Tag Archives: internet

Escape

Marie Le Conte is one of my favourite panelists on the Oh God What Now podcast. I thought I should make an effort to read one of her books, hence “Escape” (affiliate link). It is about how Millennials were the first generation to grow up with the internet and how they shaped it.

Whatever you make of the ideas or commentary1, one thing is abundantly clear: her personality shines through. You can hear her speaking every sentence. Fast, slightly scattered thoughts with the occasional random aside. In books of this type, it’s rare to come across lines such as:

Still, that isn’t quite the point I was trying to make

In works with less personality the preceding paragraph would have been edited out!

Another example.

(I’m very sorry, I’m going to have to pause for a moment to childishly laugh at the sentence ‘we were using our fingers instead of our mouths.’)

(Okay, I’m good.)

It’s not pretending to be a serious book, though there are serious points to make. It doesn’t quite hang together as a whole. She describes the chapters as essays, and that’s pretty accurate. Think of it as a collection of loosely related essays rather than a cohesive, single narrative.

The essays cover topics from finding your tribe to dating to how nothing is ever as good as it used to be2.

One of the serious points continues to be very relevant with the recent changes in ownership, and therefore moderation, of Twitter and Tumblr.

All we have now is this tiered internet, where everything non-sexual can co-exist — including racism, fake news, abuse, misogyny and the like — but nipples are beyond the pale.

And apparently I’m a terrible person.

I have been in full-time employment for nine years and I still bristle whenever someone sends me a short message with a full stop at the end.

I’ve seen people sign off their text messages. I don’t do that. But tapping space twice at the end of a text message feels like a small price to pay for have a full stop in the correct place3.

Overall, I quite enjoyed “Escape.” I wouldn’t say that it’s essential reading, or that it uncovers many new and unique insights, but you might find it relatable or funny.


  1. I’m not entirely convinced, personally. As a Gen X, I don’t feel substantially less online than many Millennials. ↩︎
  2. Millenials are getting old. ↩︎
  3. I guess this is the marker of me being Gen X. ↩︎

In The Open

I recently shared a blog post entitled “The Most Successful Developers Share More Than They Take” with the comment:

I try to practice “public by default” though, because of my work, it’s often “on the internal wiki” rather than fully open.

Unfortunately the article spends a lot of time talking about blogging and podcasting which, perhaps, undermined the point I was trying to make. If you want to write blogs, speak on podcasts, and present at conferences, good luck to you1. Not everyone will want to do those things, and that’s fine. I’m not advocating for that. I think most people can do what I meant.

Here’s the key point: make your “content” as widely available as practicable. Allow people to pull when it’s convenient for them rather than you push the information you assume they’d be interested in.

In this context, “public” doesn’t have to mean on the internet or even visible to your entire company. Nor does it mean pushing it to everyone. Updates do not need to land in everyone’s inbox.

Here are a few examples.

I work on multiple projects with a number of different clients. When I make notes, or update the status, or write meeting minutes, I put them on the company wiki rather than keep them on my local machine. My manager might be interested in how often I’m meeting with a specific client. The product team might be interested to learn which clients are using Kubernetes. I wouldn’t share most of this outside the company, but internally it’s not confidental.

If I build a small demo for a client or play with some software, I push my toy project to GitHub. Depending on what it is, it might be limited only to my team, more widely to any of my colleagues or it might be public, but I’ll be as open with it as I can.

If I’m researching something, a new technology or how to implement a particular use case, I’ll put my notes on the wiki.

If I ask a question, I will typically ask it in a public Slack channel rather than as a direct message.

An important aspect of all of these things is that I was already typing the information. The only difference is that instead of keeping it on my local machine or sharing with individuals, it’s “public.”

It means that other people can see the current state of my projects without asking for it. This immediately benefits me because I’m lazy. But in a distributed environment, where timezones are significant, it can save everyone time.

Asking questions in public can get answers from unexpected sources. That new guy might have experience you didn’t know about. Someone in a nearby timezone might get you an answer hours earlier than you were expecting. The person you would have asked might not know or be on vacation.

