Martian talk

This morning I was on the phone with a customer service representative about emails I was getting from an insurance company and which were clearly meant for someone else with a similar name (fortunately nothing earth-shaking, but still something this person would probably like to know about).  As is usually the case, the reply address was a bit bucket, but there were a couple of options in the body of the email: a phone number and a link.  I'd gone with the phone number.

The customer service rep politely suggested that I use the link instead.  I chased the link, which took me to a landing page for the insurance company.  Crucially, it was just a plain link, with nothing to identify where it had come from*.  I wasn't sure how best to try to get that across to the rep, but I tried to explain that usually there are a bunch of magic numbers or "hexadecimal gibberish" on a link like that to tie it back to where it came from.

"Oh yeah ... I call that 'Martian talk'," the rep said.

"Exactly.  There's no Martian talk on the link.  By the way, I think I'm going to start using that."

We had a good laugh and from that point on we were on the same page.  The rep took all the relevant information I could come up with and promised to follow up with IT.

What I love about the term 'Martian talk' is that it implies that there's communication going on, but not in a way that will be meaningful to the average human, and that's exactly what's happening.

And it's fun.

I'd like to follow up at some point and pull together some of the earlier posts on Martian talk -- magic numbers, hexadecimal gibberish and such -- but that will take more attention than I have at the moment.


* From a strict privacy point of view there would be plenty of clues, but there was nothing to tie the link to a particular account for that insurance company, which was what we needed.

Are we still on the information superhighway?

Some words and phrases are just plain dated. They were the cat's pajamas back in the day, but now only a square would think they were hep. For all practical purposes they've dropped off the face of the earth into a silent abyss, only to be dragged out when we feel like watching 80s videos, pointing and laughing (*). Which brings me back to the title.

What was the "information superhighway"? As usual, Wikipedia has the relevant citation:

"One of the technologies Vice President Al Gore (**) is pushing is the information superhighway, which will link everyone at home or office to everything else—movies and television shows, shopping services, electronic mail and huge collections of data."

So that happened. Not only that, the analogy to the original superhighways (i.e., the U.S. Interstate system) seems apt. Both are "enabling technologies", valuable not so much for what they do, but for the other technologies and trends they make possible. So why does the term sound so completely dated?

I'd guess there are a couple of reasons. One is that "information superhighway" was never a real geek term. It was a way of explaining the geek stuff to congresspeople who largely didn't care greatly about the technology. They cared about what supporting said technology could bring to their constituents. The interstate system was widely regarded as a Good Thing, so if you could convince people this "internet" stuff was the modern version of that Good Thing you were ahead of the game.

That was probably helpful in congress, but it gave off the impression that only suits and pointy-haired bosses talked about "superhighways". Real geeks talked about networks, client-server architectures, not-so-client-server architectures, RISC vs. CISC and whatever else happened to be floating around at the time. If you wanted to be cool in the dot-com days, you wanted to talk like a geek.

Another reason, perhaps less obvious, is that we don't call superhighways "superhighways" anymore. They're just highways. What's super about them, anyway?

These days, if you're parked on the 405 during rush hour -- that is, pretty much any time -- they don't look so super. But consider what came before them. For example, to get from LA to the San Joaquin valley, you had little choice but to take the "Ridge Route" over the Tejon summit. These days, you've got eight lanes of I-5, traversable at speeds (ahem) well in excess of whatever's posted. Before that, well here are some excerpts from a description on GBCnet.com:

Perhaps the most hazardous section [...] was the Grapevine Grade between Fort Tejon and the base of Grapevine Creek [...]. The original Ridge Route highway built in 1915 was an absolute deathtrap. This section had 119 sharp turns, two with a radius as small as 80' (a 10 MPH hairpin turn - the turning radius of an average car is 40') and when totaled caused the traveler to drive the equivalent of 12 full circles [My inner math major compels me to infer "six one way and six the other" -- DH]. As a testament to the hazards presented by this road, one turn was even labeled "Deadman's Curve." By 1934 the extension of the US 99 Ridge Route Alternate [...] offered a substantial improvement in safety and ease of driving. For one, the number of turns was reduced to 23 and the number of complete circles a driver would have to make was reduced to 1½. [...]. Perhaps the biggest improvement was the widening of the road from 20' to 30' with three 10' lanes. The addition of suicide lanes enabled motorists to pass slow trucks and allowed traffic to move more quickly as backups behind the slow vehicles became minimized.

Yep. "Suicide lanes" were an improvement. Granted, by the time I-5 came around in 1960, there had been further improvements, including an expressway that was partially incorporated into the interstate. Nonetheless, all of the above fun and excitement would have been well known to drivers at the time, and eight relatively straight and level lanes, none designated "suicide," would have warranted the "super" tag.

Similarly, if you compare grainy YouTube video, the occasional annoying wait and spam-a-go-go to dialup access to a BBS (***), the difference is night and day. But one soon forgets the night.

(*) As you might guess from my profile, I caught those 80s videos the first time around. Thought they were infinitely bitchin'.

(**) It's hard to pull out a quote like that without dragging up the "Al Gore claims he invented the internet" controversy. I'll defer to Wikipedia on that, too.

(***) Nothing against BBSs. Like many geeks of a certain age, I spent a fair bit of time on one (thanks Keith!). I hear now you can use the internet to type short text messages to people who can type back at you ... you can even download timesink games and ...

