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| Monday, March 29, 2004 |
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Must be the EMUHQVKWSTL 
| | Here are the choices United Arilies offers for "Upgrade Eligibility"... |
| | And here are the choices for "Service Class": |
| | Get this: nobody at United — at the Premier Executive desk, at Mileage Plus, or at the Web site support desk — can tell me what these things mean. All they can tell me is that somebody else must know. Not them. Effing amazing. |
| | I've been on the United Web site and the freaking phone all afternoon trying to book an upgradeable flight to London and back late next month. If I do it on the Web, I can get nice little bonuses, like cheaper fares and more miles. But how to make the fare upgradeable? Nobody knows. The reservations people say I need to book an "H" fare. But which of the above are "H"? Nobody knows. |
| | Excuse me while I put my head out the window... AAAAARGGGG! Okay, that's better. |
| | [Later...] Finally booked a non-upgradeable flight on the Web site while somebody on the Premier Executive line watched my progress, which ended when the booking appeared to fail at my end but actually succeeded inside the system. But even then she wasn't completely sure, and said I should "call Web site tech support" tomorrow "just in case." Total time wasted: five hours. And it's still not over. |
| | Oh, by the way, the last person I spoke to, who was the most good-humored and helpful of the bunch, said none of the economy fares offered on United's Web were upgradeable in the first place. Not unless you want to go to the dreaded "options" page where the choices above appear. Then.... well, good luck. |
| | Credit where due: this is the first time I've had any trouble booking a flight on the United Web site, and I've booked many dozens of them over the last several years. But this one kind of made up for the rest. |
| | Nonstop round trip from LAX to LHR: $607. Plus another £76 for the BMI leg to Dublin (booked separately on BMI's site, which worked fine), where I'll be speaking at ICT Expo. |
Saw sage
| | I missed this when it went up, but found it when somebody pointed to #10. It's good advice (especially coming from Scoble Himself, a living source of word balloons hovering above the belly of the beast), but jeez... even *I* don't believe a lot of what I say and write. That's becaue blogs are great places to vet and form opinions, and not just to showcase them. They're not pulpits, or even soap boxes. They're places to think out loud. Garrison Keillor once said "English is the preacher's language because it lets you talk until you think of what to say." Likewise with blogging, except the thinking isn't yours alone. If it works, it's everybody's. NEA, etc. |
| | Absence of ownership and control is critical, I think, to the stuff we say here, wherever here is. That's why I use a public domain license (down there in the right column somewhere). I figure there's a better chance that what I say will do some good if I'm not busy trying to own it, or to restrict it in any way. |
| | The work of thought is one of the most ancient and useful activities of humankind. To generate thought is to create life, liveliness, community. Consensus isn't important. What's important is how the generative power of our thought makes life vivid and burns out the dead brush, dead thoughts, dead institutions. |
Losing religion
| | Some nice back & forth between Dean and myself on the subject of religious radio. |
Television's future potato famine
| | I see the future of television in two places: 1) BitTorrent; and 2) Konspire2b. Dig the list of things you do on the receive side of Konspire2b: |
| | - subscribe to channels that match your interests
- go to bed
- wake up in the morning to the files that have arrived on your subscribed channels
- feel certain that the files are legit, thanks to konspire2b's heavy-duty, automatic, digital signatures
- unsubscribe from channels that disappoint you
- build trust for a channel owner's tastes over time (owners are completely responsible for what goes out on their channels)
- spend the time that you used to spend searching doing other less frustrating things (see 8 for a suggestion)
- start a channel to broadcast your own files
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| | This is the answer for the transmit side too. It's the future commercial Television will discover after it dawns on the people who pay for it (remember, it's advertisers, not viewers) that viewers will get better deals as active customers rather than as passive consumers, and will eventually contrive their own means of getting those deals. Remember that TiVo was invented in Silicon Valley, by Linux weenies. Not in Japan, by Sony. |
Web Noir revisited
| | The main problem with search engines isn't with the engines themselves, or with any of their methodologies. It's with the haystack we call the Web. And the fact that it's a haystack instead of a directory. |
| | Take every directory you can name. The yellow pages. The Sears catalog. The list of companies in the foyer of a high-rise. The library card catalog. The inventory at a book store. The student listings at a school. |
| | The Web has nothing like any of them. Beyond DNS, it has no directory structure, and no directory. It's a haystack. |
| | Of course, this is a virtue in many ways. The absence of a directory structure — a required way to organize everything to the right of the first single slash of every URL — is one of the graces that allows the Web to grow and persist as a wild and wooly place. Thanks to the absence of a directry, the Web has no hierarcies beyond the lengths of path names (/yada/yada/yada/etc.), which are made less hierarchical by the hyperlink. (Which subvert hierarchy, Dr. Weinberger famously says.) |
| | So we have search engines that go through 3-billion stalk piles of hay, looking for needles. And doing a fine job, considering. |
| | I want a new kind of search engine that combines the full-text approach that Feedster.com uses with the inbound-link analysis that Technorati does. So, I want to see webloggers who are most likely to talk about quilting in the future. |
| | There's an interesting difference, however, between giant heap of hay we call the World Wide Web, and the small corner of that heap where blogs live. This is the corner Technorati calls the Live Web (a term Allen first coined for GlobeAlive). That difference is RSS. Simply put, the Live Web is syndicated. It sends out live notifications when something is published. |
