Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

From Ada Lovelace to today, many women have been involved in the development of the internet. Early "computers" were women that did calculations. Later it was women that fed the programs to computers. In the age of the internet, women were very involved in hypertext and social networks. The book touches a few of the key areas of female involvement. The book inadvertently shows how insignificant the female achievements were. There were girl game companies, design houses and other companies that popped out for a bit, but flamed out before making a significant impact. On the academic side, Lovelace was ahead of her time, yet there were limited significant academic advancements. 

The story of hypertext is interesting. The hypertext of the world wide web is an inferior form that lacks many of the strengths of hypertext, yet it is what has caught on. We still deal with "dead links" due to the lack of two-way linkages. Perhaps we just had to have something that was more simple to serve as the base for something broader. Is this part of the challenge of female involvement? Some of the companies like "women portals" had high-brow goals, but ended up going general. The women-centric ended up going out of favor in favor of the more general.

Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back

My how things have changed in a decade. There have been huge changes in the media landscape since Free Ride was written a little over a decade ago. People are now comfortable streaming movies on phones. A computer might as well be a big screen. Paying for multiple streaming services is also the norm. Buying individual movies or songs has become rare. It seems that media producers have gained some ground. However, all is not well in the universe.

The author argues that tech companies have appropriated the "content" that from media companies without proper compensation. This has lead to a tough times for various media companies. The internet has not been the panacea that they hoped for. However, when you dig deeper into the argument, it turns out that people had not previously been paying for the media they desired. There were various forms of cross-subsidies involved. The internet helped unbundle these leaving media producers looking for a source of revenue.

Newspapers are a good example. Papers are sold for cheap (or even given away.) The cost of a newspaper may not even pay for the paper it is printed on. The newspaper provided reporting and content that interested the readers. It also was a medium for selling eyeballs to advertisers. Enter the internet. Now instead of paying the newspaper for a classified ad, you sell your couch on Craigslist. When looking to make a big purchase, you will search company websites instead of going to the newspaper. Display and keyword advertising can also be keyed to your web usage instead of what section of the newspaper you are reading. The revenue source of the newspaper evaporated. People can use Google to go directly to the newspaper article that interests them. It isn't that people are getting for free what they used to pay for. It is that they have never paid for it. The person selling the couch was paying for the reporting. Now they sell the couch for free on Craigslist.

Copyrights in general had been carried away. There is little justification in extending the copyright after the fact. (How does this encourage more creativity in the past?) Other media operations were filled with cross-subsidies. Cable companies forced you to pay for hundreds of channels you don't watch to get the few that you do. You had to pay for a full album of music even if you only wanted a single song. This unbundling requires adaptation. A lot of that adaptation has taken place since the book was written.

Alas, for the consumer things are getting worse. Today there are multiple streaming services. Each has a bundle of changing content. To get the "top hits", you must subscribe to multiple services. This would include a lot you are not interested in. The change away from physical media also eliminates the second hand market. There is no physical copy that you have to sell or give away. This gives producers greater control. It also leaves the black market as the primary way to "pass along" media you enjoy. 

What content should be free? What should be paid for? Did the pre-internet age of fat-cat gatekeepers make sense? Did the Napster free-for all make sense? There were issues with both. I don't think we have stumbled on the best method for encouraging new content and ensuring it is available. Hopefully things will shake out for the better in the next few years.

