Robin Good announced today on Twitter the "Real possibility that FriendFeed.com will be shut down for good - Streamy replacing it?" Now I have never been a fan of feeds nor feed aggregators. They always struck me as a kind of extended TV Guide - lots of choice, but little useful information. I am happy to admit, however, that this is a personal foible, and should not be considered, in particular by me, as a fundamental flaw of feeds, feed use or aggregation. However, it is clear that feeds in general have been falling in popularity for some time now, and that new forms of access, sharing and use are arising.
I remember some years ago that there was a flurry of excitement over RSS and ATOM and the possibilities that it offered. I do think that a good history of the direct influence of RSS and ATOM on the rise of social computing has yet to be written, not least in changing the way that information is now accessed on the web (via Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Ning, Bebo, not to mention the rise of blogs). I too was briefly captivated by the possibilities of feeds. I remember a few on-line conversations with Robin Good over the possibilities, all of which were very enlightening as all discussions with Robin are. I quickly realized, though, that what I was working with was a web version of an inventory, and with all of its limitations.
An inventory is useful if you are regularly accessing the same items over and over again, but it is not very useful if you are constantly looking around at different items or your useful items list is constantly changing. What you get with an inventory is a constantly growing list. Like the Library, you get more and more items, but the inventory, so necessary for management, doesn't help much with access. Christine Borgman has made this point many times over the years, as have I on this blog. Inventories are useful for managing resources, but people find things through different means. For books this has always meant finding what you need through bibliographies, indexes, word of mouth, etc., and then going to the inventory to find out where the book actually is kept.
But the limitations of feeds on their own was realized fairly quickly and we saw the rise of aggregators. There was a realization that if it was too difficult to run around the web, from feed to feed, searching for what you were interested in, what you wanted to access, and what you had accessed before, was just too complicated. What was needed was a place where all of your feed needs would be waiting for you. The problem is that aggregators always reminded me of the early Sears Roebuck Catalogue. When, in the United States, the consumers were all too dispersed and distant to come to the store, Sears Roebuck brought the aggregation of the department store to them. Of course there were others who had the idea earlier. Hammacher Schlemmer was sending out its catalogue a good 45 years before Sears Roebuck, and Montgomery Ward had a mail order catalogue 21 years earlier. However, the "Consumer's Bible," as it was often known as, offered everything one needed together in one place. You could get everything you needed from underwear to cars, from kitchen utensils to the house itself.
Like aggregators, catalogues too dominated the consumer's life for some time, but as the society has changed from literate to oral, so consumerism has changed. The catalogue has slowly been replaced over the past 30 years by the Mall. Another aggregate space, but one that is much more social (at least in the US). It is a place not just to shop, but to eat, socialize and share.
Robin Good suggested, today on Twitter, that Streamy was the next big thing after mere aggregators. Perhaps. I have looked at Streamy and it is very impressive, but my feeling is that it is only really impressive if you like malls. Streamy moves beyond the aggregator enabling the accumulation, sharing, commenting and discussion about consumables. I don't always want to be suggesting that the web is mostly a recapitulation of 20th century consumerist culture, but it does seem that the fall of FriendFeed.com, and the rise of Streamy, is not a step forward, but just another recapitulation disguised as an innovation.
12 August 2009
16 June 2009
The Tables and Chairs of Database Origins
A friend was over from the States this weekend. She is the one who invented boundary objects, and she always gets me thinking. She gets me thinking largely because she is so smart, but also because she puts things in a way that gets you thinking. That is a rare gift.
Anyway, I got to thinking about databases. There is so much rubbish written now about databases, both from the techie side - knowledge as semantic first order logics, metalanguages, and meta-descriptions, and from what we could call media anthropology - database as metaphor for social relationships, surrogates for ontologies, etc. I was also reading Lev Manovich's softbook Software Takes Command, where he talks about the early days of Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Nicholas Negroponte and their personal computer as new media. Rather, the personal computer as a universal media machine. What got me thinking was how my friend talked about databases, and how databases are missing from Lev Manovich's book. She talked about them in relation to ever more global indicators, not as mere data repositories. We can talk about how publishing, writing, TV, video, radio, sound, letter writing, the business ledger, etc. etc. have been transformed into software, and how they have been translated, mixed and extended as new media, as Manovich does. But where are databases? I thought that if word processors are the media machine's typewriter and now publisher, if spreadsheets are its ledgers, email its letters, and now we have TV, film, radio and photography on-line, what is the genealogy of the database?