There are downsides, of course. If you ask a stupid question in public, then everyone will see how dumb you are. Your notes might document a terrible, old technology that you shouldn’t be using at all, or your solution might fail horribly.

But here’s the thing: you’re not stupid. I bet other people have a similar misunderstanding. And the journey itself can be interesting. As Kepler noted:

“What matters to me is not merely to impart to the reader what I have to say, but above all to convey to him the reasons, subterfuges, and lucky hazards which led me to my discoveries.”

Those “lucky hazards” might help other avoid the same mistakes. Can we fix the documentation? Include it in the company induction? Is there a blog or a conference talk in it?2 These steps may require a little extra work but they have benefits for everyone, from future you, to your colleagues and your customers.

Someone is wrong on the internet.

The other thing is that it’s a good strategy for getting the right answer. People can be too busy to respond, right up to the point where they find that Someone On The Internet Was Wrong. People are more likely to offer to fix your work more readily than they will be to come up with a working solution from scratch.

What if no one looks up your status updates? What happens when your notes go unread? Well… nothing. You were already writing the notes and no one except you read them. Worst case, you’re exactly where you were.

In short, this is a terrible process if you want to be seen as being right all the time. However, if you value getting to the right answer and acknowledge that you’re a fallible human, if your ego can handle it, then I find it works well.

And, best of all, there is no need to speak on a podcast or to have a website.


  1. Again, possibly undermining my argument, I do write blogs — hello! — and have spoken at conferences. I’ve never appeared on a podcast, though! ↩︎

  2. I said I wasn’t advocating podcasting or blogging, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t if it’s the best way of sharing the information. ↩︎

Blocks, both technical and mental

Blocking content from the Internet is getting a lot of press of late. The last couple of weeks has seen the Pirate Bay being blocked by a number of large ISPs and debate over whether the blocking of “adult” content should be opt-in or opt-out.

Unfortunately the enthusiasm to “protect the children” and “protect the copyright holders” seems to have pushed aside much of the debate of whether we should be doing this at all or whether it’s practical.

Whether we should be doing it or not is political. I have my opinions ((I’m basically anti-censorship and in favour of personal responsibility. There are already laws covering the distribution obscene materials, why should there be restrictions on legal materials?)) but what I want to concentrate on here is whether or not blocking such content is actually possible.

There are a number of different ways of vetting content. They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they’re all deeply flawed.

First, a common one from politicians: the Internet is just like TV and cinema:

Perry said that she has been accused of censorship over the campaign, but argued that the internet was no different to TV and radio and should be regulated accordingly.

No, no it isn’t. There are a handful of TV channels, even taking cable and satellite into account, and a relatively small number of movies released every week. It’s practical to rate movies. TV programmes are distributed centrally, so pressure can be placed on a small number of UK-based commercial entities when they do naughty things.

The Internet is very different. Firstly, counting the number of web pages is rather harder. This is what Wikipedia has to say:

As of March 2009, the indexable web contains at least 25.21 billion pages.[79] On July 25, 2008, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google Search had discovered one trillion unique URLs.

Note that even the smaller number is from three years ago. I’d bet that it’s not smaller now. Clearly the same system of rating an regulation clearly isn’t going to work on that scale. And even if it was possible to rate each of these sites, the UK government has little leverage over foreign websites.

There are basically three ways to automate the process: white list, black list and keyword scanning.

A white list says “you can visit these websites.” Even assuming no new websites are ever added and no new content is ever created, rating those 25 billion pages is not practical. I don’t think we want an official approved reading list.

A black list is the opposite: “you can visit anything except these pages.” We have the same scale problem as with white lists and a few more. Much of the Internet is “user contributed” and it’s not hard to create new sites. If my site is blocked, I can create a new one with the same content very, very quickly. Basically, there’s just no way to keep on top of new content.

Keyword scanning is exactly as it sounds. Your internet traffic is scanned and if certain keywords are spotted, the page is blocked. It’s automated and dynamic, but what keywords do you look for? “Sex”? Well, do you want to block “sex education” websites? “Porn”? That would block anti-porn discussion as well as the real thing.

