The future is not like the past, and any strategy that is designed to protect the past will eventually fail.

Anyone looking at delivering electronic media should think very carefully about what this means. If your business plan relies on delivering your electronic media in an environment that duplicates the limitations of your old physical media as closely as possible, you’re doomed. The same goes, come to think of it, for network providers. If your business plan relies around taking new network technology and making it work exactly the same as your old network… You’re doing it wrong.

GigaPan, as described to me by Jason Campbell, is a method for very cheaply taking very high-resolution panoramic images. The basic idea is to have a commodity digital camera in a computerized servo-mount on a tripod. The servo-mount pans the camera over the desired areas, taking pictures at appropriate intervals as it goes. The gigapan web service then stitches the entire set of images together and provides a convenient interface for viewing.

Bonus nifty #1: no special interface is needed to the camera. It just uses another servo and a stick to manually depress the shutter switch!

Bonus nifty #2: Because the entire panorama isn’t taken at once, but over the course of several minutes (for potentially large values of several) as the camera pans over the scene, it doesn’t capture a point in time but a distribution. This occasionally creates strange artifacts when images are stitched together, but potentially has some very cool implications. Imagine if you had enough storage to keep one of these running throughout the course of an entire event of some kind, or even a significant span of time. Would it be possible to present an interface to the resulting time-distributed panorama that reflects the wealth of information gathered?

Martin Wattenberg is just plain awesome. I’d seen Name Voyager before (it’s great fun to play with), but his presentation on Many Eyes was really cool. It’s apparently being used extensively by a lot of linguistics and literary researchers, including Bible scholars. One of the more interesting observations from his talk: the key to Many Eyes was “stop words”, garbage connecting words that most software types would be inclined to throw away. However, the presence and usage of these words can offer more information about a piece of text than “significant” words!

And Evil Mad Scientist still has the best company name ever.

Fairy Tales is a fairy tale that lets the reader “fill in the blanks” as they navigate through the story. It’s a simple use of digital technology, minimally interactive, but still interesting, since it shows just how mutable formerly-fixed things can be on the web. And, now that I think about it, it welcomes user remixing and makes it an inherent part of reading the story. Nifty!

The (Former) General is a Choose Your Own Adventure story… That’s designed to be read the way everyone actually reads Choose Your Own Adventure stories: with a thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger, pinky, and nose firmly planted several pages back so you can explore alternate branches if you don’t like the one you’re on. In order to do this, it keeps a map showing you what you’ve read, what you haven’t, and how they connect together. This lets them do all kinds of silly things that would be… Highly frustrating in a normal Choose Your Own Adventure story.

The most interesting of the six is The 21 Steps. This story’s told using Google Maps. The pop-up balloons are used to present the text describing events at a location pin, and an animated Indiana Jones Is Travelling line connects the location pins in chronological order. The structure here is fairly simple, but I think there’s a lot of more elaborate variations that can be built on top of this basic foundation. It’s probably not going to catch fire as a hot new media for telling stories, but I think it could do some cool things.

Lessig provides an excellent explanation in Code 2.0 of why this is a horrible idea. Ignoring government and forging boldly forwards on your own doesn’t create an system that cannot be regulated by government. Instead, it cedes the government space to the authoritarians, allowing them to operate and expand its influence uncontested. We’re seeing the end result of that in politics now. Across pretty much all of the western world, the notion that “government is inherently harmful” or “government can do no good” or dozens of different variations on the theme have taken hold. As a result, those that would support a progressive agenda have largely abandoned government, and authoritarianism has grown unchecked.

Further, the history of privatization in the 20th century has been an unchecked series of disasters. Private entities are motivated wholly by profit, and thus incredibly susceptible to authoritarian influence. They make more money from it, after all. Public entities are, at least theoretically, answerable primarily to the public good which, in a democratic system, is determined in a distributed manner.

I believe that government can be made to understand the Benefits of Free and work in a distributed, free model. In fact, I believe it is inherent to a properly functioning democratic system. But we won’t have a properly functioning democratic system unless we believe that government can do good; that free and public are complementary, not opposed; and that “being political” is something desirable, rather than something repugnant.

The others mostly have to do with his ability to slip Internet pop culture references into a mainstream newspaper comic strip. It’s really a shame he stopped doing Medium Large.

