and Facebook accounts, news feeds you select, and predefined content. It presents it all in a unified and very nice visual design, with a user interface that is a perfect fit for the iPad—easy and a lot of fun to use. Flipboard also lets you comment, like and share items.
The application goes beyond just pasting these snippets of information together. It creates a more interesting magazine by including linked content and images that you would normally only see after following those links.
посмотрите видео-анонс, оно того стоит.
вообще, что мне особенно нравится — так это то, какие удивительные новые (и незаметные всему остальному миру) интерфейсы разрабатывают для iOS постоянно — жаль, Нильсен не в состоянии оценить, но всем другим только и остается теперь сгореть от стыда[2].
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[1] — да и комиксы, опять-таки.
[2] — все “примеры” по ссылкам от Джона Грубера.
свежий ветер
21 July 2010 | Censorship, Copyright, Internet, Jurisprudence, Politics | 1 Comment
кстати, давно не следил за хроникой известного залива и всех прилегающих территорий — а там, оказывается, все хорошо: во-первых, еще в мае Пиратская партия Швеции разместила знаменитый трекер у себя:
After its previous bandwidth provider had to take the site offline due to concerns over an aggressive Hollywood injunction, today The Pirate Bay is fully back in operation with a surprising new supplier. From a few hours ago, in a move intended to “stand up for freedom of expression”, the Swedish Pirate Party became the site’s new host.
затем они решили установить серверы прямиком в парламенте:
After their former hosting provider received an injunction telling it to stop providing bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, the worlds most resilient BitTorrent site switched to a new ISP. That host, the Swedish Pirate Party, made a stand on principle. Now they aim to take things further by running the site from inside the Swedish Parliament.
и, наконец, вчера шагнули еще дальше, решив запустить собственый провайдерский сервис:
The Swedish Pirate Party, who are at the forefront of anti-copyright lobbying in Sweden, are planning to shake up the country’s ISP market. After taking over the supply of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, Piratpartiet will now partner in the launch of Pirate ISP, a new broadband service that will offer anonymity to customers and provide financial support to the Party.
молодцы, что тут скажешь. а еще совсем недавно я безгранично сомневался в их хоть каком-нибудь успехе.
кстати, раз уж зашла речь, то вот еще небольшая победа (после затяжных боев, ага):
A Dutch court has ruled that two of the largest ISPs in the Netherlands don’t have block customer access to The Pirate Bay. According to the court, there is no evidence that the majority of the ISPs’ users are infringing copyright through The Pirate Bay, so a block would not be justified.
новая жизнь
19 July 2010 | Internet, Lifeform | No Comments
хотя самое важное было, наоборот, сказано предельно кратко:
Clay Shirky, a New York University professor <...>: “You do not actually control the message, and if you believe you control the message, it merely means you no longer understand what’s going on.”
так и есть.
партизанская война
19 July 2010 | Internet, Politics | No Comments
It was also the day Google announced that Chinese hackers tried to break into the Gmail accounts of dissidents. In response, Google said that it would no longer comply with China’s censorship laws and for a few months redirected Chinese users to its Hong Kong search engine. The dispute rose to a high-level diplomatic conflict, but it also gave added resonance to the 45-minute “Internet freedom” speech Secretary Clinton delivered a little more than a week later, in which she placed “the freedom to connect” squarely within the U.S. human rights and foreign policy agenda.
чем не дополнительные аргументы?
и вот, пожалуйста:
Just such an effort was under way one recent morning in Washington, where Ross and Cohen were meeting with Farah Pandith. Pandith is also the holder of a newly created position: special representative to Muslim communities for the United States Department of State. Born in Kashmir, Pandith emigrated to the U.S. at a young age. Now in her early 40s, she is a vibrant presence in a room and, since she was sworn in in September, has been to 25 countries trying to broaden the scope of U.S. interaction with Muslim communities.
<...>
“Here’s the problem we’re solving for,” Ross said. “It’s physically impossible for one office to engage 1.4 billion people across the planet in a way that involves a lot of air travel. We’ve got to work with you to build out a connection-technology strategy.”
