@lindsay.at

Jonathan Coulton: I do think the common thread that a lot of internet culture shares is a kind of hyper-postmodernism. I barely know what I'm talking about here so bear with me, but you know I think there's a kind of humor, in particular, that is unique to the Internet and it has to do with referencing other things in an ironic way, in re-imagining them in a certain way, recycling ideas. Of course this is part of what postmodernism means, but I think there's sort of winky aspect to the things that become really popular in internet culture that sort of sits on top of that standard postmodernism, you know, collage combination of different ideas. Look at LOLCats for example. Which is bizarre and could only exist on the Internet and is, I think a real good measuring device for determining if somebody is part of internet culture or not. You know, they're basically funny pictures of cats, with a caption you know. And so you can say, well that's dumb, that's you know there are lots of greeting cards that are like that. We've had that for a long time. But there's a self-referential quality to LOLCats and it's the language that cats speak, somehow, it's this kind of pigeon language that cats speak and it kind of makes sense. I mean, if you're a fan of LOLCats, the reason you like it is because you see a caption and a funny picture and yes, you are looking at a funny caption of a funny cat picture, but also there's a joke there and it's very hard to explain what that joke is to somebody who doesn't get it. And it has to do with that language that cats speak, that is made up, that somehow a very large group of strangers all seems to agree that this is the language that cats speak. And so, I sound like a lunatic just talking about it. And that is, I think, a perfect example of the things that become popular on the Internet and why, even though I haven't really said why because I don't even know why. 

Thanks to @siracusa for pointing this out. Note that this is a transcript from a video interview, and not necessarily reflective of Jonathan Coulton's prose style or even spelling of “pidgin.” Grr.

Anyway, this segment collided in my brain with what Noel Murray has been grappling with in multiple “A Very Special Episode” columns that I read recently, namely ones on MST3K and especially The Simpsons. This fragment from the former steps a little closer to what's so utterly compelling about referential, highly-specific humor:

That’s reflective of the whole Mystery Science Theater 3000 ethos. The show featured a barrage of pop-culture references, drawing on movies, music, sports, television, commercials, comics, children’s books, and more, with a good mix of old and new. When I watched Episode 403 for the first time, my eyes popped the moment Mike Nelson appeared as Morrissey, because I wasn’t expecting a Morrissey joke in a cheap, science-fiction-y basic-cable show. Nor was I expecting the show to drop references to Goodfellas, Muppet Babies, Ray J. Johnson, Mel Tillis, and perennially disappointing NFL quarterback Jay Schroeder. The writers free-associated, and if their free-associations jarred one viewer’s memory, they’d made a new fan. In some ways, MST3K is the ultimate example of what I referred to in my Simpsons “Very Special Episode” column as “laughing at the known.” Quite often, the references on MST3K were funny to me only because I “got it.” And when they referred to something I’d never heard of, I didn’t laugh. 

And that reminds me of the person who introduced me to Mystery Science Theater 3000. My girlfriend at the time, she mocked my occasionally goofy sense of humor, especially my favorite joke ever. I had the last laugh (and MST3K burrowed its way deep into my heart) when the episode featuring “Wild Rebels” referenced the punchline, “Silly Rabbi, kicks are for Trids!”

Anyway, it all forms part of what the web, blogs, Twitter, and meeting new people are about for me. I've thought of myself as alone-in-my-head for so long (being an oddball geek growing up, discovering my own particular tastes for myself, often by myself) that it's utterly compelling to find a common point of reference. For that reference to make its way through the gauntlet of mass media to broadcast, well, that in itself is laugh-out-loud-worthy. Twitter? Dozens of little points of connection, every day.

DeWitt Clinton's screed on URL shorteners, especially directed at Twitter's usage thereof, is interesting, not only for the actual content (which is broadly true, and fairly sensible), but for the meta-message: Google is increasingly threatened by Twitter as the prime mover in the "Real-time web."

To me, this feels a bit like fear, uncertainty, and doubt spread about a competitor, attacking the competitor's actions while distracting us about Google's own actions. Most telling was this sequence about precedent:

As a thought experiment, imagine that your email provider suddenly started rewriting all of the URLs in your outgoing emails so they could track every link the recipients click on.

…

But since Twitter is the most popular, and arguably the most influential, of the new wave of micro-blogging systems, I sincerely worry that this is going to establish a precedent that everyone else will feel compelled to follow, since it is clearly an advantage to the network if they can get away with capturing this data. I ask, why wouldn't WordPress or Facebook or Tumblr do the same if they could?