First, though, I’d like to mention something I noticed over and over throughout the weekend:

Innovation Isn’t Isolation

I was going to title this section “Developers Don’t Drive Development”, but after thinking about a couple of the sessions that really jumped out at me, I concluded it just wasn’t true. A more accurate statement is that just developers don’t drive development. What I think of as the “old model”, of giving someone a technical education, sitting them down to think really hard, and then turning them loose and getting all kinds of awesome products is gone, and I’m not sure it ever existed. A lot of the coolest things I saw this weekend were things that were created for very non-technical disciplines, and by very non-technical people. It might just have been the sessions I picked – honestly, I did steer away from anything that smelled like it’d fit in at a tech conference – but a lot of the motivators and big new ideas seemed to be coming from humanities and artistic folks. People with non-technical educations, who were taking technology and bending it to their own ends.

I’ve suspected this for a while now, but I was kind of nice to see that I’m not totally out to lunch. How far out to lunch I am remains to be seen. Other opinions along the same lines included:

• Robert, one of my co-workers, who was utterly floored by a cello performance on Friday night. I’m really sorry I missed it.
• Lenore Edman of Evil Mad Scientist (seriously, guys, best name ever) was most impressed by what I’m going to call “sewing origami”, for lack of a better term. I can’t remember what Windell Oskay (also of Evil Mad Scientist) was most impressed by – sorry, Windell.
• Lane Becker was most impressed by a game designer who ran a session I’m really sorry to have missed on Saturday and, on Sunday, had a bunch of people collaboratively build a game in chalk on the concrete between the session-tents.

Next Up: Bees. My god.

In his discussion of how we’re starting to make use of our cognitive surplus, rather than wasting it on “gin” like TV, Shirky mentions video games. He seems to view video games as a kind of intermediate ground between productive uses of the cognitive surplus, like Wikipedia, and unproductive uses, like watching sit-coms. I disagree; I think video games are an important part of why we’re able to make use of the cognitive surplus, rather than continuing to waste it on gin. In the past, our economy was based almost wholly on physical labour. Games were correspondingly physical, either helping children build up the physical traits they’d need to do their work, like strength and reflexes, or helping them learn rough analogs of the skills they’d be using as adults. For adults, games served a similar role, keeping them in form and practice while letting them relax without the pressures of work.

I think video games serve the same purpose for today’s more intellectually-oriented economy. As Danc is fond of pointing out, one of the more compelling incentives to play video games is the opportunity to explore and understand a dynamic system. In a well-designed game, the player encounters successively more complicated layers of mechanics and interactions between mechanics. One of the challenges posed by the game is untangling these mechanics and building an understanding of how the game works. I view this as a fundamental intellectual skill, one that’s necessary for understanding and working with complex systems. Video games often layer other traits on top of this – situational awareness, teamwork, memorization, quick reactions to rapidly changing circumstances, large- or small-scale organization…

It’s true that not every game player learns to generalize these skills beyond video games, or even between video games. But those that do are better prepared for the requirements of our modern intellectually-focused economy.

The focus in these analyses of popularity usually tends to emphasize the game mechanics. There is, of course, the psychologically addictive behaviour created by epic loot drops and other intermittent rewards. There’s the sense of progress and development as your character levels or advances through raids. There’s the raid encounters themselves and the extreme commitment required to learn them. But really, none of this stuff is particularly original. It’s not even more smoothly-executed than other contemporary MMOs. Yes, the graphics are friendlier. The interface is slicker. Some of the high-level stuff is more casual-friendly. To some degree, “network externalities” (thank you, Bradford C. Walker) mean that WoW’s popular because WoW’s popular. But based on my experience playing WoW and watching others play WoW, I think this stuff is all a fancy side-show to the real deal.

WoW’s more popular because scattered across all these things, in bits and pieces that add up to a significant whole, is a game that’s much, much better at doing the thing MMOs do best than any of its competitors. It’s better at being a Third Place, an informal venue for socialization.

As Kathy Sierra noted when discussing Twitter, the feeling of connectedness is a strong motivator. People want to feel connected to their friends, and want to feel like they’re building new connections. Traditionally, this has happened outside of the workplace and home, in “Third Places” that encourage casual socialization. But our modern society has been purposefully eliminating these places, and continues to do so. I suspect that some of the popularity of MMOs is due to their ability to fill that void, by providing a virtual space for casual socialization. If this is the case, it’s worth examining how WoW enhances this socialization, both at the interpersonal level and at progressively wider communal levels.

