Tag Archives: Internet

Not So Fleeting Anymore

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I took my first fal­ter­ing steps “online” in the mid-90s, cour­tesy of Trum­pet Winsock under Win­dows 3.1, fol­lowed by AOL’s UK Games Chat, doubt­less a gate­way drug to the life of Usenet and IRC that fol­lowed; hop­ing and plead­ing that my par­ents wouldn’t pick up the phone and hear the tell­tale 14.4 kilo­bit buzzing that gave away my illicit inter­net usage.

Trumpet WinsockIsn’t “going online” such a strange notion now, when “offline” is only achieved by blog­gers camp­ing in the woods as a pub­lic­ity stunt; a week with­out the inter­net in exchange for their fif­teen sec­onds of inter­net fame?

Every­thing I did online in those days, every­thing I was, is long gone now. IRC logs lost to for­mat­ted hard dri­ves; Usenet posts beyond any server’s reten­tion time; my background-MIDI hell of a web­site that prob­a­bly died with Geoc­i­ties.  But since the turn of the mil­len­nium, some­thing has been hap­pen­ing — the inter­net is less fleet­ing; more per­ma­nent.  The blog was on the rise.

It was a lit­tle over ten years ago that I penned this waste of the Eng­lish lan­guage, which has sur­vived a trip from a web­site of my own con­coc­tion, through Live­Jour­nal and Dru­pal to where it now rests as the old­est entry that has made it to my cur­rent blog.  (Sadly, I can­not say the same for the HTML for­mat­ting or the image to which it once linked.)  The fol­lies of my youth (at least, from age 16 onwards) are now pre­served for the world to see.

The eighteen-year-old spout­ing bad phi­los­o­phy.  The nineteen-year-old who wanted to be a child for­ever.  The twenty-year-old that saw him­self though the eyes of char­ac­ters he played.  The twenty-one-year-old that thought he’d be with his friends for­ever, and the twenty-two-year-old that started to realise he wouldn’t.  The twenty-four-year-old who geeked out, the twenty-five-year-old that got polit­i­cal, and the twenty-six-year-old who over­analy­ses his son’s ques­tions.

Noth­ing is deleted any­more, noth­ing lost to his­tory.  Those thoughts that I don’t com­mit to blog­gery, Twit­ter and Face­book keep for pos­ter­ity or for mar­ket­ing potential.

My son is four now; it won’t be too many years before he’s able to browse the ‘net by him­self and to stum­ble upon his father’s teenage wit­ter­ing.  What will he make of the way I cryp­ti­cally tried to fig­ure out how to reject his mother when she first asked me out, or the drama-tastic marker I placed in apol­ogy for a post I removed — a post made when I was not exactly espous­ing the virtues expected of a father.

Joseph's Laptop Now.It’s prob­a­bly the kind of detail he won’t want to know about my life, in much the same way as I’m happy with my lack of knowl­edge of my own father’s young adult­hood.  And, briefly, I con­sid­ered delet­ing most of it — the per­sonal stuff, at least.

But as I con­sid­ered it, walk­ing home in the dark, I passed the nurs­ing home that adver­tises “a spe­cial neigh­bour­hood for the mem­ory impaired”.  Should I ever get to that point, and should my fam­ily not fol­low my explicit instruc­tions to pack me off to Dig­ni­tas the minute I become a bur­den on them, I can’t think of a bet­ter way to hold onto my mem­o­ries than to have them acces­si­ble and search­able from wher­ever I may be.

Every scrap of drama, every bawl­ing whinge, every point­less meme and every polit­i­cal dia­tribe made me who I am today, and some­day I may be grate­ful to read it all again.

(Though seri­ously, I have posted a ton of crap over the years.  Man, I should never have been allowed on LiveJournal.)

SuccessWhale is Terrifying: VPS Edition

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Just under two years ago, my Suc­cess­Whale Twit­ter client was gain­ing new users at a steady rate and, as I noticed with alarm, was about to blow through my then-limited band­width allowance.

I’ve since relo­cated all my web stuff to Dreamhost, tak­ing advan­tage of their unlim­ited band­width offer­ing to plow through 10 GB and more a month. But now I’m com­ing up against the last remain­ing limit of my shared host­ing — mem­ory usage.

