mediajunk

Things I learned today:

Søtoroptimalisering is the Norwegian word for Search Engine Optimisation.

For all Norwegians out there, don't forget to buy my book about søtoroptimalisering!

One more time, because I like it so much:

Søtoroptimalisering!

Pegleg Development Company have made a free trial of their PMS (yes, that PMS) Alert Tool available for download.

Here's how the sincere folk at Pegleg describe their tool:

"Easily synchronize PMS Alert with her natural monthly cycle. Read a simple scale of five colors to get the likelihood of mood swings. Get a real-time estimation of fertility ... Get reminders when conditions are changing. Even get reminders of her next birthday and anniversary. "

!!!

It’s almost hard to believe, but this blog will be a year old tomorrow. The last 12 monhts really have flown.

Since the beginning, Mediajunk has concentrated on new media news and analysis, with particular focus on the identifying “what’s hot” in internet culture.

Of course, technology companies have vested interests in hyping up technologies such as WAP or services such as subscription-based personalised news sites – but such hype rarely reflects the way the internet is used by “ordinary” people across the world.

Among the topics and themes I’ve focused on, blogs and blogging have been top of the list. I genuinely believe that the emergence of blogging has been one of the major events in the evolution of the web. This is what I meant when I predicted, last December, that 2003 would be “the year of the blog” – and so it has been. That blogging came to prominence during the Iraq war was, I believe, incidental – (it would have happened anyway); though Salam Pax’s weblog certainly drew a lot of media attention.

The main surprise, for me, has been that celebrity weblogs have not yet taken off (unless you count US politicians as celebrities), but I think over the coming year or two, when blogs creep more and more into the mainstream, we will see blogs being used by the celebrity industry.

Another theme that I’ve explored in depth during the past year has been the development of search engine technology, particularly by the industry leader Google. Within the last twelve months, search engines have become the “red hot” sector of the internet, and it has become an exciting area to watch, what with all the mergers and acquisitions and, most recently, Microsoft’s moves to enter into the search arena.

Among the most popular entries are those that discuss the differences between male and female bloggers (partly because of prominence in Google for searches related to these topics) and the various posts on celebrity weblogs.

The blog has also built up quite a large readership – over 500 unique visitors now log on to mediajunk.com every day. The site registered over 22,000 page views last month alone.

Most of those page views have come from regular visitors – so thanks to all of you who frequently check in! I hope you keep coming back over the next 12 months, and long into the future…

I’m starting to believe that wikis are the web’s next big thing.

I first heard the term wiki during the last few weeks, although apparently it’s been around since 1995. Recent articles have cropped up explaining what wikis are and why everyone should have one, including an essay by Nathan Matias on Sitepoint.com, which does a good job of introducing the subject.

A pretty good job, that is, except for the fact that his opening definition of wikis is too vague:

“Different people have different ideas about what a wiki really is, but whatever angle you look at it, a wiki is software that handles complex problems with simple solutions.”

Well, that could describe anything from online banking to flight reservation software -- neither of which are wikis.

The definition by wiki pioneer Ward Cunningham -- "the simplest online database that could possibly work," doesn't explain very much either.

First and foremost, a wiki is a collaborative website. Visitors can, in some cases, edit the pages of the site. Indeed, some wikis let any visitor edit any page – a crazy decision, you might think, but apparently it works.

The idea is that the wiki is maintained by a community of users who, for the most part, want to see its content grow and evolve so as to be useful to all. Sure, there will always be a few vandals who want to change one of the pages. But one of the great features of a wiki is that any visitor can restore the page to one of its earlier states, so the vandal’s efforts can easily and quickly be undone.

Indeed, “wiki” itself is Hawaiin for “quick”. The wiki tool lets users create pages and hyperlink trails quickly, so that the site evolves in real-time with its community.

The reason I linked to Matias’s article was not for his definition, then, but for his nice explanation of how wikis conform much better to the “hypertext” paradigm -- unlike first- and second-generation websites.

