Prakash Kailasa has struck again, with a new modification to the WikiProxy script that adds an “Undo Wikify” option to the User Script Commands menu (under Tools). Now you can remove all those wikilinks at will. The new version is linked from the WikiProxy homepage, as always.
This is also further evidence that Greasemonkey needs some sort of script update mechanism.
I’m already getting harassed for not having commented on the denouement of Grokster vs. MGM. I was determined, for a change, to post from a position of uninformed legal hackery instead of my usual total ignorance, so I took the time to read up on the case’s conclusion. Not the actual judges’ opinions, mind you. Who has time for that? But I did read a crackpot Salon article and more level-headed New York Times take on the decision, as well as some other bits and bobs from around the web.
I’m tempted simply to point back to my original post on the case’s oral arguments. What can I add when I nailed the outcome way back in March? For those who want analysis from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about, there’s also this excellent summary by Fred von Lohmann, the EFF’s attorney-in-chief.
I will say this. First of all, from the perspective of someone who is trying to revolutionize the technical landscape of P2P-istan, I’m totally head-over-heels in love with the decision. I find it truly tragic that the Creative Commons types, for whom I have great sympathy, have chosen to align themselves with slimeballs like Grokster and Streamcast. I’ve seen any number of extreme analogies mooted to show what a dangerously slippery slope the Supremes have wandered onto, the silliest of which is the Google brain fart in the aforementioned Salon piece. But the fact remains that the defendants had built a business around actively encouraging people to violate copyright and financed it by installing all manner of junk on their users’ computers without their knowledge or consent. They deserve to be censured.
The main argument against the decision is that the Court did not provide sufficient guidance as to what constitutes “inducement”. This could theoretically allow the media companies to bully small software vendors into submission with the mere threat of legal action. But the flip side of this is the pernicious effect that the piracy-fueled file sharing vendors have on the AllPeers of the world, small companies who are actually willing to innovate in order to find a legal model for digital content delivery. This doesn’t mean that I’m a fan of big media. Don’t even get me started. But — call me crazy — I do think that artists deserve to be compensated for their creative output. So should we be concerned about potential abuse of this ruling? Perhaps. But at the end of the day, this was the right decision to take with respect to the specific circumstances of the case. The U.S. judicial system did The Right Thing, which is encouraging. No, this won’t be the last word on this issue, but if you aren’t willing to put your faith in a judiciary that has done a good job so far of navigating these treacherous waters, let me humbly suggest that you go live in a log cabin in New Zealand. Or something.
Not that this decision is of any benefit whatsoever to the media companies. Does anyone even use Grokster and Streamcast anymore? If so, perhaps this decision will prompt them to seek out one of the myriad of far better ways to get copyrighted music for free, if that’s their thing. It’s satisfying to see spyware-propagating, innovation-averse, profiteering marketing drones get their comeuppance, but the real question is this: will the media companies eventually do something to address the actual issues raised by ubiquitous digital connectivity, or will they continue to take futile legal action against everyone in sight as they slowly fade into irrelevance?
A couple of days ago, Phil Ringnalda published a short review of Microsoft’s newly unveiled RSS support. Among other things, he noted that the syntax of their sorting element broke his quick-and-dirty parser, because it includes an actual instance of the element being sorted (but with different syntax and semantics) inside the sort element, like so:
<cf:sort>
<title data-type="text">The title of the item</title>
</cf:sort>
Since Phil’s parser assumes that the title tag has specific semantics (i.e. those defined in the RSS spec), this use of the tag in a completely different context causes it to malfunction.
Among other wacky stuff going on here is the fact that the RSS 2.0 spec doesn’t define a namespace for the RSS grammar itself, as I discovered to my mild embarrassment when I claimed the opposite in the comments. Nonetheless, I believe it’s fair to say that when there’s a title tag in an RSS document, it can be assumed to be attached to the default namespace, which in this case is sadly lacking an identifying URI. Using the same unique identifier (i.e. title with no namespace) with a totally different meaning is wrong. I wouldn’t beat Microsoft up too much over this, however, as it looks to be a simple oversight.
