When I’ve got nothing better to do with my time I’m going to start a project to document all the stuff that our modern generations (me included) are forgetting about how to live without technology.

While down in North Carolina I spent a fair amount of time talking to a really interesting older man who is ridiculously smart in practical matters, like how to stay alive matters. I could do pretty well (certainly far better than most I’d wager) if I was dropped in the middle of the wilderness, or if robots destroyed civilization, but I’d have some issues. This guy would have no issue whatsoever because he can do or make whatever it is he wants to use from scratch anyway, so modern conveniences simply save him time rather than make available things he’d have had no idea how to get or make.

It struck me as interesting that, in the span of two generations, our society has mostly forgotten how to survive outside of itself. If people had to build their own homes most would get crushed by their creations. If people couldn’t get pickles or sauerkraut at the grocery store they would just stop eating them rather than making them themselves. If people couldn’t get their tanks filled at the gas station they have no way of moving around.

Not this guy. He pretty much can, and has, made anything and everything necessary to support a high quality of life with or without civilization to back him up.

Let me make clear that I’m not a survivalist nut job who thinks that I need to learn basic skills in order to be able to escape to the hills when the UN takes over America and puts Iran “peacekeepers” in downtown NY city. Rather, I think it’s an interesting juxtaposition that our society, while becoming more comfortable and prosperous has simultaneously become more fragile and ignorant in certain matters.

How many of you could even differentiate an oak from a maple from a birch? How about how to make something edible from acorns (careful, they’re poisonous without special preparation)?

I spent some time in North Carolina last week - no Internet or phone, but I’m back now.

If Xerox is targeting government, then this technology could have some interesting potential. Freedom of Information Act requests just got a whole lot easier to comply with while being simultaneously less helpful.

Not quite, really, as electronic records and the means to reveal hidden data are also subject to FOIA requests. But still, the government produces a lot of material that doesn’t necessarily have to be kept “for record” and this might be just the thing to make all non-record publication that much more confidential. Not that I approve of the government having more ways on hand to deceive the citizenry, but…

Xerox announced some pretty interesting new technology yesterday, and it makes me sad to know that this will go nowhere.

Basically what they’ve got is an ink that disappears after a certain amount of time, giving paper the ability to be re-used. “How cool,” I thought to myself, having long been a double-printer of documents (email on one side and fax coversheet on the other, for example).

But then it occurred to me that in order to realize any benefit from this technology people will have to 1) change the way they use paper and 2) adopt and purchase a new infrastructure. Getting companies to change their infrastructure and work practices is difficult at best - high-priced consultants get called in to do this all the time and fail as often as not.

So, without any evidence or statistics or anything to back myself up I hereby declare that Xerox, in pursuing this technology, has created something cool that nobody will ever use, ever.

Users of Digg may or may not recall the phenomenon of “Karma Whoring” that threatened Slashdot years ago. In brief, a certain subset of Slashdot users were essentially spamming the site to get “karma”, a (limited) form of social recognition on Slashdot. Slashdot responded, eventually, by introducing arbitrary limits to the amount of karma any user could receive, both in total and for a single comment or other contribution. In changing Slashdot’s community dynamic, the site angered and alienated many of the users who had spent lots of time building up legitimate karma, arguing that they were being lumped in with others whose contributions were of a low general quality. I had forgotten all about that piece of history until the current top-user behavior “crisis” hit Digg recently. Techcrunch has a good wrap-up of the issue that you should read if you’re unaware of what’s going on with Digg these days.

I have three thoughts regarding all this.

1. Social web sites, gasp, resemble society!

The main complaint of those who are crying foul over this latest issue cite a “top-30 cabal” as being destructively influential to the site. Who is shocked by this? Why are so many people amazed to find out that certain elite users would (whether by malice or not) associate with other elite users? That these users’ contributions and “diggs” would count for more than those of the unwashed masses is a feature uf Digg and isn’t their fault.

Cliques form, online and in life. People who are upset by this are out of touch with reality. Digg made a choice in making their weighting algorithm, and the results speak for themselves - it’s not the concern of the top users to moderate themselves to meet the desires of others whose feelings are hurt because their stories didn’t make the front page.

Anyway, if cabals are so powerful in Digg, why aren’t we seeing “top 31-60″ cabals and “top 61-90″ cabals? It would be interesting to see if these partitions start to form as a response to the influence of the top diggers.