Both West­min­ster Hub­ble, which con­stantly crawls MPs’ social net­works and RSS feeds, and an increas­ingly com­plex Suc­cess­Whale, churn through a ton of mem­ory. I don’t have a nice scary graph for this one, but at peak times, I’d esti­mate that my web server kills over half my PHP processes due to excess mem­ory use. That means Only Dream­ing basi­cally goes down, while Suc­cess­Whale throws errors around if it even loads at all.

It looks like I’m left tak­ing the expen­sive plunge of mov­ing my host­ing to a VPS rather than a shared solu­tion, which is a jump I’m ner­vous to make, espe­cially since none of my web prop­er­ties make me any money. Most wor­ry­ing of all is that VPS prices tend to vary by avail­able mem­ory, and I don’t actu­ally know how much mem­ory all my stuff would take up if it were allowed free rein. And nor do I have any way of find­ing out, bar jump­ing ship to a VPS and tak­ing advan­tage of free trial weeks.

So, dear lazy­web, do you have any expe­ri­ence with this sort of thing? And can any­one rec­c­om­mend a good (cheap!) VPS host that ful­fils the fol­low­ing criteria:

  • LAMP stack with “P” being both PHP and Python (or *BSD instead of Linux)
  • Full shell access
  • Unlim­ited (or at least 100 GB) bandwidth
  • Unlim­ited (or at least 10 GB) disk space
  • At least 20 MySQL databases
  • IMAP mail­boxes & mail forwarding

I’ve been rec­om­mended lin­ode by a friend which seems great for tin­ker­ing, though the price scales up rapidly with RAM use and I’m not sure I want to deal with the has­sle of set­ting up Apache, MySQL etc. by myself. And there’s Dreamhost’s own offer­ing, which would be vir­tu­ally zero-hassle to switch to, but prob­a­bly isn’t the cheap­est around.

So, cit­i­zens of the inter­web, I seek your advice!

Could I Live Without…?

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A cou­ple of months ago, I was par­tic­u­larly scathing about the crop of Face­book games that I was play­ing, par­tic­u­larly ones that had no end. The result? I no longer play any games on Face­book what­so­ever. As I bemoaned at length, not one of them was adding to my life in any appre­cia­ble way.

I won­der if it is now a good time to apply the same logic to var­i­ous online ser­vices — to be extremely crit­i­cal of them, to dis­cover whether or not they actu­ally add any value to my life. In short, could I live without…

 

1. A Google Account

As a search engine, Google is almost essen­tial to life on the inter­net today.  Like a lot of you, I have signed up to many Google ser­vices over the years, each one sim­ply on the merit that it was bet­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion (if there even was com­pe­ti­tion).  I go through phases of being alarmed at the amount of data Google col­lates about us all — their “do no evil” pol­icy is wear­ing thin in the eyes of their cus­tomers.  But could I man­age with­out mail, cal­en­dars and con­tacts syn­chro­nised between my phone and the web?  With­out the near-endless enter­tain­ment of Google Reader?  With­out the Android Market?

Although I resent Google’s domin­ion over my online exis­tence, its offer­ings are just bet­ter than oth­ers’.  And hav­ing an Android phone seals the deal.

Ver­dict: No.

 

2. GMail

If I can’t live with­out a Google account, maybe I should just dump the GMail part of it?  I’ve actu­ally done this once before; moved my e-mail whole­sale to my own server.  But I went back — it’s a nice feel­ing to be in charge, to have your own mail server, but every­thing was so much harder.  “Archiv­ing” and “tag­ging” become a multi-click ‘move’ oper­a­tion, IMAP has a host of strange issues, and no web­mail client is a patch on Google’s.

Ditch­ing GMail appeals, but two months down the line I’d prob­a­bly spend another evening mov­ing every­thing back again.

Ver­dict: Prob­a­bly not.