The design of the levelling process is the most obvious influence at the interpersonal level. The most natural gameplay activity for a small group of friends, or casual acquaintances, is levelling together. Other group activity requires larger groups and more coordination. WoW emphasizes levelling through questing much more heavily than most of its predecessors. This provides focus and direction to the group’s play, giving them an intermediate-term motivation and objective beyond killing the next monster. Since levelling is so easy, particularly in groups, friends are free to socialize and clown around in-game while slaughtering digital hordes. I know of many people that play the game solely because they enjoy levelling with friends. These players and their friends abandon characters that get too close to the level cap and start over, often with different classes or races, to continue playing the game in a way they enjoy.

Quests also focus player activity into specific areas, which ensures that both solo players and groups of friends levelling together will encounter the broader community. While these encounters will typically be adversarial (IE, players competing for the same mobs or objectives), the potential of an amicable encounter between members of the same faction exists. Some of my best levelling play was based on this kind of encounter, including one Rogue that I ran into by chance over and over while levelling my Priest in Stranglethorn Vale. This is actually one area where WoW’s gameplay mechanics come into conflict with its role as a third place. The respawn rate of mobs and other quest objectives is typically fairly long – at least a couple of minutes, sometimes as many as 5, occasionally 30 or more. I would guess that this is an attempt to encourage inter-faction rivalry over scarce resources, but it also serves to limit cooperation between members of the same faction. I’m curious as to the potential of a more intelligent world that responds to the presence of multiple players in the same area and shapes monster spawns, patrol patterns, and objective locations to encourage them to cooperate.

For those players that do reach the level cap, socialization takes on a different form through the dual avenues of Guild and Raids. The impact of WoW’s Raid mechanics on socialization are particularly interesting. Raid instances are long and complicated affairs, requiring the participation of 10-25 players and several hours of time. Completing a Raid instance demands not just skill and practice on the part of individual players, but organization and coordination of the Raid as a whole. Raids also have lockout timers. After participating in a Raid instance, the player is prohibited from joining a different instance of that same Raid until the instance “resets”, usually once a week. The upside of this is that the group’s progress in the raid is saved, and they can split their attempt over several nights. These mechanics combine to encourage players to form Guilds structured as social organizations similar to amateur sports teams. The members of a Guild raid together regularly, and become the first choice for other, non-Raid activity. (IE, grinding for consumables or reputation, levelling new characters, PvP, etc) This encourages the development of friendships and association within the Guild. And also, of course, politics.

Finally, the game provides multiple avenues for connection with the wider community. In-game chat channels allow easy communication with other players that are neither Guildmates nor nearby. “General” channels for an area are often used for chatting by players playing (or even just hanging out) in those areas, particularly those for major cities and “newbie zones”. Anyone who’s levelled a character on the Horde side probably knows of the horrors of “Barrens Chat”. Trade channels allow players to exchange goods and services, possibly forming friendships with frequent business partners. Similarly, the PvP Battlegrounds throw together usually-random players in teams, pitting them in a contest against a team of players from the opposite faction. This allows players to meet other players of similar advancement on their server and the other servers linked to it in a “battlegroup”.

Here, the social aspect has been slightly hindered as WoW matured. Originally, battlegrounds were server-local. You would only play with or against others on the same server. This lead to fairly long waits between games, but a very strong culture. You got to know and recognize the other people you were playing with and against, and formed loose associations with them through the heat of battle. If you were good, you could build lasting connections with other players, who would seek you out when creating “pre-made” teams. With wider, inter-server battlegroups, games are more prompt, but the population of players is so large that seeing the same people twice is extraordinarily unlikely.

The widest forum for socialization is, of course, the game’s official forums. All active players can post and discuss there in several venues, which are largely unmoderated. While this does tend to create an insipid blend of stupidity, pointless griping, sarcastic one-liners, and rampaging memes, it also fosters a real sense of community among all players of the game. WoW’s predecessors – at least those I’m aware of – either lacked official forums entirely or aggressively moderated them, which I believe would prevent the same game-wide community from developing. Most posters are only sporadic, and the large main forums are too high-traffic for any real social groupings to form. But on lower-traffic sub-forums, regular posters can gradually get to know each other and create informal communities with common interests or objectives. (IE, getting Blizzard to stop nerfing Priests ;) )

I think these factors have strongly contributed to WoW’s popularity, though I’m unsure whether the developers recognize their contribution. I do know that the flavour of the community and socialization is very different from that of any other MMO I’ve tried. It is, in my opinion, the game’s strongest feature. When I was trying to make the decision to quit, the gameplay wasn’t what was holding me back. It was the community and social aspects.

