A Decade into “Always-On” Internet

from christian sandvig discussing the current state of bandwidth in america.

In other words, Comcast has monopoly power in cable television in many markets. It has set its 250 GB/month cap so that it is impossible to buy television over its Internet service (take that, Netflix!) or to use free Internet video services in lieu of cable TV (take that, YouTube!), thus maintaining its monopoly in video. By the way, that is the definition of a violation of antitrust law. Hello, Justice Department?

related, i received this notice on 12/16.  then another about two days ago.  my phone sits on wi-fi the entire day except, usually, the two hours i’m commuting during a 5-day work week.

looking at my phone statistics (assuming since i’ve owned the iphone 4, not previous versions - but without logging into at&t’s web site, not sure), i’ve sent/received a total of 19.4 GB of data over their cellular network.  my girlfriend and i pay, on average, $150/month to have both of our iphone 4 devices supported by at&t’s network.  on top of that, another $100/month for verizon to grant us internet access and cable television over their fios network.

it costs me $3,000 a year to stay “always-on.”  so, yeah, of course i agree with this shit.

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

The funny thing is, no one’s really hiding the secret of how to make awesome online communities. Give people something cool to do and a way to talk to each other, moderate a little bit, and your job is done. Games like Eve Online or WoW have developed entire economies on top of what’s basically a message board. MetaFilter, Reddit, LiveJournal and SA all started with a couple of buttons and a textfield and have produced some fascinating subcultures. And maybe the purest (!) example is 4chan, a Lord of the Flies community that invents all the stuff you end up sharing elsewhere: image macros, copypasta, rage comics, the lolrus. The data model for 4chan is three fields long - image, timestamp, text.

Now tell me one bit of original culture that’s ever come out of Facebook.

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90’s. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

as jigga said, on to the next.

The Times's Dealings With Julian Assange

I’m a little puzzled by the complaint that most of the embassy traffic we disclosed did not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. Ninety-nine percent of what we read or hear on the news does not profoundly change our understanding of how the world works. News mostly advances by inches and feet, not in great leaps. The value of these documents — and I believe they have immense value — is not that they expose some deep, unsuspected perfidy in high places or that they upend your whole view of the world. For those who pay close attention to foreign policy, these documents provide texture, nuance and drama. They deepen and correct your understanding of how things unfold; they raise or lower your estimation of world leaders. For those who do not follow these subjects as closely, the stories are an opportunity to learn more. If a project like this makes readers pay attention, think harder, understand more clearly what is being done in their name, then we have performed a public service.

pretty fun read overall.  especially the insight to the negotiations between assange & the publications.  the context is most important though.  how bill keller & the times maneuvered this opportunity within the realm of journalism and, as he puts it, “public service.”

please note that last sentence.  yes, there is opinion & fact about the leaks themselves in this piece but the pull quote is the real idea.

knowledge is power.  or, secrets, so hot right now?

I am wondering…

And is there data that shouldn’t be passed on?

it’s impossible to understand what will matter or who will care about it.  one of my favorite things about recording in the present is that there will be context about me for others later in life.

we all bear what others leave behind.  i’m set to head into drobo-land and open up the flood gates.  will it all be around afterwards?  i don’t know.  i’m connecting dots now so someone can draw a picture later.  don’t worry about what you’ll leave behind and don’t be afraid of keeping it now.

the story always gets told.

hybrowse.com

jakelodwick:

What have you been up to, Jake?

…

I build a generalized platform for these buttons and called it Kwisi, short for “Know When I See It”, and started testing on some friends’ sites (like the Photojojo Store). The name referred to the idea that sometimes you don’t know exactly what you want — you just have to look around and see what catches your eye. When you do a Google Search, for example, you have some word in mind, and you’re attempting to go directly to it. But what if you’re just in the mood to shop? What if you want to see something new, something innovative, or strange, or obscure, or foreign? Traditional web search isn’t that helpful. So I thought I would install this platform on other sites, who would change their whole webstore around to accommodate me.

…

My philosophy here is that search engines are 20-year-old technology and we need new ways of navigating the endless data that is piling up every day. To that end, I have committed to Hybrowse as a four-month project. I will continue working full-time on it until May 1st (at the very least). This is not a startup company, it is my attempt to make life more manageable for anyone who feels overwhelmed with data. If you feel that is a noble goal then please play with the site and let me know how I can improve it. Very few things are “locked in” and it’s very easy to make changes, so if you have any opinions, please send them to me at jake@hybrowse.com. I want to know your thoughts; it’s hard for me to see the site very clearly anymore, by myself.

But before I go, I will make this more interesting and supply some new ammunition for anyone who thinks I am crazy. The crazy thing is this. By May 1st I will have 1,000 services on Hybrowse. Yes, that’s 998 more than I have right now (Netflix and Etsy). I consider this goal “impossible” and will, by any rational calculation, fail hilariously, but I don’t care — I need an audacious goal that gets my adrenaline pumping, and 100 doesn’t do it. 1000 sites. I’m like a local car salesman on tv. “THESE GOALS ARE INSANE!!!”

I genuinely think the site would be profoundly useful if it had 1,000 services. Picture it. You land on the home page and use the same “overlapping tags” mechanism to discover, say, Swedish housewares stores, then pick one, then browse their overpriced euroshit. Or you sort through Match.com profiles and try to find ones that don’t look like monsters. I don’t know how it will work. But I’m going to do it and I want your suggestions … and this is going to be a very busy couple months and I have to go now, because I suddenly realized I have a lot of effing work to do.

jake@hybrowse.com

(ps: Peter Vidani did the site’s visual design)

this is great, jake.  i really hope you reach your goal b/c the approach is absolutely necessary.  1,000 is a smart number too.