 

3. Twit­ter

I sus­pect I’m in the minor­ity, in that I fol­low no celebri­ties and don’t use Twit­ter for any­thing to do with “brand aware­ness” or “cus­tomer inter­ac­tion”.  I use it for talk­ing to my friends.  There are sim­ply too many of us, online too irreg­u­larly, to use instant mes­sag­ing — or god for­bid, phone calls — any more.  (Whether that says some­thing about the qual­ity of our inter­ac­tion, I’m not sure.)  But with­out Twit­ter I’d be largely unaware of what’s going on in the lives of the dozen or so peo­ple I care about the most.  Though my posts may be triv­ial and of inter­est to few, los­ing Twit­ter would be close to los­ing friends.

Ver­dict: No.

 

4. Face­book

The social net­work we love to hate, there are a whole host of rea­sons peo­ple would want to quit — dis­re­gard for pri­vacy, end­less Far­mville spam, lack of trans­parency / import & export func­tions — but yet, so few do.  I don’t play games on Face­book, I rarely post pho­tos, I don’t “like” pages or take quizzes.  I have around 300 “friends”, many of whom I haven’t seen since school and wouldn’t recog­nise in the street.

But there’s a few close friends and fam­ily that don’t use Twit­ter, and clos­ing my Face­book account would mean cut­ting them off.  And besides, there’s always that nag­ging thought: “you’re 26 years old, every 26-year-old is on Facebook!”

Ver­dict: It’s tempt­ing to try.

 

5. Google+

Like many geeks, I am an “early adopter” of Google+, a social net­work that’s still in beta.  Now and again I load the page or run the mobile app, to see what peo­ple have posted — and they’ve posted exactly the same as they posted on Twit­ter.  Plus, with­out an API, I never bother to man­u­ally copy my own Twit­ter and Face­book posts to G+ too.

It’s nice to be in there in case it picks up and becomes the next Social Net­work to Rule them All.  But right now, it’s tak­ing up brain power and space on my book­marks tool­bar, and I’m gain­ing noth­ing from it.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

6. Live­Jour­nal

All my Live­Jour­nal posts are already syn­di­cated from my blog, and I go through phases of dis­abling com­ments on my LJ posts to drag peo­ple to com­ment on the blog itself.  It rarely works, but I have so lit­tle inter­ac­tion with peo­ple through Live­Jour­nal these days that it barely mat­ters.  Live­Jour­nal is dying, at least from my per­spec­tive, and I have already declared it time to quit.  Per­haps now is the time.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

7. DeviantArt

Once upon a time, I posted sto­ries here with reg­u­lar­ity.  Now, it’s a place I visit daily on the off-chance that one of the cou­ple of artists whose pic­tures I enjoy has posted some­thing.  Usu­ally, they havent.  This is what RSS was made for.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

8. Flickr

Though firmly an ama­teur, I’m proud of my pho­tos and Flickr is where I choose to show them off.  It’s also where fam­ily mem­bers abroad go to see what we’re up to, and it’s my insur­ance against a hard disk crash eras­ing the bits and bytes of our mem­o­ries.  Just as with GMail, there’s a strong temp­ta­tion to move my pic­tures to my own server, and run my own image gallery — but Flickr just does it bet­ter.

Ver­dict: No.

 

9. Last.fm

I’ve been a keen scrob­bler since the days when peo­ple knew what “scrob­ble” meant, and it’s so easy to set up that I’ve always set it up on any new com­puter, oper­at­ing sys­tem or media player.  But why?  I know what my taste in music is, and I have lit­tle inter­est in my own lis­ten­ing his­tory.  My friends surely have even less.  The only rea­son I can see for con­tin­u­ing is that I’m proud of the amount of data I’ve gen­er­ated already — and that’s no rea­son at all for car­ry­ing on.

Ver­dict: Yes.

 

10. Foursquare

In using Foursquare, I may be just as much a vic­tim of the sunk cost fal­lacy as I was in all those Face­book games.  I’ve now been “play­ing” for so long that I’ve stopped car­ing about beat­ing my friends; stopped car­ing how far away the next wall-chart sticker might be.  Check­ing in is just some­thing I do when I arrive at a place.  I’m now essen­tially get­ting noth­ing out of Foursquare, even though I’m still reli­ably giv­ing the com­pany and its affil­i­ates a com­plete his­tory of where I go and where I shop.

Ver­dict: Hell yes, ditch this yesterday.

 

What are your thoughts on my rea­son­ing?  Which ser­vices are you tied to, and which are you con­sid­er­ing leav­ing for good?  I’d be inter­ested to know.

