Over this past week I’ve discussed a number of different issues relating to the nature of the web and our role in both building and preserving its architecture. Without exception, the web is changing our lives in a way that we are still mostly incapable of describing, despite our efforts to categorize and organize information.

One of the key concepts that has been unearthed in the last few days is the notion of permanence and the long term persistence of Internet content and our connected society. As I have been watching this little log grow over the past 3 weeks, I’ve checked the progress in the web logs from day to day to see how people are finding me and where they are coming from. The things you find out are pretty amazing.

What I have come to find out is that there are several new forms of persistence that have come into existence, of course we tend to overlook them. So here’s what I’ve seen so far:

Google Persistence

Although this site is very new, that hasn’t prevented Google from indexing it in one way or another, be it by domain, by name, or in reference to some term a user has searched for (apparently kazaa’s law is on a lot of people’s minds). Google has become one of the new historians for the online society. It is often thought that information can escape if it is erased from your site quickly enough. Ironically, today’s world of syndication — a stream flowing into a river — brings content and information to the world at lightning speed. And once this happens, odds are Google’s grabbed it, indexed it, and archived it away.

Trackback Persistence

Movable Type users are very familiar with this concept of persistence. Although Trackback, the idea that one author automagically rings another author’s entry’s doorbell, is intended to pass along a “FYI” message to the original author, the reality is that an excerpt of someone elses’s stream of consciousness is xeroxed and filed away tightly at someone elses repository for you. If you’re lucky, you’ve Trackbacked to someone left on the power scale and you also get the secondary, yet powerful Googsistence working for you.

Comment Persistence

For many, it’s easier to comment on other’s thoughts than to initiate your own topics. I was in this position for the past year, blogging vicariously through friends, buddies, and even the occassional Anti-Buddy. The interesting thing is that even though the commentary is lower down in the overall hierarchy, it’s extremely valuable and probably equally important to the entire blogosphere. To understand how Comment Persistence kicks in, well it’s the same as Trackback Persistence really. Once your comments are down on paper, they’e out there for good — except if you write something completely inappropriate and the owner removes them (but we know better than to assume that it’s not been grabbed, indexed, or archived by Google yet.

The record of our thoughts, actions, and reactions to our interaction are now quickly becoming a huge, dynamic part of our collective history. Today is my birthday and I’m heading off to celebrate for the next few days, safe with the knowledge that my image is being etched on mirrorred platters around the world.

It seems that my recent rant on Cruft has generated some feedback, and surely it is welcome. Oli Studholme has posted a nice response, to the points that I have laid out relating to Cruft. Note that Oli’s entry can be conveniently located at http://oli.boblet.net/2004/01/29/cruft, which I agree is both readable and self-describing.

Before I address Oli’s points directly, I think that it’s important that I make it clear that I am not opposed to developing Cruft-Free URLs from a systematic point of view. I am, however, addressing the consumer issue of the matter, specifically the individual end-user’s concern about long URLs and their “ability” to digest these matters to generate naming conventions on their own.

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This really is not a surprise, but it’s pretty funny if you ask me. Seems that the entire time Bill Clinton was in office, he sent only 2 official e-mails, which barely compares to the almost 40 million his staff exchanged.

“The only two he sent,” Skip Rutherford, president of the Clinton Presidential Foundation, which is raising money for the library, said on Monday.

One of them may not actually qualify for electronic communication because it was a test to see if the commander in chief knew how to push the button on an e-mail.

Former Ohio Sen. John Glenn has the distinction of being the first American to orbit the Earth and the only person to receive an e-mail written by Clinton when he was in office.

Source: CNN

I guess old habits die hard. Let’s see what W is up to when that information is released.

The world we know has quickly changed from one of 10-digit phone numbers to significantly longer URIs, URLs for us common folk. For some members of the web community, especially the blogging and web standards aficionados, this outgrowth of the URL as a universal identifier has lead to a new feeling of urgency to protect the sanctity of the URI.

What is Cruft?