2. Digg needs to learn lessons from those who have been there before.

Kevin Rose was inspired by Slashdot and was doubtlessly aware of many of the emergent social phenomena that have been featured on Slashdot over the years. It therefore makes me wonder why certain of the lessons that Slashdot learned very publicly many years ago are being re-learned by Rose and Co. today. Users have suggested fixes to address many of the Digg issues, and unsurprisingly many of them reflect the current state of Slashdot. I understand that learning from personal experience can be very rewarding, but the Digg crew needs to be sharper than this if they really expect to stay ahead of the competition.

Speaking of staying ahead of the competition, it is interesting to look back in hindsight now and see the actions of Netscape’s Calacanis in the present light. Calacanis sought to draw top submitters from Digg to Netscape’s clone site by actually paying them (Revolting! How dare he try to compensate people for doing work!). However, given what is now known about how some of the submitters may have gained their top perch, it might seem that Calacanis could have been better off going in another direction, because…

3. Influential top users aren’t a good thing.

The Techcrunch article makes an excellent point that is this - if site content is generated by a few rather than by the many, what’s to differentiate Digg from the New York Times? Users in effect are simply trading one group of editors (professional) for another (amateur).

Digg is/was differentiated because of the range and volume of content submitted. Anecdotally, I’ve witnessed Digg being transformed into another form of RSS aggregator as top diggers simply post forwards to top blogs and sites like Techcrunch and Wired. This prevents lots of content that is interesting or more difficult to uncover from rising out of the noise, as the weight of the cabal overwhelms the lesser contributors.

So, despite all the huge volume of work being done by many of the top diggers, in reality their efforts are counter to the public interest. By carrying “weight” in their efforts, they have become a force to skew Digg, and that’s not Digg.

So what’s the thing for Digg to do? Digg doesn’t need to topple the top users, but they definately should make it so that the voice of the top users don’t carry any more weight than any body else. Digg has grown enough, has a large enough base now, that there is no longer any benefit in that practice.

The top contributors will still remain the top contributors due simply to the fact that they submit whole raft-loads of content. Their “promoted” ratios will fall, though, and this will be good for everybody.

I do a fair amount of random poking around on Wikipedia. I forget how I came to this, but I ended up on Valerie Solanas, Situationism and most interestingly, Alternative Society.

I’m conservative. I think radical feminists like Valerie Solanas are destructive to society, and not in a good way (meaning they seek only to destroy and have little to offer, rather than destroying with the aim of rebuilding something superior in its place). I think counter-culture movements like Situationism, Anarcho-communism, Leftism and the associated bits are similarly non-productive/-effective/-reasonable/-helpful.

So I found it interesting that I identified with some of the ideas of Alernative Society. Specifically, rather than trying to destroy something to build something else in its place, AS seeks to provide viable, working alternative to a system that draws people to it. Think about it as the new idea wins the popularity contest.

I grant that AS is a bit unworkable in certain situations, but America is an open and free enough society that, rather than seeking revolutionary progress, anybody should be able to communicate and further their ideas and goals through AS (if they’re good ideas). I’d like to pursue this topic further, to see what’s been done, and to explore what might be the natural limitations of this form of activism.

Today saw the release of an updated line of iMacs from Apple. This update expands the iMac line in both directions, going both toward the low end as well as the high end.

In releasing the new 24″ iMac Apple has filled the space between the iMac line and the Mac Pro line. What puzzles me, however, is what the expansion toward the low end (in the form of the $1000 17″ iMac) does for Apple, as the new iMac encroaches on the Mac mini line. Specifically, only $200 separate the high-end mini from the low-end iMac, and while it’s true that the iMac actually has weaker stats in some areas than the mini (specifically in the optical drive), you get a nice wide-screen 17″ display, faster and larger HDD, keyboard and mouse, iSight camera and significantly more powerful Inter Core 2 Duo (as opposed to Core Duo in the mini) processor in the iMac.

So what this is resulting in, for me, is a little confusion about what Apple is intending to do with their mini. It seems that the current price of the computer makes it unattractive in relation to the iMac. If Apple doesn’t come out with a significant price reduction or feature increase for the mini, Apple will have itself to blame for turning the mini into a dog.

This confusion about product specs and led me to reflect back on my thoughts on creating a new hardware paradigm/platform (ref. Utopian View (of Hardware)). I’d like to think that, under a sufficiently elevated model, products could be intelligently designed and promoted in such a way as to make understanding them simple and free of drama. Maybe that’s naive.