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I’ve been beta testing Google Wave for the past few weeks, since I got an invite form a kind soul (don’t ask me for an invite, I’m second gen, so I don’t have any to give out, unfortunately), and I’ve been rather surprised and confused at the amount of naysaying going on from various tech pundits about how Wave is a failure, or it doesn’t live up to its promise. My experience has been quite the opposite: I’ve been using it successfully (minus a few bugs—it is beta software, after all) to collaborate with co-workers and colleagues, and I can absolutely see the promise of Wave as a replacement for—or enhancement to—traditional email, once adoption rates reach a critical capacity (hopefully a total replacement. I fucking hate email).

So it was very heartening to read this breakdown by Daniel Tenner (via Steven Gould) about what Wave is and isn’t, and what it’s good for and what it’s not designed to be:

Wave is not a social tool. It’s not Twitter, it’s not GTalk, it’s not Facebook. It was never designed to appeal to the crowds of geeks who are currently trying it out.

Wave is built for the corporate environment. It’s a tool for getting work done. And as far as those go, it’s an excellent tool, even at this very early stage.

I agree completely. Well, almost. I don’t necessarily think Wave’s appeal is limited to the corporate environment; quite the opposite: I see it becoming an invaluable tool for anyone who needs to communicate and collaborate: soccer moms organizing their PTA, artists collaborating on a project, designers working with clients, musicians brainstorming and shooting ideas back and forth, families trying to agree on a schedule, and yes, corporate suits collaborating on a business document.

In short: so far, so great. If I have one misgiving about Wave, it’s that more of my day-to-day co-workers and colleagues aren’t on it yet.

I was a huge fan of Hulu on Boxee, and as a result of Hulu pulling out, I have really stopped seeing Hulu as a viable source of content for me, since I’d much rather watch programming on my large television screen than on my computer. Instead, I’ve been using services like iTunes on my Apple TV, completely sidestepping the content providers’ ad-revenues. I prefer the lack of ads and the better quality (and yes, quality on iTunes has gotten better, to the point that I now consider BitTorrenting these shows to be more of a hassle than using iTunes, a revision on my previous position, despite the fact that the shows are still DRM-infested. If I want to send something to a friend, I’ll then go through the trouble of firing up the ol’ BT client), but it does come at a monetary price. The ads on Hulu are a smaller price to pay—it’s a fair trade—but I do take a huge exception to Hulu telling me that I can’t use my TV for watching their content—that I HAVE to watch things on their terms, only on the device they want me to use.

As someone working in a similar industry, and facing similar problems, I understand the content providers’ hands being tied, in terms of their being dependent on the business model that things like Hulu potentially cannibalize, and I also understand that change at large corporations is not easy—it takes time and planning to turn a big ship around. But honestly, I can’t see how Hulu on Boxee hurts their bottom line: they’re still getting ad impressions, and in extreme cases like mine, where I don’t have a cable subscription at all to begin with, ad impressions via Hulu on Boxee are not cannibalizing ad impressions on the broadcast networks.

While my case is probably the exception for now, as less tech savvy people start to realize that things like Boxee are out there, and are very easy to use, that situation will change. It’s untenable for me to pay a cable company for a slew of channels I don’t want, when the specific content I do want is individually available for me online. As the economy gets worse, and people start cutting down on their expenses, alternatives like Hulu on Boxee may very well become the norm. Content providers would be well served to work with outfits like Boxee, instead of flat-out shutting them down. The long term benefits are evident, but the network execs need to start looking beyond this financial quarter—or this season’s ratings—to be able to see the forest for the trees.

Boxee has now implemented what amounts to a work-around to the absence of Hulu on their software, and I applaud them for it. Time will tell if the fight they’ve got coming will be one they win. I sure hope so.

Megan Messinger has posted a good piece on Tor.com outlining the recent minor shitstorm that George R. R. Martin has started by essentially telling his detractors to back the fuck off, and let him write his books in peace, and at his own damn pace. Since the rampant sense of entitlement so prevalent in today’s society—and in fan communities particularly—is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, I couldn’t help but chime in in the comments section.

Additionally—and I say this as a creative professional who generally pans the idea of the “creative genius” stereotype that is commonly ascribed to creative types—creativity is not a spigot that can be turned on or off at will. Some are better than others at channeling their thoughts into a cohesive work on a regular basis, others truly struggle with it (I’m very much in this last group, fwiw). Again, it’s the height of arrogance to sit there as a consumer and pass judgement on someone else’s inner world.

Go check out the rest of it at “Fed Up? So Are They“ on Tor.com.

Clay Shirky on the future of media:

The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press – high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication – is over. But will the New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.

The whole article is well worth a read. It’s not too long, but it covers basics of Shirky’s predictions about how the media laandscape is going to shift (or is already shifting).

