Category Archives: Internet

Blogging coming back in style?

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David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp) is leaving Medium for… a WordPress blog.

“Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions.”

“Beyond that, though, we’ve grown ever more aware of the problems with centralizing the internet. Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.”

“With the new take, we’re also trying to bring more of a classic SvN style back to the site. Not just big, marque pieces, but lots of smaller observations, quotes, links, and other posts as well. In fact, the intention is to lessen our dependency on Twitter too, and simply turn Signal v Noise into the independent home for all our thoughts and ideas – big or small.”

I’ve been seeing articles (posts?) on Medium for six or seven years but never paid much attention. Here’s the Wikipedia page. Mr. Hansson’s post reads like Dave Winer from the early days of blogging.

Where are they now?

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You know how some insanely popular rock group has a bunch of hits and then… just disappears. At least from the media mainstream. They didn’t get less talented overnight and, sure, tastes change but this always seemed odd to me. In reviewing blog posts from the early days of the web, I see something similar. Here are some of the people most influential (for me) from that era (in no particular order): Bruce Sterling, Chris Pirillo, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Kevin Kelley, Jeff Jarvis, Seth Goden.

On second thought, I’ll bet the folks are still around but — like everyone else — have migrated to social media, abandoning their blogs. Perhaps the web they wrote about and — in some cases — predicted, disappeared/never happened.

AI Superpowers

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“In his book “AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order,” Kai-Fu Lee, a well-known artificial-intelligence expert, venture capitalist and former president of Google China, argues that China and Silicon Valley will lead the world in AI. But his highly readable book covers a lot of other ground as well, and among the most interesting insights are his descriptions of the differences between Chinese and Silicon Valley tech culture.” (Washington Post review) Not quite finished but here are some excerpts:

If artificial intelligence is the new electricity, Chinese entrepreneurs will be the tycoons and tinkerers who electrify everything from household appliances to homeowners’ insurance. […] Ambitious mayors across China are scrambling to turn their cities into showcases for new AI applications. They’re plotting driverless trucking routes, installing facial recognition systems on public transportation, and hooking traffic grids into “city brains” that optimize flows.

China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. […] The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.

Adoption of mobile payments happened at lightning speed. By the end of 2016, it was hard to find a shop in a major (Chinese) city that did not accept mobile payments. […] By the end of 2017, 65 percent of China’s over 753 million smartphone users had enabled mobile payments. […] It got to the point where beggars on the streets of Chinese cities began hanging pieces of paper around their necks with printouts of two QR codes, one for Alipay and one for WeChat. […]

For 2017, total transactions on China’s mobile payment platforms reportedly surpassed $ 17 trillion—greater than China’s GDP. […] Data from mobile payments is currently generating the richest maps of consumer activity the world has ever known, far exceeding the data from traditional credit-card purchases or online activity captured by e-commerce players like Amazon or platforms like Google and Yelp. […] Recent estimates have Chinese companies outstripping U.S. competitors ten to one in quantity of food deliveries and fifty to one in spending on mobile payments. China’s e-commerce purchases are roughly double the U.S. totals, and the gap is only growing.

U.S. federal funding for math and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google’s own R& D budget.

Between 2007 and 2017, China went from having zero high-speed rail lines to having more miles of high-speed rail operational than the rest of the world combined.

It no longer makes sense to think of oneself as “going online.” When you order a full meal just by speaking a sentence from your couch, are you online or offline? When your refrigerator at home tells your shopping cart at the store that you’re out of milk, are you moving through a physical world or a digital one?In the United States we build self-driving cars to adapt to our existing roads because we assume the roads can’t change. In China, there’s a sense that everything can change—including current roads. Indeed, local officials are already modifying existing highways, reorganizing freight patterns, and building cities that will be tailor-made for driverless cars.

Much of today’s white-collar workforce is paid to take in and process information, and then make a decision or recommendation based on that information—which is precisely what AI algorithms do best.

Fixing Flickr

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Flickr, the photo sharing site, launched in February, 2004. I created my account in May, 2005, and have been a user ever since. I have more than 1,800 photos in my account which isn’t a large number. That’s because I don’t upload every photo I take. I’ve never used Flickr as a “warehouse” for storing photos. I put stuff on Flickr that I want to share, although I tend to use my blog for that these days. My photos have been viewed more than a million times (collectively) but I doubt that’s a big number, comparatively speaking.

For most of its existence, Flickr has been owned by Yahoo! who fucked it up in ways too numerous to mention. Earlier this year Flickr was sold to SmugMug, a paid image sharing, image hosting service, and online video platform. The new owners are making changes and a bunch of the 800,000 Flickr users are freaking out. They’ve been getting unlimited storage for free and in a couple of months that ends. The new limit is 1,000 photos or upgrade to a Pro account for $50 a year. (Which I did back in 2005)

The vast majority of Flickr users are not using the service as a “photo sharing” platform. They’re taking advantage of the free terabyte of storage to warehouse and back-up all of their photos. Fun while it lasted but guess what? Internet companies make changes like this all the time. I think this is a logical move will keep Flickr financially healthy. Others think it will kill the service. Time will tell.

What my Pro account give me under this new plan?

