One of my first posts on this blog last year included a link to Idee Inc, an exciting image recognition and visual search technology company here in Toronto. Leila Boujnane is CEO, and co-founder with CTO Paul Bloore, of.
Here’s an intro that explains the things you can do, such as tagging …and you can also just go directly here to play in their Visual Search Lab.
Non profit American news co-operative Associated Press is a monopolistic news re-distribution conglomerate in the United States. Their content is created for them by contributing media (newspapers, radio, and television) in the US. Last year, threatened by the freedom of the internet, AP began charging for any right to use or reprint its content electronically.
On Sep 6, 12:22 PM EDT, Wired published an AP article on Net Neutrality titled Feds OK fee for Priority Web Traffic, which I can’t link to without paying. I can link to the Agonist Forum’s Ten Things That Finally Killed Net Neutrality, or to Peter Kaplan’s Justice Dept wary of “net neutrality” proposals on Yahoo News via Reuters.
There has been plenty of conversation online about Net Neutrality, but precious little in the mainstream media. Much of the online conversation focuses on Republicans and big bad capitalists in general as the perpetrators of the death of net neutrality. Little of it talks about what Net Neutrality is in plain English, or what it means to all of us. It is freedom of speech and freedom of access, which includes freedom to make a living. It affects every single one of us.
It’s worth an hour or two of everyone’s time to learn about this.
Start with Tim Berners-Lee, and sign up at Save The Internet.
Save The Internet is a very unfortunate name. This isn’t like Save the Whales, and it’s a lot more than an appeal to conscience. I’d name it Claim Our Freedom.
The opposition to Net Neutrality has been led mostly by delivery system giants such as AT&T with opposition coming from companies dependent on a customer base that is free to leave, including eBay and Google (although Google has been getting progressively quieter on the subject lately). When you do read mainstream press on the subject, pay some attention to the way the issue is presented (including what is left out). This will usually tells you everything you need to know about the presenter’s agenda.
The average non-tech person has never heard of Net Neutrality, or if they have they don’t understand it at all. When it is explained in terms of their telephone company wanting the right to both ‘capture’ a fee from the consumer and control access to what we currently create for one another for free, then everyone gets it. Take it one step further and explain that your access to others is going to be controlled by big media and telephony, which translates into censorship, and more people might start to value what we have here and protest against losing it.
Who is communicating this effectively outside of the core online tech communities? There is over 80% computer saturation in North America and there are over a billion people online worldwide, so why don’t most of them know anything about this? This is a serious issue that threatens free speech and personal freedom. Is Net Neutrality dead and is it just because we didn’t take the time to tell everyone about it?
Shame on the US press.
I can only conclude that mainstream media is all for censorship. We’ve been listening to their crying over lost readership growing in volume as it is directly impacted by more and more individual voices online.
Many professional journalists are horrified by what is called citizen media with its lack of professional standards. Despite many strong voices advocating the joining of traditional press to online citizen publishing, however, I don’t see anyone actually doing it.
AT&T and Google are corporations, not people. They have a clear legal obligation to their shareholders to make as much money as possible. Period.
The onus for communicating the threat here falls squarely on the shoulders of a free press. Anyone who knowingly ducks is either a coward or a political hack, but cannot rightfully claim the designation of free. Free press means us, just as it did in earlier times of our countries (US and Canada). You and me. We’re the free press today, not the Times or the Post or CNN or Fox.
Why isn’t everyone saying this plainly while we still have the freedom to do so?
A proposed Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web was posted this morning by Joseph Smarr on Open Social Web.
Joseph’s preamble states that it isn’t carved in stone (the phrase is chiseled in granite), but is intended to spur conversation and debate.
Do I have anything to contribute? On first reading, I’d say that the form and language tiptoe around rights which have already been abrogated by default, but at this moment I still have smoke coming out of my ears. This ‘document’ floored me.
Users, I presume, means all the constituents using the internet and web services? Or is this just for white American entrepreneurial tech insiders?
Why has this document been authored by four men? Four of the 10 men authoring the blog on which it’s posted?
You couldn’t find any women interested enough to participate? Any women prominent enough to consider inviting? Any women interested in the subject of their rights? Are there any powerful American female tech insiders? I’m a Canadian woman and I’m looking for them. I am also a ‘user’.
Women happen to be half of your constituents. Just like men, we aren’t all American. We aren’t all techies. We care about our rights.
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later…
Phil Wolff on Skype Journal says,
BORUS is a shallow attempt to codify broader, deeper rights in cyberspace. It’s like petitioning for the right to print an afternoon edition of the local newspaper on paper instead of fighting for Freedom of Speech with heart, guns, money and blood.”