Matias rightly quotes Vannevarr Bush, the person who first envisaged the world of interconnected hypertext documents, in his seminal 1945 article, “As We May Think.” He imagined that the Memex (the name he gave to an imaginary construct that today sounds like the internet) would be an extension of our memory, rich with links between different documents.

One of the trends I have noticed in the evolution of the web during the last ten years is that, in the “early” days, web pages were created like print documents – i.e. much of the web was “brochureware”.

In the late 1990s, Big Business, and the IT industry in particular, jumped on board the internet bandwagon. Realising that the web medium had a lot more power than print, self-proclaimed gurus hyped the coming of “online multimedia," “personalization” and “portals.”

None of these concepts really took off – because they all borrow too heavily from traditional (read: old) media, which use the “broadcast” model. With old media, the organisation creating and disseminating the content has ultimate control over its messages. Not so on the web -- at least, not if you want to engage a community.

The internet was, right from the beginning, about creating and empowering communities. That’s what businesses failed to see, and it cost them dearly when the bubble (built on the hype I mentioned above) burst.

As the dust settles, however, we are seeing the true nature of the new medium emerge. Weblogs – where publishing is effortless and visitor comments, trackback links, etc. are part of the weblog experience – are one example of this.

The shape-shifting techniques used by Amazon, Ryze and Sitepoint (to take three from the top of my head), where the way the information on the site is presented to you depends on your own actions and trails through that site, represent a second example.

Wikis are a third, though they have yet to take off in the way that weblogs have. But as users become more web-savvy, wikis will explode in popularity.

The web hasn’t stopped evolving; it’s only getting started. Watch out for wikis!

Just to show that Moore’s Law hasn’t yet reached its limit, a California-based company called ClearSpeed Technologies is to unveil a new microprocessor that, a spokesperson told reporters at Wired News, “has the potential to bring supercomputer performance to the desktop.”

Okay, so you need to put 24 of these chips into a single machine, but that’s entirely possible, and a laptop with 24 microprocessors (arranged on six PCI cards) would still be a snip, at around $25,000.

“That’s not cheap!” I hear you shout.

For a PC, it isn’t. But for a supercomputer, it is. And a PC that contains 24 of ClearSpeed’s CS301 chips would be powerful enough to enter the current list of the world’s 500 top supercomputers.

“By comparison, most of the supercomputers on the Top 500 list are clusters of hundreds of processors and cost millions of dollars.

The most powerful supercomputer in the world, Japan's Earth Simulator, operates at about 35 teraflops, consumes a warehouse-size space and cost $350 million.”

But who would need a “laptop supercomputer,” other than guys who like to show off their gadgets?

Lots of people apparently, particulary those working in Hollywood computer graphics industry.

If you're having one of those "I hate my job" days, maybe you should pause to count your blessings. It really could be worse. You could, for example, be a professional fart sniffer, or barnyard animal masturbator.

I'm serious.

William Speed Weed has written a great feature for Popular Science magazine on the 18 worst jobs in the world of scientific research.

You'll instinctively hold your nose (and other body parts) as you're reading it; just as well DigiScents never managed to perfect their proposed smells through the web technology!

I was watching a Discovery Channel documentary on robotics this morning and learned about the Asimo robot.

I'd heard about it before, but Asimo is much more advanced than I'd realised. Developer Honda seems to be serious about creating a market for humanoid robots.

So, indeed, is the Japanese government who, worrying about the ageing population (and without a significant pool of immigrants, who provide a cheap labour supply in other developed countries), provides funding for the R&D of "assistive technologies" to help the aged.

It turns out that Asimov was in the news recently, as he was the "ambassador" in a state visit to the Czech Rebuplic.

The video clip of the event (requires RealPlayer), from the BBC site, is fun to watch.

I'm blushing today.

