Technology

What if bits and bytes smelled? And what if they smelled bad? And what if they had the capacity to carry viruses – no, not the email kind but biological n’er-do-wells?

Somewhere out in that vast and ill-defined world we call “digital space,” there’s a lot – and I mean a lot – of refuse. Imagine it having a physical nature, something that took up physical space like old toasters or meat that has gone bad. What if it had rats?

I don’t think I’d care for it.

I call it “The Great Digital Landfill” because that is really what much of the Internet is, just as it is much of what we keep on our computers – used and effectively worthless docs, pics, emails, programs and who knows what all else. There is no pressing need to clear any of it up because there is so much capacity (or so we suppose, if and when we think of it).

But what if it smelled bad? What if digital material had “best before” dates and, once the a date was passed, whatever that item might be it would begin to stink out the joint? I think we would likely put our minds to “cleaning up” with a bit more alacrity.

A very quick Google search reveals that “digital landfill” is not an uncommon term. Some of the material found is about the electronic trash we create and some is … well, a little odd (not unusual on the web). There are actually two aspects to this:

• The trashed hardware (cell phones, laptops etc.)
• The trashed content (emails, docs, pics etc.)

The first of those, hardware, is the serious one because it actually is physical and it is a very real problem. I believe I’ve seen documentaries or news reports of entire islands in Southeast Asia completely buried under technological trash, but hopefully that is just a nightmare I had due to spicy food prior to bed.

The second one, the digital content that has expired and is no longer useful, is just clutter. I sometimes wonder how search engines plough through it all. On our personal computers, I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done a search and been discouraged to find page after page of results.

I’ve even found documents on my laptop that I couldn’t remember if I had written them or someone else had.

Imagine, however, this scene. Arnold, a student, has just been called to a meeting with Professor Axel. It goes like this:

“I’ve been going over your work, Arnold, and I have a question. Did you write this?”

“Umm … yes! Yes, I did.”

“When?”

Arnold’s eyes dart side to side. “The weekend. Saturday night! Yes. And I finished it up Sunday morning.”

Professor Axel frowns. “That’s strange. Your submission has a very distinctive odor. An unpleasant one.”

“I … I … I hadn’t noticed.”

“Really? That’s strange too … since it’s stinking to high heaven! This damn thing is at least three years old!”

Poor Arnold. Caught cheating because digital material goes bad and stinks.

Yes, I think our attitudes toward all those emails in our Gmail accounts, all our stored documents, abandoned blogs, not to mention all that discarded hardware, would definitely alter if technology and the content we produced with it would just smell bad after a certain period of time.

Maybe that’s the challenge? Maybe we need to make technology that stinks.

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I’ve been looking at a few sites offering web design and related services and I find myself puzzled, even a bit alarmed. This is not due to what I found (though in some cases it was) but by what I did not find.

I have seen absolutely no reference to content. Do the sites magically populate themselves? If not, who does it? If the client does, is there no consultative service to advise them on what and how to put the content in or maintaining it? If the client doesn’t handle the content, who does? If the web design company does, who handles the research, the writing, the editing? Have they a background in it? Are they good?

There were no references to social media other than “Follow us on Twitter” and/or something similar for Facebook. If a company is moving to or revamping an online presence, isn’t this a crucial aspect? Where do they get help, direction or advice on this?

I found a few web design/web services companies with URLs that required the www preface. Personally, I never use it anymore. I just type in something like writelife.net. No http. No www. I suspect many people are like me. If so, there are a lot of people going to a “page not found” message when they type in the web company’s address. I can’t believe that builds a lot of confidence in a web design company’s awareness of how the web works.

I also found quite a few companies using dated language. In the world of business, marketing and technology, terminology changes almost daily and if you rely on today’s clichés you become tomorrow’s anachronism. Surely “offering solutions” is at least ten years old. I believe current terminology should be avoided at all costs but I do realize it is often unavoidable. But this puts the onus on you to continually assess your site and see where and how it requires revamping. In the online world, static means death.

