Musings & Meanderings

There’ve been many rounds of conversation in recent years about the term users. Many dislike it intensely. I’ve always had a ‘…just don’t call me late for dinner’ attitude to this term, finding it perfectly appropriate in some circumstances and less so in others. Instead of looking for an alternative generic term that encompasses every single person using a computer for any reason, I usually try to make the terminology congruent with the activity. Sort of an ‘it is what it does’ approach.

Here are some examples of terms I use:

1. audience
2. citizen
3. constituent
4. contributor
5. customer
6. member
7. participant
8. service provider
9. user
10. vendor
11. viewer
12. visitor

Last week’s conversation about Glam, on Michael Arrington’s and Jeff Jarvis’s blogs (here and here), got me thinking about this again, and realizing just how overly broad the definitions of our different roles here is. In many ways, those of us who’ve been around for some time still tend to think of geeks vs non-techs in terms of both support and business, of active users vs lurkers (and worse) in terms of forums and communities, and so on. These two-sided definitions make sense when observing and comprehending online activity from the perspective of personal experience. The more you broaden that perspective, however, the more variant roles and activities become, begging further definition. Beyond a core group, whether it’s social or special interest or a dev team, are far more complex communities and, further, entire societies.

Glam, for example, illustrates how increasingly professional bloggers and web publishers have become sub-contractors for advertisers. This may be a fairly traditional media model, but the old publishing definitions of writer and reader don’t fit the same way here. Whether we’re offering opinion, analysis, or entertainment online, the moment we start selling advertising we become a vendor of space in a way closer to a landlord model than to any other. The advertiser isn’t paying us for our attention, but for the numbers of other ‘eyeballs’ we can attract. So Glam and similar sites are, in effect, supporting a range of commercial activity that spans the entire marketing and media gamut from product to customer. Glam has users and its users have users, and so on.

The media model is one of the more complex ones, especially where it overlaps with pure free speech, but there are many other ecosystems developing in which one of the activities only is the exchange of goods and/or services. The difficulty with new role definitions here is that we each can play far more of them, and in more ways, than ever before. User, whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to the term, doesn’t come close to recognizing the range of multiple roles of a billion people beginning to create new ecocosms. There are hundreds of categories and thousands of definitions of hardware and software. There are endless business and job categories. Shouldn’t we have at least as many for the users? There are more of us, doing more various things, than in either of the first 2 groups, which some of us are also part of.

Me Tarzan …you Jane. See Spot run …to get online and click here? Machines are awesome, something I’ve believed in since I discovering Lotus 123 and DBase II about 25 years ago. Free societies, with free speech and free enterprise, are pretty awesome too. Advancing our comprehension of, and communication about, the latter up to the level of the former, is a goal worth pursuing, imo. What do you think?

A recent part time activity of mine has included some detective work which led me, among other things to a particular IP block. These 255 IP addresses, on which you could probably host hundreds of thousands of websites, show a very short list of users, but most of the info is phony, including the provider, tech support, and abuse contact info. The block is listed as registered to NTT America. The first time I called them, the tech taking my call cheerfully entered the IP numbers I gave him, froze into silence, started stuttering, and ended, after several attempts, with a tentative sounding statement that they do not have that block listed after all. Further lookup shows the block as belonging to a netherworld where blocks created before any registries existed reside.

The contact with NTT started me thinking about the ingrained distrust of big business among denizens of the web. This distrust, regardless of whether it is political in origin, has become an unquestioned tenet of faith in many segments of modern society, sometimes with less basis than we require before accepting a religious tenet.

As I often repeat, neither businesses nor currencies are bad. It is people who do right or wrong.

There are many tech and non-tech small business owners on the web. There are plenty of techs and devs who eat based on their ability to get paid for their skill sets on a consulting basis, and who also believe in a peer to peer social and economic model. Individuals, service providers or consumers, represent the vast majority of the population using the internet. Big business, venture capitalists, and public companies, however, represent the vast majority of both investment and ownership of all the resources here. Understanding these entities, and dealing with them, is unavoidable for anyone interested in new or alternative models of any sort.