Lola Ailina Laranang, a gifted writer and a sincere, inspiring blogger, recently asked me if she could use one of my photos to create a piece of "Flash Fiction".

I protested that I really wasn't a "photographer" but Ailina went ahead and used the picture anyway.

I'm terribly flattered! But don't worry: I won't be giving up the day(-and-night) job.

*****
MORE FLATTERY JUST IN:
I notice a big spike in my site visitors lately and realized it was from being quoted in Adam Curry's weblog on Sunday. Adam's blog has one of the biggest readerships in the 'sphere, so that was another nice boost, cheers Mr. Curry!

The New York Times has a feature on corporate blogging, which, according to the article's headline, is catching on.

Disappointingly, the piece does not give much of an insight into the potential benefits for executives (e.g. online identity management); what types of executives should blog (blogging isn't for everyone!); what they should blog about; the style they should use; how often they should blog; how long a post should be; etc.

The particular examples given in the article (such as Christopher Ireland's blog) are not particularly good examples of blogging (I would have chosen a better-presented, more entertaining blog, such as Kevin Lynch's).

The article (by Thom Weidlich) makes bland and rather obvious observations ("Blogs have drawbacks. Ms. Ireland has already been unsettled by a query from a reader for more personal information"). It doesn't tackle the biggest issue of corporate blogging -- the clash between the individual and the organization.

Hmmm... maybe I should go and write an article on corporate blogging myself. Then again, I'm so busy blogging, where would I find the time?

I don't do "links to other blogs I like".

But there's an exception to every rule:

OTHER BLOGS I LIKE
1. Ultramicroscopic is ultramagnificient.

If you get excited by this detailed poster of the evolution of computer languages (600k jpg) or this complex explanation of how a story filters its way through the blogosphere, then I'm sorry, but you're too geeky even for the internet and I'll have to ask you to leave.

However, you'll probably want to take the "how geeky are you" test or (worse!) the "what Matrix character are you" test on your way out. Just please, please, please don't post your results to your blog.

And if you ever fill out that Friday Five thing, I may have to kill you.

Really.

UCLA scientists will soon test an artificial hippocampus for rats -- a chip attached to the brain that will be used to store memories.

If successful, the device will then be tested on monkeys, and could eventually be used for humans with damaged hippocampi. The Guardian article quotes Joel Anderson, a bioethics expert at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, as having an ethical issue with the chip. "If someone can't form new memories, then to what extent can they give consent to have this implant?" he asks.

As far as I know, I don't have any brain damage, but I still wouldn't mind getting an upgrade, like sticking some extra RAM in there. Maybe then I'd remember to pay my car insurance.

*****

The will they/won't they debate over Google's position regarding weblogs from their main index has swung back into the won't remove camp, following Dave Winer's post about a note he received from a Google spokesperson, in which he is assured that "there's been no consideration of removing weblogs from our index."

The Lemon's visual history of the internet is proving popular for tongue-in-cheek statments such as this:

They will probably soon have something to say about aggregators, the latest fad -- which I attempted to explain a few weeks back. Meantime, Blogging Headline News is a decent example of an RSS-driven portal, from Australia.

I'm curious to know whether you think aggregators are useful, or will they simply add to an ever-increasing digital deluge of useless information?

Beck is the latest high-profile celebrity to have launched a bona fide blog. I've added him to my list of celebrity blogs (RHS of this page), but apparently I'll have to remove William Gibson's blog from that list in a few weeks. In an interview with Karlin Lillington, the SF author claims that maintaining the blog is "stifling his creativity", so he plans to discontinue it at the end of the promotional tour for his current novel. (Will Gibson be the first of many blog "drop-outs"?)

Nevertheless, the blog phenomenon continues to spread, reaching some of the remotest regions on the surface of the planet -- including Mt. Everest! Climber Lorenzo Gariano, currently tackling the great peak, "has been recording every stage of his momentous journey via a satellite phone which beams live audio blogs to a website run by the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, (KMI), based in Milton Keynes," according to BBC News.