None of the above is true of all web design sites. Hopefully, I just stumbled on a few that skewed my perception. It is worrying though. On the other hand, from my perspective, maybe it holds the promise of some work. :-)

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Our world, particularly business and technology, is peppered with metaphors and analogies. An article in the Harvard Business Review, The Next Evolution in Economics: Rethinking Growth, uses a biological analogy in discussing how we view business growth. It drew a response, Science, analogy and ecoliteracy, from pathways questioning the accuracy of the analogy and suggesting another would be more appropriate.

In some sense I agree, but I disagree more. My argument is simply this: 1) while there may be similarities, things compared are never the same and, 2) the key point to be communicated is better done with the biological analogy.

In this instance, it is likely true that the biological comparison only goes so far and that, in order to go further, an ecosystem is a better analogy. However, I don’t think that analogy does what the initial, biological analogy does nearly as well, which is to convey the most important idea informing the analogy’s use: constant growth is death.

To use an analogy (no joke intended) … Let’s say I’ve made a movie. I’m asked, “What’s it like?” If I answer, “It’s sort of like Casablanca,” almost everyone will have an idea of what that means. Of course, it won’t be accurate – it may even be misleading, especially if I leave it at that.

But if I answer, “It’s sort of like The End of the Affair,” some people will have an idea of what that means having read the book or seen the movie, but others will not. Casablanca communicates far better than The End of the Affair simply because more people are familiar with it.

Getting back to the biology/ecosystem analogies … The biological one communicates more broadly and with much more impact than the ecosystem one, particularly if you bring in the idea of cancer as a malignant growth. Many, many people have been touched by cancer in one way or another.

The problem with my argument is that, once you establish the idea of constant growth as a negative, you run into problems. But I don’t think it’s a problem specific to this instance, it’s a problem with all analogies. They are always inaccurate because no two things are ever the same. Their use is in communicating a key idea. Their flaw is in our nature, which is to simplify and not think things through and realize they are inevitably inexact. Ecosystem may be more exact but it, too, will only go so far.

From what I’ve seen in the business world, however, at the ground level where middle-managers and executives are engaged in daily business activities, the idea of constant growth is very deeply rooted and unquestioned. I think the only way to shake it loose is with an analogy that has the kind of impact of the biological one. I just don’t think the ecosystem analogy would do the same. It’s also a more complex analogy, I think, at least compared to the biological one.

I suppose my quibble is dependent on defining what it is that is to be communicated and to whom. But it seems to me, at least as far as a broader, general audience goes, you won’t be able to communicate anything until you create the conditions to so, and I think that lies in freeing people from the traditional growth, growth, growth-at-all costs mindset to one where growth is seen differently – as not necessarily a good thing or, growth is good but a different kind of growth.

As I often do, I agree and disagree simultaneously. There must be a metaphor for that.

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Every month or few months a study pops up that reveals that teens don’t use Twitter. Actually, they do. They just don’t make up the huge base some expected and are not the group fueling Twitter growth. The New York Times had a pretty good article on this (Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens) and there are others, most noting a certain surprise with this unexpected information.

I think this is a good example of how we create and buy into orthodoxies without ever really questioning them or, more importantly, revisiting them and seeing if they are still valid (assuming they were in the first place).

A few years ago in discussing font sizes, Jakob Nielsen noted that today’s young person is tomorrow’s older person and that not taking an older demographic into account and not being aware of how demographics change over time (because we age), is a dangerous stance.

The “conventional wisdom” that young people were necessary to technology may have been somewhat true but that “early adopter” demographic of the time this idea came about has since aged, becoming an older demographic. Teens now are a different group of teens. And an older demographic, while perhaps not dominated by early adopters, is not idle. They may come into the game late but they do eventually come in — if only because younger people join the ranks of older people. And late in the game is often when the game is most critical, where the most is on the line.