Generally speaking, cruft refers to “Excess; superfluous junk” (see Dictionary.com). In the web purists world, however, a slightly more specific definition has been applied — “all that junk the average web user doesn’t care about that makes URL’s long and annoying” (as defined by Mark Pilgrim, a respected gladiator for the cause.

To make this somewhat more relevant, let’s take a quick look at an example of a crufty URL and an un-crufted one:

Crufty

http://cnn.com/news/2004/0004.html

Cruft-Free

http://cnn.com/news/2004/4/

Why Cruft Matters

I tried to formulate my own respectable list of reasons why Cruft was a bad thing, but I found a valuable, clear definition over at Oli Studholme’s blog, Boblet.

An important but overlooked aspect of websites is the URL, or Uniform Resource Locator. This is the ‘web address’, usually of a page on the internet. While it seems minor, this is part of the page’s interface, and some simple rules can make a big difference in ease of use. Important ease-of-use elements for people are the URL should be:

• easy to type
• easy to remember
• short if possible
• ‘hackable’ ie predictable enough to guess
• and permanent

Source: Boblet

Why Cruft Doesn’t Matter (IMHO)

All this being said, I understand the merits of the process, but I certainly don’t understand the need for it from a strictly “consumer” point of view. Let’s look at the different aspects of a truly cruft-less URL.

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The recent rage about Orkut has breed a new round of commentary on the true nature of social networking as a whole. Generally, the arguments are centering around the Good they serve the end user and whether or not they can actually make money.

I don’t have an answer to either of those questions, but certainly I hope there is a light at the end of both those tunnels. Perhaps the better question to ask is what makes this round of “social” networking interesting at all. Currently, the data collected is misleading if nothing else. Overtly flat profiles read more like online xeroxes of resumes once past. The ties one can discover are not only misleading but almost measurably meaningless, i.e. the tie to the stranger on the subway has far more contact and context.

As one reader noted in the conversation following Ross Mayfield’s ever-syndicated “frictionless whuffie fun” post:

I also think another aspect of what makes Orkut (and Friendster et al) not work is that there’s no “there” there. The lack of personal journals/blogs makes the individual content sort of hollow. All you are given to learn about someone is pictures and a few short blurbs, which is nothing compared to stalking through their last few months of journal posts.

Source: User Comment, Many 2 Many

The question still stands — why is something as complex and wonderful as the human psyche and its boundless connections to both its environment and inhabitants categorized, summarize, trivialized down to a 30 field questionaire and 6 random hyperlinks?

SPAM is an intolerable pest that annoys every connected citizen. Bill Gates seems to think that Microsoft is on track to take down the demon once and for all. How long you ask? By 2006 (“Two years from now, spam will be solved” he said). The techniques laid out by Gates are, for the most part, both intuitive and known through the Anti-SPAM industry.

As noted in the report:

But the most promising, Gates said, was a method that would hit the sender of an e-mail in the pocketbook.

People would set a level of monetary risk – low or high, depending on their choice – for receiving e-mail from strangers. If the e-mail turns out to be from a long-lost relative, for example, the recipient would charge nothing. But if it is unwanted spam, the sender would have to fork over the cash.

“In the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant,” Gates predicted.

Source: CBS News

It’s not clear exactly how one might exact this payment, but seemingly a worldwide registry would need to be established that provided legitimate means to trace the origins of a message to a responsible party. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a lot of coordination. It seems that once a problem has grown large enough, as the SPAM issue surely has, that a much larger force or movement, capable of stemming distribution at the most active hubs, is the only solution that can eradicate the problem as a whole. Microsoft is large, but are they influential enough to keep from falling down?

I received an IM from someone yesterday about a new service, Orkut, released in affiliation with Google.

At first blush, I wasn’t really able to tell much, other than that a programmer had designed the site and the community was definitely closed — an invitation from an insider is required

Fortunately, I tuned in to the Social Software Weblog this morning to see if they had covered it yet and got an even deeper insight into the matter. As they report:

Orkut has implemented a “Karma” system, where you can rate your connections in three different categories Cool, Sexy and Trustworthy.