NTT America, Inc. is a privately owned subsidiary of a Japanese corporation. Whether they are as big as AT&T is not publicly known, although they are enterprise driven and undoubtedly more profitable that the Texas based creation spawned by baby bell. Many fret about Google as well, but as a consumer driven company (and without looking at politics or behind the scenes), they should, imo, rank pretty low on the list of big companies whose interests conflict with those of the general population. Anyone who wants more information about a home grown public company such as this can also become a shareholder. Tracking hacker activity to a company such as NTT, only to hear them expresses no interest in correcting the fact that they are publicly registered as responsible for the hosting block, concerns me far more than what an American public company might do.

A public company is a powerful vehicle. The attendant legal structures offer opportunity for various lucrative occupations, such as stock market promotion, which contribute little to society in general. Regardless of this, the vast majority of large companies remain law abiding and respectable. We don’t worry about GM or P&G taking control of our activities or limiting our freedoms. What makes technology different in this respect is its potential for invasiveness. We are right to be vigilant, but vigilance by itself will make little difference to how the next stage of growth is constituted. The only thing that can make a difference is understanding and involvement.

Peer to peer interactions as a class of business aren’t currently more than a speck on the entire landscape. Those who care about liberty and autonomy would do well to adopt a larger focus. In the same way that media and a few other big businesses are struggling to develop micro-management of electronic relationships and communication with customers, the independent operators should be developing macro visions based, not on the ‘wisdom of crowds’, but on the power of many. A group of many with modest to reasonable means can elect world leaders and influence economies just as a few individuals wielding vast resources can.

The current corporate business models are, in practice, the most likely to influence events and lives. The only thing that can change this is alternative models of a competitive size. Consider building, joining, contributing to, or at least endorsing one. The more of us who have a personal stake in electronically based businesses, the more we know and trust one another in the marketplace and personally, the less we’ll need to worry about potential threats posed by others.

Matt posts Best Open Source Social Networking awarded to WordPress by Packt Publishing. Wtg!

Check out the numbers in A Hollow Victory Microsoft which says “the fact is that open source has won this battle”. There’s a lot of spin in this post, which refers only to web hosting software, rather than the OS upon which Microsoft’s empire is built, but the basis is real. Unix and Apache are increasingly adopted by enterprise developers because they work, and new development growth continues to be increasingly based on open source vs Windows.

Open source isn’t about free. It’s about self sufficiency and community. It is about building things for ourselves instead of serving a master.

The anonymous WordPress blog to which I linked above, called There Is No Government Like No Government, claims to be about anarchy, yet is rich with the political cant of the extreme left, with an occasional right wing position thrown in. Does anyone other than me find this ironically amusing?

There’s a hidden chasm in many a segment of open source communities which is tied to political agendas (qu’elle surprise). Many community members bristle at big business, and many corporations deserve it, exhibiting intent to capitalize on free software, as they do on the free content millions of individuals create on the web every day. Open source community members are far more likely to be on the political left than the right. Nevertheless there is a core of practitioners of true free enterprise, which is apolitical. Here new economic models are needed, and here casting aside canned political agendas can make a great difference for all of us.

Open source developers who are apolitical shouldn’t worry about capitalistic opportunism, other than in the aspect in which it gains baseless dominance through big government support, regardless of which party is in power. The fact that open source has the momentum it does, is based on achievement and performance, not politics. Keep that thought.

…please count me out. I’m a stubborn believer in the wisdom of people being necessary to harness, and benefit from, the power of machines. An increase in combined and collaborative knowledge? Great. Crowds in the cloud with the wizard standing behind a curtain? Not so much. As long as people don’t really want to know how any of it works, though, the wizards will remain.

Twine is the ‘Facebook killer’ hopeful, an invite only beta social network
launched by Nova Spivack’s Radar Networks.
Nick Carr likes it better than Freebase.

This social network proposes to make sense of all your personal information. The aim is to deliver benefits to you in the form of better tools for organizing your personal data and sharing it with others. Could it be that one of the ultimate goals is to create targeted advertising effective enough to make it impossible to distinguish from personal recommendation?

Read the Terms of Use page on Twine before you sign up. Rights to all information you contribute to Twine are granted in perpetuity, which is pretty standard. You retain, of course, all responsibility for inaccuracy and illegality, and so on. I read everything I could find on the site. One of the many things I did not find was any mention of delineation between personal and non-personal information, or any mention of user rights at all.