Also, when we speak in these general terms I think we tend to polarize: a young demographic means teens and an older demographic means retirees. We don’t really see the huge group between the extremes or how demographic groups overlap and blend.

We often get so caught up in predicting and projecting and imagining where things are going that we fail to see where they are and, relying on our various theories of how these things work, fail to see how they are actually evolving. Theories are nice, and sometimes on the money, but sometimes they deflect us from seeing things as they are or as they are becoming or as they may go. They can become shortcuts around actually thinking.

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We need to stop thinking in terms of technology and social media and think in terms of people. All communication is not functional, practical, purposeful. A lot of it is inconsequential but inconsequential communication is important: sometimes the act of communicating is more important than what is communicated. (Yes, I’ve said this before.)

We see tweets and status updates like, “This latte is crap!” which is something you might say to someone as you head down the hall to a meeting, or in the boardroom before the meeting starts. Or, late Friday, “Now the weekend begins! Hurray!” Does anyone need to see that?

Well, yes. They do. They don’t need to see a constant barrage of it, but every so often they need to see it in order to know that there is a real person behind those tweets and updates and that person thinks and feels kind of the way we do. We may not agree that the latte isn’t so great — we might like the latte — but the way it’s communicated might be funny, or passionate, or … well, something.

Think of it this way: You are walking down the street. You see a panhandler, a guy you see almost every day. You cross the street to avoid him because you know what’s coming: “Spare change?”

It’s not that you don’t care about homelessness. It’s not that you don’t care about the guy. It is about the fact that it is relentless. It is unchanging. It’s essentially a sales pitch, a request, and everything that is unwavering in its refrain becomes tedious — especially if its a sales pitch.

What about those people who want to introduce you to the Bible? You might be more open to a least listen to them except you know, whenever you see them, it’s always going to be the same thing. So you avoid them.

I can’t remember what movie it was but in some film, a romantic comedy, one of the characters, when asked about his relationship, says of his wife of many years, “Every morning I wake up and think, ‘I wonder what she’ll say today?’”

That’s what makes us interesting. That is why the trivial is important. Because sometimes the trivial isn’t so trivial, and sometimes it’s trivial but kind of neat, and sometimes it’s trivial but, “So what?” he or she said it and you love the way that person says things (or tweets, or updates).

Sometimes the content of a communication is the act of communicating itself, and nothing more. Even so, that kind of communication is often the most important. With apologies to Peter Gabriel:

Some of it is just transcendental,
Some of it is just really dumb.
But I, I love it when you sing to me.

(This post was prompted after reading Tzaddi’s post, Do you have time for coffee? over at the ThriveWire site. One other thing … I changed my post’s title after posting. Not a “best practices” thing to do, but so it goes.)

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With just about everyone weighing in on the Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, I thought I’d add to the noise and toss in my riveting insight (or lack thereof).

First of all, I’ve no idea what it means. But then, no one else does either — there is interesting speculation, however. One of the first notions that was tossed out there on the Internet was that it had less to do with Facebook getting FriendFeed itself and more to do with getting the talent behind it. As one story (PC World) puts it, “… the team behind FriendFeed has quite the impressive collective résumé.” Many of them are former Google employees and worked on things like Gmail and Google Maps. So, yes, I could see why Facebook would want them.

And according to a BBC article, “As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and the company’s four founders will be given senior roles on the social networking site’s engineering and product teams.”

From a user perspective, given how awkward, clunky and user bewildering much of Facebook is, I’m hoping this will be a good thing.

This morning the thinking appears to have shifted from yesterday’s and appears more focused on the challenge this acquisition poses to Google and Twitter. (See that BBC article, for example.) The business-tech world loves nothing more than to see these things in Stanley Cup playoffs terms.

I can, however, see this as an accurate assessment. For example, from that BBC item:

“Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting,” Mr (Robert) Scoble told the BBC.

For me, someone who uses these social networks and the tools but who doesn’t spend much time understanding the technology, only enough to know it works, I’ve always seen these networks this way:

Size: Facebook biggest, Twitter smaller, FriendFeed smallest.