IE6, WordPress, and Dick Moves

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For years, anti-IE6 sen­ti­ment on the inter­net has been ris­ing — and justly so. It’s ten years old, and cares so lit­tle for stan­dards that web devel­op­ers often have to code for it specif­i­cally. Quite rea­son­ably, they — we — are a bit fed up with that. Suc­ces­sive ver­sions of Inter­net Explorer have become much bet­ter at stan­dards sup­port, and it would be great if every IE user would just upgrade to IE9 tomorrow.

But life isn’t like that, espe­cially not in the world of cor­po­rate IT.

Par­tic­u­larly infu­ri­at­ing for those with no choice over their browser are the pop-ups that tell us to “upgrade our browser for the best expe­ri­ence”, or worse still, land­ing pages that flat-out deny access to any­one not using a mod­ern browser. The IE6 users of the world agree with you! We don’t like the browser much either. But to rub our faces in it is kind of a dick move.

image

With ver­sion 3.2, Word­Press is incor­po­rat­ing one of these “upgrade your browser” pop­ups along­side an acknowl­edge­ment that their admin dash­board may no longer work. I’m sure the many cor­po­rate blog­gers who have no choice but to use Word­Press from IE6 won’t be too happy about that move, but even for the rest of us just try­ing to get to our site dash­board from work, it’s annoy­ing. Much as we hate those pop­ups, our own sites (at least, their admin areas) will now be dis­play­ing them.

Word­Press’ announce­ment con­tains a handy sam­ple e-mail to send to your boss or sysadmin:

Hi there. The com­puter I use at [where you use the com­puter] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. Inter­net Explorer 6 was cre­ated 10 years ago, before mod­ern web stan­dards, and does not sup­port mod­ern web appli­ca­tions. More and more sites and appli­ca­tions are drop­ping sup­port for IE6, includ­ing the new ver­sion of Word­Press. Even Microsoft, the mak­ers of IE6, are count­ing down until IE6 goes the way of the dinosaur (see http://www.ie6countdown.com/ for more infor­ma­tion). Can you please install an updated ver­sion of IE or any mod­ern browser (see http://browsehappy.com for more infor­ma­tion) on the avail­able com­put­ers? Thank you very much.

I get the feel­ing that the Word­Press team haven’t spent a lot of time behind the cor­po­rate firewall.

Luck­ily, my com­pany has within the last year upgraded to IE8. But many oth­ers are not so lucky. From me a year ago, that sam­ple e-mail would have had to look more like this:

Hi there. The com­puter I use at [where you use the com­puter] is equipped with an out-of-date web browser. […] Could the Min­istry of Defence please spend tens or hun­dreds of thou­sands of pounds of pub­lic money check­ing and vet­ting a new browser, so that I can access a cou­ple of web apps that are by no stretch of the imag­i­na­tion business-critical? Could this browser then be added to the list of those allowed on our net­works? To my own com­pany, please could you spend a sim­i­lar sum of money test­ing this soft­ware, deploy­ing it to our PCs, check­ing our cor­po­rate soft­ware for com­pat­i­bil­ity, mod­i­fy­ing it where nec­es­sary, pur­chas­ing newer ver­sions of our core busi­ness tools, and deal­ing with users’ tech­ni­cal sup­port calls over the fol­low­ing months? I’m sure this can all be hap­pily afforded within our boun­teous over­heads. Thank you very much.

The cor­po­rate upgrade process is long and slow, and lit­tle can be done about that. We already hate IE6 — popup ban­ners telling us that have to upgrade it to use your site don’t make us hate IE6 more, they make us hate your site more. Please, please, stop it.

Geo-IP Security: Option Three

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Face­book, and many other online ser­vices, have an almost-clever secu­rity mea­sure that tries to pro­tect users against account theft. It uses your IP address to do a “Geo-IP” lookup — that is, to fig­ure out roughly where in the world you nor­mally access the site from. If an access attempt hap­pens from else­where, the user will have to sup­ply extra infor­ma­tion to log in — often an “iden­tify this per­son from their tagged pho­tos” quiz.

