stevenberlinjohnson.com

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It's that time of year: happy Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Chanukah, Festivus, Boxing Day, etc...

I thought this might be a good time to say thanks to all of you for stopping by over the past two months or so. This little blog has been one of the best parts of 2002 for me, and I hope it'll just keep growing in 2003. We've averaged around 1,000 visitors a day, with almost every post from me generating interesting comments and followup conversations. It's also been a great stimulus for me, working out new ideas in this public space -- I've actually been about twice as productive as normal since I started maintaining the blog. The more I keep at it, the more it seems to me like a kind of intellectual version of going to the gym: having to post responses and ideas on a semi-regular basis, and having those ideas sharpened or shot down by such smart people, flexes the thinking/writing muscles in a great way. It's the most fun I've had on the web since we started FEED seven years ago...

In the next few months, I'm going to try to experiment a little with the blog format, both by offering some new tools I've been collaborating on, and by trying to open up the book-writing process a little more. (Are you guys ready to be a focus group?) It should be an interesting process, and worth staying tuned for. In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the holidays, and keep in touch.

Blogs and the short block

Jason Kottke posts about the virtues of short blocks, which he's noticing with fresh eyes now that he's relocated to the West Village. (Welcome, Jason!) Jane Jacobs talks about this in Death and Life: why the tighter, short-block grid is preferable to the looser grid with long stretches between intersections. It's one of the gems from that book that I didn't address in Emergence, but I've talked about it in a couple of speeches, including one at O'Reilly's Emerging Tech conference last May. Jason and I were emailing about the idea -- and how it potentially connected to the web, and the blogosphere -- and I realized that I'd never published anything about short blocks. (As far as I can remember.)

I think there is a useful connection to be made here. The power of short blocks is ultimately that they create a more even density in the city fabric: because short blocks offer more potential routes from x to y, they diversify the flow of pedestrian traffic through the city. In the long blocks model, pedestrians are funneled onto a few primary pathways, which quickly become over-crowded. With short blocks, they spread out through the entire street system. So you get some people on every street, unlike the long blocks model, which puts all the people on some streets, and no people on other streets. In the long blocks model, you get Times Square interspersed with desolate stretches; in the short blocks model you get the West Village: a bar or restaurant on every corner, a few interesting boutiques or bookstores in between, an interesting mix on the sidewalk, but never so much that you feel crowded out.

If you translate all this over to the Web, it seems to me that the blogosphere is the closest thing going to the short blocks neighborhood: the population density is not nearly as oppressive as what you find on the major sites (much less old media networks.) But it's not as atomized as the world of IM. Short blocks is 50 people on the sidewalk at any given time, instead of 5 or 500. The blogosphere is 50 people on the site at any given time, instead of 5 or 5 million. (Which reminds me of Dave Weinberger's line: "On the internet, everyone is famous to 15 people.") That's a very human scale, I think -- it opens you up to new perspectives, but doesn't overwhelm you at the same time.

The other two towers

Jeff Jarvis was a lot closer to ground zero than I was on 9/11, and ever since he's been one of the most passionate and articulate writers about that day and its aftermath, but I think he's partly wrong about the new designs for the WTC site. To my eye, they are a vast improvement over the first rendition, and while they certainly have a "master architect" show-off vibe to them, I think a certain amount of that is appropriate at this point, particularly after the office park mediocrity of the first go round.

The day after they fell, I found myself thinking two thoughts about what should replace them. First, we needed something just as tall, to restore the skyline. Second, what we built shouldn't have many people in it -- maybe just an observation deck. The Eiffel Tower came to mind as a good model. That's why I'm particularly drawn to the THINK design, which features two gleaming wireframe towers that are largely empty. (Their slideshow specifically references the Eiffel Tower.) Jeff's right that some of the other designs look dangerously unstable. Building something that causes visitors to say, "I can't believe that thing is still standing!" isn't exactly appropriate for this setting. Plus, there are the economic ramifications of building something that daring: no one -- seriously, no one -- is going to happily head off to work in a leaning twin tower.

Only connect

Here's a project for the LazyWeb: the three programs that I use most for text processing (Word, Entourage, and text input fields in my browser, which is currently Chimera) are all weak-to-useless when it comes to adding ordinary links to text. Most of the time, I find myself switching windows, selecting a URL, copying it to the clipboard, switching back to my document, and then typing out the href tag and pasting in the URL. 99% of the time, I'm pointing to a URL that I've visited in the last thirty minutes.

So what I'd love to see is a little service, like CopyPaste, available to any application, that keeps track of the last 25 URLs you've visited. Anytime you're working with text in any application, you select a string of words, hit a special key combination, and a list of recent URLs appears. Select one, and it automatically formats your HTML link for you. I'd use that service dozens of times a day. Maybe there's something out there that will do this already?

Query Of The Year

No one loves the annual Google Zeitgeist ritual more than I do, but it has been getting raves everywhere, so I thought I'd just register a few objections.

1. The timeline looks nice, but almost all the graphs tell the same story: when some news event happens, people search on the keywords involved in the news. No way! Pim Fortuyn dies, suddenly there are lots of requests for Pim Fortuyn. Flip through the timeline and ask yourself: how many of these charts tell you something you didn't know already?

2. Where's the porn? Are the top requests really that clean? There's not a porn search anywhere (except Anna Kournikova, of course.)

3. Scooby Doo is number 5 on the top movie chart, and Lord Of The Rings is number 10. Surely this is a typo. I have to believe this is a typo.

Of course, the great thing about Google these days is that with the release of the Google APIs, we might well see dozens of comparable year-end portraits for 2003, collated by Googlewatchers all over the web. Let a thousand Zeitgeists bloom!

