The Social Web’s Evolving Social Contract

When tech companies handed their keys to their creditors at the end of the boom in 2000, some left behind heaps of customer records in filing cabinets and on harddrives . The accountants turned out the lights. The keepers of those files, network and account managers, had long been fired. That data went to the dumpsters or was scavenged by furniture trolls.

Fast forward to the current recession. Sure companies will go bankrupt. Some may be equally negligent guarding your personal information, but more likely your credit card number, address, and content will be hoovered-up by some larger acquiring company. The content created at Pownce is now Six Apart’s responsibility. The info at Napster is being sucked into the databases of Best Buy — yes the Napster! Elsewhere, Google Notebooks are going dark.

The powerless, to compensate for their condition, often feel the need to strike out. That is not what this is. It’s not alarmist. It’s not a call for an internet user’s bill-of-rights. It is just an observation that on the second go-around with web-company closures, the implied social contract that exists in cities — where it is OK to have cars drive by you at highspeed and have you not fear for your life — is now in effect with data and personal information on the net.

Metadata and its Discontents

Like everyone else, I’ve been tremendously excited about the possibilities of user-generated metadata for some time now. I mean, I’ve been up nights with this stuff.

I’ve watched the inspirational videos (enjoying with a feeling of smug superiority the utopian Austrian downtempo music that I was prescient enough to have purchased when it first came out). I’ve enjoyed David Weinberger’s wonderful Everything Is Miscellaneous. And I’ve been thrilled that some social networking sites (I’m looking at you, LibraryThing) have been imaginative in exploring the technology’s implications, even though their innovations — like ‘tag mirror‘ and ‘tag mash‘ — have occasionally been somewhat limited by resources available to a small startup competing against land-grab services like the Amazon-funded Shelfari.

In short, there are a lot of exciting ideas out there. Tagging, semantic markup, microformats, faceted browsing — all technologies that bring the possibilities of digital categorization to the armchair user.

Unfortunately, it’s still incredibly hard to make use of all this potential functionality. That’s because most businesses have done exactly what you’d expect: buried their heads in the sand or gone to market with half-hearted implementations because they want to look like they’re part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Many of these efforts have been failures. Amazon’s attempt to get users to tag its wares failed to ignite, just as you’d expect if you invited users to conduct an inventory count at their local store. These offerings have usually been under the hood of awkward user interfaces that obscure, rather than reveal, the possibilities of the technology.

Tagging in disguise

True, there have been some honest attempts to bring this technology to users — but they have typically relied on conceptual models inherited from previous media. Gmail is a great example. ‘Labels’ allow you to tag your email in as many combinations as you imagine — but most people use them just as they would use a paper-based filing system: no more than one label per email.

Let’s just put that in perspective. We’re still organizing our correspondence in the same one-place-per-item system that would have been available to Babylonian scribes working with clay tablets. In spite of the fact that technologies to allow us more powerful systems are now abundant. We’re doing this out of habit. Which usually means that our interfaces, both graphic and conceptual, are holding us back.

You see the same thing with iTunes playlists. Playlists essentially are tagging, but are restricted behind the wall of each user’s own library. And the mix & match possibilities of tagging, though possible via ‘smart playlists’, are basically hidden behind the pretense that users are building something just like a radio playlist or a cassette mixtape.

Metadata is not macrodata

The result of these outdated conceptual models is to put digital classification back in the box. Users believe that metadata is ‘higher’ data: a summary of the item in question. They can put a song in multiple playlists, classify a book with multiple tags. And that’s as far as the revolution goes. But that’s the crudest form of metadata possible — in fact, it’s not much more than a user-generated classification schema.

As a result, users tend to be pretty conservative. Here, for example, is a snapshot from my LibraryThing account:

Really? That’s all I could come up with? Sure — because that’s what most people do with their tags: use them like shelf labels for their personal libraries.

But tags — even at this higher level — promise far more freedom for idiosyncrasy. Tags should allow you to indulge your own personal responses to a book, song, film, or object, rather than slavishly follow the conventions of classification that we’ve inherited. Here, for example, is a first stab at what is admittedly the most taggable book ever written:

Tags really do promise an animals belonging to the emperor kinda world.