Theoretical usefulness: FriendFeed most, Twitter a bit less, Facebook least.

Practical usefulness: A crapshoot between Facebook and Twitter (for me), FriendFeed least.

Put another way, of them all, it’s FriendFeed I like most, though it’s the one I know the least about. Maybe I just haven’t used it enough to see all its flaws and maybe it does things the others also do, but I’m unaware of them. The problem with FriendFeed, however, is the old retail thing about location, location, location. So far, Facebook keeps winning not because it’s best but because that is where the most users are and most users means most useful (to me).

There are really two things about FriendFeed that I like: 1) the interface, which I find cleaner, easier to read and understand (overall) than either Facebook or Twitter and, 2) it aggregates all my other feeds so, for example, my Flickr photos show up without the need of using Facebook’s incredibly slow and frustrating photos tool or some clunky third party app.

Currently, however, no one knows what the real impact of the acquisition will be. One thought has been it’s the end of FriendFeed. If that’s the case, it brings up an interesting issue, one that hasn’t received much attention that I’m aware of: Data portability, as discussed here. What happens if, for example, Flickr were to end for some reason or other? What happens to your account? Where do your photos go?

Or, what happens if you no longer like Facebook and decide that’s it, I’m going elsewhere (maybe even drop social networks altogether)? What happens to your content? How do you get it, download it to your own computer or some other storage device?

How are you protected from data loss? Or are you protected? That’s a lot of data to just let it go “poof!”

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I can save you some reading and get straight to my point: we fear conspiracies when what we should fear is human error.

Now that the fiasco with Amazon is fading from our top-of-mind awareness, it strikes me that there are a few things to be learned from it. Some for us; some for Amazon.

For us, I think the main one is: Something isn’t true just because you want it to be. And with an issue such as the one that occurred, you don’t rely on what a “Members Services representative” says because they are likely as much in the dark as you are. You head up the chain and get an official response.

For Amazon, when you don’t know, say so. Calling a balls-up like the vanishing of gay-lesbian titles from their lists and rankings a “glitch” merely adds fuel to the fire. The correct response is, “We are as alarmed as our customers. Currently, we don’t know what happened. It appears to be a technical issue. We’re working around the clock to identify what the problem is and where it lies and are dedicated to fixing it as soon as possible. We’ll be keeping our customers informed of our progress along the way and apologize to them and to those authors whose works have been affected.”

Or something like that. Better still would to have been really blunt and state that Amazon is a business and would not deliberately risk sales and the possibility of bad publicity that could affect their revenue.

The other lesson for Amazon, I think, is to accept that you can’t be all things to all people. You have to make some choices. Tweaking algorithms and tags and so on to keep everyone happy is risky because it makes something complex even more so.

It should also be a reminder to everyone that our reliance on technology is a precarious one. Think of all the pages of code in all the world’s systems and how many characters those pages include, the asterisks, backslashes, forward slashes and words and rules and consider how easily one character could be wrong, one input mis-typed or mis-entered, and how that smallest of things can affect something like an Amazon, a Google, an eBay and all the others. How about bank sites and your finances? Your taxes?

It actually amazes me that there aren’t more screw-ups given how much code, how many characters, how many true-false statements make the world work today. It’s pretty astonishing.

It’s also something worth thinking about.

Update #1:

This is why the Amazon kerfuffle and #amazonfail are important: Clay Shirky, ‘The Failure of #amazonfail.’

Update #1:

Exacerbating this issue is Amazon’s communications. I see nothing on their home page referring to this. They have an Amazon Daily Blog that I found with absolutely no reference to the fiasco, just marketing rubbish. Why are they not in a dialogue with their customers? Why are they letting everyone else do the talking out on the Internet and not engaging their customers in a discussion?

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Comedian Louis CK puts technology in perspective:

Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy

(Embedding disabled, so just a link.)

