Marsden is Here

It is the last few hours of 2022. There is no KAOS party this year, and as D has come down with something flu-like we are also not venturing out to either of the drinkies we have been invited to.

I am not feeling positive going into the New Year, even less so than going into this year. Hanging over me or settled in my gut is something like generalised anxiety, but not exactly. I suspect it may be some type of self loathing, born of having given more than I intended or wanted to over this year physically, emotionally, financially with nothing to show for it myself and precious little to show for anyone else.

Let's take a look back in bullet points
( snip )

Topic warning: sexual harassment

Context: Yesterday a #metoo campaign to raise awareness of sexual harassment and assault started to spread on social media.

If all the people who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote "Me, too." as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

( content behind the cut )

Last week Public Address put out an appeal for donations not just towards keeping the server lights on but towards keeping the site owner/manager paid. The latter bit was new, the former happens periodically. Aggregated I probably throw $100-$150 at PA a year (or would like to), that's probably comparable to the cost of a quality dead-tree subscription (I really have no idea.) That is a measure of the value I see PA providing as a current events forum and community.

Comparatively I did not sign up with the NZ Herald when they experimented with a paywall a while back regardless of the amount of personal value I was finding find in their site because they were locking the content away from everyone else. (And signing up for a subscription / having to log in to see stuff / just seemed too complicated. There's a low but non-trivial barrier there.)

I repeatedly refuse to take out a subscription to The Press (local dead-tree paper) when the telemarketers call because I have no interest in the bulk of the content, even though it would leave me better informed on local events and I do eagerly read the interesting parts of the paper whenever I happen across a copy. I would probably subscribe to a pdf version of selected sections delivered to my inbox daily.

Back to PA - some discussion surfaced over there about how to pay for "the good stuff" in general - not just stuff that brings value to the individual but that adds to the entire conversation. Or provides the forum in which to have the conversation, which PA excels at. As Russell sums it up (emphasis mine)

But there is another model. The subscriber radio model. My readers don’t actually need much persuading that the argument for paying so that everyone can have nice things is a strong one. In the past two years, I’ve made more from asking them for a contribution than I have from advertising. Keith Ng has also had some success in asking readers to crowdfund his stories – after he’s published them.

But this needs a permanent structure, and it needs to work for all of us. One solution I see is this: a simple, voluntary subscription system which can be joined by any New Zealand website or blog at one end, and any reader at the other. In concept, it’s simple.

As a means of funding advertising just doesn't cut it, especially for the niche sites and site-specific subscription models / paywalls only seem to work if you have a (large) critical mass of subscribers who find personal value in what you deliver.

But the things I find myself paying for in something like a subscription manner are those that match the bit I emphasised in the quote above - those who can afford contribute so that *everyone* can have nice stuff, and can hopefully be secure in the fact that should they fall on hard times they (which includes quite a bit of "I") will still have access to those services.

This is the model Livejournal used to have before it was sold to someone who wanted to make a profit from it and the model Dreamwidth is emulating since it opened up basic accounts.

Wikipedia is another site that I consider "new-media" which I contribute to periodically. And I have put my bit towards crowd-funding other initiatives like NWZ

Heck even the photo-hosting I pay for is to ensure others continue to get use and enjoyment from my putting them out there, off-site backup is a bonus.

I'd happily pay for the things FaceBook does well - essentially providing hyper-local news about my social circle and event management - as long as it meant that my friends also continued to be able to use the service and were treated a little less like "product". I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to pay; maybe around that $100 a year; maybe up to $300 in small chunks. That might sound a lot in this digitally priced age but remember conceptually I would be paying not just for me, and it would still be less than a dollar a day.

There is certainly a personal use component - Twitter or Tumblr could both operate on the same model and at the present time I wouldn't "subscribe" because I don't use them a great deal although I have accounts and follow some people who surface interesting stuff. But I'm certain there are plenty of people who would.

~~~
Another model I saw some time ago - and I can't remember what it was called now - was a Tip jar model where you paid in some amount each [time period] and sites authors could embed a click widget - at the end of the [time period] however much you had put in was divided among the people whose content you had found valuable enough to 'Tip' on. As I recall the service folded because of not reaching critical mass.

And that is really the rub when it comes to setting up a mass provider/subscriber model. Not only do you need the people willing (and able) to pay for the greater good and the people willing (and able) to help generate content with value (including the work of maintaining the spaces/communities where good conversation happens around the content) you need to strike the balance where they break-even. I say break even because I don't think there is a for-profit model here. Instead you have people being paid for producing content, people being paid for maintaining communities, developers being paid to improve those communities with new features, web-hosts being paid to host them .... quite a lot of people (hopefully) making a living, quite a lot more people getting value from the work they do, and really what more do you need?

Rape Culture 101
~~~
The new, silent, French revolution - Paris trials help-yourself, electrically powered hire cars on the same model as the Paris do-it-yourself bicycle hire scheme.

~~~
The Economy of Ideas written about the issues surrounding digital property sometime in the 90's I believe, issues still not resolved.

Throughout the time I've been groping around cyberspace, an immense, unsolved conundrum has remained at the root of nearly every legal, ethical, governmental, and social vexation to be found in the Virtual World. I refer to the problem of digitized property. The enigma is this: If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?

Since we don't have a solution to what is a profoundly new kind of challenge, and are apparently unable to delay the galloping digitization of everything not obstinately physical, we are sailing into the future on a sinking ship.