Even if you pass this test of your iden­tity, how­ever, strange things some­times hap­pen — after a recent trip to France I found myself hav­ing to re-authenticate all my apps, and after a few days in Ger­many, my friend Pete could only restore nor­mal ser­vice by chang­ing his password.

I can see how this fea­ture could be use­ful for some peo­ple — per­haps even the major­ity — but for some it has the poten­tial to be a major irri­ta­tion. Not only is there no way to dis­able it in Facebook’s case, there’s also no way of vent­ing your frus­tra­tion when it goes hor­ri­bly wrong.

For this rea­son, I sug­gest that Facebook’s set­tings page needs the fol­low­ing options:

image

A Place for Google Plus?

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“Google+”, Google’s new stab at social net­work­ing, is doing the rounds of tech news sites today. So what’s it like — if you scored an invite, should you be using it, and if you haven’t yet, are you miss­ing out?

If you’ve used Face­book — and let’s face it, you have — Google+‘s inter­face will be imme­di­ately intu­itive. A long feed of sta­tuses and shared links, the abil­ity to com­ment, re-share and “+1″ (i.e. like). It does pho­tos and videos, inte­grat­ing with Picasa. It does check-ins, inte­grat­ing with Lat­i­tude. It does text and video chat, inte­grat­ing with Google Talk. You’re prob­a­bly not sur­prised by any of this.

It’s most un-Facebook-like fea­ture is its “Cir­cles” — groups of peo­ple that you can share with eas­ily. This is pos­si­ble with Face­book groups, but there it’s the excep­tion rather than the rule. Google clearly intends for your Cir­cles to define the way you share, chat, and use Google+.

Google+ Circles Manager

Google+ Cir­cles Manager

If this is sound­ing a lot like Dias­pora to you, well… it is. Aside from the dis­trib­uted nature of Dias­pora, it’s vir­tu­ally iden­ti­cal — includ­ing the slow invite pro­ce­dure that causes it to be a vir­tual ghost town at the moment. Only time will tell if it suf­fers from the same prob­lem, the root cause of which being that it is not the world’s first social network.

It has some great ideas, and if nobody were mem­bers of Twit­ter or Face­book already, it would be easy to say “yeah, this is great, let’s all use this”. But Google+ requires effort — time taken to invite friends, curate your groups, set up shar­ing pref­er­ences. It’s a rea­son­able amount of effort to invest for peo­ple that aren’t sure if their friends are going to use it too.

But the biggest, most impor­tant issue is that it doesn’t, at present, inte­grate. With any­thing. Now it is still under heavy devel­op­ment; I’m sure inte­grat­ing with other ser­vices will come soon. But right now, it doesn’t talk to Twit­ter. It doesn’t talk to Face­book. It doesn’t have a pub­lic API to talk to third-party apps. I, and many other users, are so heav­ily invested in Twit­ter and Face­book that the tran­si­tion to Google+ has to be seam­less — it has to work along­side the other net­works, with­out any extra effort, oth­er­wise it’s just not worth the bother.

To make the point, this is how the net­works and apps that I cur­rently use inter­act: (yes, I was that bored)

Graph of my interaction with Social Networks

Graph of my inter­ac­tion with Social Networks

There’s not space on there for some­thing that accepts sta­tus updates, unless it’s sup­ported by Suc­cess­Whale or Tweet­Deck. There’s no space for some­thing that accepts check-ins, unless it syncs with Foursquare. No space for any­thing to use my pic­tures unless it can get them itself from Flickr. No space for another chat sys­tem unless I can use it from Pid­gin or Skype.

I don’t mean to be neg­a­tive to Google+ — it’s a good ser­vice which I’m sure, given time, will become great. One day it may be the new Face­book, a social net­work­ing behe­moth that all oth­ers aim for and com­pare them­selves to. And it actu­ally cares some­what about pri­vacy (for now), which would in my opin­ion make it a prefer­able king of the social net­works. Its UI is great; com­bin­ing Google’s char­ac­ter­is­tic min­i­mal­ism with some actual great design rather than just util­i­tar­ian blocks of colour.