Bloggers Versus Lott

Sometime on Monday, as it started to look at though the media was going to give Trent Lott a free pass for bemoaning the good old days of segregation, I found myself thinking how incredible it was that when Gore made his "no controlling authority" speech, the phrase was covered and mocked relentlessly -- all because it supposedly revealed something Clintonesque about Gore's handing of the controversy, in that he resorted to wonky legalese in defending his campaign calls.

But here we have the Senate Majority Leader making it clear, once again, that he thinks the civil rights movement was a big waste of time, and the lede doesn't just get buried, it never even makes it into a story. So being lawyerly gets you pilloried everywhere, but being a racist gets you a free pass.

Of course, he's no longer getting that pass, thanks almost entirely to the blogosphere (to Andrew, Joe, Virginia, Josh, Mickey, Glenn, et al.) I think the last few days have been a great example of what political blogging is capable of: not breaking new stories, but keeping stories alive that the mainstream press, for whatever reason, decides to ignore. It's like a journalistic flotation device: the blogosphere can pump air back into a story that's starting to sink, and when it bobs back up to the surface again, big media has to pay attention. If Lott actually ends up stepping down over this, it will be a watershed event for bloggers everywhere.

Update, 12/11 8:07 PM: Jeff Jarvis asks a typically astute question: "I haven't yet seen where this crossed the bloodstream: Where do we see that blogs had an influence on the press and influenced them to get back on the story? I'm not questioning that it happened; I'm just looking for the specific proof, for that makes for much stronger bragging." The Kurtz story linked to above was one crossover point, I'd say. Someone could probably do an interesting Blogdex vs. Lexis/Nexis comparison watching the story percolate up from the blogs to traditional media outlets...

Apple makes a more complicated interface. On purpose.

I've got a new piece up on Slate today, about Apple's iApps, Microsoft's Longhorn (the rumored next generation OS), and the issue of interface uniformity. It's basically making the argument that by bundling applications like iPhoto and iTunes with the Mac OS, Apple is implicitly making the argument that the "one interface fits all" model doesn't work for organizing some types of data. In other words, once you've organized your music collection with iTunes, or your photos with iPhoto, you'll never go back to organizing them via the Finder again. So it becomes a swiss-army-knife approach to file management, rather than a one-tool-fits-all. Interestingly, Microsoft seems to be going in the opposite direction, at least with its desktop interfaces. (The Media Center interface, designed to be manipulated by a remote control, is another matter.)

One interesting analogy here, which I'd originally included in the piece, is the way this struggle mirrors debates about the brain: is the brain a swiss-army-knife of specialized modules, or is it more of a general intelligence? The evidence right now certainly makes it seem like evolution selected the modular approach. It will be interesting to see if our interfaces follow a comparable path.

This year's model

A little while ago, when Nick Denton first started talking to me about his ideas for weblog-based businesses, I tried unsuccessfully to persuade him that there was an interesting subscription-based service that would basically offer an integrated package of all the cool blogosphere/web services/google mini-apps. For a few bucks a month you'd get access to the latest data-mining tools, and have someone crunching all the data for topics that you were interested in, notifying you if anything new came along. I imagined it as a company with basically one super-smart coder as the primary employee, with a few others tossing in ideas part-time. Wouldn't make a fortune for anyone, but it might be sustainable.

I don't think I did a very good job of persuading Nick, alas. (Probably for good reason.) But I'm very intrigued by Technorati, which seems to have at least a few of the elements that I imagined, and which sports a subscription service right out of the gate. The watchlist feature is the most intriguing thus far, though I suspect there's even more in the works...

Panopticon R Us

Some critics of my Wired piece on the "urban atomic wall" thought that the idea of distributing radiation sensors in urban areas was technically far-fetched. But apparently they're working already, at least according to this story in the NY Times:

In both cases, the people involved had been treated with radioactive materials. And in both cases, doctors said, they were stopped by law enforcement officers armed with radiation detectors used to track possible terrorists.
Such reports are flowing into doctors' offices, physicians in the metropolitan region and elsewhere say.

I'd talked a little in the Wired story about how people undergoing radiation treatment would set off these alarms, and the piece itself ends with an enigmatic line from Brookhaven's Ralph James, saying that "sensors have already been deployed in Washington and New York." Living only about twenty blocks from Penn Station, I found this new report distinctly comforting. As a society, I think we can probably tolerate a few privacy invasions of people emitting gamma rays, if it keeps nuclear terror away from our cities.

On the glass-half-empty side, the Total Information Awareness thing (could they have come up with a creepier title?) definitely has me flushing my browser cache nightly. Kudos to Salon, for an excellent assessment of the comp-sci behind TIA, and to John Gilmore, for some fine flyover shots of John Poindexter's house.

The little things

Shortly after we first published an article on nanotechnology and the "gray goo problem" at FEED, I started to think that there was an interesting Armageddon/Deep Impact-style Hollywood script in the idea: instead of a giant meteor from outer space destroying the planet, you have the planet threatened by tiny machines the size of molecules. I'm sure many people had the same idea, particularly after Bill Joy wrote about "gray goo" in his widely-circulated Wired essay. For the past few years, I've toyed with the idea of how a script like that would work, and what's always interested me was the problem of trying to build an exciting cinematic experience when the villain was thousands of times smaller than a dust particle. It's like trying to film Jaws with a shark the size of a sea monkey.

So I was intrigued when I first heard that Michael Crichton's new book, Prey, revolved around runaway self-reproducing nanomachines. It occurred to me if anyone besides Richard Preston can turn an invisible (and somewhat esoteric) menace into something truly terrifying, it's Crichton. So I picked up a copy at the airport on the way down here (I've been in Florida for the past week with family) and tore through it in about 48 hours. A few observations follow, but no real spoilers...