~~~
Personal names around the world

People who create web forms, databases, or ontologies are often unaware how different people’s names can be in other countries. They build their forms or databases in a way that assumes too much on the part of foreign users. This article will first introduce you to some of the different styles used for personal names, and then some of the possible implications for handling those on the Web.

~~~

It took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after humans spoke their first words. It took thousands more before the printing press and a few hundred again before the telegraph. Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. A Flickr here, a Twitter there, and a new way of relating to others emerges. New types of conversation, argumentation, and collaboration are realized. Using examples from anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, YouTube, university classrooms, and “the future,” this presentation will demonstrate the profound yet often unnoticed ways in which media “mediate” our culture.

[Edit: Fuck it LiveJournal, why won't you embed the video?]

40min, which is why it has been sitting in my inbox for 2 months.

Returned from a weekend away without internet - to an internet outage. Was Not Impressed. Even less impressed when the outage continued for a second day.

OTOH, the car got washed (2 or 3 times over two days) and some gardening done.

~~~
Winter Weekend happened. I had fun. There were board games and bad movies and large amounts of food. My predilection for relatively early nights meant I missed out on various fire-related activities. Had a very dirty car upon returning to Chch, hence the washing.

One person asked if I had met my victory conditions for the weekend. I replied yes, but not sufficiently to declare Total Victory.

I have the feeling that whatever good it did me may have slipped away already. Last night was my first solid nights sleep in forever, but I still didn't manage to get out of bed until much later than I was awake. And much of today has been a loss, leaving me looking forward ot tomorrraw with something resembling despair.

I've been meaning to repost this for about a month. More detail from one of the organisers of the Wellington-based 'noir-themed transmedia story' I mentioned after BarCamp Chch.

http://fengshuicity.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/the-case-of-the-midnight-note/

Initial fundraising ideas really did include cupcakes and teeshirts. In the end, we decided to stick with what we knew. We knew our Twitter community, and we knew how well attended Tweetups were. We decided to hold a Tweetup “like no other”. We settled on the idea of creating a noir-themed transmedia story that our community could follow online. The story would end at noir-themed fundraising Tweetup at a secret speakeasy.

We started to think about the story and how it could be told. Timothy has a background in gaming, and Chelsea in improv comedy. Watching the two of them weave a noir world from their imaginings was fascinating. We kept referring back to our community. How could we tell the story in a way that people could follow. How do we meaningfully include them?

The project included two major parts: a noir-themed transmedia story and a noir-themed fundraising event.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us (or, the evolution of text in the electronic age)


Internet in the Home as predicted in 1969


Yoinked from Top 10 YouTube Videos About The Web @ ReadWriteWeb

Commenting on my previous post mr_orgue pointed me at this post about the recent RWW/Facebook login mixup.

Basically, a post on Read Write Web about Facebook became the #1 google result for "Facebook Login". This resulted in a lot of people using similar behaviour to that mentioned previously clicking through in an attempt to log in to their facebook accounts. Because commenting at RWW supports OpenID, there was a facebook logo you could click on to autheticate with your facebook details... (OpenID of course connects you to the authenticating site briefly to enter these).

Despite RWW adding a big bold disclaimer at the top of the post people kept doing this. These weren't stupid people, they were just looking to login like they had done every time previously and faced with a different visual assumed it was some sort of redesign and scanned for something recognisable that would help with that task. Like a button with the facebook logo next to a form field.

The post linked above talks at length about about the implications of this.

If you are an interface designer, a brand manager or a security expert, your reaction to this incident should be one of deep humility. Your interface, your brand and your security scheme is much more fragile than you'd ever dared to fear. All of your work has come to naught.

These people represent the vast majority of internet users. It's a rare breed who actually 'Use the Internet' in terms of urls and pages links. Most people 'Log into Facebook' or 'Watch Youtube' or 'Order a Pizza'.

We can't feasibly make all these people 'more like us' (developers), nor should we try. We build websites that they can use, and they shape a future where 'the internet' means about the same as 'the pavement' and requires about as much thought when it's used.

For those with an interest in education there's some really good conversations going on at Public Address, from Russell's post on National Standards and Jolisa's accounting of their experience with the American system.

~~~
This quote in the Herald from Paula Bennett about National's approach to tightening up social welfare riles me.

"This may include practical training, attending a basic skills course or attending drug and alcohol rehabilitation," the policy said.

"After that, they will be required to actively look for a job, to go to any job interview they are referred to, and to accept any offer of suitable employment, whether fulltime, part-time, temporary or seasonal.

"If they do not comply with these obligations, they will have their benefit reduced in the first instance, then suspended and then cancelled."

( rant1 )
~~~
Similarly, this whole shake-up to weed out 'lazy' students

In his statement yesterday Prime Minister John Key said there were "increasingly urgent problems" in tertiary education, pointing to low-quality courses and students who were lazy or studied year after year without going into the workforce.
...
"We will also take a careful look at the policy settings around student support to ensure that taxpayers' generosity is not being exploited by those who refuse to take their tertiary studies seriously or who show little inclination to transition from tertiary training into work."

( rant2 )
~~~
Finally and completely different, I wouldn't normally talk about internet dating sites but this Christchurch startup (Stuff article) falls into both the 'that's a new take' and 'why didn't someone think of that sooner' categories, and that amuses me. The idea is that since people are pretty crap at writing about themselves, you have to get a friend to write your profile. The url given in the article is actually buggered, try checkoutmyfriend.co.nz, not .com.