Mostly we are used to thinking of the internet as a means of exchanging, sharing, finding, and now as a repository of, information. It is a way to extend communication in relationships much more than it is a source of relationships. This holds true even for some of the core tech group building full time for the rest of us. In this post, when I say we, I am, as always, talking about all of us.
Our desires go far beyond information. We also need stories and fantasies, conversation and relationships. We will develop ways to fulfill these needs and desires wherever we reside. The length of time we spend anywhere outside of work is largely determined by the depth of our satisfaction.
So we began to develop ‘places’ on the internet, and we traveled between them.
If the internet became about places, and web 1.0 about spaces, then web 2.0 is about sound.
Places were for both work and play. Two way communication was multiplied for groups and enhanced by chat. We made web pages to put our stuff on, for ourselves, or to share or show off or sell our goods or services. Games became multi-player. Instead of just travelling around, we wanted destinations, places to hang out with others for a while, ways to hear more than one voice at a time.
Spaces developed as our way of both gathering together and being able to do more than just hang out. The marketplaces such as eBay and worlds such as MySpace offered both the reach of earlier travel and the satisfaction of congregation.
With the wide adoption of syndication, another threshold of group size was crossed.
Web 2.0 seemed, initially, to be about social activities and tools. The word widget, which used to be used mostly as a euphemism for case studies in business school, has become, if not quite a household, then at least a home computer room word.
As another bubble grew, and there were more start up than any single person could keep track of, so grew the number of posts protesting the resulting noise, especially after Twitter appeared. Cacophony. Overload. Someone regularly posting somewhere about burnout.
Shortly after Twitter’s early growth surge, I posted wondering whether Twitter was about stories, about starting to create more immediate connections to one another as part of living out community stories, but I now believe that this was off the mark. We’re not there yet, to the point where real community grows and create its stories everywhere, although there are certainly real, strong communities here and there.
Where we are, though, is very much about sound, and if you ‘listen’ this way, music emerges from the cacophony.
Digg may not be my thing, but it is musical. Technorati, although getting a bit discordant of late, was utterly melodic. Google’s whoosh is more like rushing rapids, fast and powerful, and possibly dangerous. Microsoft doesn’t make music, but could build sophisticated stages and amphitheaters and more. Mac users relate to their machines as to music. Twitter is the musical mix of voices at a party, and some of the best blogging networks could be compared to impromptu a cappella. The best individual voices are musical too. Library thing is a melodic widget. Even the best thoughtful and intellectual conversation has the rhythm and flow of music.
There are growing sites that don’t have much of this musical quality. It seems to me that those which exhibit the most vigor are the ones using the lure of cash registers clanging. Will they overtake the music? My answer is that it depends on how much great music we can make, and also on whether we can learn how to make music without abandoning economic reality.
This music isn’t directly formed by design or functionality, it emerges from the interaction of the participants. Of course we’ll go to sites that are more attractive and easier to use, and of course we need them, but what draws us together and orchestrates the music is a lot more than that. It’s more than entrepreneurial start up enthusiasm, too. It’s an expression of our needs and desires, just as it always has been. Next time you check out the latest offering…
Listen for the music.
One of this week’s high points for me was visiting Tara Hunt’s weblog ::HorsePigCow::. Tara is a fellow Canadian, who is now in San Francisco. My loss, not to have met her before she left Toronto.
Tara is writing on the community roles we play. In her post titled Archetypes in Communities - The Caretaker, she profiles her own Jungian personality type, and refers to the ways in which interaction between people in different roles is an architectural component of healthy communities (my words).
I’ve valued Jung’s theories highly since discovering his work as an adolescent. This discovery was occasioned by reading that Carl Jung collected case studies of children who saw mandalas. I also sought out the definitions of mandala and learned that I had been one of the children who saw them.
In her second post the next day, Tara reviewed a primary list of archetypes, asking What’s Your Archetype?. Although I do agree that these personality types are more behavioral models than true archetypes, the work that Tara is doing in studying our roles in communities is most welcome.
Visit her post to find the url of a site where you can take a Myers-Briggs typology test to determine your personality type. If this sort of test interests you, check out the Personal DNA link in the sidebar here as well. Most tests such as these are far too short and standardized to give an accurate in-depth representation, so using a variety, and reading further about the various theories is the best practice. Understanding ourselves better is usually beneficial to all our relationships and interactions in life, too.
The understanding of communities, and the complex dynamics of people in them, is (imo) one of the essential steps toward creating online resources that address needs and desires we all have that go beyond personal gratification, that connect us to one another on more than a superficial level. I can also easily imagine a myriad of other online applications for more of this kind of mapping.
Go Tara. 