The scanners can be a lot more sophisticated than this but the fundamental problem remains: there’s no way to be sure that they are blocking the correct content. Both good and bad sites are blocked, and still with no guarantee that nothing untoward gets through.

In all cases, if children can still access “adult” content with relative ease — both deliberately and accidentally — what’s the point?

Of course I’m not in favour of taking content without paying for it or exposing children to inappropriate material. But, to use a cliche, the genie is out the bottle. Like the reaction to WikiLeaks there is little point in pretending that nothing has changed or that the same techniques and tools can be used to fight them.

Instead, if you’re a publisher you need to make your content legally available and easier to access than the alternative. iTunes has showed that people are willing to pay. So far, you’ve mostly shown that you’d rather treat paying customers as criminals. That’s not helping.

As for protecting children, it all comes back to being a responsible parent. Put the computer in the living room. Talk to them. Sure, use white or black lists or filtering, just be aware that it can never be 100% effective and that not everyone has children that need protecting. Whatever the Daily Mail and your technically unaware MP says, you can’t say the connection is being checked, problem solved.

Just say no to SOPA

You’ve almost certainly seen that Wikipedia is kinda-sorta offline today protesting a proposed US law that would effectively give copyright holders the ability to blacklist pretty much any website without judicial review.

While rights holders do have legitimate concerns over people taking content without paying for it — I don’t like to call in piracy or theft — this really isn’t the answer. Wired sums it up nicely:

SOPA and PIPA represent a legal strategy that focuses the attention of business leaders on stopping losses rather than promoting innovation and building new products. It obfuscates the fact that piracy is, in the long run, an unavoidable cost of doing business, one that should be bearable provided the fundamentals of the business (say, customer satisfaction) are sound.

If there’s one thing that the iTunes Store taught us, it’s the people will actually pay for convenience.

But the first word, and therefore this final word, goes go to TheOatmeal, who makes the point better by using an analogy involving kittens and flamethrowers. You should watch the whole thing.

A new CEO for Yahoo?

Rumour has it that Yahoo! are looking for a new CEO. Some people have been putting their name forward for the role, or at least offering suggestions for Carol Bartz’s successor. This post is in response to Joe Stumps list of ideas.

To be clear, I know that list is not completely serious. I know that he’s not really angling for the CEO role and I understand that many of the options would not be achievable even if they were the best thing for Yahoo! That’s not the point I’m trying to make.

The point, in summary, is that buying a bunch of companies to get smart people is not going to fix Yahoo!s problems.

Let’s look at some of the suggestions and, more importantly, how they inter-relate.

I’d buy Instagram and put them in charge of both Instagram and Flickr. They would have 100% autonomy over the entire “Yahoo! Photo” division.

Fine. Instagram has done really well. But what makes it successful? (Assuming that it is successful. So far it has managed to attract a lot of users but there’s no revenue stream as far as I can see.)

Is it the photo part? Well, partially. It has filters that people like playing around with. Another key to its success is the sharing, social side. But…

I’d buy Path and With for the sole reason of bringing Dave and his team on to lead the new “Yahoo! Social” division.

What’s the direction of the company if “Yahoo! Photo” and “Yahoo! Social” are both doing social stuff? Who decides how to share photos or videos?

And how is social distinct from mobile?

I would buy Twitter and Square in order to bring Jack Dorsey on full-time to run a new division called “Yahoo! Mobile.” He would have 100% autonomy over the entire mobile strategy.

Part of the success of both Instagram and Path are the fact that they’re “mobile.”

Mobile and social are not divisions any more than a technology company should have an “internet” division; they are fundamentals that need to influence all modern web “properties.”

Buying companies is not a solution. They’ve bought plenty over the years, but that didn’t help. What happened to Flickr? How “Yahoo!” is it? What about Delicious?

What Yahoo! lacks is not smart people or good technology, it’s a coherent way of tying everything together. Unfortunately that can’t be fixed by maintaining existing fiefdoms or importing new ones.