Apple, Google, & the future of the internets

I thought this might be an interesting summary of a few things floating around the internet of late. I know we have both Apple fanboys and Windows jocks alike on this blong. We've been surprisingly respectful on issues of technology so far, so lets see how long we can last before we all take a collective dump on civility and TEAR THIS PLACE APART! Actually, I'm just curious if you guys think Apple and/or Google are heading in the right direction. BEGIN!

Charlie Stross: The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash.
I don't get the title. The piece seems less about Flash than it is an excellent forecast on the future collapse and rebirth of the computer industry...

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That's the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit.

Christina Warren: Apple versus Flash versus HTML5

A solid analysis of why Flash will be a non-entity in the future, and why it has little to do with Apple. With a cool graph, here. In fact, Windows seems to agree. (bummer for vector-based animators, of course)

Bobbie Johnson: Apple iPad will choke innovation, say open internet advocates

Wade Roush: The Apple Paradox: How a company that's so closed foster so much open innovation

Kyle Conroy: What if I had bought Apple stock instead?
Ugh.

It is also worth noting where Windows seems to stand on this front: Here, and here.

Lastly, Jon Stewart: On Apple's response to the stolen iPhone prototype. Granted, who knows if Apple forced the police to burn Gizmodo's headquarters to the ground, Either way, Mr. Stewart sums it up perfectly with "Appholes".

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Appholes
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Internet 101

Some of these things may be new, but you'll have seen many of these things before. You won't have seen all these things one after the other, though. Unless you've seen these lists before, I guess.

http://www.youshouldhaveseenthis.com

http://www.youshouldhavealsoseenthis.com/

Compiled by @greg_rutter

Internet Archeology via the Onion.

The acting in this is really superb morning TV.


Via Kathy with a K.

Get out of my way, media!

Chris Anderson, Wired's editor-in-chief says:

Sorry, I don't use the word "media." I don't use the word "news." I don't think that those words mean anything anymore. They defined publishing in the 20th century. Today, they are a barrier. They are standing in our way, like a horseless carriage.

I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don't go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We're tuning out television news, we're tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it's just that it's not like this drumbeat of bad news. It's news that matters. I figure by the time something gets to me it's been vetted by those I trust. So the stupid stuff that doesn't matter is not going to get to me.

I don't get how he can think the words "media" and "news" are a barrier and then shortly afterward say he reads lots of articles from mainstream media. It's like he's dissing the very thing he relies on for "important stuff." Right?

And I can understand tuning out inane TV news, but tuning out newspapers? It's kind of like saying, I want to be oblivious. I'll just read what my friends think is neat.

Yes? Or am I the ignorant one here? Please help me understand the ways and thoughts of this Internet wise man.

Hello, "World"

With an irony too delicious not to report the hell out of, last week Amazon reached into the electric minds of its Kindle book readers and deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984. These were copies that users had paid for, and thought they owned. They did not, it turns out! Granted, these were unauthorized copies of 1984 and Animal Farm, and users in question were refunded the purchase price, so maybe it was more like a recall, except under cover of darkness and completely involuntary.

Had the books not been Orwell's, and instead, say; Dr. Phil's, the act would not have echoed so loudly in the Blongoverse. They were, though, and they did, and today Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave the increasingly common Big Giant Apology to make up things.

This, along with my net connection crapping out every 20 minutes yesterday, and the island-wide AT&T outage the day before, got me thinking, that hey, a lot of who I am exists in that digital space--not just work, and email, but goals, and plans, and memories, and friends. This is a common modern realization, I know. But now that a good chunk of what I consider to be my mind is subscription-based, I wonder if I've made the right move, here. I couldn't tell you my wife's phone number. I mean, I can access it, and my expanding definitions of what it is to know something make me okay with this.

But every disconnection from the network leaves me a little clammy, and power outages have become downright existential experiences. And if my life is so easy to remove, is it still my life? If I back up properly, will I live forever?