I do realize that the genealogies for all of these systems are complex, and that what is most important is the transformation from media to media machine to integrated new media, but that is not what I am talking about here. What I am talking about here is where is the genealogy for databases, they seem to be the odd one out.
Some histories place the database within the genealogy of information management, within the history of the Archive and the Library. But this can't be right. Databases are not repositories, though they may now function as repositories, but this certainly is not their heritage. Others place it within command and control systems. Though this certainly was the origin of the word itself, from tabulations coordinating command and control systems, this does not seem right either as it is to specific a locale for a genealogy. It is as though we were to say that John Smith was the first to explicitly acknowledge his name, therefore he is the origin of the Smiths.
They genealogy has to lie with tabulation. It has to be found in the 19th century rise of tabulation, census, and indicators, and, technologically, with the tabulation machines (Herman Hollerith's machines, IBM, etc.). Now I don't have the time, or the space, to explore this here. However, what I would like to ask, as a way forward, is "Why has some centralized, imperial and state instrument like tabulation come to be a dominant application on the Web and underlie the functioning of just about everything?"
Anyway, I got to thinking about databases. There is so much rubbish written now about databases, both from the techie side - knowledge as semantic first order logics, metalanguages, and meta-descriptions, and from what we could call media anthropology - database as metaphor for social relationships, surrogates for ontologies, etc. I was also reading Lev Manovich's softbook Software Takes Command, where he talks about the early days of Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Nicholas Negroponte and their personal computer as new media. Rather, the personal computer as a universal media machine. What got me thinking was how my friend talked about databases, and how databases are missing from Lev Manovich's book. She talked about them in relation to ever more global indicators, not as mere data repositories. We can talk about how publishing, writing, TV, video, radio, sound, letter writing, the business ledger, etc. etc. have been transformed into software, and how they have been translated, mixed and extended as new media, as Manovich does. But where are databases? I thought that if word processors are the media machine's typewriter and now publisher, if spreadsheets are its ledgers, email its letters, and now we have TV, film, radio and photography on-line, what is the genealogy of the database?
I do realize that the genealogies for all of these systems are complex, and that what is most important is the transformation from media to media machine to integrated new media, but that is not what I am talking about here. What I am talking about here is where is the genealogy for databases, they seem to be the odd one out.
Some histories place the database within the genealogy of information management, within the history of the Archive and the Library. But this can't be right. Databases are not repositories, though they may now function as repositories, but this certainly is not their heritage. Others place it within command and control systems. Though this certainly was the origin of the word itself, from tabulations coordinating command and control systems, this does not seem right either as it is to specific a locale for a genealogy. It is as though we were to say that John Smith was the first to explicitly acknowledge his name, therefore he is the origin of the Smiths.
They genealogy has to lie with tabulation. It has to be found in the 19th century rise of tabulation, census, and indicators, and, technologically, with the tabulation machines (Herman Hollerith's machines, IBM, etc.). Now I don't have the time, or the space, to explore this here. However, what I would like to ask, as a way forward, is "Why has some centralized, imperial and state instrument like tabulation come to be a dominant application on the Web and underlie the functioning of just about everything?"
22 May 2009
You want that wrapped or just in a bag?
Kevin Marks' blogged a year ago in An API is a bespoke suit, a standard is a t-shirt, that the problem with an API is that it:
It is true that APIs are "tailored" in the sense that Kevin Marks says, and this is a major drawback. However, there are further problems with standards that far outstretch this tailored inconvenience.
First of all, Standard APIs simply move the tailoring from the API to the wrapper. Fine, you no longer have to tailor your code to all those APIs, but every publisher has to tailor a wrapper.
Second, why do we think that tailoring is such a bad thing? The assumption here, and I hope I am not reading too much into Kevin Marks' statements, is that what we want is nice simple and standardised information. Well, the whole social web thing seems to disprove this. The power of the web is in the diversity, complexity and, yes, even the messiness.
To push this metaphor in a different direction, the problem is that all we seem to be able to find in the shops now are racks and racks of sub-standard (pardon the pun) t-Shirts. What we really would like are some choices, not racks of the same things, no matter how many amusing slogans are printed onto them.
If I could push the metaphor in yet another direction, t-shirts, no matter how convenient, simple and comfortable, are simply not appropriate attire for many social settings. I do not simply mean here that we should not wear t-shirts to weddings or the opera (this is admittedly a matter of debate), but that for many cultures t-shirts are not acceptable attire period. Are we all expected to dress, or share and transform API data, in the same way?