Tagging Experience

There’s one thing that’s even worse about this tags-as-summary model. It doesn’t adequately represent how we interact with the world. We don’t treat songs, books, articles, and films as great flat surfaces onto which one-line summaries can be slapped. We don’t form an emotional attachment to a piece of music because of its unified formal merits, but instead because of the place it has in our lives: what we were doing when we first heard it, who we were with, what it reminded us of.

Often it isn’t an album, or even a song, on its own, that brings these associations. Perhaps it’s just a moment. The mixture of plaintive regret and warm consolation in Aretha Franklin’s voice when she sings the first eight words of “Soul Serenade”. The weird way in which the first 18 seconds of The Stone Roses’ “Fool’s Gold” filter “Shaft” (via Young MC’s “Know How”) and James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”, and yet are still overwhelmingly redolent of the Manchester scene of 1989 and the amazing possibilities of a new moment in English popular music.

We enjoy passages in a book — phrases, paragraphs, lines of dialogue. We thrill at scenes in a movie. We want to highlight parts of an article to show to friends.

So we need the technologies that will help us share those moments and associations — and to combine them with others in ways that produce exciting and unexpected results. High-level classification actually obscures the richness of our relationships with content, rather than reveals it. And right now that’s where we’re stuck.

Splice & dice classification

What we really need, then is user-generated splice & dice classification. We need the ability to go from this:

Tags for I Wish courtesy of Last.fm

To this:

Splice & Dice Tags for I Wish

Data wants to mate

What are the key principles?

1. Users define the boundaries at which their metadata is be applied: For a book, I might want to tag the entire book, a chapter, a passage, a paragraph, or a phrase. Or even just a Cormac McCarthy’s use of the word “bedlamites“. For a movie: the entire film, a scene, a snippet of dialogue, a particular tracking shot, the cut between two shots.
2. Users define the nature of their metadata: My metadata might be textual, audio, video. I might want to impose my own classification system on Suttree to make it easier for me to enjoy the book; I might want to highlight passages that correspond to the title character’s occasional but impressive use of alcohol. Or I might want to associate certain passages with songs from Tom Waits and Buck 65 and clips from Jim Jarmusch films. We’ve reached the point where tags don’t take us far enough. Data doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to mate.
3. Interfaces must be designed around the functionality, not around conceptual handrails: We may have passed beyond the point at which the conceptual models of former eras — tags, playlists, labels — can handle this stuff. The key concept here should not come from taxonomy but from evolution: radiation. Content must be freed to expand, evolve — and to do so in promiscuous and profuse ways that its creators could not have begun to imagine. The interfaces we design to enable this must make the functionality extremely intuitive. It needs to be hard not to use it.

Bringing hypertext to the masses

We’re pretty excited about this idea, so expect to see a bunch of posts on the possible applications. What kind of devices and interfaces will enable (and interpret) user-defined relationships between units of content? What kinds of opportunities exist with user-defined boundaries around what those units of content actually are? What tools will allow users to weave content together at the interrstices of their own choosing? How can all types of content make use of the ‘atomization’ of their content, freeing the smaller components — moments, passages, phrases — from their contexts, and allowing users to combine them in ways that make sense to them, intellectually or emotionally?

Several companies are already chipping at the edges of this — Flickr’s “notes” feature, for example, is the most high-profile current application — but it remains to be seen whether open standards and copyright can keep pace with the extraordinary implications.

Hip-hop has thrived off this approach to content for decades, but in other genres and media it doesn’t go far beyond quotation, allusion, or homage — and none of it generated by the consumer of information instead of the producer.

Much of the original excitement about hypertext was that it would foreground the connective relationships between areas of knowledge. But the first content-management systems for the internet left the responsibility to maintain these relationships with the individual writer. Writers were expected to include hyperlinks in their texts as they published them. This was a mistake. These relationships should be available for maintenance by the consumers of content — the crowd — not the producer. That is how the promise of hypertext can be realized — providing the ability for users, readers, and consumers to constantly update the relationships between tiny units of content based on what seems relevant to them now, not at the time of production. Based on what they use the content for, not what it was intended for.

That’s how we interact with the world. Data should be no poorer.

Note to self: carry notepad

I can’t remember what I wanted to write about. I had an idea earlier today. It’s gone now.