We're supposed to be outraged by the privacy implications here, but the real outrage to Google is that it makes their job harder. Look at Gmail's privacy statement on what they do about you clicking links on email you receive:

When you use Gmail, Google's servers automatically record certain information about your use of Gmail. Similar to other web services, Google records information such as account activity (including storage usage, number of log-ins), data displayed or clicked on (including UI elements, ads, links); and other log information (including browser type, IP-address, date and time of access, cookie ID, and referrer URL).

Yes, Google's asserted rights are over your own use and not with others' use of the links you send. Ask an average user on the distinction, and I think they'd say it's different but not categorically so.

The other part that interested me is the "Safety and Transparency" part for Twitter's links. A major part of Twitter's justification for wrapping every URL (which I'm still personally dubious about) is to protect people from malicious links. Well, that sounds suspiciously like the role Google's stopbadware.org interstitial warning page plays, especially when Twitter doesn't have direct control of how the status message is displayed (it may be via a third-party application or SMS). Is this an argument against URL rewriting, or an argument against anyone else acting as a trustworthy intermediary?

I think Twitter's revelations on its monetisation and platform strategy earlier this year have Google genuinely worried that Twitter is turning into a trusted gateway into the web, and so it gives rise to pieces like DeWitt's, where Twitter is attacked for minimal differences in approach to taking on a threatening gatekeeper role. Google's problem, and DeWitt's myopia in offering solutions ("consider using an html payload"), is that Google is fundamentally of the web, and deals with web pages viewed through browsers. Twitter reaches beyond the web, being deeply embedded into mobile devices, and deals with much smaller units of interest than a web page.

So you say you’re concerned about Apple’s hegemony with the iPad. You’re concerned that the iPad is for media consumption only, and will quash creativity. You’re concerned that it’s a power play that closes off open formats. You’re concerned that it concentrates too much power in the hands of one gatekeeper to your applications. If so, then go away.

Go to the open source world, because there’s no closed-source corporation nimble enough to catch up with Apple on their touch-based OS.

Apple has just grabbed the high ground in this scramble, and some variation of their personal, slate-like computing paradigm will dominate consumer computing’s attention for years – if not decades – to come. The computer is growing up, and Apple thinks they have the key to turning a general purpose computer into a traditional consumer electronics device.

(Incidentally, I can’t name a player in the computer industry that doesn’t share this common goal of ubiquity. Consider Google’s overt actions in the past year. Nearly every major new effort Microsoft has made for well over a decade has been in this direction.)

So, if we accept that Apple will cast a shadow as long as it has with the iPhone, what is to be done? The only alternative I can see is to work on organizing the open source world into offering an effort that could compete.

Forget the tappity-tappity of single touch alone. Reviews of existing best-of-breed single-touch devices suggest that people already demand something more. Apple owns multi-touch (as in, has key interaction modalities tied up in US Patents), and you would do well to look at something else. Pen-based computing has been around for two decades. Go and improve writing recognition. Consider previous user experience successes (such as the Newton and early PalmOS), and integrate the best of their innovations.

What does a responsive pen-based web browser look like? Can you make it swoop and glide like Apple’s offering? Maybe that’s the wrong way to go about it, but you can be sure that consumers won’t accept either long times to refresh a page each time it is moved or the one-line-at-a-time emulation of a user holding down a scroll arrow in a window.

Consider ergonomics everywhere. Apple does. Study people with a pen, clipboard, and some set tasks. How do people act when standing with the clipboard cradled in their arms? When leaning back on a sofa? When poking at it on a table top? How do these three main body positions inform software interaction modalities? Can one UI design accommodate all three? Make sure you can accommodate left-handers easily, now (and others with disabilities).

Once you’ve cracked the basic interactions, make it easy to create an application: be opinionated. There’s already too much flexibility, especially in the open-source world. When presented with a choice, offer the simpler way of doing things. What developers need is a strong vision and the building blocks for making applications. Start with the basics: navigating a hierarchy, filling out a form.

Got that? Congratulations. If you’re very, very good, you might be able to compete with usability of iPhone OS 1.0.

So you say you’re concerned about Apple’s hegemony. So go. Go and run, because Apple has a huge lead.