Make no mistake about it, this is pretty unique at the moment. Most of the other sites have “testimonial” sections where you can write nice things about the person in a free form text field. Orkut however appears to be the first to provide a rating scale that can then be compiled and the statistics used for *other* purposes. The key to the karma system will be…what “other” purposes it will be used for and will Google ask for permission to use it or assume ownership of the data. Just a few of the questions that we’ll have to wait and find out about.

Source: Soical Software Weblog

The most interesting aspect of this system is definitely the ranking/rating system that is implemented. One thing that strikes me is the lack of any negative values. Clearly the rankings shown seem to indicate that one can go only from good to great. On one level, I can understand that the invitation-only nature of the system would lend itself to be a “good aggregator”, however that seems somewhat too forgiving. , There are too many naturally occuring scenarios that could require that the rating be adjusted to reflect a negative value. Perhaps there is a way to prune nodes from the tree, essentially keeping it “good” — though that seems counter-intuitive to a true social network representation.

This leads me to yet another notion mentioned — personalization. It seems that Google has a new resource for aggregating data on individuals. It’s not clear how well this information could be tied together (legally and technically speaking), but the ramifications are vertainly interesting.

In theory, there are many forms of personalization that can be designed. I can roughly identify them as such:

• Direct Personalization

  This form of personalization comes from asking user’s direct and pointed questions relating to their preferences. We see this often as the configurable options for most widgets in software today.

• Indirect Personalization

  This form of personalization occurs behind the scenes. This personalization occurs by observing the user’s actions and altering the environment as a result of it. The best example I can think of is Amazon’s shopping experience.

• Historical Personalization

  This form of personalization relies on a pre-existing repository of data. Some time ago, when designing the TrueResponse Library application, I designed a Historical Personalization engine. To summarize, the data in the application was all categorized. Combining this data with previous content data and statistics on view rates from the current and previous customers, we were able to determine which content a customer was yet to receive as well as to loosely predict which content would be most successful in wooing the customer.

• Peer Personalization *

  Struck by the possibilities of Google’s new system, I am wondering if this is not the next form of personalization. Imagine the combination of social networks, peer attitudes, and user profiles to implement the next generation of personalization engines. Clearly, using the values suggested by your network of friends, potentially combined with the values of your your evaluators, can lead to some new and exciting opportunities.

Very interesting indeed. I’ll continue with this in a future post.

When this blog was first conceived of, a couple of months ago, I really had no idea what to expect and surely hadn’t played extensively with the exisiting blogging packages to see what was really involved.

Ironically enough, as a well seasoned Cold Fusion developer and entrepreneur, I have been working on my own blogging software for some time, but delayed the launch of my blog hoping to work within my own software. But everyone who’s ever written software knows that things take longer than expected, however, the flow of ideas and things I wanted to comment on did not. So I bit the bullet and went with one of the pre-existing packages.

Needless to say, this has been fun so far and I only hope I can keep up with the pace required to make something meaningful and lasting. It is definitely not hard to come up with ideas for content, just taking the time to write them down and provide the context is challenging with my schedule.

In the past two weeks, I have seen the blog grow slowly and surely. Seeing traffic slowly grow in such a short period of time is really an amazing thing and there are hardly enough experiences I can dream up to compare it to at this time. Naturally, there are many other things to get done, but I thought I would recount a few of the things, silly as they are, that have happened so far.

Template Re-Design

In a past life, I was a graphic designer. I’ve held on dearly to those values and attention to presentation and detail throughout my career as a developer as well. Naturally, I was not prepared for the trials of imagining an identity for this blog.

Fortunately, my daily trials of the blogosphere took me to The Mossy Blog to read up on some Flash work and I was struck by the design of their blog. Of course, I was also taken aback as I realized I couldn’t whip this up in any time flat. As fate would have it, though, I found that they used a great template as their starting point created by the fols at Leorex called the Aura Web Page Exoskin. A couple of hours later, I was on my way with a new design to boot.

Trackbacking

This may sound crazy, but it’s a pretty scary thing the first time you actually Trackback to someone else’s entry. I can say that butterflies did indeed form that first time I hit Publish. I think it boils down to fact that at that moment you are not just blogging your thoughts, but you are actually letting another node in our world know. The blogging world is far smaller than might be expected and once you put your flag out, people do indeed find it.