More contentious was my suggestion to reference the sorted element using a qualified name inside an attribute value (taking the liberty of giving RSS a namespace prefix though it doesn’t really deserve one):
<cf:sort element="rss:title" />
This led to me being torn a new one by Dare Obasanjo, a member of Microsoft’s XML team, who puts forth as evidence a document by the W3C’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG). I proceeded to read the document, with some trepidation since, while I’m not one to shy away from a geek pissing contest, the TAG is the closest thing there is to XML royalty.
Luckily the document states no such thing. In fact, it seems to hint at a schism inside the TAG since it rather than offering a definitive view, it simply observes that using QNames in XML content is already common practice, so we should understand the implications. It then proceeds to pick apart these implications in a very thorough and perspicacious manner.
What it all comes down to is this: why did the XML Namespaces WG decide to use prefixes in QNames in the first place? After all, they could have just mandated that the full namepace URI be used instead, every time a QName occurs. Try typing out a few namespace-compliant XML documents in this way, however, and you’ll see why: it’s massively verbose, and typing a potentially cryptic URI over and over again is pretty darn error-prone. Evidently they felt that the extra processing firepower needed to interpret the prefixes was worth the cost, and despite having written my share of XML processing software that has to manage this added complexity, I agree.
Okay, so if prefixes make sense in tag and attribute names, why not in XML content? In my opinion, it all comes down to the two warring factions of the XML world: the schema folks (to whom I am firmly allied) and the others (let’s call them “Perl Scripters” for convenience). An XML document containing namespaces encapsulates all the information (i.e. prefix mappings) required to process it. When QNames are placed in XML content, you can still do exactly the same types of automated processing (including the canonicalization example from the TAG paper), but you need a schema so you know where the QNames are.
Prakash Kailasa tweaked the WikiProxy script to make more efficient use of CSS styles. I’ve put the modified version online. It doesn’t act any different but the implementation is somewhat cleaner. Thanks, Prakash!
In other WikiProxy happenings, we’ve had a couple of requests for multilingual support. My attitude was “learn English, buddy”, but Stef, who is the man with the plan with regard to the WikiProxy web service, is far more enlightened than I. He’s added a new section to the script’s homepage entitled “$%^^&$!> Solo Inglés?” To me it reads like a commitment to add support for foreign Wikipediae (pardon my Greek). So expect to see that coming down the pipe.
Yesterday Slashdot ran a review of J.D. Lasica’s Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation:
While big thinkers like Lessig, Doc Searls and Howard Rheingold (who wrote the foreword) have constructed the intellectual scaffolding that alerted us to Hollywood’s goals of fencing in the Internet and keeping the public domain from expanding, it is left to reporters like Lasica to uncover the depressing specifics of the copyright cartel’s actions.
Seems like the backlash against big media’s shrapnel-hurling panic attack is starting to leak into the mainstream. Definitely on my reading list.
With the consumer empowerment that stems from the increasing use of internet technology for distributing media content, it will be interesting to observe to what extent companies that exploit advertising-based revenue streams are willing to dial down their use of ads in order to adapt to evolving consumer attitudes. For example, a recent news nugget from the IMDb Studio Briefing suggests that the film industry is experiencing its much-ballyhooed slump in part because movie theatres show too many ads before the feature presentation begins:
However, today’s (Tuesday) Los Angeles Times suggested that movie theaters themselves may be driving audiences away. “The overall moviegoing experience has become a shell of its former self,” the newspaper commented in an article about the box-office slump. “Even as theaters offer stadium seats and martinis, moviegoers are being bombarded with countless advertisements and coming attractions.” Several studio execs interviewed by the paper agreed. DreamWorks spokesperson Terry Press said that the ads ruin the value of movie trailers, the studios’ most powerful marketing tool. Producer Richard Zanuck added that moviegoers “come to see the film and not to be sold something else.”
This springboards nicely off an article from earlier in the month describing the outrage experienced by the publisher of a Hollywood trade rag after a visit to the cinema:
Robert J. Dowling, who apparently does not watch movies at press screenings, described attending a movie last weekend and being “assaulted with one inane commercial after another. Not commercials that are geared to movie fans, but ads for television shows, telephones, soft drinks, credit cards — seemingly every product on the market. And I could not stop thinking about how this onslaught of commercials was coming after we’d paid $20 for our senior tickets plus what we ordered at the snack stand. On and on the commercials went. They were loud, annoying, distracting, and, above all, they totally ruined that transcendent feeling you look forward to when you’re just about to watch a movie.”