In the twitter commentary that followed Apple's iPod announcement, while I was getting caught up with the news, I realised that Mail was missing from the new iPod touch. I got to thinking that was an interesting omission, and reflected that the widgets, the stock, weather, and Google maps features, in particular, were particularly telling (rather than "curious"). It points to the fundamental (and very deep) way in which the iPod touch and the iPhone differ.

The iPhone is an always-on, lightly tethered communications device. It presumes that at least a minimal network connection is always available. Weather and stock information is conceivably continuously updated. Mail can be checked regularly or pushed to the device.

The iPod is about entertainment, as it always has been. It is the mobile "lean back" to the iPhone's "sit forward." The 'curious' thing about these two devices is driven by how the world is today: in 2007, an Entertainment device and a Communications device look remarkably similar. (And, as an interesting corollary, it exemplifies how Apple generally sees the web as it is today.)

And it's in that striking similarity and feature near-parity that the iPod touch necessitated a price drop from the iPhone, to something more in line with its feature differential. Really, you're paying subscription fees to AT&T wireless for having the communications device cum phone.

It sounds like a reasonable choice for people to make during the upcoming holiday season.

I can't take credit for this one: this idea was completely that of my brilliant young officemate, Johnathan Ishmael.

Rather than concentrating on the "Safari on Windows is to help the browser acceptance ecosystem" or the "there to entice people to the Mac experience" arguments that most have been concentrating on. Johnathan cuts straight to the big punchline and sees it as a trial run for offering commercial sales of previously Mac-only applications like iLife.

The browser itself might not go very far in capturing people for every-day browsing (especially judging from initial reactions), but it may well be enough to shake out problems with the underlying software platform for porting Safari. Technically, it has some legs. It has been observed that Safari is very much like a Mac application, and that there are CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics and CFNetwork DLLs. Is this, plus QuickTime, plus some of iTunes's efforts enough to provide the underlying frameworks for the iLife suite?

iLife is cited by many (including Johnathan, a Windows user) as one of the most compelling ideas to buy a Mac. Why should Apple offer that commercially? Not only does it get the income from the sale, but it gets people comfortable with the application platform. iPod People are comfortable with the way iTunes organises their music. Some of them have been comfortable enough for that to let them think they'd be comfortable with a Mac. If iLife were introduced on Windows, it could capture a lot of loyalty: there's nothing quite like it for media creation and management on the PC.

With that captured loyalty, there's a lot gained. If Apple applications already take care of some of your most prized digital content, then that's a fairly big barrier lowered there. What other barriers are there? Microsoft Office? Nope. Accessing MS Word files with WordPad? TextEdit fills that role handily.

I personally think it's an intriguing idea and a possible future. As with my other speculation here on the blog, it's an idea that could be done by Apple, and perhaps something that has been discussed internally. Apple doesn't always do what's feasible, and certainly not right away. Apple does what's right for Apple in the future, and happily that's often right for me, as a consumer.

In the course of hanging out on the ZFS discussion list, I've developed a healthy paranoia for the safety of my data. Hard disk drives fail all too easily nowadays, and I know it's a matter of time before another major data-loss event, especially since my family's large media collections are being held on single external hard drives prized more for their attractive cases than for their reliability.

I found out a had a few hundred pounds left on my consulting account code at the university, and it's ideal for buying computer kit. I ran it past my Executive Producer (read: 'wife'), and she's also ready for redundant network-attached storage, having also looked into it for her job. I spent several days trying to figure out if I could build a solution myself based on OpenSolaris and ZFS, but ended up thwarted by form factor: I could find no cases that were compact as well as capacious enough for (at least) four hard drives.

So, I looked around, and it sounded like the Infrant ReadyNAS NV Plus is the unit to beat. As a UK supplier has a special on disks bundled with the unit, I put in an order right away.

But I wonder, what do I really want? I want flexibility and ease of administration. I want verifiable redundancy. I want ZFS. I also want something that will work seamlessly with my home network. I want something that understands Apple's protocols well. I want to be able to stop running iTunes at some point during the day, but still keep synching with my AppleTV. I want an integrated backup solution that works well with Apple's upcoming Time Machine feature in Leopard. I want something only Apple could provide.