So is this a lot of eggs in one basket, or just the price of doing business? Or perhaps... An entirely different clichéd metaphor, heretofore unexplored, ladies and gentlemen?

Internet Meme Generation Discussion

Behold, as these three guys take you on an hour and a half long discussion of Internet meme generation. This isn't just an exploration of the memes themselves--these guys take a serious look at the groups and subgroups where the ideas seem to continually originate from.

Of particular interest is the part early on about 4chan's /b/ imageboard (beginning at about 3:45) Rapid combination and recombination of ideas and content, along with complete anonymity seems to be a recipe for exactly the kind of hive mind we've been talking about.


Warning: This hour and a half long video is an hour and a half long.

Amazon's Epic Day of Fail

Super sorry for the long post, but I think this is one of the most fascinating events I've witnessed on the Internet. In case you missed it last week, here's what you missed:

Amazon's got a sales ranking system that determines what books are found in searches, which appear in in-house ads, and who gets on best seller lists. This all goes a long way towards increasing a book's sales popularity...

While it made the news on April 12, it looks like the first signs were in February, when Craig Seymour found that his memoir of a gay stripper had no sales ranking. When asked, Amazon replied that this was because his book was classified as an "adult product". News really only began to spread a week ago however when people noticed that LBGT books were deranked, en masse. This included an Ellen Degeneres biography, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, E.M. Forster's Maurice, books on gays in politics, self-help LBGT books, a children's book on homosexuality, etc (a community generated list, here).

From the NY Times:

Word of the problem started spreading across blogs and Twitter on Sunday after Mark R. Probst, the author of The Filly, a gay western romance for young adults, posted on his blog that several gay romances, including his, had lost their sales rankings on Amazon. Mr. Probst e-mailed Amazon and got a reply that said the company was excluding “ ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best-seller lists.”

Unfortunately for Amazon the Internet realized that this "adult material" did not appear to include heterosexual content, including such books as Ron Jeremy's Hardest Working Man in Show Business, others filled with Playboy centerfolds, and even a book entitled A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality was still ranked (and is still the top hit if you search for "homosexuality" at Amazon).

So here's where it gets fun: Twitter. Twitter! I had no idea the impact Twitter could have beyond telling everyone what color your poo was in the morning! (nor apparently did Amazon).

The shitstorm that followed started with thousands of Enraged Twitter Users using the #amazonfail thread. This quickly became the top trend in Twitter, beating out Easter and Jesus on the holiday weekend. Here, all the news about the Fail could be found in realtime as everyone repeatedly tweeted about the same pebble of breaking news that they found (probably on Twitter) and wanted to share with others (on twitter). Metafilter, Digg, Reddit, the major news groups, and pretty much any major blog had something to say about it, and proudly the internet united behind our LGBT brothers and sisters!

Meanwhile, Amazon's PR response was this: “We recently discovered a glitch to our Amazon sales rank feature that is in the process of being fixed.”

The Internet, seeing this as being blown off with an inane, half-baked response and more importantly without an apology of any kind, came back with the new Twitter tag, #glitchmyass, as everyone and their dog agreed that Amazon was full of crap. Serious rioting ensued, complete with bombs (A googlebomb), petitions (over 24,000 sigs), open protest letters, calls for public crucifixions, logos, t-shirts, facebook groups, theme music... And of course amazonfail.com was for sale on ebay.

It turns out that while their PR group was high on easter peeps others at Amazon were completely panicking:

By this time, Amazon.com had upgraded the problem to Sev-1... Sev-1 is reserved for the most critical operational issues and often are sent up the management chain to the senior vice president level.

----

...So it's a week later, the books have their ratings back (Twitter kept track of that, too, but I forgot the #tag), and here's what the Internets have come up with:

Official explanation from Amazon: A Glitch

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles - in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica.

[Note: still no actual apology...]