Google+ for Android - Main FeedGoogle+ for Android - Friends & Circles

But for $deity’s sake, Google, give this thing a pub­lic API. As Twit­ter realised five years ago, the API is as impor­tant as — if not more impor­tant than — the ser­vice itself. Let us mix it up in weird and won­der­ful ways with the ser­vices we’re already using, and Google+ will instantly lose most of its bar­rier to entry.

Twitter, Facebook and the Expectation of Privacy

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I’ve been asked a cou­ple of times why it is that my sta­tus posts on Face­book are locked down, vis­i­ble only to friends or some­times friends-of-friends:

Facebook post

…but yet with the same button-click that I post to Face­book, I post exactly the same thing, pub­licly, on Twitter:

Twitter post

Surely that’s undo­ing all the good of my Face­book pri­vacy settings?

The rea­son is because I’m not doing it for rea­sons of my pri­vacy — I’m doing it for yours, and what your expec­ta­tions of pri­vacy might be.

On Twit­ter, a reply to me is a first-class cit­i­zen — a tweet in its own right. It has a ‘reply ID’ field to help thread con­ver­sa­tions, and it men­tions my han­dle using the ‘@’ con­ven­tion, but oth­er­wise it is a tweet like any other. You, the replier, have one sim­ple pri­vacy set­ting — is your account pub­lic or pri­vate? Can the world see your tweets (includ­ing that reply) or just the peo­ple you allow?

By con­trast, on Face­book, a com­ment is a second-class cit­i­zen — a child of the orig­i­nal post. Implicit in this is that it inher­its the orig­i­nal post’s pri­vacy set­tings. As the com­menter, you do not have con­trol over who sees what you write. Assum­ing — as most have — that the orig­i­nal poster has accepted the default pri­vacy options, the com­menter has only one choice: either allow their reply to be pub­lic and search­able for the entire inter­net, or don’t reply.

On Face­book there’s no way I can let you set who can see your com­ments, so I do the best thing I can: make your com­ments vis­i­ble only to the 300 or so peo­ple who I am rea­son­ably sure are not evil. If you like, you can check the list and see if you object to any­body on it.

It’s not ideal, but it’s the best I can do to respect com­menters’ pri­vacy on a ser­vice that itself respects pri­vacy only grudgingly.

Data and the Generation Gap

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I returned to my par­ents’ house after my final year at uni­ver­sity approx­i­mately an eter­nity ago* to dis­cover that they had at last entered the Cre­ta­ceous and acquired a broad­band inter­net con­nec­tion. I was less than impressed with the lim­its imposed on this con­nec­tion, though — it came with a measly 1GB monthly data limit, which of course for them was per­fectly ade­quate. I don’t know how much they get through these days (and I’m will­ing to bet they don’t either), but I sus­pect their 1GB limit is still firmly in place.

Well, what do you know, I have a 1GB limit too, that this month I’m get­ting wor­ry­ingly close to. Only mine is on my mobile phone. My WiFi is always on when I’m at home, leav­ing at most 70 hours a week at which I might be actu­ally get­ting through that mobile data. 40 of which I spend at work, sit­ting in front of a com­puter. …With inter­net access. Extrap­o­lat­ing over the month, that implies that I use around 10MB an hour, just pas­sively, not delib­er­ately “surf­ing” the net.

It’s not by any means a fair com­par­i­son, but if those bytes were all printed out as sin­gle char­ac­ters, my pas­sive data con­sump­tion is roughly a War and Peace every two minutes.

And that, not to put too fine a point on it, is fuck­ing insane.

I’m guess­ing that my par­ents’ pas­sive data con­sump­tion is near zero — they both have smart­phones but don’t use social net­works or really down­load any apps, and their lap­top stays in its bag upstairs until they bring it out to use it. Nat­u­rally, when they’re not using it, they turn their router off to save elec­tric­ity. A laud­able idea, to be sure, but therein lay my sec­ond prob­lem with my par­ents’ inter­net connection.

“Why have it on when you’re not using the inter­net?” they asked.

“But what if my com­puter wants to use the internet?”