Most any publishing of information on the web can be deemed, under what will eventually be understood as common law use, to constitute the granting of redistribution licenses of some type. All of us who venture out here have personal responsibility for what we do and say in public. There are very few of us both knowledgeable and fortunate enough to remain totally anonymous on the internet forever. Anyone whose true goal is total anonymity avoids public places.

Personal privacy is not about having something to hide. It is an essential component of freedom, autonomy, and simple human dignity, as well as an important element in personal and family safety and security.

My wish for the day is to see the buzzword ‘transparency’ replaced with a more traditional and meaningful word, namely ‘responsibility’.
A perpetual wish is for linking ‘benefits’ to ‘respect’.

There is so much that we users could accomplish and benefit from, together, on a semantic web. Yesterday I read Tara Hunt’s post on The Brown Act of 1953, and was struck, as always, by the casualness with which many embrace these online tools, and also by the unspoken characterization of older, more cautious generations as an obstacle to progress. Much of that caution has a sound basis.

When I first started blogging in 2006, there was much public discussion about trust, especially following the ground breaking sale of MySpace. Trust is essential to human communication and interaction. Trusting a corporate entity is different from trusting a person. I, for one, am much more likely to trust you with my data if you recognize and respect my ownership of it.

Millions trust Facebook enough to submit their birthdate, a fact connected to their driver’s license, social insurance number, etc., online. Hundreds of millions have an account of some sort with Google, which has relatively comprehensive privacy policies and offers snail mail access to communication in case of problems. Millions of you may also join in making Twine one of the next hot destinations. As Danah Boyd says, “read those contracts!”.

From my install process, which had to be hacked, to my WordPress feeds, which are still acting up regularly, rather like brief blackouts, I was repeatedly told that there was something wrong with my code or file configuration. This caused me to spend all my usual blogging hours, and a few nights, digging through every single file. There are a couple of hundred of these, only a dozen of which I had initially worked with for the set up and theme.

All that time spent wasn’t necessarily a bad thing (although I’m suffering from withdrawal in missing many of my favorite reads) since it afforded me an even deeper appreciation of what has been created by the WordPress community.

Why didn’t my index files work? Nobody knew, so we just kept making new ones.

What were those way too long strings that doubled back in error messages? Must be a non-tech newbie code mistake I made somewhere.

What was that —>  thing that kept appearing before certain pages loaded? Tech people just shrugged.

That thing represents the hidden encoding characters preceding a UTF-8 file that has been saved with a BOM, or byte order mark, and I’ve also now read somewhere that PHP doesn’t care much for BOM.

Although I found many entries in help forums by webmasters waylaid by BOM, the only formal faq I’ve found on it is by Sun and Unicode. The Wikipedia entry refers to this being a problem with Unix and not Windows servers, and I’ve read that including the BOM in UTF-8 by default was one of those unilateral Microsoft decisions. Here also is a post by WordPress blogger Pierre, and a related issue post on translating character sets and collation in WordPress.

I first found evidence by downloading one of the suspected problem files and opening it in WebTide, which showed me unicode hard break characters before the file content. They didn’t appear on the page, but rather in the code schema window.

Getting rid of the BOM is fairly simple, although time consuming. You have to open a file that can be saved in plain text with no encoding and then paste the file contents into it. After saving it, you then copy the contents again, and paste them into a new file in an editor that will save with no BOM. Not all editors will do that, even the fanciest professional ones might require you to know how to script in that function. I’m using Notepad++, one of the top downloads on sourceforge.net, and really liking it so far.

There’s a possibility that db files can become corrupted as well. There is a WordPress plugin called UTF-8 DB converter which I think was developed for upgrading from versions earlier than 2.0 (which I think is when WordPress switched from Latin-1 encoding to UTF-8) but I don’t know whether it would help with this issue.

It’ll still be a while before I can get to setting up all my blogrolls and links here, and to joining in as many conversations as usual, but in the meantime, I hope that this post on the BOM issue might make it a bit easier for someone else to learn about than it was for me. I do wonder how much buggy behavior remains a mystery for the moment because of BOM.