To remind us a) that blogs can be topical and b) the blog format can be used for purposes other than diarying, check out the SARSwatch weblog, which tracks the spread of the virus, along with relevant breaking news.

The SARS site strengthens my hunch that the blog format is more than just a fad, and may turn out to be a killer app of sorts -- perhaps even the "default" format for all web sites.

See? You don't even need to have a home in real life to have a home on the web!

There are a lot of silly articles out there about the "battle" between journalism and blogging, asking whether the latter will displace the former. Blogging and journalism are not in competition; new media is not in competition with old. At most, new media sometimes changes the function of old media, in carving out a new niche for itself (just as television changed the function of radio).

One of the reasons why blogging will never rival journalism became clear this week when noted "warblogger" Sean-Paul Kelley, publisher of The Agonist, was reported by Wired magazine (no less) to have blatantly plagiarized many of his entries.

*****

Newspapers, see, have ethics and standards, a point that the LA Times sought to make when it sacked a photographer for deliberately manipulating an image taken in Iraq.

Isn't it curious that they were so public about the dismissal though, even publishing the original photographs? Hmmm...

Google encourages users to email suggestions; pity they don't publish the better ones. One web consulting company -- with the quirky name 37Signals --believes its suggestion is so good that it decided to post an online demo.

The idea is for Google to propose related searches on entered keywords. I think it's a great concept, and the demo captures it simply and powerfully. 37 bravos!

Continuing our fine pedigree of bringing you the latest craze in blogland, take a look at Blogshares.com, a pretend stock market based on blogs.

And yes, mediajunk is listed there ... though I wouldn't recommend buying just yet.

It was bound to happen: Dr. Pepper is recruiting influential young bloggers to help them market a new spin-off drink. Bloggers aren't payed for advertising, but get promotional items instead (all the Dr. P they can drink?).

I believe this move indicates the future for online advertising, which up to now hasn't succeeded on the internet. New media users are empowered, not passive; when confronted with advertising, they generally dismiss it (by closing pop-up windows, not following links, etc.).

The logical next (counter-adaptational) step for advertisers is to merge advertising messages with what appears to be 'ordinary' content (as already happens in other media -- e.g. where magazines write feature articles that endorse advertisers' products/services).

Henry Copeland has suggested -- a suggestion he's trying to make a living from -- that advertisers should utilise thin media, but it's doubtful whether his idea of blogads will catch on. The placement of the ads isn't the problem; it doesn't matter if clickthrough banners appear on corporate sites or personal ones. No, the nature of online advertising (currently intrusive and reliant on user participation) is likely to change.

I once came across an article (now lost in cyberspace) about how Hollywood promoted movies by creating sites that masqueraded as fansites; preferring sites that looked amateur rather than professional, since they appeared more authentic.

As for students becoming advertisers, well, isn't branded clothing one of the most sinister form of advertising? Not the most outrageous though. That award goes to UK agency Cunning Stunts, who are offering students £88.20 a week to wear corporate logos ... on their foreheads !

it seems there has been much blog chatter of late about what makes a blog a blog. is it about linking, is it about creating new and creative content, is it about what you had for lunch tuesday? my general attitude is live and let live, que sera sera, but with the proliferation of so many bad blogs, i find myself pondering the issue.

you have a promise from me that all content here at ultramicroscopic mediajunk is my own (and copyrighted!) unless otherwise denoted.

One of America's most prestigious and elite universities has hired well-known blogger David Winer as a weblog consultant. Winer, author of the Scripting News site, aims to kick-start a blogging habit among Harvard's staff and students, to enhance the school's "digital identity".

Winer believes that many other colleges will follow Harvard's lead. "I've already gotten e-mail from tons of educational institutions that want to be up on what we're doing," he points out.

The phrase "new and rapidly-expanding market" should by now be bubbling its merry way to the epicentre of your consciousness...