Next: The Future Just Happened

Next details some of the drastic societal changes caused by the internet. It was written 18 years ago, and thus provides an interesting insight into where we thought things were going. Amazon would continue on its path to dominate retail. Ebay is still around, but it was Craigslist that played a bigger role in sucking the gas out of local newspapers. The financial markets recovered from the dot com bubble, only to hit the housing bubble and now are on their way to the next bubble. Many old school careers have died away. However, there is almost a greater clinging to "credentialism". Lawyers are still needed to perform legal activities, even if most of it can be done by a computer or somebody in India. Doctors still need to prescribe medicine, even if the diagnoses can be found on the internet. However, people are taking much more of this into their own hands.
Privacy is one area where Lewis's trajectory was way off. He saw people willing to give up their privacy for their own benefit or even to be heard. Today, however, things have flipped to an almost polar opposite. People are paranoid about exposing too much, and laws are made to give a great deal more privacy rights.
He did catch on to the corporations co-opting the rebels. Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and SnapChat were nowhere to be found when he wrote this book. However, they are now behemoths in their own right. And they are now heavily utilized by companies as part of their social media strategy. Google had barely been founded when this book was written. Now they are staring down the eyes of regulators. Tech has gone from "upstart" to regulated utility.
The story of media did not follow the expected path, but has actually managed to gain more control, while at the same time losing it. File sharing has faded as people can new just stream music and video. Network, Cable and Satellite television watching has become archaic. There were cord cutters. And now there are just "never had a cord" households. The book details the launch of the DVR with TiVo and ReplayTV. Tivo is still around. However, the set-top box has been adopted by most cable providers. They did help get people accustomed to TV on demand. However, most people took it a step further and just subscribed to Netflix. Today, however, most studios are launching their own streaming services. This fragmentation seems a last-ditch effort that could lead us back to the bad-old days of piracy. Music streaming is fairly available with services like Spotify. Bands don't see much revenue from it. But they rarely did earlier. The book talks about Marillion's direct relationship with their fans. Today, bands need the direct communication to survive.
The book talks about a few "whiz kids" that had run ins with adult society. A teenager made money promoting stocks. Another gave free legal advice. Another helped write computer programs. These still exist. However, they don't make news. Society has almost brushed aside the kids and filled the internet with so much "garbage" that it is hard to find reliable advice outside official channels. Democratization has sewed its own fall.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Is giving away something a valid business model? Chris Anderson attempts to show how "free" business models can work. The book contains a lot of interesting anecdotes, but some of material already seems dated, just six years after the publication. However, the "dated" facts actually serve to help his thesis. Some concerns were echoed about facebook's business model. Wouldn't monetizing cause them to lose the eyeballs they had built up? Apparently not. Facebook has managed to build up an extremely profitable business. Google is still profiting by giving away even more (and selling a little bit.) Freemium models where only a minute percentage of customers pay are working well. Online music streaming services have caught on.

With costs of distribution getting smaller and smaller, it becomes easier to have a distribution model where most people get the digital product for free. Building up a large network of free users can help make a platform viable for paid users. Psychologically, mircropayments have not worked well (since there is a huge cliff between "free" and "pay") However, instead of charging everyone 1 cent, 1 person can be charged a $1 and everyone else can get it free. This allows building a large network or following (which also adds value to those who pay.)

The book is an interesting read, with many ideas that now seem obvious. Free can be a promotional tool as well as a valid business model.

Distrust that Particular Flavor

These writings were primarily Gibson's articles for wired magazine. Many of them were written in the early days of the internet (even including the pre-web days.) He made some interesting observations, some of which seem to have come to fruit. In this selection, we get the raw articles, along with some of some present day commentary looking back at them. In some cases, he admits to getting things totally wrong. In other cases, he confesses to being somewhat of a "luddite" with regards to technology - but that is a good thing.

In addition to technology, there is also a focus on different societies, especially Japanese. Again, with some things he seems to admit to having gotten some things wrong. However, most of the descriptions are his personal feelings about places he likes.

While there are a couple clunkers in here, most of the writings are pretty good. The commentary helps everything to flow together well, making it a nice readable work.

The Future of Us

A girl (Emma) in 1996 gets a new computer. Josh, her next-door neighbor friend brings over an AOL CD and they go on the internet. However, instead of the AOL of that day, they end up seeing her facebook page - 15 years in the future. Every small thing they do can impact their future.

In spite of all the changes she makes, Emma still finds herself in rotten relationships in the future. She attempts to "change" her life to avoid one loser husband or situation, but then simply ends up with another one that is bad in a different way.

Josh, on the other hand, is shown to be married to one of the super-hot girls at school who was thought to be way out of his league. His changes seem to change some of the details of their life together (number of kids, vacation spots, etc.) However, they seem to remain together. With this knowledge in the background, he actually speaks up to defend her in one of their classes. This leads to them actually going out together.

I was hoping that Josh would actually stay with his "future bride". It would make a great story of a boy overcoming his feelings of inferiority to reach his dream situation. The prodding of the future event helps him to accomplish what he may have otherwise thought was impossible.

However, this is a teen book, more likely targeted towards the female audience. So, Josh has to end up with Emma at the end. Sigh. Sappy and not quite as interesting. However, this doesn't happen until the very end. Skip the last chapter and you can picture this better type of ending.

