Merry Christmas from Tarky7 !
Here is a web based virtual Yule Log and a blessing from Tarky7 and the ether:
May 2008 bring you and your loved ones happiness, health, success, joy and world peace !
It has been less than a year since I started working with WordPress, building websites and doing Search Engine Marketing, and it has been a real blast ! Thank you for all your kindness and support !
Found this morning on Slashdot. A story about a guy who’s MacBook Pro laptop had a hard drive failure. He went into the Mac store, they swapped out the failed drive on warranty, and guess what, they refused to return his dead drive. He left the store without the drive and now is concerned about the sensitive data on his old disk. Well, so would I !
I checked out the link and read the blog who’s name is Dave Winer, and I was amazed that someone with his experience could find himself in a situation where his private property and a great deal of code and ongoing work projects would be hijacked by a group of store clerks carrying out the will of Apple Computers.
Dave Winer’s blog has an amazing Page Rank of 8 with 33,000 (33K) backwards links.
“We’re experiencing a bit of turbulence from the side-effects of structural limitations inherent in centralized closed source system development model – beyond a point nobody on the outside really knows what is going on inside.”
El Zorro
Now by and large although i’ve never met them personally i believe that the techies working on flickr cal et al are brilliant and wonderful people – particularly the ones who openly give back what they’re learning to the community (ie Link && Link ). before rounding off about a sinister conspiracy theory you must also consider that the problematic these people are dealing with is immense (think : data volumes, storage, servers, real-time distributed databases, massive in memory ram cache, hardware and so on). implementing any new functionality to such a system requires a serious understanding of so much that even with the best due diligence and safety harness there’s always room for the possibility that something is not quite working out the way it was intended (especially if the messages between technical/commerical/executive) get confused in translation / implementation
what the likes of big clustered centralized sites like flickr, facebook, youtube et al are doing has never been attempted before so technically and to an extent ethically (in terms of the socio implications of globalized virtual cross border multi-cultural meme exchange systems) they are exploring the model and (hopefully with our participation) making up the rules as they go. what is important is that the community feedback is consensually applied and not subordinated to any kind of “lets do evil” type strategy.
flickr, i still think you guys are doing a great job which is why i like so many others still love to hang out here and share little reflections from our lives. i know that you listen and from past experience when something makes sense (or not as in the suggestion in this thread) you act.
looking at the wider picture i begin to wonder whether this is actually the way to go – does what we are seeing here mark the beginning of a fragmentation and de-centralization phase along the lines of my personally favored open-source model – that which evolved with bsd / linux and at a higher level of abstraction spawned smtp / web / wiki / bbs – that is to say the technology framework becomes itself collaborative – ie it is open-sourced, becomes in its centralized form completely transparent and is freely distributed to anyone who wishes to host this on their server (on the basis that what they learn and the improvements they make are re-merged in for the good of the whole). with the advent of web2.0 api’s and interconnectedness the distributed model may still come back into vogue once the current regression in a back to the future sense towards the mid/mainframe structure unwinds. think eco-systems of interconnected clusters – all potentially interacting and sending messages to one another in the way that say atoms, molecules or reflected light does. ask yourself why did http/html succeed in creating the current version of the internet we use? ok the trade off is that the single globalised community (photosharing in the case of flickr) fragments and what you get is a vision of networks of individual entities selectively collaborating, coexisting and interconnecting according to their own affinities and blinkering (or wide opening) their particular worldview according to where they are and how they like it.
actually this issue may be more fundamental than what we are seeing here – as i suspect your google search result screenshot alludes – the problem may be wider than we suspect – ie. real time personalized re-writing of your personal view of the internet by the people who know whats best for you – those kind corporate and political entities seeking actively to define and control your flow ™. infowars, firewalls, censorship, filtering, projection, suggestion, brainwashing and mind control – patterns and strategies designed to serve the respective best interests of competing ideological-politico worldviews each seeking to assert itself as the defacto version of reality – whats happening right now in the wider online sphere (or should i say, what could happen) makes orwell’s vision of a nightmarish big-brother future look understated.
personally i think its time to admit defeat and give over the control immediately to the uber-intelligent ai supercomputer intelligence masquerading in its current infantile guise as a harmless bunch of wifi rabbits (www.nabaztag.com). Republished from d_nurv’s stream on Flickr
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I am with TechDirt on this one:
“Furthermore, as she goes on to lament a lack of interest in books as a necessary core for a new generation of writers, she mocks “blogging” which is actually helping more people write more than they would otherwise. It’s an elitist stance to suggest that just because it’s short-form and online it doesn’t matter. It’s also wrong. Studies have shown that students these days are much more comfortable writing — in large part because they spend so much more time communicating via the written word online.”
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education and our great store of literature. Of course we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, evidenced by the founding of working-men’s libraries, institutes, and the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less.
Out of touch is putting it mildly. There are great possibilities for text, reading, writing and the preservation of knowledge and history in it’s purest form because of the growth of the blogging community on the Internet.
A relevant quote from the ether, found though Flickr:
“I’m done with Facebook. I’ve never really seen the value in it (except Scrabulous, perhaps) and I am getting increasingly uneasy about handing over so much information to them. The recent Beacon debacle was revelatory.
So I’m saying goodbye. I do sincerely hope that all 201 of my friends will continue to be my friends — you know where to find me! Please invite me to your parties via good ol’ fashioned email (I also accept phone calls); we can compare relative hotness and trivia knowledge in real life.
As it turns out, you can only *deactivate* your account on your own. An email to customer service revealed how to fully delete it from their servers:
“If you want your information removed from our servers, we can do this for you. However, you need to first log in, delete all profile content, and deactivate. Once you have cleared your account, let us know, and we’ll take care of the rest. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
Have you been thinking about leaving Facebook too? Please join me – let’s all do it this Friday at noon!” ( December 7, 2007 )
A few links here to listen to some feedback from the ether. Flickr Zuckerman himself and a Facebook movement to dump accounts (quoted above) . I don’t think a few hundred thousand leaving Facebook will make a dent, but this boils down to honesty and integrity, not really about privacy.