It’s tempting to bash the film industry for passing the buck yet again with respect to falling year-on-year box office receipts. First it was Chinese DVD pirates, then it was BitTorrent jockeys, and now it’s the cinemas who are to blame. In this instance, however, I would tend to agree. With intense competition both from alternate means of viewing films (rentals, VOD, cable, satellite, etc.) and from new-fangled leisure activities (internet surfing, video consoles, opulent theme parks in exotic locations, etc.), the film industry needs to revive the perception that a trip to the movies is a full-blown fun-for-the-whole-family event, not just a run-of-the-mill entertainment fix.
The good news is that, for once, the media industry has put two and two and come up with four, or a rough approximation thereof. Quite plausibly the unconscionable fusillade of marketing propaganda that ticket-wielding consumers are subjected to in American movie theatres actually does have a negative effect on box office sales. The other good news is that this is hitting the studios where it hurts: right in the wallet. Expect those ads to get substantially toned down, or better yet eliminated entirely.
It seems that Technorati has gone live with the beta they were testing over the past few weeks. I like it. Of particular note is the fact that they now eliminate duplicates from the list of linking sites. In the past, this list was often polluted with the same entries popping up twice or even three times.
Another problem with the previous version was the delay in updating the figure for total number of links when new ones appeared. I stayed on 41 links for weeks even though my cosmos was changing constantly. I’m curious to see whether this behavior has improved in the new version. Which means, of course, that everyone should link to this post so we can gauge how quickly their statistics are brought up-to-date. The fact that this would also bump up my Google PageRank never crossed my mind, of course.
My comment spam has been getting really bad lately, probably as a result of more people linking to the blog. So it’s a good sign, but extremely annoying nonetheless.
I’m fighting back by adding a “captcha” to the comment form. It’s a bit of an inconvenience, but after manually erasing over 150 spam comments today, I didn’t see much of an alternative. We’ll see if it helps. If anyone has problems getting the captcha to work, please let me know.
Just when you’ve finally convinced yourself that the world is flat, something happens to change your mind. I’m referring of course to Thomas L. Friedman’s best-selling globalization exposé The World Is Flat, which advances the hypothesis that, thanks to high-tech communications technology, geographically disparate groups of individuals can now compete on even footing with multinational corporations.
All very exciting, revolutionary stuff. But then I was talking to a programmer friend of mine the other day, and his job-hunting experiences led me to question this theory. He lives in Oregon, and as an experienced software developer he’s gotten a lot of interest from potential employers all along the West Coast. The rub is that he doesn’t want to relocate, and none of the companies he’s talking to are willing to let him work remotely. So how is it that Indian and Chinese programmers are supposedly able to break through geographical boundaries while a guy based in the Pacific Northwest can’t even get a job from a company in Seattle or San Francisco?
In my demented imagination, the flip side of this issue is the continuing struggle of open source developers to find a general-purpose business model that enables them to pay their rent without selling their souls. Successful open source projects like Linux, Apache and Mozilla offer convincing proof that distributed development can work, even (especially?) for enormously complex software. But their financing strategies are too ad hoc, and rely too much on the altruism of a core group of programmers, for them to be applied to software development in general.
I have a brilliant solution for this: charge for open source software and use the money to pay the developers. Clever, eh? Of course, there are plenty of examples of companies selling shareware products, but I’m not aware of any that take advantage of open source-style source control, project management and testing and plow their revenues into compensation for a geographically dispersed group of developers.
It seems like what’s missing is a fair and transparent mechanism for paying remote developers for the work they contribute to a distributed project. I can hire the developer for a salary, but how do I know he isn’t working two hours a day and spending the rest of his time on the couch with a bong and a bag of Fritos? Or I could choose an objective-seeming but naive approach like paying based on the number of lines of code. That worked great for IBM’s OS/2 team, after all.
I’m not sure what exactly the solution is. But whoever figures it out is going to make the world a whole lot flatter, and rake in a sick amount of cash in the process.