| | And, it seems to me, syndication implies a directory of some kind, at least at the source side of the notifications. |
| | See, Technorati's spiders don't go out and crawl anything until they receive a notification that something has just been published. Aside from the efficiencies involved (Technorati doesn't waste bandwidth or server patience searching for stuff that may not have changed), it's interesting to me that most sources of notifications are organized and archived. This makes them different in kind from the Wide parts of the Web. |
| | To show what I mean, consider the difference between a blog's archive and the complete absence of any kind of history at most of the places on the Wide Web we call "sites." Same goes for publications syndicated by Scoop, PHP, Slash, Drupal and similar content management systems. They have history. And they organize that history. The schemas and naming conventions may not be the same; but they are all chronological, and they all respect the need to save archives, and the enormous importance of those archives. (Hmm.. makes me think of blogs as The World Deep Web.) |
| | By the way, everything I know about directories I learned from Craig Burton, who has been a voice in the wilderness against the proliferation of namespaces for as long as I've known him (which dates back to when he was kicking Microsoft's — and everybody else's — ass, with great humor, at Novell in the '80s). |
| | At Novell, and later at The Burton Group, Craig and Jamie Lewis (who still runs TBG) decided they needed to change the network conversation from one about who had the best silo of private "pipes and protocols" to one about types of services, and how to make them interoperable. And they succeeded. Whether we know it or not, we all talk today inside the structure of terms Craig and Jamie laid on the world with the Network Services Model (NSM) for understanding what a network is, and what it does. |
| | The NSM sees the network in terms of services, rather than in terms of wiring, protocols and other network mechanics. Services in the old days included file, print, messaging, management, directory and security. Today Web (hypertext) is a service too. There is no limit to how many we can have. But we won't have them until they're ubiquitous parts of the Net's infrastructure. |
| | So an interesting irony of the Net is that it lacks many of the services that were taken for granted on LANs back when Craig and Jamie came up with the Network Services Model in the first place. For example, we have messaging for mail (SMTP, POP, IMAP, MIME, etc.). But little at all for directory, file, print or security (no, firewalls don't count). |
| | More than three years ago, Craig put out a new version of the Network Services Model, for the Net. He called it The Internet Services Model, and provided it as a way of measuring progress, as well as a way to organize understanding. |
| | To describe the dawn state of progress where we languished then, he coined the term Web Noir. |
| | Whe I look around at how far we've come, it looks to me like we're still there. But I do believe RSS, the concepts of notification and syndication, and the growing size and importance of the Live Web, bring the dawn at least a little bit closer. |
Help sack Rome
| | A lot of what I write is about journalism, which I am pleased to see reequipped and transformed by weblog technologies. By transforming millions of passive users into active journalists, blog tech is equipping the Huns to overrun Rome. It¹s a wonderful thing to watch. I hated Rome. |
| | I began writing about hypertext¹s subversion of big-J journalism long before I started blogging in 1999. But I didn¹t even think about the simultaneous subversion of big-L literature until Alan Graham sent me the selections gathered for this book. I realized for the first time that bloggers are also producing real literature at a prodigious rate, and in immeasurable quantities, all of it equally personal and connected, all of it unbent by a publisher¹s agenda. |
Reduxions
Noam saying?
Digital Hooky
| | I'm signed up to attend Digital Hollywood this week; but I've got a chapter to finish, plus lots of other work, so I'll miss it. But I'll be glad to point to any reports that go up. |
Duke of Fours
| | I'm not the kind to root for overdogs, but I became a Duke fan the year after they finished 14-13, with a 2-10 record in the ACC. I got turned on to the team when I attended a 1977 preseason exhibition game in Cameron agianst Xavier. Not sure it was the same Xavier Duke beat yesterday, but I remember the Xavs had big Xs on their jerseys. Anyway, it was the first time I'd seen Duke play at all. Jim Spanarkel was a senior. Mike Gminski was a Junior. Gene Banks was the much-awaited freshman power forward. Kenny Dennard was the other new forward. John Harrell was the other guard (with Spanarkel) and Bob Bender, another guard, was a transfer from Indiana. As I recall, he couldn't play that day. But the team was amazing to watch. They played like they loved the game, and really enjoyed being on the floor with each other. Even on that first day there was real chemistry. |
| | That was a team that nobody expected to go to the Final Four, and which lost the championship game to Goose Givens and Kentucky. John Feinstein, the prolific sports writer, was a student at Duke then, called them Forever's Team. They went 27-7 that year, and were favored to win it all the next year. And the year after that. But they didn't. (Even though Spanarkel, Gminski, Banks and Dennard all went on to become NBA players.) National championships by rivals UNC and NC State followed in the coming years. |
| | After I moved to California, I went to see Duke play in two final fours, both of which they were favored to win. I flew to Kansas City to watch them lose to Kansas in 1988. I drove 17 straight hours from Palo Alto to Seattle to watch them lose the next year in the King Dome. They were favored to win that one, too. After that I quit going. The next year they were blown out by UNLV. They finally achieved dynastic stature in '91 and '92, when they won consecutive national titles. Can I help it that they got good and pretty much stayed that way? |
| | For the record (whatever that is), I was no fan of Coach K when he replaced the lovable Bill Foster in 1980. K had a sour disposition and snapped constantly at referees. I once said "There's nothing about that guy that a blow-dry and a sense of humor wouldn't cure." It kinda stuck for awhile. |
| | Turns out I was fulla shit. He's clearly one of the best coaches in the history of the game. As usual, Bobby Knight was right. |
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