Digital guru Clay Shirky’s media forecast and predictions for 2009 | Media | The Guardian.

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boing boing

I’ve always thought this (along with the notion that long distance charges are a holdover from analogue days, and also are for the most part bogus), but I always had lingering doubts, since no one else seemed to pipe up about it. Now the NYT confirms:

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: “Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn’t.”

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

And why have I always thought this? Because if you know half a thing or two about how information moves from place to place, it just makes sense. The telcos take advantage of the fact that most people won’t be bothered to work this stuff out for themselves, which makes us all suckers. If I had my druthers, we’d all be using VoIP on community ad-hoc WiFi networks.

What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting [NYT]
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The New York Times: Text messages cost carriers virtually nothing [Boing Boing Gadgets]

Featuring Jack Black as Jesus, a cast of lots, and the ever awesome Dr. Horrible himself, Neil Patrick Harris:

Pure win.

Charlie Stross has a good, solid list of do-able things for President-elect Barack Obama (damn, I just don’t get tired of writing that) to concentrate on during his first 100 days. I don’t know if it’s really feasible for all these things to happen, but I sure hope they are—I agree 100% with Stross, which happens quite a bit, actually.
1. Shut down Gitmo
2. Reboot torture
3. Dismantle the DHS (hell yeah)
4. Ratify the Kyoto Treaty (double hell yeah)
5. Start a Congressional inquiry into political appointees
6. Find some young, fresh, liberal faces for the Supreme Court
7. Start a Congressional inquiry into election practices
8. Start a public inquiry into the misuse of intelligence (heh) in the run-up to 9/11
9. Talk to the Russians about (a) gas and oil security, and (b) Ballistic Missle Defense
10. Start talking to all of the G11 (inc’l Spain) about rebooting the global economy

Check out the list, along with deeper commentary, here.

In a move that surprises absolutely no one, the U.S. Government has found a way to escalate one of its ongoing military conflicts right before the election. Funny how I’ve been reading about this since yesterday morning in the international press, but it’s not until today that the American media picks it up. From the NYT:

An explosion on Sunday killed nine construction workers and wounded 19 others near the border of Iraq and Syria, the police in Anbar Province said.

The BBC is a bit less, eh, accommodating to U.S. spin, shall we say:

US military helicopters have carried out a raid inside Syria along the Iraqi border, killing eight people including four children, Syrian officials say.

I’m on record as saying that it’s quite plausible that military action this close to an election could be the excuse Bush (or his minders, rather; Dubya is probably running around the White House with a huge case of Senioritis) needs to call off the election and declare martial law. Let’s hope I’m dead wrong, or that if I’m not, the public won’t stand for it (hoping for the former, because, frankly, the American public is like a brachiosaurus: it takes way too long for the impulse to reach the brain, and for the animal to then process and react).

To top things off, Jon Taplin has another take on the October surprise, this one by way of Al-Qaeda.

Those luminaries at the TSA strike again:

Late Monday, the Transportation Security Administration had announced that a laptop containing data on about 33,000 travelers who had applied for a national airport security fast-pass card was believed to have been stolen from a locked office at the San Francisco Airport in late July.
Early Tuesday, however, the computer was found in the same company office from which it was supposedly stolen. . . .

As a person who has never, ever, in my nearly thirty years on this planet, misplaced so much as his wallet or house keys, let alone his laptop, let me say this:
You fucking idiots. You total, complete, ridiculously inept retards.
(Now, watch me lose my wallet, my keys, and my laptop in a perfect trifecta of hubris-inspired Murphy’s Law chicanery)

But wait, it gets better. When asked about the contents of the laptop, a Senior VP for the private contractor hired by the government to do its job for them run the screening program says:

“Yes, it was sensitive privacy information, but not the stuff that was most sensitive,”

Ooooh, ok. So it was just the reuglur seekrit stuffs, not the sooper dooper double seekrit stuffs. I shall sleep better tonight. Oh yes.

This morning on DailyKos, I ran across this short article about a woman whose $100 campaign contribution was returned by the Obama campaign because she’s a registered lobbyist. Here’s a snippet, typoes and all:

It’s not often you get told that you are persona non grata and end up praising the person who exiled you. But that [sic] what I am doing. Obama actions are living up to his words. Through the actions of his campaign he is demonstrating that his values are real and his commitment is certain.

Another aspect that is quite impressive to me is that the Obama campaign has a mechnism [sic] set up to check each donation, even one as small as mine, against the lobbyist database, and then return it.

What I find most telling in this story isn’t that Obama is true to his word (this much I’m -surprisingly- already convinced of), it’s that he’s truly leveraging technology in order to make his operation more efficient and transparent, as can be seen by the fact that even a contribution as small as $100 doesn’t get past the screeners he’s had set in place. This lends real weight to his platform proposals for more transparency in government via the judicious and efficient use of technology, particularly the internet.