Archive for June, 2006

In case you still haven’t figured out what side you are on in the great Net Neutrality debate, perhaps this brief post by Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web will nudge you to the light (thanks to Ars Technica for the link). It’s worth the time to read the Ars Technica post as well. Both posts clearly state what is at stake, and shoot down the telco ‘anti-regulation’ arguement.

If you have time, you might also want to check out this article by Danny Weitzer of MIT which goes in to more detail on the technical issues involved.

So, yesterday I did about 10 minutes in front of the Eureka Rotary. I’m a member. I was part of a presentation about the Redwood Technology Consortium. I am President of the Board! And before I got in to technology, I spent about 20 years in professional and academic theater doing everything from circus to Shakespeare.

When I used to do theater I was extremely confident. I could walk out on stage and make the audience laugh with my entrance. I felt the power of the spotlight. I thought I could do the same with this crowd. I thought I knew the material (RTC and local telecom issues). I had a joke ready. But I blew it.
I said ‘uh’ in front of every sentence. I was uncomfortabale. I was nervous. I felt the audience staring at me waiting for something interesting or funny and I couldn’t deliver. I wanted to get off stage as quickly as possible.

Maybe it wasn’t that bad. But I felt horrible. Where did that guy go who could hold an audience just by looking at them? He’s been buried for 10 years. At least my cat and dog think I’m still fascinating. One reason to have pets I guess.

The Times-Standard is reporting that the City of Blue Lake would like to have a web site. The report states that volunteers agreed to get a start on the site. When that faltered “Police Chief Dave Gundersen took on the effort — but the result was a little more complex than city leaders had envisioned.”

How many times have I heard stories like this. Because of web design tools like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, it seems like everyone who can type believes they can build and maintain web sites. The fact is, though. They can. But often the difference between volunteer or an amateur web site and one built by a professional company that undertands the technology thoroughly is like the difference between a photocopied newsletter built in Word and a polished, designed newsletter using profession layout tools built by a trained professional.

Of course, the latter is more expensive. But what is the value you receive in return? That’s always the question. Does the City of Blue need a web site? If so, why? What is the City trying to accomplish with the web site? What will be people be able to find on the web site? How will they find it? What, besides look at information about Blue Lake will site visitors be able to do there? How will the site be maintained? Who will do it? How will the site be marketed? It’s long past the time when you could put up a site and expect it to be found by the right people. These are all basic questions that are often not asked when an organization is thinking about having a web site.

The article goes on to state “The city manager noted that City Planner Bob Brown had offered the services of his firm — Streamline Planning — to create the website. They built the city of Trinidad’s website. The obstacle is the cost, estimated at $5,000.” I’m not sure what that cost is based on. But the City of Trinidad’s site does not look too difficult to build. It looks like a standard template with a couple stock calendar applications thrown in.

At the end of the article, City Manager Wiley Buck stated he was hoping for a site similar to the City of Ferndale’s. Again, this is a very simple site. Plain old html like we used to build in 1995. The only dynamic feature on the site is a search tool which is actually run off a third party server. So, if that’s all they want, they probably could get “Arcata High School, College of the Redwoods or Humboldt State University students” to help out. But, will the site get done in a timely manner? Will it have a professional look? Will it have the features they would like? Do they even know what features they would like? Do they even know what’s possible? What would they like their web site to be like 6 months from now? 1 year from now?

I think it’s wonderful they want to have a web site. But have they asked, or been asked the right questions? From this article it doesn’t sound like it.

If they want to save money, though and only want a simple site, why not use a free template like the Eureka Arts and Culture Commission did?  Of course, maybe they shouldn’t leave the name of the free web template company in the title tage of the home page.

In what appears to be largely a partisan vote the House has rejected a Net Neutrality provision that would have prohibited carriers from giving special status to data for content providers who are willing to pay the extra fees.

The vote fell largely along party lines with Democarts voting in favor of Network Neutrality and Republicans voting agains it.

There is still some hope for the concept in a Senate bill that has more bi-partisan support, but this bill has weaker language in it. I guess we’ll see if this bill will get some strength both in language and in political support. Otherwise, the open Internet will quickly get turned in to a two-tiered Internet with the upper tier only available to major companies willing and able to pay the higer costs to get preferred treatment. The egalitarian nature of the Internet that has fostered so much bottom up content that could find an audience may be over.

Why? Simple. The upper tier of content (which will also be provided by the same carriers who are charging others) will get delivered at ever better speeds and priority. The lower tier will be delivered at degraded speeds and smoothness. Which content will most people want to consume?

If AT&T over voice over IP (VoIP) phone service do you think they will give equal packet priority to Skype users? Not likely.

This morning while running (and breathing heavily) I listened to a fascintating story on NPR about a facility that cares for the elderly using a very sophisticated monitoring system. The clients in this care home wear a badge that transmits minute by minute data about what they are doing, what they have eaten, their heart rate, their breath rate, God only know what other data this badge collects.

This story brought out a lot of thoughts as I trudged around my usual route dragging my lazy yellow lab over the last mile.

The first was that I predicted this kind of data gathering and monitoring at least 10 years ago when I used to teach web design for the College of the Redwoods Community Education Program. What seemed self-evident to me at the time, must have sounded crackpot to the students trying to learn the basics of HTML. I said back then that the Internet would become a conduit for all kinds of data and that the web sites they wanted to build would be just a tiny slice. I didn’t think it would take this long. And I didn’t imagine the first real world application of this this concept would flourish among the elderly. Now, though it makes sense. It’s only a matter of time until we are all wearing clothes that monitor our vital signs, our slightest activities, the data gathered in some vast database monitored by the NSA and powered by solar panels woven in to the sleeves and back panels of our shirts and jackets. We are moving to a world connected everywhere and through everything at all time to the greater network.

Is this a good thing or bad? What freedoms do we give up? Gosh, remember Richard Brautigan?:

“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

We can be swaddled in technology, but do we really want that? Do we have a choice?

My mother died of Alzheimer’s last year. She lived in a care home right up until she died. It was a lovely, comforting place with a good staff. Still, I never felt I had enough information about her condition. Though the home was only a 6 minute drive from where I lived, I still couldn’t get over there often enough. And when I did, I never felt I had the whole story. In the NPR story, one of the people profiled cut his daughter off from receiving his data because she was using it to interfere with his daily life.

So enough about others. Again, my thoughts turn back to…me. What will I want when I need to have 24 hour care? Will I want the comfort of knowing someone is monitoring every heartbeat, each step, each breath? Or will I wish to toss off the the web of care and fade off in to oblivion? If I would accept this level of attention then, why not now in case I develop something way before I need to go to a care home. And what about the children? What level of scrutiny will they accept? What level of monitoring will we permit in the name of safety?

These questions aren’t future based. They are immediate. They go to heart of the government’s arguement over warrantless wiretapping and wholesale gathering of phone call data. All necessary to protect us from terrorists they say.