This weekend I watched Steve Job’s keynote presentation at WWDC 2005. The speech was worth seeing for a number of reasons. My strongest impression was totally unrelated to the keynote, however: wifi is freaking cool as hell. I finally bought an access point last week, so despite the fact that I couldn’t figure out a way to rip the QuickTime stream to disk, I was able to watch it on my laptop while lying in bed on Saturday morning.
Though I’m always impressed by the slickness of the production values that technology dog-and-pony shows like this benefit from nowadays, the quality of the guest speakers was uneven. The guy from Mathematica was charming and funny in an extremely dorky way and had stunning demos of cryptic but very colorful wireframe models rotating in real time. Intel CEO Paul Otellini was supersmooth, rivalling Jobs himself for onstage presence. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, on the other hand, was amazingly wooden, and the Microsoft representative they rolled out was so whiny and uninteresting that I couldn’t wait for her to go away. In her defence, the vibes from the audience were palpably hostile, either due to the unmitigated hatred that Apple developers feel towards the Evil Empire or because folks were so disappointed that Bill Gates himself didn’t show up. Probably a bit of both.
Seeing the presentation helped me to understand why Jobs is so secretive and leak averse. The Apple/Intel announcement was huge, momentous even, but the impact was totally spoiled by the fact that the press had already spilled the beans days before. Imagine it they’d be able to keep a lid on that one until the WWDC! They would have finally been able to try out those defibrillators that public buildings in the States are obliged to bolt to the wall every ten feet.
As far as the actual announcement is concerned, it was presented as very much a technical decision to use a more promising microprocessor architecture, not a strategic migration to commodity hardware. There might even be something to this, but I can’t get over the feeling that this is a smokescreen to cover a hidden agenda of some sort. And even if it was just a pragmatic attempt to get faster, cooler chips for future generations of Macs, it may yet break the price and compatibility barrier that has kept Apple’s marketshare bogged down in the low single digits despite vastly superior software. As such, it might go down as one of the most greatest accidental business decisions of all time.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Valentin Laube, we now have WikiProxy icons in fiery red and soothing green. To use, copy one of these links (they’re data URLs) and use it to replace the one in your version of the script.
Update: Valentin went ahead and made a new version with a slick mouse-over effect, as well as all three icon colors. You can choose which one to use by changing the value of “iconcolor” at the very beginning of the script. Thanks dude!
That the New York Daily News would run an incoherent, pointless and frequently ludicrous article is hardly eyebrow-raising. The recent piece entitled “Nerds make better lovers” succeeds in all respects. The title is attention-grabbing but total misleading since only two paragraphs of the story touch on this topic even tangentially, and both are based entirely on the excrutiatingly tacky pop sociology of E. Jean Carroll, Elle magazine’s “love and sex advice columnist”. And it’s a mystery why they choose to dredge this up now when the classic teen flick Revenge of the Nerds already nailed the subject two decades ago with the immortal observation that “Jocks only think about sports, nerds only think about sex.”
The article goes on to expound a highly original take on geekdown. Once adorned with taped-together glasses, a pocket protector and a chess club membership, nowadays a nerd is anyone with “oversize ears”, a “nasal drawl” or (oh the humanity!) a “mismatched wardrobe.” Nevermind that the best examples the author can come up with are a teenage heartthrob, a music mogul and a consummate Hollywood insider. The ultimate non-sequitor, however, is the reference to Tiger Woods and his bikini model wife. It might seem rather unexceptional to find a superstar athlete with a gorgeous blonde on his arm, but he does, after all, have “a geek-like drive for a stodgy sport.” Good grief.
What is a bit surprising is that geeks seem to lap this drivel up. The article made the front page of Slashdot, no less, and was duly linked by a slew of wishful-thinking tech bloggers. Well I say someone should set the record straight and run an accurate piece on actual celebrity/geek pairings. Couples like, ehm… okay, nevermind.
Another cool effect of the WikiProxy script, if use becomes widespread enough, might be to encourage people to add terms that should be included but aren’t. For example, I just looked up the tee times for the third round of the Booz Allen Classic (not that I’m planning to spend my Saturday evening watching golf, no, never!). I started giggling again (gotta get a grip!) when I saw that the notables in the bunch (Vijay, Ernie, Phil, etc.) were linked to their corresponding entries in Wikipedia. Of course, there are still some glitches. Joey Snyder III (who?) gets partial honors since the script flagged the “III” as an acronym and linked it. Michael Allen and Richard Green were selected because they have the kind of names that you know must be shared by someone famous, somewhere.