Getting Trackbacked

Of course, once you are writing , you are hoping that someone else is seeing what you say and finds it interesting enough to share that with their own circle of friends. I got my first Trackback from Ben Hammersley to an entry that I had made. Granted, this wasn’t the sort of mention I was anticipating, but it was exciting nonetheless.

Getting into the Goog

Now I must admit, I’m a programmer geek at heart. I read Full As A Goog on a regular basis. If you don’t know, it’s a blog dedicated to “Rich Internet Application Goodness”. For me, it’s one of those sites you hope some day to be a part of. Of course, I knew when I set out that, despite my coding skills and experiences, I didn’t want to make another blog exploring coding techniques and issues.. and with that, relinquished that I would not be an ideal candidate to ever show up on the Goog in any capacity.

That all changed today and I’ll admit I was actually confused at first! When I dialed in to check out the latest postings, I came across an entry titled Social Twister. At first I thought to myself, “Wow! Someone else is using the name of my blog, and it was John Dowdell, a Macromedia employee and the author of a blog that I visit almost daily. So I read the description and found that John actually was talking about me! I realized that I had pointed back to one of his entries and he must have found out about my site as a result. All I can say is, pretty neat!

In response to John’s comment.. I feel the pressure.. but I’m on the job.

That’s about all I can report on to date, but it’s been a great feeling so far. I actually do hope that as business and consumer adoption of blogging blossoms that the marketing folks don’t forget to deal with what it means to you, the owner of the blog.

And by the way, Gothamist.. I do like to use “I” in all my posts. Not sure how else to do it ;)

Marketing has changed the way that people understand how technology works. A sort of weird science where by it’s better to sell the big number than explain why the smaller is good enough or better.

Consider the case of the Mars Explorer and the pictures taken.

Over the past several years, I have made a great deal of friends, a large amount of buddies, and a random enemy or two, and several anti-buddies. In that same time span, I’ve also grown to admire and respect a wide range of people from the authors of the books I read to those that compose and publish via their blog. Before I talk about what these people mean to me, I think it best to define them these different roles and provide a little context.

Friends

These are really those people that I know in person and have been fortunate enough to spend some tangible amount of time in person with. In general, this group of people includes friends from as far back as elementary school all the way up to the folks I work with day in and day out.

Friends definitely provide the first line of support in most normal circumstances — if not by virtue of their proximity. Usually, our relationships with our friends are “tried, tested, and true” and the impact of the stressors in our life on our day-to-day experiences do not require explanation or justification.

Buddies

I wish I could make this as simple as those individuals that appear on my Buddy List in Trillian, but of course that’s not the case. The harsh fact is that my buddy list is made up of my friends, my family, my buddies, and some restless bots that are full of insight.

Buddies are individuals that I know purely online and have never met in person. I have on occasion spoken to these people on the phone, but that’s about the extend of it. This is not to trivialize the relationship at all. In many cases, I have buddies that I spend the significant part of my day in constant contact with through a variety of random IM pings.

Buddies also help to pass the time. While the friends are busy out and about, and you know where and why, if you’re still at the computer it gives you a chance to catch up with people. This is especially true since most of my buddies are actually in other parts of the world. To add to that, it provides a way to learn about how things are done in many different places, lacking the time or means to necessarily travel and experience it firsthand.

Enemies

This is really your traditional bad guy that’s crossed you in such a way that you need to stay away from them. I don’t think much more explanation is required ;)

Anti-Buddies

As ironic as it sounds, my “Buddy” list is also loaded with lots of people that I don’t want to have contact with. Some of these people are on my list because some annoying IM spammer found some way to message me and with the auto-add feature or some other internal error they get onto my list. Of course, since I usually am not here when it happens, and I don’t see it happen and then I can’t remember later if I needed that person on my list at all.

But the real Anti-Buddies are those people that you scorn from the online world. The same people you choose to make yourself “Invisible” to or those ones you choose to block since you “can’t take their sh*t anymore”. Ironically enough, to NOT be my buddy, I’ve got to carry you around as if you were.

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