b.cognosco

Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.

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Monday, December 15, 2003

Good Graphics, Good Blog

To me this is a sign of maturity in both the medium and the process of weblogging. The graphics each of these (and I'm sure many other) bloggers uses are explanatory and demonstrative of a particular concept or point they are making. In the best cases, like those above, the graphs sum up an entire post in a succinct, visual manner.

Such graphs add immensely to the post, changing them from simple op-ed pieces to instructive, conceptual works that inspire thought, response, perhaps even action. It's a great change -- but one that not every weblogger can manage. First you must have a concept behind your text -- some well-reasoned thought upon which you're basing your post. Simple opinion won't do. Second, you must have some basic graphic skills. Simple representations are often the most difficult, and reducing things to the minimum needed to make a point (key to any good info graphic) is a skill in itself.

But if you've got those two things please put them to use on your weblog. It's a great way to stand out from the crowd. Design blogs like IDblog or Boxes and Arrows are great places to look for samples and techniques since, as you would expect, they use lots of graphics to show their web design concepts.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 1:04 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Sunday, December 14, 2003

Moving Wiki-ly Along

But the wiki has some challenges, the most egregious of which is a total lack of structure. The larger a wiki gets the more difficult it becomes to find anything, and the longer it takes to locate specific items you've seen before. It looks to me that with a large number of users a wiki will soon become a morass, useless to all but the most ardent devotee, unless there is some serious personal effort devoted to building structure.

There seem to be two views of this phenomenon:

• First, that this is the "wiki way" -- a sort of religion that eschews all structure as a kind of creeping evil that, once allowed in, will destroy creativity and thought.
• The second is that structure will organically emerge, that topics which are interesting will draw attention and those that do not will wither and die.

The view of structure as evil is misguided. Structure is an enabler, a framework, a support, an aid. It helps people. Stairs do not prevent us from taking every possible route to the second floor -- they enable us to get there at all. Walls do not dictate what is inside them -- they merely help us group things conveniently. Structure need not be an evil dictator.

I may have a lower frustration threshold than many people, but I have now spent enough time hunting for things in the wiki environment that I am confident I would not put such a system into general use in any work place I ran. Nor do I know a single executive (or for that matter traditional knowledge worker) who would want such a system as the general knowledge enabler for their company. I understand why wiki technology is such a tiny niche.

The second point -- that structure will emerge organically -- is a little more plausible but not much more realistic. It turns out that wikis need a dedicated, passionate facilitator (or small facilitation group). Facilitators need to be steeped in wikiness and know how to guide and aid users, looking for clues to what is important and building paths to that material.

In an environment where everything is everywhere but nothing is anywhere good ideas don't necessarily rise to the top. The window for recognition and ascension of an idea is pretty small. With a number of contributors to a wiki it doesn't take long for a recently posted idea to drop off the top of the list unless someone picks it up right away. Those searching for it later may have difficulty finding it. We know from years of e-mail and web user studies that people rarely scroll beyond their first screen of material. A good idea may wither and die not because it's unworthy, but simply for a lack of visibility.

Personally, I won't spend more than 5-10 seconds searching for something in a system if I know it's there but I can't find it. Further, about the third time I waste that 5-10 seconds searching fruitlessly I leave and don't come back. I don't have time. I consider the system useless. And falling back on my 20 years of experience in the workaday world of corporate America I'm confident in saying so will the vast majority of people in the work force. To assume otherwise is folly.

The first person who writes to tell me I don't "get it" will find a horse head in their bed. I do get it. I get that systems which take longer and do less in exchange for one small benefit (ad hoc editing) are not appealing to businesses (and that's where my interests lie.) If you've tried to sell wiki systems into the work place and been thrown out on your ear I can understand. Get used to it.