The net is strewn with "Apple needs to provide this form factor or they won't get my custom" articles. I know that Apple's strength is in providing a simple, comprehensible product range that potentially serves a vast proportion of the populace. Still I wonder if an "iServe" could be coming. Consider:

• The AppleTV, iPhone, and the Airport Extreme (presumably running Darwin) are showing the way that Apple can expand their offerings while cashing in on the intellectual capital they've built up over the years of fine-tuning the full stack of Mac OS X. Add a little more sophistication with regards to storage to the Airport Extreme, and you have the basis of the device I'm envisaging.
• Apple has been building expertise and goodwill in the storage arena for years with the XServe RAID. It gets a fair amount of respect for that product from certain quarters. It won't be the first time Apple has tested a technology at the professional high end as a dress rehearsal for something in the consumer space.
• Apple has been very open about its efforts to port ZFS to Mac OS X/Darwin, and many have noted how ideal Time Machine would be as a GUI for ZFS's snapshot feature.
• The backup qualities of Time Machine only go as far as the reliability of the backup media, and external hard drives have had a sinking reputation for years. Building a reliable RAID NAS on ZFS would be a solution to a problem that people don't realise they have. You can now have faith in your backups, and serve all your home's or small workgroup's computers at once.
• Time Machine, as far as I understand it, seems to be rather storage-hungry (with snapshots, saving a copy of every version of every file that has existed on your computer from the day you install Leopard), and with the vast majority of Macs shipping with a single hard drive, that's a bit incongruous. Why should Apple sell you a software solution without providing the hardware or service to go along with it? This could be a sign for Apple to sell you something more.
• With iTunes moving into an increasing role as a media hub application, it makes bigger and bigger demands of the machine it runs on. With an AppleTV in the house, the ideal (as I use it) really seems to be 24-7 operation of the host computer, with iTunes always running. My Mac mini G4 has always been a 24-hour computer, but other people would like to send their iMacs to sleep once in a while. Seeing as iTunes serves multiple roles (media jukebox, media organizer, store front end, and a synchronizing/streaming server) at once, there's room for splitting off one of these functionalities into a lightweight server process that integrates with the iPod ecosystem more cleanly than the third-party daapd offered with RAID NAS products.
• There are NAS and RAIDed NAS products on the market already, and although they're gaining popularity, there are no dominant players. That's an opportunity for Apple to capture mind share with a new product. It's interesting that Netgear just bought Infrant, but Netgear still doesn't seem to be able to capture the public's imagination as Apple does.

RoughlyDrafted had a nice analysis of Apple's current NAS storage capabilities when it compared the new Airport Extreme with Windows Home Server. I think the Airport-as-NAS is just the thin end of the wedge for Apple, so here's what I propose:

• A 4- or 5-disk RAIDZ-capable array of disks
• AFP and SMB file sharing
• Printer sharing
• The server portions of iTunes
• Low power consumption
• Small form factor
• Simple administration through something resembling the Airport Assistant
• Possibly a gigabit ethernet interface (but certainly at least 100Mbit), for workgroups or direct connections
• Possibly USB and Firewire for direct connections

...and that's it. It could be a wireless (802.11 draft N) device, and could have router and wireless access point capabilities, but those would dilute the message on what this device is for: to serve and protect your files, reliably, quietly, and cheaply.

Everyone wonders when, with Apple. This is mere speculation: it may never happen. When could it happen, then? I would expect this sort of product to come in the wake of next year's Macworld Expo in January 2008, at the very earliest. I see the iServe as dependent on Leopard shipping, to help build the demand for the feature through Time Machine. It wants a major announcement to give it the time in the spotlight for the general populace to understand what it's for. That suggests Macworld Expo. As I've envisaged it, it's quite a boring, back-room product (which, we have to note, resembles the new Airport Extreme in 2007, which didn't even get a Macworld keynote mention), so an October release for the Christmas buying season would be inappropriate. I know that I could use this sort of product tomorrow, and would happily cancel my Infrant order to do so. That, I must acknowledge, is more wishful thinking than anything else in this article.

Any thoughts?

[I know I'm not the first to propose an iServe (though these couple links were found just after I finished the article). This is ultimately a revisiting of an idea that's been around for a while, with an idea on how Apple could make its mark on an emerging market category, and a survey of current developments with the Apple of 2007.]

I just found out that Apple's having its annual shareholder meeting today. Here's a question that I was surprised didn't get asked on the financial statement phone conference a few weeks ago:

How much did the settlement with Apple Corps cost?

I mean, Apple clearly paid a lot of money to be absolutely in the clear with the name, and it seems that it's essentially buying goodwill and the ability to work in the clear in the music industry. I wondered about this before, but still haven't turned up any answers.