The ending we get is Emma realizing that she must live in the day, rather than trying to needlessly try to optimize some imagined future. The depressed her of the future eventually exits facebook altogether, leaving the her of the present to go on with her life. Some of their friends bring Josh and Emma together to have fun. They realize that they are really meant for each other. (The end of their "relationship" 6 months ago was a mistake. They have had the friendship thing down since grade school. The relationship thing will work out with some more work.)

The concept reminds me of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. If you know a little about the future, that may give you the strength to do what you need to do to make it happen. The book also did a nice job of capturing the spirit of the mid 90s and contrasting that with today. It was a fun read, in spite of the sappy ending.

Filter Bubble

Companies like Google, Facebook, Axiom and Blue Kai know a lot about you. They can use this to taylor websites and advertising to individual users. This can have serious impact on our society.

Huge amounts of information are produced every day. Determining what is relevant is a huge challenge. That is where algorithms come in. Google taylors search results to the individual users. Facebook's news feed is based on what it thinks users are interested in seeing. Advertisers and retailers also customize their online promotions based on what they think users will be interested in seeing. This can cause people to reside in a "bubble" where they only see things that they like. They may not see opposing viewpoints or anything that allows them to think. This is even more worrisome since most of this data filtering is done transparently without users knowing they are living in a bubble. (Perhaps this is a form of "mind control" where the big companies can gradually nudge people in a direction they would like.)

Personalization is treated as a "black box" by most companies. The companies themselves may not even know exactly what results are being returned. They can tweak algorithms based on feedback. However, they probably could not tell exactly what type of results would be returned. The algorithms can use various different data points to personalize. Thus, even if a user is not logged on, their location, computer or web browser could identify them and provide personalized results.

This book rambles on to sound the alarm against "filter bubbles" that allow individuals to live in their isolated worlds filtered to provide what they want. This will keep out information from opposing viewpoints. It will also tend to stock them up with the most "sensational" junk-food content rather than the "good for you content." This could result in a dumbing down of society as people don't work their brains to get around new thoughts. Also, it can make it more difficult for new thoughts and media to get out there. (Since discovery is often based on "likes", only things most like what already exist will tend to get more exposure. Thus, even though it is theoretically easier for new things to be discovered, it is actually much more difficult to find innovation.

The filter bubble is often transparent to users, and can gradually steer content to more extreme viewpoints. This can lead to highly cantankerous partisan discussions. (Since each side is not exposed to the opposing view, they not even understand how others can feel that way.) Even worse, people wont realize they are living in the filter bubble and assume that everybody else is receiving the same information. Discovering "new" ideas can actually be more difficult than it was in the days when everybody was force-fed the same broadcasts.

I was expecting this book to be a discussion of the difficulty we have today of "filtering" through all the information out there. Instead, it focussed on the danger of a personalized web. The two are tightly related. However, this book seemed to spend a lot of time rambling from bullet point to bullet point. It contained plenty of good ideas, but the connections where not very strong.

The amount of information out there is enormous. Discovering useful information is becoming more and more difficult. The quantity of "junk" out there seems to be growing at a faster rate than the amount of useful data. Fifteen years ago, it was easy to put a website out there and get visitors interested in the content. You might get a few random spammers or bots, but most traffic was legitimate. Similarly, if you wanted to search for something, you could use one of the numerous search engines and find relevant sites. The search results may contain a bunch of sites that you were not interested in, but this was more a result of bad algorithms than bad sites.

Today, however, there is so much junk out there. You may have to wade through numerous spam and junk sites to get to the site you want. People are much less likely to find a site that somebody just put up. I see more traffic on this blog than on my proto-blog from 1996. However, the quality of traffic seems to be much worse (at least judging from the ratio of real comments to spam comments.) It is harder to discover quality new content. And it is harder for quality new content to be discovered.