All of human knowledge

In the annual (?) appeal for funding for the Wikimedia Foundation, Jimmy Wales asks us to

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

This seems like perfectly fine wording for a fundraising appeal, a decent description of what Wikipedia is about, and a noble ideal to boot. So let's rain on the parade by picking it apart, shall we?

Is it possible, even in principle, to give even one person access to the sum of all human knowledge? Actually, what does "the sum of human knowledge" even mean? Some time ago, I was convinced it was "everything in the encyclopedia". Now I'm not so sure. Wikipedia itself specifically excludes knowledge that isn't "notable" (what did I have for breakfast yesterday?) and "original research" such as tends to creep in as people summarize pieces of articles and draw conclusions from them. It also goes to great lengths to exclude or at least neutralize opinion (POV in the jargon (*)).

In other words, it aims to gather information generally accepted as "known". This is the kind of philosophical quicksand that holds up just fine so long as all you do is walk blithely across it. So let's just walk ...

Assuming there's such a thing as the sum of human knowledge, for some value of "knowledge", could anyone access it? Well, you don't really want to access all of it. You couldn't anyway. You want to be able to access the bit you need at the moment, right then and there.

This runs directly into the limits human bandwidth. Not only is there only so much raw information you can process at one time, there is only so much metadata -- information about what and where other information is -- that you can process at one time. Sure, the knowledge you're looking for is in there, and you have both the careful work of editors and categorizers and the raw horsepower of text search at your disposal. But can you find it? Empirically, the answer so far is "often". I doubt it will ever be "always".

Nonetheless, an unachievable goal is still worth aiming for so long as we produce useful results along the way.

(*) The Wikipedia article on POV contains a very relevant bit of wisdom:

In Thought du Jour Harold Geneen has stated:^[1]

The reliability of the person giving you the facts is as important as the facts themselves. Keep in mind that facts are seldom facts, but what people think are facts, heavily tinged with assumptions.

Naming the social compenent

I've previously argued that what we call "social networking" comprises (at least) two major parts: A graph of network connections, with access control, and a social aspect, through which people identify themselves as belonging to various groups. Here are some possible names for the social aspect:

• Social Aspect or Social Component: Why not? Not snappy, but descriptive.
• Totem: Earl suggests this in a comment. Webster's defines it as an entity that watches over or assists a group of people. The term has spiritual origins, but so do daemon and avatar, for example.
• Brand: If totem has more purely human connotations, brand is more purely commercial (notwithstanding that commerce is a very human activity). The term is already in use; commercial sites care very much about their brands.

There probably isn't any one correct term, and if there is one, it may not be any of the above. I can't think of many cases where someone would say "X is my brand", but on the other hand business people use the term freely and appropriately. For that matter, I'm not sure I can see people saying "X is my totem," but you never know what might catch on.

Renaming social networking

I've previously argued that what we call "social networking" comprises two very separate things:

• A set of features for navigating from your immediate connections to their connections and so on, generally with a filtering capability ("Who in my network is over 30/says they liked Casablanca/joined since I last looked/etc?")
• Names, logos, slogans and other branding to identify people as having something humanly meaningful in common ("all the cool kids/movie buffs/seasoned professionals/etc join this site")

I'm looking for good names for these parts. The first one needs something technical, like "connection graph navigation" but less of a mouthful. The second one needs something more human, like "banners" (as in "rallying under the banner of ..."), but snappier and more evocative.

I'm sure that the combination will continue to be called "social networking," whether or not the label really fits, but it would be good to have nice crisp labels for the parts when we want to talk about them without confusion.

I don't know what to call it, but I know I don't like it

You know the story. I've got an appointment tomorrow. My phone knows about it. My calendar program knows about it and can even tell the phone. The other person's corporate schedule knows about it. The other person's PDA knows about it. That's four copies of the same thing, variously synced up automatically, semi-automatically or manually (as when we both agree verbally on the time and place, then each enter the information into the appropriate system).

There ought to be one resource with one URN and (potentially) several URLs. Instead we just have the copies and the potential URLs.

I've heard several names for this, but none of them quite works for me. I'd be glad to hear more and better:

• Silos: You know, those tall towers in the countryside, each full of, well, something, and each separate from the others. Except that a silo is generally full of silage. You take stuff like corn stubble that the combine leaves behind, dump it in a silo (maybe the familiar tower, maybe just a big trench or plastic bag) let it ferment and then feed it to the livestock in the winter. Not the flow of information we're talking about (or hmm ... maybe it is).
• Balkanization: Refers, of course, to the Balkans, small states formed from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and later Yugoslavia. Each has its own government, language, culture etc. and they don't necessarily cooperate all that well. That matches up pretty well with a mess of operating systems, file formats and so forth, but my cell phone didn't suddenly declare independence from my laptop. I'd also prefer to stay out of recent geopolitical history out of deference to those actually involved.
• Fragmentation: Again, this assumes there was a coherent whole to begin with.
• Fiefdoms: This may be closest. Fiefdoms could arise for all kinds of reasons. Each had its own house rules and customs. Sometimes they would cooperate, sometimes they would guard their resources like, well, little fiefdoms. The defining feature of a fiefdom is allegiance to a higher rank of nobility, ultimately up to the monarch. My laptop and cell phone both owe fealty to me. My counterpart's cell phone is liege to my counterpart or to corporate, depending. If you buy that, the metaphor works fairly well.