The most striking aspect for me, however, is who isn’t linked: great golfers like Chris DiMarco, Luke Donald and Chad Campbell. Granted, these guys aren’t household names, but if the characters (characters!) from the O.C. deserve their own pages then these guys do too. Hopefully if people get into the habit of surfing around with the WikiProxy turned on, they’ll be outraged enough to correct these deficencies.
Every now and then I consider unsubscribing from Slashdot. Usually this is right after they reject one of my story submissions, so there’s a small chance that this impulse might be due at least partially to sour grapes. At the same time, there is very little rhyme and reason to the stories they do run, a huge proportion of which involve obscure Linux-related topics that I couldn’t care less about and/or topics that are covered in a more focused manner elsewhere in my extensive blogroll. But in the end I have to accept that it’s still a must read for any self-respecting geek, if for nothing else than to call up the occasional comment thread and gauge the tone of today’s nerdland zeitgeist.
They do come up with some zingers now and then that test my resolve. A case in point: “Could Apple’s Intel Desktop Threaten Linux?” The title sounds vaguely intriguing, but the article is in fact a (very) thinly veiled advertisement for something called Symphony OS, a hitherto unknown Linux desktop (and surely no competition for OS X!). My only thought before I zapped it and moved on was that the guy must be buddies with Slashdot founder Rob Malda, who posted the article, and how nice it must be to leverage your personal ties to get your product plugs in front of their gazillions of geek eyeballs.
So it was with some satisfaction that I discovered today that Clay Shirky had experienced similar outrage at the article in question, and even went as far as to investigate the matter in detail:
This is an interesting kind of spam, or maybe we could call it a reputation hack. I have no way of knowing who esavard is in relation to EliasAlucard, but I am betting they are pretty closely related. They create a Wikipedia page, point to it as if to demonstrate independent interest for the project in their potential slashdot post, then point to the slashdot effect on the Wikipedia page as proof of said independent interest. Voila, an instant trend.
He goes on to lament the “downside of the mass amateurization of publishing,” in that a combination of a hastily assembled Wikipedia article and a well-placed Slashdot plug can make a marginal product seem substantial. Of course, for most of us it’s not all that easy to get on Slashdot. But the real solution to this problem has a spiffy self-referential twist: the very fact that A-listers like Clay (not to mention Z-listers like myself) can blow the whistle on this kind of stunt. Reputation is king on the New Web, and if you try to cheat the system, in the end you may find that it causes you more harm than good.
Stefan Magdalinski of whitelabel.org created a bit of a stir with his WikiProxy, which mashes the BBC’s famously link-averse news pages together with the appropriate Wikipedia entries. The site works by reading in a BBC page, extracting candidates for linking using specially tailored regular expressions, and then comparing these candidates to a list of head phrases from the Wikipedia database. Yet another example of how third parties can add value to sites independently of the site owner.
This begs the question of why to restrict this feature to the BBC site. Since proxying the entire web is a bit of an endeavor (if you’re not Google, that is), Stef and I whipped up a Greasemonkey-based implementation that does the term extraction and linking locally on the user’s machine. You still need to check the term candidates against the Wikipedia database, which at 18-odd megabytes would be difficult to shoehorn into a user script. So Stef kindly agreed to subject his server to further pounding by making the term lookup accessible as a web service. The script calls the service asynchronously when a new page is loaded in the browser and adds links to whatever terms are sent back. You can play with the web service directly on the script’s official homepage.
I’ve been surfing with the script turned on for the last couple of days, and I described the effect to Stef as “jump-up-and-down-giggling cool”. What’s interesting is that the information that a term has an entry in Wikipedia is arguably as valuable as the link itself. As I read down a page, I can now note effortlessly which people, places and TLAs have been bestowed with this not insignificant honor. Now if I can just figure out how to get it to link movie names to the IMDB, addresses to Google Maps, foreign terms to a translation dictionary and so forth, then we’ll really be on to something!
Update: Many thanks to Valentin Laube for adding nifty icons to the WikiProxied links!
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