My problem: I don’t have a smartphone or any other kind of electronic note-taking sort of technology. I often have my iPod on my person, and I’m seldom without my cellphone, but for a guy who writes for a technology blog I leave the house embarrassingly bereft of any technology for recording much of anything. I think my cellphone can take dictation notes, but then I’d have to actually dictate into it, possibly overheard and later mocked by people who, like me, would find a guy dictating into his cellphone impossibly silly. I’d also have to figure out how to use the feature, which my phone may or may not have. And I’d have to check my dictation notes when I got home and probably write them down on something.

I saw something called the PicoPad a while ago on Lifehacker and wondered if it would fit the bill. The size of a credit card, the PicoPad is a folder with paper cards and a pen that’s really a sawed-off pen refill with strategically-placed gaffer’s tape for ergonomics. And it’s brilliant. For transmitting ideas instantaneously you can’t beat Apple and Blackberry (idea for promoting the G-Phone: mall-based stores where you can buy a G-Phone & wireless plan and get tech support and service and have a free slice of apple or blackberry pie – your choice! – and coffee while you wait… sorry to clutter the blog but I had to jot this down somewhere) but for recording them for yourself, wirelessly and without impacting battery life, you can’t beat a pad and paper.

So why not just carry a pad and paper like other GTD-practitioners? Because I don’t want to. Because few notepads and pens fit comfortably in a hip pocket without making unsightly bulges and generally causing discomfort of one kind or another. Because I believe that if I’m trying to unclutter my mind by taking notes to capture information as it comes to me I should not be cluttering my appearance or the storage technology inherent in the clothing I choose to wear (i.e. pockets). My aim is elegance, so any inelegant solution is no solution at all. I already carry a wallet, keys, and one or two electronic devices. That’s already too much stuff. More is not the answer. My stuff should just do more.

So why not get something sleek and sexy like an iPhone or Blackberry, thereby replacing my cellphone and possibly my iPod while adding the functionality of note-taking? If the answer to that isn’t obvious, let me ask why don’t you buy me one and pay for the data plan?

And anyway, I think there’s something to be said for taking a note the old-fashioned way, especially when you’re recording a piece of information in the presence of someone else, like a phone number or note to yourself to do them some favour. Whip out your smartphone and start tapping away and you’ll need to reassure the data donor that you’re just making a note for yourself, not checking email or sending a tweet, and then while you’ve got your device out you why not just sneak a peek at an email or two and tap out a quick, pointless note to your friends. But with a slip of paper and pen your intention is clear and your attention is focused. Anyone can see what you’re doing. A notepad is not a multi-function device, and that’s a good thing. Let other schmoozers toss off non-commitments like “hey, remind me to get you the ARC of that new Don DeLillo novel.” With pen and paper at hand you make the note there and then, demonstrating preparedness and focus without a trace of ambivalence or inattention. Elegant, indeed.

Audiobooks, or how I learned to love housework

You’re going to read about audiobooks quite a bit in this blog. (E-books, too, but you’re already reading this on a screen so you don’t need to hear how great they are; you just need someone to figure out how to sell them to you.) There are a few reasons we like audiobooks. The first is a matter of circumstance: through my job I have access to a huge supply of them. Three of us work at the same place, so when we want to share something we love, here come the discs.

Reason #2 is the one that counts for Datachondria.

Reading isn’t primarily a visual activity. It’s actually quite physical. Think about it. What can you do with your hands when you’re reading? How fast can you walk when you’re reading? Can you run? In what kind of weather can you read outdoors? At what time of day? Can you read with gloves on? Mittens? Can you watch your kid playing at the park while reading? Can you walk your dog? Fold laundry?

Reading requires a huge number of physical conditions to be met in order to be done effectively. But I’ve found that comprehending language only requires that no other language be input at the same time. I can carry on a conversation while eating as long as I can hear my companions distinctly. If there are several conversations going on at the table at once I can really only participate in one at a time, though if I concentrate only on listening I might be able to keep up with up to three threads of light discussion, but this has no bearing at all on the enjoyment I take from my meal.

Audiobooks let me employ that part of my brain that processes language while the rest of me is doing something else. I can’t write an email while listening to an audiobook, not in the sense that I can be said to be doing both at exactly the same moment, but I can usually format a spreadsheet, do some light banking, eat a salad, dust the living room, etc. The only thing I can’t do while listening to an audiobook is read, speak, or listen to speech.