Ars Technica's article, iPhone to be subsidized or not? We're getting dizzy trying to answer, is a bit more muddled than their usual coverage:

Will the iPhone be subsidized by AT&T or not? Yes? No? Maybe? Reply hazy, try again? The theories are all over the map, but recent reports say that the answer is "probably not."

I really had the impression that this was nearing resolution (or consensus) already. In learning about Verizon passing on the iPhone, we learned what Apple was after: a share of ongoing revenue from the mobile carrier's subscribers. It seems like a reasonable substitution for subsidies: what would normally be discounted from the up-front price is instead paid out to the hardware supplier. Why shouldn't we believe that's what Apple got from AT&T/Cingular? It makes sense for Apple, as:

• It protects the price point of the iPhone and the iPod, the relationship of which is very critical.
• Such price point protection allows Apple control across markets – iPhones are not going to be radically different in price between the US, UK, Germany, and South Korea due to different network providers offering different levels of subsidies.
• It gives Apple an ongoing revenue model to allow for new feature updates, in keeping with Sarbanes-Oxley (a point we learned about with Apple's 2007Q2 conference call).
• There's clearly no need for Apple to lower their price point to the consumer in order to garner higher volume: if this is like most other Apple product launches, supplies are likely to be constrained in the first couple months as production ramps up.
• Prices will drop, not at the rate of new phones (often halved within six months, at least within the UK), but at the rate of iPods (more like $50/year for the top-of-the-line iPod).

No, there's no way we can know for certain until the iPhone is launched, but I believe this is in keeping with the Apple we know: hacking an entrenched system to work to its own advantage. It can't get around the network carriers being the gatekeepers to its hardware, but it can tweak the existing model so that rather than cheapening its product, it gets even more profit.

I've been watching Fake Steve Jobs for a while now, and now I'm realising that, true to his growing reputation as the Suck 2.0, writing in character and adopting a persona really can free one up, not only for iconoclastic pronouncements, but for making real insights. I was bowled over when I saw NBC and News Corp., sitting in a tree:

What we're doing today with things like Apple TV or TiVo is just applying Band-Aids to patch up a frigtarded system (linear TV programming) that made sense in the 1950s when bandwidth was limited. Our Apple TV only sidesteps the problem. It still forces you to download to your computer, then beam through a router to our TV box and then up into your TV. So great. Now you've got more pipes coming into your TV but this new pipe is kind of unreliable (wifi routers) and slow and clumsy.

The real fix is gonna happen when someone figures out the back end, aggregating good content (ie Seinfeld and I Love Lucy rather than Ask a Ninja) and then finds a way to get that straight into your TV without all these clumsy connections and multiple hops. But it's a battle. The linear model, as stupid as it is, still clings to life. Inertia is a powerful thing. But ultimately we'll win. Give us ten years. And yeah, this is why Apple is presenting itself to the Hollywood studios as a friend and ally, not a competitor. It's also why we didn't buy YouTube.

It's not necessarily the future, or the future as imagined by Apple, but it's definitely a (plausible) future...

I spent most of last night offline, and only logged on at midnight to see what was up. Well, it turns out that a lot was up, and I felt compelled to spend the next couple hours crafting my response to the news at the mediadescri.be blog:

The majors’ implicit message in floating the idea of DRM-free music was, “You may enjoy your position as the major digital music portal today because of the dominant position we granted you, but we can take it away and open it to all comers by advocating MP3s.”

That brings us to today. Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Music” is a masterful document.... It is an open letter to the majors in response to the anti-DRM whispering campaign of the past couple months. Jobs calls the majors’ bluff and says, “Go ahead, punks. I’ll call your bluff. Let’s all sell DRM-free music. Apple still has the clout to offer the most compelling top-to-bottom experience.” In one swift blow, Jobs has cut off any majors-initiated whispering campaign at the knees by getting worldwide attention as only he could.

I sort of bury the lede, but I like how the thousand-word post is pull-quoteable. I'm also fairly pleased to have something to say about the issue that's at least a little off the beaten track. Sadly, there are thousands of responses already, and it'll be hard to get any attention. I do faintly regret that I hadn't gotten to writing up the first half of the article (that the anti-DRM whispers are really the majors trying to find a bargaining wedge with Apple) earlier, as those thoughts had been forming for a while, but I like how it all comes together with yesterday's news.