The problems with standards in general, and such content transforming standards in particular, is that they have to take a single view of the world for granted. This may be conceptually trivial as in cases of transport standards such as TCP/IP where its world is the world of distributed servers. But the Web is not a world of information, but is a world of discussion, translation, use, sharing, conversation, performance, selling, etc., etc., etc.
Kevin Marks is right that APIs also over determine what they see as useful in their data. In part, I don't see this as a necessarily bad thing as each API reflects a context for the information as well as the information. However, a far more simple solution, than the mass produced t-shirt, would be something like Jeff Lindsay's webhooks. Rather than a commodity metaphor, Jeff's webhooks are more like recycling. Rather than sending out racks of t-shirts, webhooks would be more like this:
is like being a bespoke tailor - you have to measure them carefully, and cut your code exactly right to fit in with their shapes, and the effort is the same for every site you have to deal with (you get more skilled at it over time, but it is a craft nonetheless). (1)Alternately, he sees Standards, like HTML5, OpenID, OAuth or OpenSocial, to be like "like designing a t-shirt".
when a site adopts a standard format for expressing their data, or how to interact with it, you can put your code together once, try it out on some conformance tests, and be sure it will work across a wide range of different sites. (2)Today he Tweeted that he wanted to know if this metaphor made sense. I thought I would do a @ back, but then thought that this deserved more discussion. So here is a bit of a response to Kevin (albeit unsolicited).
It is true that APIs are "tailored" in the sense that Kevin Marks says, and this is a major drawback. However, there are further problems with standards that far outstretch this tailored inconvenience.
First of all, Standard APIs simply move the tailoring from the API to the wrapper. Fine, you no longer have to tailor your code to all those APIs, but every publisher has to tailor a wrapper.
Second, why do we think that tailoring is such a bad thing? The assumption here, and I hope I am not reading too much into Kevin Marks' statements, is that what we want is nice simple and standardised information. Well, the whole social web thing seems to disprove this. The power of the web is in the diversity, complexity and, yes, even the messiness.
To push this metaphor in a different direction, the problem is that all we seem to be able to find in the shops now are racks and racks of sub-standard (pardon the pun) t-Shirts. What we really would like are some choices, not racks of the same things, no matter how many amusing slogans are printed onto them.
If I could push the metaphor in yet another direction, t-shirts, no matter how convenient, simple and comfortable, are simply not appropriate attire for many social settings. I do not simply mean here that we should not wear t-shirts to weddings or the opera (this is admittedly a matter of debate), but that for many cultures t-shirts are not acceptable attire period. Are we all expected to dress, or share and transform API data, in the same way?
The problems with standards in general, and such content transforming standards in particular, is that they have to take a single view of the world for granted. This may be conceptually trivial as in cases of transport standards such as TCP/IP where its world is the world of distributed servers. But the Web is not a world of information, but is a world of discussion, translation, use, sharing, conversation, performance, selling, etc., etc., etc.
Kevin Marks is right that APIs also over determine what they see as useful in their data. In part, I don't see this as a necessarily bad thing as each API reflects a context for the information as well as the information. However, a far more simple solution, than the mass produced t-shirt, would be something like Jeff Lindsay's webhooks. Rather than a commodity metaphor, Jeff's webhooks are more like recycling. Rather than sending out racks of t-shirts, webhooks would be more like this:
"Here is some old plastic that we collected."Mass production or sustainability. I suppose that is the question. Is it better to take our information and let people re-use it, in whole new ways, or to broadcast out our information in increasingly narrow channels? I would chose the former in both cases.
"Ok, crunch it up and send it over."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"That's none of your business. However, we are going to transform it into a whole new set of things."
06 April 2009
The PUSH and PULL Museum - Jeff Lindsay's WebHooks
Jeff Lindsay, or NASA Ames Labs and general WebHooks guru, gave a presentation back in February at Google about WebHooks. WebHooks are a very simple idea, a RESTful POST and PULL system for a programmable Web. The idea of WebHooks is simple, make it so that Web users can set a condition when met on your system through an update or commit will send your information to a URL. That is pretty much it. However, the point, and its implications, goes much deeper than this.