<...>
“We don’t have to come up with that right now,” Ross said. “You have a body of great material. We ought to have somebody go through it and do grabs. Figure out over the course of whatever it is you’ve said, those things that can be encapsulated in 140 characters or less. Let’s say it’s 10 things. We then translate it into Pashto, Dari, Urdu, Arabic, Swahili, etc., etc. The next thing is we identify the ‘influencer’ Muslims on Twitter, on Facebook, on the other major social-media platforms. And we, in a soft way, using the appropriate diplomacy, reach out to them and say: Hey, we want to get across the following messages. They’re messages that we think are consistent with your values. This is a voice coming from the United States that we think you wanted to hear. So we get the imam… .”
“… the youth leader… .” Pandith said.
“We get these other people to then play the role of tweeting it, and then saying, ‘Follow this woman,’ and/or putting it on whatever dominant social-media platform they use.”
опять все та же тактика.
ближе к телу
19 July 2010 | Internet, Politics | 1 Comment
интересная статья в New York Times о повсеместном использовании сетевых технологий в соверменной дипломатии:
On Twitter, [Jared] Cohen, who is 28, and [Alec] Ross, who is 38, are among the most followed of anyone working for the U.S. government, coming in third and fourth after Barack Obama and John McCain. This didn’t happen by chance. Their Twitter posts have become an integral part of a new State Department effort to bring diplomacy into the digital age, by using widely available technologies to reach out to citizens, companies and other nonstate actors. Ross and Cohen’s style of engagement — perhaps best described as a cross between social-networking culture and foreign-policy arcana — reflects the hybrid nature of this approach.
политика тоже старается быть модной: сегодня в одном списке находятся и Леди Гага, и Барак Обама, и Ким Кардашян, и все-все-все:
Two of Cohen’s recent posts were, in order: “Guinea holds first free election since 1958” and “Yes, the season premier [sic] of Entourage is tonight, soooo excited!” This offhand mix of pop and politics has on occasion raised eyebrows and a few hackles (writing about a frappucino during a rare diplomatic mission to Syria; a trip with Ashton Kutcher to Russia in February), yet, together, Ross and Cohen have formed an unlikely and unprecedented team in the State Department. They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft.
налицо смена коммуникаций и дальнейшее ускорение (перестройка и гласность?):
Traditional forms of diplomacy still dominate, but 21st-century statecraft is not mere corporate rebranding — swapping tweets for broadcasts. It represents a shift in form and in strategy — a way to amplify traditional diplomatic efforts, develop tech-based policy solutions and encourage cyberactivism.
однако, не все так радужно:
Is this growing fascination with social media a mere sign of our desperation with other, more conventional instruments of diplomatic leverage? Perhaps so.
так и есть — достаточно вспомнить прошлогодние иранские выборы, помноженные на беспомощную официальную позицию США:
Most of the news that reached the West from Iran came via YouTube and Twitter. In June of last year, three days into the postelection protests, a Twitter post by the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi alerted Cohen that Twitter was scheduled to go down for maintenance. Cohen sent an e-mail message to Dorsey, the site’s 33-year-old chairman, without running it up the chain of command. Dorsey went to work — “I was definitely raising my voice” trying to find a way for the service to stay up, Dorsey told me. The New York Times broke the story of Cohen’s e-mail message. A flurry of public speculation ensued as to whether keeping Twitter up contradicted the president’s stated policy of nonintervention in the Iranian election.
и что случилось? ровным счетом ничего:
Will the oppressed masses in authoritarian states join the barricades once they get unfettered access to Wikipedia and Twitter?
This seems quite unlikely. In fact, our debate about the Internet’s role in democratization—increasingly dominated by techno-utopianism—is in dire need of moderation, for there are at least as many reasons to be skeptical. Ironically, the role that the Internet played in the recent events in Iran shows us why: Revolutionary change that can topple strong authoritarian regimes requires a high degree of centralization among their opponents. The Internet does not always help here. One can have “organizing without organizations”—the phrase is in the subtitle of “Here Comes Everybody,” Clay Shirky’s best-selling 2008 book about the power of social media—but one can’t have revolutions without revolutionaries.