The first thing I noticed after listening to a few audiobooks is that I spend a hell of a lot of time at home doing none of the things that would prevent me from listening to an audiobook. This revelation came a few weeks after my wife began photographing weddings on the weekends, leaving me to figure out what to do with myself at home. The first few Saturdays didn’t go so well. I watched a few DVDs I didn’t really want to watch again. I read a couple chapters of a book or two I wasn’t really into. I spent an incredible amount of time on the internet doing absolutely nothing of value. There was laundry that could have been done, groceries I could have gotten, letters to mail, empties to return, random errands to run, and there really wasn’t a good reason for me to be in the middle of washing dishes when she came home at midnight except that only by about 11:30 did the shame of accomplishing absolutely nothing with my day turn unbearable. Why did I put off housework? Probably for the same reasons that everyone does: because it’s boring. Even if I don’t want to watch Apocalypse Now: Redux for the 16th time, I’d rather tell myself I spent 4 hours of my day doing that than having handed over my weekend to chores.

Then one Friday afternoon a copy of Daniel Levitin’s This is Your Brain on Music arrived in my mailbox at work and I took it home with me for the weekend. Earlier in the week wifey had specifically asked me to do the laundry (or I offered and she called my bluff; either way I’d be elbow-deep in undies) so I knew I had two things I wanted to do with my Saturday: “read” this audiobook and get through at least 3 or 4 loads of laundry, including folding and ironing. 5 discs/ 6 hours, and about as many loads later I knew I’d been witness to a breakthrough. I can indulge my intellectual curiosity (or appetite for narrative, though my at-home audiobook diet is 3:1 non-fiction to fiction) while getting things done around the house. In these early days I was still limited by proximity to the stereo, as iTunes hadn’t yet released version 8 with all its audiobook-friendly enhancements (more on that in a future post), and I hadn’t yet acquired a pair of wireless headphones. But wheeling the hamper into the living room, folding on the coffee table, and setting up the ironing board behind the couch all worked just fine for a while.

These days I always have one audiobook on the go at home and one or two in queue just in case I find myself with an extra heavy load of dishes ahead of me. I’ve learned that reading is addictive in all its forms. When we moved and I didn’t have my gear set up to listen to audiobooks wirelessly in our new home I became unproductive and irritable: I was in withdrawal. A few days into it I got a good fix when left alone to paint the room where my computer had been temporarily stationed — fortunately with the speakers hooked up. I still had to pause when I went to the kitchen for a beer (this was serious painting, after all) which made me pine for the adapter to get my wireless headphones back in the game. But at least the shakes were gone.

This week we bought a dishwasher and I had a thought, not expressed until now: will I still get to listen to audiobooks for the two hours per week I used to spend washing dishes? I haven’t discussed this with Wifey yet. Maybe her delicates need hand-washing? Could I learn to bake? Perhaps the dog could use a brushing? I could vacuum — but that’s loud. This place could use a good sweeping! And dusting. Maybe some paint touch-ups…

Datachondria: Better Living Through Data

Welcome to Datachondria, a blog about living.

Here you’ll find a diverse crowd holding an open conversation — with each other and with the void — about data, technology, information, and the way we live now.

You’ll find us writing as users, consumers, participants, citizens, parents — not as industry insiders or high-window theorists. Although from time to time we’ll probably do that too.

We’ll talk about the exciting implications of a new technology for day-to-day living — and the frustrating holes in the user experience. We’ll write about things that individuals, businesses, governments, and organizations do with data: the things they do well, the things they could do better, and the things they fail to do at all. About the things that could improve our lives in ways trivial and superficial or ways vast and life-changing.

We’ll be asking questions about the implications and complications of technology for personal living, social conduct, and public society. The fears and anxieties that new technologies provoke. The implications for our physical day-to-day lives and for the digital manifestations of self that we use to represent ourselves. How will this help me find my keys? How will this help me structure my personal finances, stay in touch with my friends, discover new music, and avoid the kid who stalked me in high school? What does this mean for how I communicate, or how I make decisions about my work? Does this change the way I think about etiquette, public policy, and whether Nirvana really were a good band? (They were not.) [Yes they were. - ed.]

The relationship between our lives — personal and communal — and the technologies we use is a two-way process, a constant conversation. We’ll be recording some of the dialogue and choosing the soundtrack. Datachondria. Better living through data. Better data through living.