Tag: Dave Winer

Moore’s Law and the Economy(?)

Dave Winer writes,

John, imho, the reason our economy is not in synch with Moore’s Law is the selfishness, even destructiveness, of the people of technology. The Boy Kills Boy syndrome. Everything from patents to browser wars, a very small number of people form the brakes on the advance of technology.

Right, because the continuing advance in CPU speed, as predicted by Moore’s Law, is due to a cooperative love fest between IBM, Motorola, Apple, Intel and AMD. No selfish companies in that mix, nosiree!

Metadata Madness

There have been several major upgrades to Conversant, the software that powers this web site, including a feature Macrobyte calls Custom Fields, but I personally think of as Metadata Madness (think of those bad television ads for car dealers).

Pretty much everything on this web site is actually part of a database. Things like the text of a message, the creation date, the author, the subject, etc. are essentially fields in that database. Storing information in a database presents a lot more possibilities than static systems.

Metadata — data about data — expands that power and makes it possible to manipulate data in lots of very cool ways.

Conversant already had an excellent metadata tool called “Labels.” On this site, I used those to lumps stories into categories. This story, for example, is assigned to a label called “Web.” Other stories are assigned to lablels like “Computer Games” or “Religion.”

Custom fields let me take that to the next level. For example, after all of the writing I did on the 9/11 attack, I wanted to create a page that would feature just the stories I’d written about that attack. I suppose I could have created a new, separate label for those stories, but then that would defeat the purpose of having broad categories.

Instead I created a “keywords” text field — which is now a field that all messages on the site have — and simply assigned all the 9/11 stories with the keyword “9/11.” You can see the results in this test page.

I’ve also added a short “description” field, though haven’t yet implemented it on this site. For an example of how this can come in handy, visit http://www.animalrights.net/articles/2001/ and notice how the more recent articles have short descriptions after them. This text is also used on the front page to summarize text (though at the moment I have to copy and paste this text into weblog entries, but this feature will be integrated automatically in an upcoming update of the weblog).

At the moment I’m mostly using these free-form text fields, but custom field option also offers date fields, popup menu fields, and list/combo fields.

Using a combination of these you could really build some powerful applications. For example, there is only 1 record in the database at the moment, but I’m using the custom fields to rebuild my database of animal rights terrorism that will be fully searchable on a number of different fields.

And that’s really the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of really cool things you can do with this, and as I get more into it I’ll be posting more examples.

The important things, as far as I’m concerned, is offering yet another sophisticated way to manipulate existing data. In today’s Dave Winer talks about software like Blogger and Manila as idea processors. I love that concept, but the problem with strictly outline and chronologically based processes is that neither hierarchical outlines nor a chronological ordering make it very easy to connect related (or unrelated) ideas and see the big picture.

For example, the other day I wrote a brief snippet slamming Salon.Com for its story about 9/11 and sex. That’s still fresh in my mind. A year from now, I am not going to remember that at all, much less guess which day I wrote that on. But I will be able to see that, and all related stories, by visiting the 9/11 page or a similar page of Salon.Com-related stories.

Although other people tell me they enjoy my web sites, everything I write is largely for my own benefit and future use. Being able to easily create and edit metadata makes it extremely easy to take the varied daily writing I do and organize it in a way that has long term value beyond what I’m interested in at the moment.

Americans and Foreign Affairs

The latest edition of Scripting.Com is a good illustration of the problems with American foreign policy — very few Americans consistently follow foreign affairs.

On the one hand, for example, Dave Winer notes that many people are surprised to learn about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. Many of the people I’ve talked to seem to think that the Taliban has a regular military along the lines of Iraq. It was a bit absurd watching Dan Rather on CBS the other day reporting about Taliban troops supposedly massing on Pakistan’s border and allegedly armed with Scud missiles.

On the other hand, Winer himself clearly knows little about the history of the region when he says,

Here’s the scoop. The Taliban believe they brought down the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and there’s reason to believe they’re right.

Well, since the Taliban militia wasn’t formed until 1994 — quite a few years after the Soviet withdrawal — it is a bit hard to understand how they could be right about bringing down the Soviet Union. On the other hand, there’s a reason to believe Winer is unfamiliar with Afghanistan’s history.

After the Soviet pullout the various groups fighting the Soviets began fighting each other and for awhile it looked like Afghanistan was going to go the route of Sudan, where a 40+ year civil war has raged with neither side able to completely establish control over the other.

Pakistan didn’t exactly warm to the idea of this instability near its border, and began aiding the Taliban. If it hadn’t been for Pakistan’s help, it is unlikely the Taliban would have ever managed to control a significant portion of the country.

Osama bin Laden certainly played a significant role in the anti-Soviet jihad, but the Taliban is a product of the post-Soviet withdrawal era, not the cause of said withdrawal.

It Is Not a Sequel, It Is Literature?

What exactly was Dave Winer talking about yesterday when he posted the sentence below, about Alice Randall’s controversial The Wind Done Gone,

Listening to her talk about her family and especially her father, there’s no doubt that the book is literature, not a sequel as the heirs of Margaret Mitchell have claimed.

The last time I checked, a sequel to a novel would generally be classified as literature. Besides which, Randall’s novel has generally gotten very bad reviews with most reviewers noting that had the Mitchell estate not done something as absurd as taking Randall to court, that the novel would have gone largely unnoticed.

The biggest absurdity in the The Wind Done Gone case, however, is that 65 years after Gone With the Wind was first published and 52 years after Mitchell’s untimely death, the novel is still not in the public domain thanks to the several copyright extensions largely bought and paid for by a handful of large media corporations.