First of all, as Jeff Lindsay, and Kurt Cagle at O'Reilly, point out, WebHooks are really much more revolutionary than they seem at first sight. In the current world of the interactive Web, even Web 2.0, it is largely a PUSH, or some might say POST, world. Users access our web pages, ask for resources which are broadcast on other web pages. Now, as Web 2.0 and Social Computing have shown, there is a lot of potential in this model. Especially with the addition of Mashups, APIs and AJAX. However, what this model is lacking, according to Lindsay, is the a real programmable web. As Jeff Lindsay says, this time as progrium:
Obviously licenses will have to be developed and certain decisions made about use of museum data, though museums are already making their on-line data available via Attribution/Non-Commercial license. However, with the ability to allow users to decide what data they want, under what conditions it is to be provided, and how they will use it, could completely transform museums. Simply to have the ability for Source Communities to be certain that all data concerning their patrimony is automatically sent to them, for their use, without having to constantly come and request such information, will radically shift the power of description and identity in museums.
A brave new world? Probably not. But the beginnings of a radical shift in who can account for museum collections? We can but hope.
First of all, as Jeff Lindsay, and Kurt Cagle at O'Reilly, point out, WebHooks are really much more revolutionary than they seem at first sight. In the current world of the interactive Web, even Web 2.0, it is largely a PUSH, or some might say POST, world. Users access our web pages, ask for resources which are broadcast on other web pages. Now, as Web 2.0 and Social Computing have shown, there is a lot of potential in this model. Especially with the addition of Mashups, APIs and AJAX. However, what this model is lacking, according to Lindsay, is the a real programmable web. As Jeff Lindsay says, this time as progrium:
To users, web hooks are a way to get events and data in realtime from their web applications. From this they can use the data however they like, empowering them with the ability to extend and integrate, and start seeing the true vision of the programmable web. (Quoted From)The technology of this is very simple, trivial even, but the implications for the Web, and museums, is vast. We can envisage a Museum 2.0 world where every time we update, commit our documentation, or even simply add to our online resources, that thousands of users will get data sent to URLs. What will these URLs do with this data? That is up to them. They may mash it up, they may insert it into their own databases, they may simply embed it within their own web pages. It is up to who develops the URL as to how it will process this data.
Obviously licenses will have to be developed and certain decisions made about use of museum data, though museums are already making their on-line data available via Attribution/Non-Commercial license. However, with the ability to allow users to decide what data they want, under what conditions it is to be provided, and how they will use it, could completely transform museums. Simply to have the ability for Source Communities to be certain that all data concerning their patrimony is automatically sent to them, for their use, without having to constantly come and request such information, will radically shift the power of description and identity in museums.
A brave new world? Probably not. But the beginnings of a radical shift in who can account for museum collections? We can but hope.
What the G20 could mean for museums
What could the outcomes of the recent G20 meeting mean for museums, aside from perhaps easing the financial strain that all are feeling? Most would say, "Nothing really". However, there was a very significant change at the last G20 summit which, if nothing else, should serve as both a warning and a model for museums. The significant change was what George Soros calls a "Turning Point". This turning point was that the core nations of the G20, the G7 or what we could even call the G1 (the United States), gave up much of their power which they held in the form of special voting rights. In particular, from 2011, the US will no longer have its veto rights. More power has been shifted to the "developing" countries - in particular India, China and Brazil - not only on the G20, but also within the IMF, the World Bank, and perhaps even onto the UN Security Council.
The significance of this, from museums' point of view, is not only the shift in financial power that this will certainly create (that is the point of it), but the shift in political power and the possibility of real multilateralism.
I do not need to go into any detail here about the colonial foundations of museums, especially those of the Euro-American museum tradition. It is not only that our museums were founded during the height of the colonial period, to support colonial ideals and ends, and that we hold vast colonial collections. It is also that our whole tradition of practice sits on colonial foundations. Of course I also do not need to go into detail about the enormous amount of work that museums have done over the past 20-30 years to transform these colonial foundations, what was at one time called the New Museology. Nor do I need to cover here, again, the work of many museums over recent years to incorporate deep forms of collaboration with source communities and stakeholders (see Peers and Brown for a good recent summary). The important thing to realize here, and the relevance of what has happened this time at the G20, was that the same thing could have been said of the world's financial governance over the past 30 years. That we could have gone to the IMF, the World Bank and the even the G20 and found ample evidence of a greater degree of collaboration and consideration of the needs and concerns of "developing" nations over the past 20 years. The point is that despite new levels of inclusion, of collaboration, of a shift from institutional concerns to those of other stakeholders within the IMF, the World Bank and even the G20, these institutions remained colonial - or rather neo-colonial.