From an Amazon worker on the inside: The French!

A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up 'adult,' which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like 'erotic' and 'sexuality.' That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon.

From the popular internet: A hacker terrorist has claimed responsibility for the event!

Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code"... The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon. I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay and outrage across the blogosphere ain't so bad.

And still others don't care what caused it, but continue to party up the hate towards Amazon until they officially apologize.

So anyway...

It's amazing how fun it is to be a part of a mob mentality, especially when you're so obviously on the right side! I admit that early Monday (last week) morning (after only a few hours of sleep with a migraine, you see) I may have possibly written an e-mail to Amazon... it could be that this letter might have contained a few phrases such as, "less intelligence than a pile of bricks made from bird feces... demand a public apology... may never buy from Amazon again," and, "...require sensitivity training" (+_+). But I didn't send it. Probably. And of course now in hindsight... yeah this is a huge mistake on Amazon's part, but they're a huge company, and with some serious, complicated technical stuff they have to deal with. An apology is definitely still in order I think, but I can't imagine this was anything really malicious on the inside of Amazon if it hit a bunch of genres the same way... I could see how the Reproductive & Sexual Medicine people might not be as vocal, you see.

Anyway. I just thought that was a fun break from the other break I was taking from studying.

News skimmer

I think the New York Times has figured something out here. I hope it helps them make money.

The Life of an Internet Meme

Comment by Shaper_pmp of Reddit:

All memes go through this lifecycle:

1. Meme is born. Almost nobody understands it, and it's barely funny when you do.


2. Meme gets adopted by a specific social group. Meme now serves as a shibboleth indicating membership of the group, and encourages feelings of belonging and "insidership" whenever it's encountered. At this stage, the meme varies between mildly amusing and hilarious, depending on how it's used.


3. Meme becomes mainstream - everyone is using it at every opportunity, and - its use as a shibboleth negated - it gradually gets stale from overuse. Meme is hilarious to newcomers, but increasingly sterile and boring to older users.


4. Meme effectively dies - people using it are generally downmodded or castigated for trying for "easy" posts. Importantly, it can still be funny even at this stage if it's used particularly well... however, 99% of the uses at this point are people trying to cash in on easy karma - the kind of people who tell the same jokes for years without realising that the 17th time you hear it, it's no longer funny.


5. Meme is effectively dead, but may experience rare and infrequent resurrection in particularly deserving cases. Generally these uses get applauded, because nobody wants to risk approbation for posting stale memes unless they're really sure this is a perfect opportunity for it - one that's literally too good to miss.

Importantly, by stage 5 the meme starts once again to be funny, because it's once again serving as a shibboleth... though this time instead of showing how advanced and up-to-date the poster is, it instead serves to indicate his membership in the "old guard" of whatever social group it's posted to - "I've been around here so long I remember when this was funny", it quietly indicates to other old-timers and well-educated newbies alike.

WoW and the office of the President

President-elect Barack Obama appointed Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford as his FCC transition co-chairs. Aside from being a professor of legal studies and business ethics, he also happens to be one of the Horde:

What does this tell us about him, as a person, as a gamer, as a government official? I will attempt to translate all the dorkese.
1. - CULTURAL RELATIVISM

Every player in WoW belongs to one of two warring factions, Alliance or Horde. Werbach is Horde. Children often choose to be Alliance because they perceive them as "the good guys", but students of history (both ours and Azeroth's) recognize that Alliance culture is based on medieval European culture and Horde culture is based on the indigenous cultures that were supplanted by the West.

Werbach is a Tauren (a minotaur), which basically makes him a Native Kalimdorian. The Tauren revere nature, living in wigwams near giant totem poles. As a Shaman (see below), he could also have chosen a troll (blue-skinned Jamaican-like monster) or an orc (green-skinned Klingon-like monster), so there must be something about the cow-man that appeals to his liberal guilt.

From the Boingboing.