I also understand that religious fervor is no substitute for provable value. It really, truly doesn't matter if you love wikis. Some people do and it's great for them. But the work world is not filled with Leonardo Da Vincis who can free float through an information smorgasbord and remain productive. Nor are there a plethora of bosses who will support people spending time weeding, pruning, trimming, and growing a wiki garden instead of working. That people will, or even should, grow their own navigation structure from scratch is not realistic. Workers on deadline want efficiency. Bosses want productivity.

As I said at the top, I really like certain wiki functions and I think they hold great promise for improving the way we work and share information. But they also have real limits and areas where they make things worse, not better. To ignore this, and to condescend to those who do not get the wiki way is counterproductive. Worse, it runs the risk of alienating people who may legitimately benefit from a less ambitious wiki implementation.

Wikis are not an either/or proposition. Wikis can, and I think should, be viewed as an adjunct to a robust collaborative system. Getting past the structural divide and to a general agreement that wikis can enhance, but not replace, other web systems is a great first step.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 1:19 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Thursday, November 20, 2003

The ISP Nanny State

One of the first things I came across did not make me feel good. Going through the [isp-wireless] list archives I came across a disturbing, 35-message thread on P2P blocking. Over two dozen people made comments after a wISP in Sioux Falls, SD posted the following:

Last week I installed a Mikrotik 2.8beta box configured as a bridge after the router. We are blocking P2P file sharing and the results have been very entertaining. People will not actually call up and tell you that Kazaa is not working. It is the "Internet" has stopped working... Or I cannot get to the sites that I need.

This ISP has instituted arbitrary packet blocking without notice to customers and seems to think it's a joke. A number of other wISPs expressed interest in just how this was being done, what equipment was being used, and how they could serve up the same QOS. There was a fair amount of discussion of how and why to block P2P, how much to choke it down, and whether or not customers who think "the Internet has stopped working" could figure out what was happening. But not much about the blatant stupidity of this policy. Only one participant called this outright foolishness and asked how the wISP was getting away with it, though in fairness there were a few others who voiced some disapproval or suggested smarter alternatives such as more flexible billing or blocking only the outbound P2P packets.

To some extent this conversation isn't surprising. There is a real need to manage bandwidth usage and costs and with the wireless ISP industry still nascent, and with a disproportionate number of small-time (and likely unsophisticated) operators, it's not surprising to see this sort of talk. But it is still sad. And worse, these guys apparently think this sort of thing is going on at larger ISPs:

This type of filtering is the EXACT same thing that cable companies are putting into place nation wide. Here in Mass, Our local cable company is putting caps on the kazaa downloads and uploads using this type of filter but because it only effects that application, web browsing and email are totally unaffected. Although they are not admitting to doing this, we have confirmed via actual trials that this is indeed what is going on. The trick is to figure out what a good speed ratio is and cater to that figure. For us, the 1k/s per person is perfectly acceptable since it doesn't impact downloading. Less then that would affect search packets and thus be noticed.

I do not, at present, use any of the P2P file sharing packages. I wouldn't know if my ISP, earthlink, were blocking outbound Kazaa packets. But I do know that once the ISPs start down the path of arbitrary packet monitor they have stopped being an ISP and become the worst kind of nanny -- a nanny who hides behind the cloak of technology and does in secret what could not be done in public.

Some of the ISPs fall back on the "NO SERVERS" clause in their customer contracts -- a brain-dead paean to the half-fast "consumer" Internet model of the media conglomerates (you know, those people who think the purpose of a roof is to keep rain off the television set.) Others don't see any need to justify what they're doing, proving they don't know what they're doing at all.

I won't argue with an ISP who wants to become a hall monitor as long as they disclose what they're doing (AOL makes billions selling the Internet with training wheels.) I certainly won't argue with one who wants to bill for excess bandwidth usage. But I wonder if this business of approving some content while preventing others doesn't start the whole ISP industry down a slippery slope of legal liability for messages that pass across their pipes.

What I do know is that there is a lot more at stake here than just some backwater ISP's backhaul bill. Secret packet filtering is neither good ethics nor good business.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 10:00 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

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