можно, впрочем, и по-другому — так, в Российской Федерации, например, авторитарный двухглавый орел использует Твиттер для манипулирования балансом власти между “головами” — на первый взгляд смотрится потешно, однако, что это, как не тот же поход в массы, что был озвучен выше?
самое, то есть, интересное:
According to data compiled by the East German government, East Germans who watched West German television were paradoxically more satisfied with life in their country and the communist regime. Speaking in 1990, the East German writer Christoph Hein spoke of the difficulties of mobilizing his fellow citizens, pointing out that “the whole people could leave the country and move to the West…at 8 p.m.—via television.” Ironically, the fact that Dresden—where the 1989 protests started—lies too far and too low to have received Western broadcasts may partly explain the rebellious spirit of the city’s inhabitants.
The parallels to the Internet with its endless supply of online entertainment are obvious: Twitter and Facebook might make political mobilization of the kind that is required to topple dictators harder, not easier.
все понятно?
мой инвентарь
16 July 2010 | Apple, Facebook, Google, Internet, Lifeform, The Great Game | No Comments
несмотря на то, что Google Buzz, кажется, начинает в конце концов работать[1], понятно все же, что ничего, кроме очередного провала, он создателям не принес. как и все предыдущие социальные проекты Google. как и Lively. как и Orkut. как и Wave. как и что-нибудь еще.
скорее всего, случилось это по целому ряду причин, зачастую, возможно, даже противоложных друг другу. интересны, впрочем, не отдельные какие-то аспекты, но срез вцелом: почему большие игроки провалились на рынке социальных услуг?
What’s the main difference between successful Google applications (search, maps, news, email) and a successful social applications? With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then go on to something else, whereas great social applications are designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave.
натурально, так оно и есть:
Consider this example: Google Answers focused on answers and failed; Yahoo! Answers focused on social and succeeded. The primary purpose of a social application is connecting with others, seeing what they’re up to, and maybe even having some small, fun interactions that though not utilitarian are entertaining and help us connect with our own humanity. Google apps are for working and getting things done; social apps are for interacting and having fun.
хорошая статья, в общем. собственно, во многом именно поэтому я и не использую Facebook. а количество тех, за кем пытаюсь следить в Twitter, застряло на 12 — и никакой социальной цепи мы не создаем, поскольку вращаемся по разным орбитам, и, следовательно, непрерывно свободны.
но кроме разницы в целях, налицо, как пишет Адам Рифкин, так же разница в подходах:
Social apps are whimsical and fun; Google apps are whittled and functional.
и вот как раз отголоски этих различий можно увидеть не только на примере социальных задач, но куда шире. скажем, прошлогоднее наблюдение о дизайне:
Without a person at (or near) the helm who thoroughly understands the principles and elements of Design, a company eventually runs out of reasons for design decisions. With every new design decision, critics cry foul. Without conviction, doubt creeps in. Instincts fail. “Is this the right move?” When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
или свежевыпущенный App Inventor для Android:
I won’t even begin to argue about whether App Inventor’s UI components are as elegant as Cocoa’s. They aren’t. But Google has taken another direction altogether: the user’s experience isn’t going to be perfect, but the user’s experience will be the experience he or she wants.
замечательная платформа — там же, сразу в рекламном ролике и видно, что на самом деле хочет пользователь. но как бы ни было, Google в самом деле старается решать пользовательские задачи.
однако, многие ли понимают разницу между обычным молтоком, киянкой и скальным? да что там, хотя бы между столярным и геологическим? кто знает об инструментах и разбирается в них, кроме специалистов? хочет ли корпорация и дальше оставаться зажатой в своей нише? или все-таки стремится стать чем-то еще?
им решать.
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[1] — как выяснилось, я погорячился. он все так же с пятого на десятое, как и раньше.