Category: Internet & Wireless

Seana Mulcahy in today’s MediaPost talked about “Things I Hate on the Net”. Now, she’s not a techgal – she a marketing / branding babe – so among her listed items the usual litany of email scams, popups / popunders, spyware, broken / dead links, site registration, poor integration (what else is new), audio surprises (you know, those suddenly singing or talking little bursts when you’re on a conference call – it’s happened to me), and click-happy sites. Most of these are products of bad site design that are easily remedied – fire the marketing department and get a good designer. But some of these are tech-derived marketing inventions (surprise!) intended to exploit weaknesses and loopholes in our crazy-quilt Internet. We wouldn’t see much of the latter right now if a fundamental issue was resolved. And it’s actually a business mindset, not just a marketing or tech mindset.

So, “What do I hate about the net?” Simple – you can’t evolve anything new or tune something to get around problems, because everyone bets on failure and wants to exploit it for their own private purposes. I hear this all the time from technologists, inventors, and businessmen. “Take no risks”. And it’s betting on failure that spawns all these customer plagues today that Seana so loathes.

Fascinating little keynote at Imedia Summit by Lincoln Millstein, COO of New York Times Digital on the future of media.

Mr. Millstein sees “Big Iron Publishing” – the presses and paper and trucks and newsroom – as being nonscalable and noncompetitive compared to Internet media. Also, inventory of content is the burning limiting factor to encourage more interaction and stickiness with a site’s audience.

Norimitsu Onishi’s article in the New York Times entitled “Japanese Find a Forum to Vent Most-Secret Feelings” is fascinating. According to Mr. Onishi, “In a society in which subtlety is prized above all, face-to-face confrontation is avoided, insults can be leveled with verbal nuances and hidden meanings are found everywhere, there is one place where the Japanese go to bare their souls and engage in verbal combat: Channel 2.”

What is “Channel 2”? Simply an anonymous Internet BBS where secrets can be unburdened and read by others without retribution. Unlike American “talk radio”, where people actually want to be known, Channel 2 is a way to reveal oneself and others with no concern for social or business status.

Mike Cassidy of the Merc wrote a nice essay on the casualties of the dot-com bubble selling out and leaving Silicon Valley. Not all of the people who worked hard here cashed out or got rich — actually, only a few did really well, although most everyone here likes to pretend they did better than everyone else. It’s a peculiar SV conceit.

I’m fourth generation Californian, born in Fremont and went to Berkeley. I’ve always lived in the Bay Area. I remember the orchards, now long gone, and how I used to ride my bike through them coming home from Parkmont Elementary school.

But I don’t resent other folks who came here trying for a bit of the gold. After all, that’s part of the American Dream. Does anyone remember the American Dream anymore?

So it makes me sad that young people have to sell everything and leave, just because so many businesses have gone on a bender about outsourcing. It is “irrational joylessness”, an almost armageddon wish-fulfillment. It is a maxim that a man who thinks he will die tomorrow will somehow make it so.

And all Craig Barrett can say is “life is tough”, as John Paczkowski noted a few days back in his column. What a wonderful guy.

Mike also spoke of experiencing a lack of enthusiasm about google, as John’s column quoted. Sounds like a few people will make out like bandits and it will assuredly be successful given it’s backers, but it won’t save that young couple Mike wrote about yesterday, nor a lot of others who have contributed to the success of the Valley.

It is often the case that a “different” puzzle presents an opportunity for a young scientist to say “Oh, I can solve this problem because it’s different”. Well, sure… but is it simpler, or simply different?

The question begs in a discussion of using reliable link layers in wireless to solve the problem of retransmissions and poor QOS. The problem is that artifact of retransmission distorts the use of the medium, because too many retransmits / congestion events occur, biasing the statistics and becoming unfair. The solution for the wireless approach is to use the same thing that causes artifacts of noise as an architectural solution.

In the wired case, the solution is smaller packet sizes, so that when congestion occurs, congestion recovery impacts fewer events. But the increase in the number of packets than distorts the results of reliable link layer, so you get the same problem, only it’s less obvious, which is why I mention the wireless case first.

In the first case, it’s a first order effect. In the second case, it’s a second order effect dominating the first. But in neither case is it a “different” effect that can be solved independent of the other. And there’s where the delusion lies.

An old physics trick — look at the really lossy case first, and then once you’ve figured out what’s the problem, ask if a similar problem hides in the less lossy case. Given the scope of the Internet, little problems become big fast.

Of course, I got told last year that this wasn’t a problem in wireless. Oh, and we’ll eventually find weapons of mass destruction, too. Are you holding your breath?

Fred Turner, Professor at Stanford, spoke the other day at SCU on “Counterculture into Cyberculture: How the Whole Earth Catalog Brought Us “Virtual Community”. Basically a history talk of the WELL and the organizing power of the hippie movement through the “whole earth” commercial powerhouse of the time. I found it curiously amusing – kind of like watching your mom in a “Granny dress” or your dad with a beard strumming a guitar.

While I’m not quite the age of the “summer of love” crowd (I think I preferred collecting Breyer horses then), I have watched the evolution of these communities from a technology standpoint, and have seen both their strengths and weaknesses as they grew (and in some cases died). As history and anthropology are an avocation and since I’ve been involved in developing and growing relationships using technology, it is a serious topic. So I went and listened.

One of the clear as bells problems stemmed from the willful misunderstanding of what the technology of the time provided and how it could be used. The WELL provided a novel community experience all right, but it was basically too limited to be of great use to build the kind of movement envisioned by the “counterculture” – it was just too early, and easily supplanted by the Internet.

The evolution, technology, and mechanisms which would become the Internet were actually quite separate in design and execution, rose colored glasses of the counterculture notwithstanding.

I know a lot of folks (even Al Gore) would like to stake a claim to the Internet’s success, or as the syllabus stated “the network technology of the WELL helped translate the ideals of the American counterculture into key resources for understanding the social possibilities of digital networking in the 1990s.” But I’m afraid it just isn’t so – it evolved independently and with funding from some of those guys – the DOD comes to mind – that the counterculture tended to protest against.

I’ve never found the hippie movement to be very progressive in using technology, except for television. It’s understandable, given the paroxysms of the time. Just like the nostalgia for this period by these guys isn’t so great for women and people of color.

But we should get real here: the right has used the Internet far more effectively to convey its message until Howard Dean went against his own party’s anti-tech bias and proved the Internet could be beneficial to the left.

It took thirty years, a lot of hard work, a ton of research funds, real tech visionaries like Cerf and Kahn and Berners-Lee to make the Internet the real world wide web.

Not all the cute stores that sold wood stoves, guitars and granny dresses could make one TCP/IP connection or HTTP web page.