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How does my mind work? This post is a good example of how the process of writing is, for me, the process of understanding. It was only in writing this post that I arrived at what I really was looking for. I think I knew the answer but was only able to articulate it after writing this. It goes like this (btw … feel free to skip to the end to find what I was actually looking for):

I’m reading Peter Morville’s 2005 book Ambient Findability, a book about … well, ambient findability. Of course, the question for the layperson is, what in the world is ambient findability? In an online interview with Boxes and Arrows, the author says, “Ambient findability describes a world at the crossroads of ubiquitous computing and the Internet in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.”

Well, that tells me what it does, but is what it does what it is? (How’s that for a baffling sentence?)

Perhaps this is a confusion in the interview. The question asked is, “What is ‘ambient findability’?” It refers to the concept. The answer, however, may be a response to “What is ‘Ambient Findability’?, referring to the book. Except, that is also how the book defines ambient findability.

Here’s the thing … I have the book (haven’t finished reading it yet), and I’ve been online looking for a clearly stated definition of the term “ambient findability.” I can’t find one. (It doesn’t appear to be particularly findable, ambient or otherwise.) I don’t really need one. I can intuit a definition from usage. And I can get a sense from the author’s quote above.

What I’m really looking for is the relationship between the word “ambient” and “findability.” From the little I’ve read, it seems the word ambient is unnecessary. It seems as if findability alone would do the trick. Unless “ambient” is meant to imply a world of “… ubiquitous computing and the Internet …” Is the term meant to limit the frame of reference to the environment implicit in that: computing and the Internet? If so, it’s still a bit non-specific. As is findability. Something can be found within the environment that surrounds it – but where is the reference to the Internet, data, bits and bytes?

It sounds picky. It is picky. But I really like clearly defined concepts. I also wonder if the word ambient is the best word to use here. Outside the field of study, I wonder how many people would get excited about a phrase like that, much less know what is meant by it? If the concept(s) behind it are of importance, shouldn’t the phrase be more intuitive, more accessible to everyone?

I’m not suggesting the book was written for a general audience. I don’t think it was. And this isn’t a review of the book – I’d have to read the entire thing for that and I’m only partly through it. This post isn’t to praise or condemn the book. It’s simply a little ranting about the language that tends to come out of the field of technology. It often seems utterly detached from the people actually using the tools of technology and the technological environment that constitutes our daily “ambience.”

On the other hand … perhaps the key is in the book itself, in the definition. The definition in the book is pretty much the same as the quote above, but with greater detail. In defining/describing findability, Morville writes, “Findability requires definition, distinction, difference. In physical environments, size, shape, color and location set objects apart. In the digital realm, we rely heavily on words. Words as labels. Words as links. Keywords.”

He continues, “The humble keyword has become surprisingly important in recent years. As a vital ingredient in the online search process, keywords have become part of our everyday experience … And words are the key to our success.”

I think that pretty much explains the reason for the phrase, and the book’s title. Baffling as it may be to the lay person, the phrase is certainly distinct.

In the book, under “Definition,” he defines the two words of the phrase ambient findability and wraps his explanation with, “Ambient findability describes a fast emerging world …” Again, the definition is about what it does and not what it is. Maybe what it does is what it is. But it keeps buggering me up because it doesn’t read like a definition but a like a description.

So … here’s my attempt at a definition that reads like a definition:

Ambient findability: the ability, or lack thereof, to find or be found within a given surrounding environment. (see, Digital ambient findability, DAF)

Digital ambient findability: (also known by the acronym DAF), the ability, or lack thereof, to find or be found within a digital environment, especially the Internet, often referred to more simply as ambient findability. (see, Ambient Findability)

Yes, I know, I know. Seems a very long-winded way to go just for that. Btw … if you can revise, improve upon or replace my definition(s), please do so. They’re not intended as the be all and end all. They’re just suggestions.

Note: I’ve made an edit, deleting some pointless material at the start of this post. Initially I used strikethrough so you could see how moronic I can be but it made for too much struck text preceding the actual post. Mea culpa.

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