I find myself spending more time on "established" sites. They may occasionally guide me to independent sites. However, they are more likely to simply direct to other well-known commercial sites. With so much information out there, curation has to be done somewhere. I don't have the time to do it (or even to create an algorithm to do it.) I'm dependent on somebody to do it for me. Since this is a huge undertaking, these "somebodies" will likely be large corporations that need to earn money. Since I am cheep, putting up with advertising is my most likely "payment". This puts me in a position vulnerable to being influenced by whatever the corporation or the advertisers desire. (Ironically, at the same time the internet is giving away unlimited content for the price of advertising, broadcast media has become more reliant on "subscriber fees" as part of its business model.) Thus, we become subject to whatever whims the big algorithms have. Is this really much different from being beholden to the broadcaster's desires? At least with the broadcasters, we were likely to find something new we liked. With personalization we can find ourselves further ghettoized. (I'm often finding that problem with online radio. I can create a station that plays songs I like within a very narrowly defined range. However, I get sick of the same type of music and want more variety. However, it is difficult to get variety without a bunch of junk. I'd almost prefer to have a DJ picking the music for me.) I still haven't found a recommendation engine that does a really good job. With the glut of information out there, one of the big challenge is filtering the unique from the derivative. Perhaps now is the time to reinvent the web.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

The title "tubes" comes from a quote from the late Senator Ted Stevens who described the internet as "a bunch of tubes." In this book Andrew Blum travels the world to see the physical structures that make up our modern internet.

He starts with the story of his local internet going down because of a squirrel chewing on cables. He then goes on to describe the structure of the internet. He sees the massive switching centers, undersea cables and even data centers. The "last mile" connections from the fiber to the individual cable-modem was harder to come by, but he was able to end with some basic details of how the network finally reached his house.

The concept of peering was interesting. The internet is made up of a number of different networks. These networks all operate on their own. They must be joined somewhere to the outside world. Often this linkage will be in a big city, so you might have all traffic between two networks in Minnesota routed through Chicago. This networks may later decide to link themselves, allowing traffic to pass directly between them.

The internet is also highly redundant and decentralized. There are multiple paths to reach most destinations. This paths are typically not contained in a central location, but instead contained in individual routers. The global backbones help provide fiber-optic cable to the world.

The book was an eye-opener in the physical world of the internet. The one open question that I had was "who gets paid and who does the paying?"

Planet Google

[September 2009] If you want to know the origins of many of the Google features popular today, this is the book to read. If you are looking for a behind the scenes look at the people and personalities behind the company, this book is probably not for you. The author is clearly an outsider who knows a lot of the details of the company, but not much more than anybody who had dedicated time to studying it. There is very little intimacy with the Google founders or key players. However, the details of the different 'business ventures' of Google provide an effective 'behind the scenes' view of what Google was thinking when rolling out features like mail, and why it had to buy Youtube after being beat out in video.

Click

The author presents a number of analyses on people's behavior from his work at the web research firm Hitwise. Being that it focuses on the internet, some of the observations already seem stale (Myspace?), however, it is still interesting.

One of the main premises is that more accurate data can be found by actually looking at people's web traffic behavior than by asking them questions. People are more likely to engage in cognitive dissidence when responding to surveys, giving answers that they think people want to here. Their actual web traffic, however, shows what they are really interested in.

While this can provide interesting looks in to modern social behavior, understanding it can often require filtering through noise. (An example given was predicting the results of a popular vote reality show - the most searched person would be expected to win - except when the searches appear from external sources.) There are interesting results that can be obtained from these results, however, like other tools, we still must work to ensure that we are properly analyzing and interpreting the results.

iPod touch

I've had a 1st generation iPod touch for almost two years, so I guess its time to write about it. I'm not sure I would have chosen to buy it on my own. However, how was I to resist when I won it? (I actually had the choice between an iPhone and a touch. Since the iPhone would set me back at least $1440 in monthly costs, I opted for the touch.)

How is it? Well, as an mp3 player, it gets mediocre marks. Trying to quickly pause it can be a pain. First you have to push a button, then move your hand across a slider, and then locate the pause button. The last part can actually be a challenge. One 'feature' of the touch is the ability to 'rotate' the screen. On the music player, the rotated displays have different sets of options in different positions. Thus, the pause control will be in a different place depending on the rotation. Unfortunately, it is not all that great at identifying which way it is rotated. (Sometimes I have to shake it around to get it to really recognize the display.) Thus, pausing can be a challenge.

The other issue with the touch screen is that it requires human skin. Thus, in addition to the three step pause process, you also need to bear some skin. Even in Cupertino, people occasionally wear gloves. On the bright side, I have a glove with a hole in the finger that has suddenly found a new use with the iPod. I've also even been successful at using my nose.

