So I want to take a break from writing about politics and write a little something about all the tech stuff I've gotten into recently. This is a long post, the culmination of a few weeks of surfin', so bear with me and let me know in the comments if you want me to stop posting such long posts. I'm moving towards fewer, more in-depth posts, but that might not suit everyone and I certainly don't want to inconvenience any of you. Anyway, on with the info.
First, I've really gotten into Mozilla, the open-source browser built on the bones of Netscape Navigator. I downloaded it because there was a program I wanted to try (which I'll get into below) and I have to say I love it. The main thing it has to recommend it (stolen from Opera) is tabbed browsing (ie, your browser window looks like an excel page with many different sections). Click on a link and the new page loads in the background, allowing you to continue reading or switch over and switch back without getting as lost. It makes checking out nooks and crannies that much easier--something you'll be wishing you had in this article, for example.
The real killer app part of tabbed browsing, though, is the ability to bookmark a group of tabs as a single bookmark. I have a politics tab with all my favorite sites in it (e.g. atrios, DailyKos, Hullabaloo, Salon) and, with a single click, they've all loaded. When I'm done reading, I close the tab and move on. It's really changed the way I use the internet.
There are some drawbacks to Mozilla, and it's not my only browser (not that you can uninstall the IE browser, as the Microsoft trial proved--well, sorta kinda and this entry is long enough already). The mail client isn't as good as Outlook Express, but it's all right. The main bummer is that it's not as well-integrated with Blogger as IE. There's a plugin called Mozblog that doesn't work as well for me as the right-click BlogThis feature. I bookmarked the javascript BlogThis app, and it only works occasionally. Even Blogger's web interface looks a little funny when you load it (the margins in the posting frame are half-width), and you can't do CTRL-SHIFT-A to make links, which is a real drag. Other than that, though, the browsing experience is much, much better with tabs.
I downloaded Mozilla because NewsMonster required it. I found Newsmonster on Six Log, the blog of Six Apart, the company that makes Moveable Type. MT really has some interesting features Blogger doesn't have yet, and I've toyed with getting it up and running, but in the VHS/Beta department, Blogger gives free, painless hosting, and that could be the equivalent of "it records longer than 30 minutes." I'd love it if Blogger implemented some of MT's cooler featurees, including TrackBack and categorized archives.
Anyway, Newsmonster is one of the many networking tools trying to generate emergent content. It subscribes to RSS feeds of various weblogs and/or websites and, in its not-yet-implemented feature, will allow you to search on nodes to find more interesting news. Let's say you like my site. You can then see which sites I've subscribed to and go to them directly, and so on, until you're getting the content you want--see the site for details (and his idea about blognet--it's sort of like Weblog Neighborhood in Radio). The issue is how to overcome Clay Shirky's observation about the fact that information gets centralized on the internet. I was interested in this because I had the exact same idea a few weeks ago (no, really) and it turns out the guy designing it lives ten blocks from me.
Basically, it seems to me that we're really on the verge of some cool emergent content. For some background on what emergence is, here are some good places to look. Start with this really good overview, then read Joi Ito's article on emergent democracy, then check out his archives on emergent democracy. Blogroots has a trackback-based site that aggregates posts about weblogs here, and you might want to check out the blog from the author of Smart Mobs.
The problem with emergence comes down to a couple of things. First, you want to make sure there's a low signal-to-noise ratio, so that the democracy of the internet, where anyone can say anything, doesn't turn into cacophony. One way you can do this is via reputation, where someone is invested in his/her reputation and therefore doesn't say anything stupid. The problem is that sometimes, anonymity really frees people up to say something useful that they might not ordinarily say for fear of reprisal. These two articles (here and here), while technical, are pretty interesting--they describe an anonymous persistent reputation system. That way anonymity isn't just an excuse to talk smack. (More information on reputation systems can be found at the Reputations Research Network.) The other way to preserve high signal-to-noise ratios is by moderating (or "modding") comments, so that cream rises to the top. Clay Shirky has written an interesting article on the social contracts implied in collaborative/emergent/content management systems.
When emergence works, you end up with true collective wisdom. Farah and I won our local video store's pool based on share prices in the Hollywood Stock Exchange, deciding to go for it based on James Surowiecki's excellent article on decision markets. We won without having seen a single picture (we're new parents in the video-only phase, with this being a notable exception)--which made Best Picture go down a lot easier, actually. Ideally you'd end up with good ideas floating to the top. Clay Shirky imagines this changing the music industry; some people use NetFlix because it's so good at recommending new movies. Howard Dean's campaign has made a lot of hay out of this, using Meetup and actually raising tons of money from an idea that emerged from the grassroots.
If you want to move out of the realm of the theoretical, here are some implementations of it. There's Friendster, a way of finding new friends of friends (pitched initially as a dating service). On the information front, you can find out new information by tracking word bursts, or random links from similar sites through Tangent, or More Like This From Others (which is an ingenious idea for solving the problem of different people categorizing information in different ways). Mediagora is a really cool idea by Kevin Marks for a content distribution system where copying would generate benefits to all people (another idea I had--damn it). MoJo is an idea for distributed journalism--basically a way of coordinating a bunch of eyewitness reports. On the technical front, there's the Open Content Network and the more-established BitTorrent, which use p2p networks to cache materials from servers that are getting overwhelmed. If these ideas don't appeal to you and you have a better one (but no coding skills), submit it to the LazyWeb.
I've also found some tools that enable this kind of collaboration. The biggest and baddest is slashcode, but there are a few more like Scoop (and MeFi clones such as FreeFilter and phpilfer), as well as closed-source apps like Open Cola and Groove. I didn't know anything about PHP based community software, but then I checked out an amazing site called Open Source CMS and took PHPNuke and Postnuke for a test drive (see the PHPnuke tutorial here: PHPNuke: Management and Programming and the postnuke tutorial) for more information). What Open Source CMS allows you to do is register as the admin and administer (for an hour) a site running the software of your choice. This spares you the hassle of installing it and trying it out (and messing stuff up) but it allows you to see how hard/easy it is to do certain tasks. This site is one of the coolest ones I've found in a long time. I just wish they'd allow you to test-drive MT.
As this moves forward, it of course becomes more and more vital to address the digital divide issue. A network is only as good as its reach, and millions of people in this country (and billions around the world) can't participate in any discussion. Think of it as the loss of a ton of human capital, if the rights idea doesn't appeal to you. In an emergent network, their loss is literally your loss. So I'm particularly intrigued by Don Samuelson's plan to bring wireless broadband access to low-income housing in Chicago.
In the meantime, I'm having a love affair with a pre-cyber form of information distribution for the public--the San Francisco Public Library. I'm going through a phase of checking out the library's extensive collection of electronica, reserving discs on the SFPL's incredibly slow website (come on, folks, this is where it took off) and getting emailed when they're in. I'm also refreshing my HTML and starting to learn PHP and Perl. I just want to know enough to be conversant with the people who do it--the same way I don't want to fix my own car, but at least know when I'm getting good service. Anyway, I hope you found this as interesting as I do.