These institutions remained neo-colonial despite new levels of collaboration and dialogue because their primary goal, and their primary source of authority, was preserved through their control of resources. The IMF, the World Bank and the G20 remained neo-colonial because the handful of ex-colonial countries retained the power to define what the resources were, how they could be accessed and how they could be distributed. This was the fundamental change heralded at the last G20 summit. For the first time in its history, for the first time in several hundred years, the process of real multilateralism was begun. Not finished, not implemented, but at least begun.
This is the wake-up call for museums. What we are seeing, or what I hope we are seeing, is a fundamental shift from a neo-colonial control - a benevolent paternalism that acts for the good of its public, but retains how its resources are used and even what they mean - to a situation where those effected by these resources, those who have a major stake in these resources, have a major say in their definition, allocation and use. Museums as a neo-colonial institution, in the sense of Julia Harrison, have a history, even contemporary history, very similar to these financial institutions. Not as powerful, that is certain, but just as superintending. The wake-up call for museums is that their world of privilege, of having the sole right to define, describe, and determine use of their collections, is coming to an end.
No longer will cries for the primacy of preservation for a global good hold sway - cries similar to the foundation of both the IMF and the World Bank for the preservation of the global economy. No longer will the claim of institutional nor professional rights take precedence over the rights of local patrimony and use. We have all seen that the foundations of the world markets are crumbling. They are crumbling because they are rotten to the core. The new consensus is being driven by a new multilateralism which is far bigger, far more diverse, far more distributed than every before. Museums too are build on similar foundations, with similar materials, and similar ideals. Is it time that museums consider giving up their special voting rights before it is too late for us too?
The significance of this, from museums' point of view, is not only the shift in financial power that this will certainly create (that is the point of it), but the shift in political power and the possibility of real multilateralism.
I do not need to go into any detail here about the colonial foundations of museums, especially those of the Euro-American museum tradition. It is not only that our museums were founded during the height of the colonial period, to support colonial ideals and ends, and that we hold vast colonial collections. It is also that our whole tradition of practice sits on colonial foundations. Of course I also do not need to go into detail about the enormous amount of work that museums have done over the past 20-30 years to transform these colonial foundations, what was at one time called the New Museology. Nor do I need to cover here, again, the work of many museums over recent years to incorporate deep forms of collaboration with source communities and stakeholders (see Peers and Brown for a good recent summary). The important thing to realize here, and the relevance of what has happened this time at the G20, was that the same thing could have been said of the world's financial governance over the past 30 years. That we could have gone to the IMF, the World Bank and the even the G20 and found ample evidence of a greater degree of collaboration and consideration of the needs and concerns of "developing" nations over the past 20 years. The point is that despite new levels of inclusion, of collaboration, of a shift from institutional concerns to those of other stakeholders within the IMF, the World Bank and even the G20, these institutions remained colonial - or rather neo-colonial.
These institutions remained neo-colonial despite new levels of collaboration and dialogue because their primary goal, and their primary source of authority, was preserved through their control of resources. The IMF, the World Bank and the G20 remained neo-colonial because the handful of ex-colonial countries retained the power to define what the resources were, how they could be accessed and how they could be distributed. This was the fundamental change heralded at the last G20 summit. For the first time in its history, for the first time in several hundred years, the process of real multilateralism was begun. Not finished, not implemented, but at least begun.
This is the wake-up call for museums. What we are seeing, or what I hope we are seeing, is a fundamental shift from a neo-colonial control - a benevolent paternalism that acts for the good of its public, but retains how its resources are used and even what they mean - to a situation where those effected by these resources, those who have a major stake in these resources, have a major say in their definition, allocation and use. Museums as a neo-colonial institution, in the sense of Julia Harrison, have a history, even contemporary history, very similar to these financial institutions. Not as powerful, that is certain, but just as superintending. The wake-up call for museums is that their world of privilege, of having the sole right to define, describe, and determine use of their collections, is coming to an end.
No longer will cries for the primacy of preservation for a global good hold sway - cries similar to the foundation of both the IMF and the World Bank for the preservation of the global economy. No longer will the claim of institutional nor professional rights take precedence over the rights of local patrimony and use. We have all seen that the foundations of the world markets are crumbling. They are crumbling because they are rotten to the core. The new consensus is being driven by a new multilateralism which is far bigger, far more diverse, far more distributed than every before. Museums too are build on similar foundations, with similar materials, and similar ideals. Is it time that museums consider giving up their special voting rights before it is too late for us too?
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