The iPhone OS 3.0 brings in two new issues to the iPod touch as an MP3 player. The first general issue is that it has to spend time "rebuilding the library" after every time you add new songs. This can take in excess of 10 minutes, and seems to stop if you hit the 'screen off' button at the top of the iPod. Just when you get in the mood to listen to some tunes or audiobooks, it hits you with that. Ugghh.

The other new annoyance is the 'unsorting' of smart playlists. Regardless of what steps you go through, it will display the contents of automatically updating smart playlist in a random order. I like to listen to audiobooks that I set up as smart playlists. The major advantage of the smart playlists (before theupgrade) was that old tracks would go off the list after they were played, and I could easily go to the last track I was on, even if I listened to something else in between. With the upgrade, the smart playlists are in random order. You can go to a secondary 'album' display and see the playlist in the correct order. However, you have to make sure it is playing here, otherwise, you may get some random surprises. Also, the secondary display does not 'drop' tracks that have been played, so it can be a challenge to find where you left off. (There is one nice new feature in the 3.0 OS in that it remembers what you were listening to after syncing.)

These issues made me really wonder why I bothered to upgrade, especially since Apple likes to charge for the upgrades. However, on the bright side, the iPod does not seem to crash anymore. (I seemed to be getting ever-increasing 'reboots' with the previous 1.x OS.) Also, Apple gradually had been reducing the price of the upgrades, with the 3.x upgrade going for only $5. Since I had $9 left on an iTunes gift card, I thought I'd give it a shot, in hopes of reducing crashes (and getting apps.) The upgrade had its own issues, some of which I've described in my
adventures in extracting notes.db backups.

Music-wise, the one additional feature with the 3.X OS is the ability to quickly create 'on-the-fly' genius mixes from a given song. This can sometimes come in handy when you are in the mood for a certain musical fix, but haven't created a playlist for it.

What about as a PDA? Well, the iPod touch does have wireless access. The mail application is good (and even allows downloading yahoo mail.) The Safari web browser allows surfing regular web sites - as long as they don't use flash. Some youtube videos can also be watched through a tool. A big problem is the lack of a flash plugin. Apple seems to be against it, so it probably wont happen soon. Typing is not that bad, but not that great. It would be nice if you could use a stylus. However, you can get a pretty decent 'blackberry' like thumbing on the touch screen. Wifi does seem to be a bigger drain on batteries, so I often turn it off if I don't need it.

Apps? There are a huge number of apps in the app store. However, finding worthwhile ones can be a challenge. I've found some language study and ebook applications that are worthwhile. However, I tend to use the 'notes' application for jotting down notes more often than other applications. Many of the apps I've found would clearly go in the 'junk' category.

Video watching is ok. However, it really only works for shorts. (It gets annoying holding up a small screen with headphones for long shows.) Video also seems to drain the battery fairly fast.

Battery-life in general is quite good. Even after nearly two years it seems to work fairly well.

Overall, its a halfway-decent mp3 player combined with a halfway-decent PDA.

Is the internet making us dumb?

I stumbled across this article in the Atlantic monthly (ironically, while googling something totally different.) The author notes that the ability of so much data online allows us to get information quickly, greatly reducing what were once long hours in the library. However, in the process, we have lost some of the ability to concentrate in deep thoughts and long text.
It was funny, that I even found the article itself to be much longer than a typical internet read. It sounds like he is right on. Google is in fact making us stupid - while at the same time augmenting our intelligence in other areas, just as writing and publishing have done earlier.
The scariest part about this is the strong interdependence. With more and more dependent on the net, we find it difficult to function without it. I've seen an office pretty much shut down when the internet connection goes down. What work can you do without the net? I remember 10 years ago finding it a real challenge to work when the company had blocked outgoing internet connections. And that was back when offices were not nearly so net-dependent. Attempts to serve as a company gatekeepers can be a challenge both to productivity and morale. But, the lack of connectivity can be devastating. And even more worrisome is the central 'google' gatekeeper. It seems search results have been getting worse - probably as a result of more junk out there. But other times, the junk filtering eliminates the valuable results that you are in fact looking for. Will we one day have a great index tied in to our brains? By that time the computers may just decide they've had enough of this 'slavery'...