The books you sell have “pass-along” rates. They get bought by one person. Then they get passed along to other people. The other people find an author they like, or they don’t.

When they do, some of them may come in to your book store and buy some paperback backlist titles, or buy the book they read and liked so that they can read it again. You want this to happen.

Go read the full thing, it’s really excellent.

He’s got a good follow-up post today too (Born Free), about a program that’s part of World Book Day in the UK and Ireland. As part of World Book Day, £1 book tokens are being distributed to schoolchildren across the UK and Ireland, and a bunch of “World Book Day £1″ books are being published specifically for the occasion. It’s a wonderful promotion, and I encourage everyone go to read his post (from which all of the information in this paragraph is shamelessly lifted) to find out more.

Mark Dominus demonstrates one example of this while examining the whole “Design Patterns” mess. The “Design Pattern” movement seems to be unconsciously based on this ignorance of history, through an assumption that modern programming languages are the be-all and end-all of programming languages, and always have been. As Dominus puts it:

If these problems recurred in every language, we might conclude that they were endemic to programming itself. We might not, but it’s hard to say, since if there are any such problems, they have not yet been brought to my attention. Every pattern discovered so far seems to be specific to only a small subset of the world’s languages.

Some awareness of the history of programming languages might produce a slightly greater awareness of the trends Dominus identifies in the history of programming language development. It might help us avoid re-treading the same ground over and over while claiming that we’re exploring new territory. Perhaps we could even focus our attentions on the areas of language development that actually need work?

Another excellent example is this recent article on Internet software patents by Philip Greenspun, who correctly identifies that most modern software “innovation” is rehashing the work of early pioneers. We’re just scaling that work in obvious ways to take advantage of increased system capacity, or making half-cooked implementations of ideas that these pioneers devised in a much more robust form but were unable to follow through with.

Looking back on my computer science degrees, I’m honestly confused about why there wasn’t more history taught. We got a lot of algorithms, mathematics, and mainstream languages (C, C++, Java) thrown at us, but very little history of or context for the things we were learning. Except for Dr. Grundke’s second-year assembly language course and Dr. Cox’s third-year programming languages course, it wasn’t until fourth year courses or graduate work that historical matters were mentioned at all. And even then, no consideration was given to the implications of the history or its influence. It was written off as obsolete, interesting but largely irrelevant. Even in graduate courses, my experience shows a near-exclusive focus on recent history.

Yet Engelbart’s NLS did things that modern computer systems still can’t manage. Modern programming language and environment development seems to put a lot of sweat into developing poor copies of Smalltalk and LISP. Years of time are put into recreating things that our Internet protocols can already do, because the existing programs that implement these protocols don’t. I’m not saying these older solutions didn’t have their flaws, or that there haven’t been original new developments. But the history of these older technologies at least merits study, so we can focus on improving the things they did wrong and take advantage of the things they did right. Unfortunately, many of the students graduating from computer science programs (possibly the vast majority, including many graduate students!) are as completely unaware of this rich history as they are of modern developments.

This is particularly strange to me, because one of the big motivators for my interest in computers was Steven Levy’s Hackers. Levy’s examination of the early days of the computer movement was inspiring and educational. While non-technical, it provided some good examples of what does work (openness) and what doesn’t work (secrecy), which almost certainly shaped my interest in the Free Software movement. Towards the end of the book, he also inadvertently demonstrates the importance of historical awareness by following people who were sure that history was irrelevant. This lack of awareness doomed them to repeat their predecessors’ mistakes, eventually leading to the collapse of their movements, companies, and technology.

I also have to wonder how much influence the proprietary software movement’s had on this mentality. When your ideal model of software development is behind closed doors, you have to pretend that there’s no need for awareness of other technologies, much less awareness of how they work. If you recognize that reading, working with, and building on notable programs and technology written by others  is valuable, the claim that software innovation requires absolute secrecy starts to look a little shaky.

TLDR: what I want to see is a required course – possibly even a full-year course! – on the history of computing. A proper history course, one that critically examines the causes and effects of events, their influence, and forces the students to become aware of these historical pioneers and the technology they developed. Teach them what it did and what it didn’t do. Heck, if it’s feasible, make them use it a little.