It’s not just the rate of tech­no­log­i­cal progress that is extreme, it’s the inevitable way in which it trans­forms our lives. Back in the late sev­en­ties, the com­put­ers my par­ents used at uni­ver­sity were giant things, all main­frames and time-sharing and punch cards. Con­sumer hard dri­ves of 10MB were a thing of the eight­ies. And here was I, not thirty years later, com­ing back from uni­ver­sity with the idea that I should be able to down­load that amount of data every hour, with­out ask­ing for it, and mostly with­out even look­ing at it. With the idea that not only should I not fight for time on a sin­gle com­puter, but that my com­puter should be left to talk to oth­ers over the inter­net with­out me being involved.

I’m not say­ing my folks are stuck with a 70s idea of com­put­ing; far from it. But the extent to which our lives are data-saturated now com­pared to thirty years ago is mon­u­men­tal. And I won­der what, in thirty years’ time, my son will make of our archaic blogs, social net­works and video streaming.


* 2006.

Debt Rating for the Internet Age

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With the recent finan­cial cri­sis, and unrest in the Mid­dle East and north Africa, there has been much talk in the news of changes to coun­tries’ debt rat­ings — usu­ally for the worse. But their scale, not to put too fine a point on it, is mad.

There’s an A, B and a C, sure. But there’s also Aaa, Aa1, Aa2, Aa3, A1, A2, A3… then we get to Baa, which is pre­sum­ably index-linked to the country’s sheep indus­try. Then beneath that are the “Junk” rat­ings, which rather than being some­thing intu­itive like “F”, run the entire gamut between Ba1 and C, a total of 11 dif­fer­ent levels.

I pro­pose that, for the 21st Cen­tury, we estab­lish a 21st Cen­tury nam­ing scheme to replace these bizarre terms. The scheme would be intu­itive and con­tem­po­rary, and thus much more eas­ily under­stood by the lay­man. The lev­els map as follows:

Moody’s Rat­ing

New Rat­ing

C

FFFFUUUUUUUU–

Ca

Epic Fail

Caa

OMG

B

WTF

Ba

BBQ

Baa

LOL

A

u jelly?

Aa

Epic Win

Aaa

Never gonna let you down

“In light of recent unrest, Libya’s debt has been down­graded from ‘LOL’ to ‘WTF’.” See? Sim­ple. Intuitive.

And if you clicked that link, you have no-one to blame but yourself.

The Pulse

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Another after­noon of high-volume Pen­du­lum and high-caffeine brain, blaz­ing through work on one screen while flick­ing my atten­tion over two oth­ers. Two news pages and four Twit­ter lists are open, poised. They all refresh auto­mat­i­cally, but each time my eyes focus on them I reach for the man­ual refresh but­ton purely on instinct.

It’s a con­stant stream of news that’s in real terms utterly use­less to me. I’ve never been to Egypt and I don’t know any­one there. I don’t know a lot about Mubarak’s regime or any of the alter­na­tives. In a world with­out the inter­net, maybe I’d buy a paper tomor­row and read about it with mild inter­est. But the inter­net itself, and the real-time access it brings, can ele­vate any topic to the point of obsession.

Some­thing big is going down in a coun­try thou­sands of miles away, in a coun­try where everyone’s phones are offline, inter­net access has been cut, and news agen­cies’ cam­eras have been con­vis­cated. But still the news comes. Phone calls trans­lated into tweets, live blogs pushed byte by byte over satel­lite modems, hand­held cam­corders stand­ing in for the lost news cameras.

The imme­di­acy of it, the raw trans­port of infor­ma­tion from real­ity to text and video, the process itself kicks off a lit­tle spark of adren­a­line, induc­ing a stress response, refresh, refresh, refresh until the source stops broad­cast­ing, then find a new one. Never stop. Dis­con­nec­tion is death.

The white-hot pulse of news flashes upwards from Tahrir Square out to low-earth orbit, back to the sur­face, across mil­lions of spi­der­web miles of cable and straight into my forebrain.

The real world feels so slow some­times. It can be min­utes between tweets.

It’s a con­ti­nent away and it doesn’t affect my life at all. But I don’t want to be a day late read­ing the news — I don’t want to be 30 sec­onds late.

Each day I carry around a plethora of devices that let me avoid that hor­ri­ble late­ness; allow me to find the pulse from wher­ever in the world it starts and catch it before it’s had a minute to grow cold. One day, we will be able to catch that pulse and ride it with a mere thought — and for me, that day can’t come soon enough.