  • One of the many dumb things Yahoo! did was make Flickr subscribers get a Yahoo! account and use that to log into their Flicker account. Cluster. Fuck. That ends soon and we can use any email account to log in.
  • Unlimited storage
  • Ad-free browsing. I would HATE having ads on my Flickr pages
  • Better stats to see which of photos are most viewed. Admittedly not a big deal to me.
  • Better support when I need it.
  • Longer (10 min) videos. Up from 3 minutes.

Free is not a business model. And if a dollar a week is too pricey for you… sorry, Charlie. I’m happy to pay for services I like. For those who aren’t, there are free services like Google Photos.

“Social media is making the world a better place”

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I gave up Twitter two years ago, never did Facebook and said goodbye to Google+ recently. Social media seemed only slightly less afflictive than opioid addiction. But this post by Kevin Drum offers a glimmer of hope:

The internet boasts an immediacy that allows it to pack a bigger punch than any previous medium. But this is hardly something new. Newspapers packed a bigger punch than the gossipmonger who appeared in your village every few weeks. Radio was more powerful than newspapers. TV was more powerful than radio. And social media is more powerful than TV.

Broadly speaking, the world is not worse than it used to be. We simply see far more of its dark corners than we used to, and we see them in the most visceral possible way: live, in color, and with caustic commentary.

The money quote: “If you want to make things better, you first have to convince people that something bad is happening. Social media does that.”

Google+ going away

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It’s that scene where all the seniors are gathered at the high school hangout, just before everyone heads off to college or the Army or a full-time job at Wal Mart. Everyone promises to keep in touch but knows they won’t. I’ll miss the friends I’ve made on Google+. I got in the car or on a plane to go meet some of you f2f.

But like everyone else, I could see this coming. I’m guessing a lot of folks will swing over to FB and reassemble there. Not an option for me. In fact, this was my last little toe-in-the-social media-water. I’ve been spending time one a Land Rover forum and feel comfortable with the focused/moderated environment. No politics, no ranting… just guys talking about their trucks.

I guess I’m still a little surprised nobody has figured out a way to do a paid social media platform. Sure seems like there would be a lot (okay, enough) people willing to pay, say, twenty bucks a year for an ad-free site. But no such thing exists as far as I know.

Goodbye DSL

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I remember my excitement, all those years ago (2005), when I upgraded from dial-up internet access to “high speed” DSL. It was never great but it was the best thing available (we can’t get cable). The local phone company (CenturyLink) advertised 10mbps download (1mbps up) but we never got more than 8 and that was good enough. But for the last six months we’ve had continual problems. Good fast connection one minute… then almost nothing five minutes later. Lots of phone calls and two visits by technicians (image of large man scratching his head) and the service is still unreliable. So today is the day we cancel the service (which only costs $45/mo).

I’ve replaced it with AT&T’s wireless internet service. I’m now getting — on average — 35mbps down and 5mbps up. More than 4x faster! And almost certainly more reliable.

I’m paying $60 per month for the service and that gets me 50gb of data a month. Because we’re also DirecTV customers, they give us an additional 50gb. 100gb/mo should be enough but if we run over, we have an additional 30gb on our phones which can serve as wifi hotspots. I’ll monitor this for a few months to see what our usage looks like. DSL is ancient tech and while it has been mostly a good experience, I happy to see it go.

UPDATE 10/17/18: Or maybe not. Looks like we’ve used three quarters of our 100gb just halfway through our billing period. The overages could mount up fast. And we just don’t want to have to watch and budget. So we’re going back to DSL and will learn to live with slow speeds and unreliable service. But hey, I remember dial-up.

DSL vs. AT&T Wireless

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We have a DSL line from our local telco for internet access. We pay $45 a month for 10 megabits download speed (never get more than 8) and less than 1 megabit upload speed. Not great but all that’s available where we live.

Been having problems for the last couple of weeks with technicians coming up to check lines, etc. Keep thinking they have it fixed but the problem persists so we’ve been using the hotspot feature on our iPhones. Yesterday I stopped by the local AT&T store to talk about our data plan to avoid getting surprised by a huge bill.

We’re currently paying $130 a months for 15gb that Barb and I share. Historically, we use very little of this but if we start making heavy use of the hotspot feature that could change. Without getting any further into the weeds here, I upgraded to an “unlimited” data plan for $150 a month. But the plan lets us stop paying for HBO and we get some other discounts so the faster service winds up costing me less than I was paying.

I’d never checked to see what kind of speeds I get from our AT&T wireless so I figured this was a good time to take a look. We’re getting 18 mbs down and 5.6 mbs up. More than twice as fast as the DSL line!

We don’t stream a lot of movies but do have Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV. I’ll keep the DSL service for a few months while we monitor our wireless data use, but I’m thinking I can adios the DSL.

This is might be more noteworthy to me because I remember the dial-up modem days. 2400, 14,400, 56K. Dark days? An exciting time? Could never have imagined I’d be able to connect to the internet with a mobile phone. Could never have imagined a mobile phone.

The Amazon Brand

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Overheard a woman talking to a friend this morning say something like “I bought it from Amazon.” I’m pretty sure whatever she purchased wasn’t manufactured by Amazon. But the Amazon brand has pretty much gobbled up the branding value from all the stuff they sell. I get as much value from Amazon as from the company that made the whatever. More? Has any company ever owned so much mind-space? Maybe Sears back in the mail order catalog days?