Author: Curt Hopkins

The British novelist Ian McEwan said, “The naming of what is there is what is important.” But there is a thing, or an idea, a system or network, that we live with every day, that we live in, that we, in point of fact, are, which has no name.

When apprehending and recognizing something new, we humans name it. Some say we name things in order to control them and there might be some truth to that. But who would not elect to control an earthquake than be controlled by one?

Our information gathering network has changed out of recognition, but its taxonomy has lagged behind. We need to name this new network, and we would like the readership of ReadWriteWeb to help us.

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In the Big Room, our editorial chat room, we were speaking about the earthquake that struck Baja this afternoon.

Before the media, even the new media, got it, we had read it on Twitter. ReadWriteWeb has written before on the ability of this new tool, and others like it, to gather and disseminate information.

In the course of this discussion, we came to a surprising realization. Twitter was no more the issue than the so-called mainstream media was. We were beyond all of that now. Our network was not restricted to three news channels, or the cable news networks, or a handful of social media websites or thousands of Facebook accounts, or even all of those things taken as a whole. Our access to information, our ability to exchange it, was no longer bound by anything at all, with the possible exception of time. The reason for this sea-change is that we ourselves have in part become the system formerly we only used. We have become the fulcrum of our own network. Prometheus is well and truly unbound.

This network, the one that connects us to virtually every part of the world, to every person on the globe, branches like a Mandelbrot set. It consists of computing devices from desktop computers to laptops to tablets to phones; it consists of every program written to run those devices, every website and service that helps us to process and move the truths we witness or create; it consists of cell towers and server farms; it consists of social media tools and word processing programs; but above all it consists of, it is powered by, human beings, both singularly and in aggregate, minds and mind.

Our network is alive.

But it needs a name, and we don’t have one. Jokingly, one of us called it The Culture. It isn’t. It isn’t even a culture. Just a network. But a vast one, a possibly game-changing one and, above all, a nameless one, one which we should control rather than allow to control us.

Help us assert control over an exciting, but daunting reality. What should this global network, this lace of machine and human, location, data and feeling, thought and thing, observer and observed, speaker and listener, be called?

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Bodies dropped in a faint across the International Date Line yesterday and today as panicked iPad users received the “Not Charging” message in the upper right-hand corner of their brand new tablets.

Even ReadWriteWeb was not free of the need for smelling salts as one of our new iPad-owners followed her instinct and hooked the tablet up to her laptop in the same fashion she always has for her iPhone. That feeling that mixes acid running down your bones and your stomach dropping into your shoes was temporary if acute. A bit of rummaging and she plugged the proprietary charger in.

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Endgadget reported that neither USB hubs nor Wingtel rings would charge the device either.

Apple’s iPad support page on charging states that this is a result of insufficient power output from some computers, rather than a design fault. Further, if you put your iPad to sleep, it will charge up.

Either way, the charging constraint is an issue, mostly as it limits the available avenues to recharging on the go. But perhaps as important was the apparent failure in the company’s user experience process. Not a hard ball to drop, given how intently a company and its teams live with the product they are developing, but an important one nonetheless. At the very least, the message “Not Charging” was inaccurate if not outright untrue.

Generally speaking, RTFM is not enough. Thinking through user experience, including testing by people outside the team, is mandatory. We will see if this sort of oversight will result in similar issues in the coming days.

Audrey Watters contributed to this report.

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According to Bloomberg, sales of iPad in its debut weekend is likely to be double what was originally estimated.

Piper Jaffray predicted 200,000 to 300,000 units would be sold. Sanford C. Bernstein & Company predicted 300,000 to 400,000. However, the first day has seen an estimated 700,000 of the tablets out the door. (See ReadWriteWeb’s ongoing coverage of the iPad launch.)

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“Lines at five stores surveyed by Piper Jaffray were longer than expected,” Bloomberg reportered, “yet Apple had iPads available yesterday evening, signaling the company was able to produce enough devices to fulfill initial demand.”

With a starting price of $499, the first weekend will have brought in approximately $35,000,000 retail. Trefis predicted on Forbes that the iPad debut would result in a 2% increase in Apple stock, but long-term rise may depend on the success of its apps offering. Apple closed on Friday, according to NASDAQ, at $235.97.

This in itself was an all-time high for the stock, according to the San Jose Mercury News, “thanks more to rumors about the iPhone than anticipation for Saturday’s iPad debut.”

Photo by Louise Docker

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A new startup is looking to apply crowdsourcing to the fashion industry. Fashion Stake, whose website will open to the general public in several weeks, will allow the fashion-conscious to directly invest in designers.

Its motto is, “Democratize Fashion” – a tall order.

The site, led by Harvard Business School alumnus Daniel Gulati, will put designers and companies together with consumers on two levels, financially and critically. Financially, an investment in a designer will return the ability to apply credits toward purchasing that designer’s garments.

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Critically, the full space of social media tools will be used. Viewers may browse collections, vote them up or down and suggest ideas for new garments or lines and praise or criticize designer directions.

Although Gulati told us he could not divulge the number or nature of the designers he has waiting in the wings, a screenshot on the company’s blog shows the names Phillip Lim, Alexander Wang, Donna Karan and Jeffrey Montero.

Given the increasing comfort level that consumers have with dialogic shopping – as well as the horrendous downturn in an industry that was already plagued with vicious gatekeepers – it could provide a price-conscious connection to haute couture, as well as the sense of investment that fashion-oriented television shows like Project Runway have tapped into.

In addition to the front page of the website, Fashion Stake also has its blog, a Twitter account and a Facebook page.

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Flurry, the analytics firm for mobile applications, has released an updated snapshot of iPad developer activities.

Flurry’s Peter Farago broke it down on the Flurry blog.

“iPad made up 22% of new projects starts within Flurry over the last 60 days. In March, over 3,000 unique applications were created within Flurry. A second point of interest is that Android’s share of new project starts has decreased from 18% to 8%.”

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However, Farago cautions against concluding that Android development is falling off.

“Android’s percent has declined because iPhone and iPad growth is increasing at a rate faster than that of Android.”

He also notes that Blackberry development is down, with only 1% of developers tackling that device, down from 4% in 2009. This is within the Flurry system of developers, it is worth noting.

The following graphic consists of “averages taken across 2009 vs. the last 60 days.”

The take-away, in addition to the current spike of popularity for the iPad among developers, is the fact that “(t)he total pie is growing significantly, month over month.”

Mobile continues to be a growth industry, as ReadWriteWeb has observed a number of times.

Update: A typo in the Flurry report indicated that “Android’s share of new project starts has decreased from 18% to 8%.” It should, reflecting the graphic, say that it had “decreased from 18% to 10%.”

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Have you become the Mayor of Buttita Plaza Pawn on Foursquare? Or the Archbishop of Myung Dong Tofu Cabin, or the…Deputy Sheriff of the Twilight Bowl? Yay for you! Meanwhile, bloggers in Morocco and Vietnam have become the Governor of Prison and the Water Commissioner of the Interrogation Room.

Feel bad? I’m not going to tell you you shouldn’t. All this technology we use and write about and enthuse on has higher stakes than we think. Here are some of them.

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Moroccan blogger Abdellatif Ouaiss arrested. Ouaiss was arrested Sunday for “an article published in his English-language blog in which he criticized the ten-year rule of King Mohammed VI” according to Rihab Alhoria.

Vietnamese human rights lawyer and blogger Le Thi Cong Nhan rearrested. In the middle of March, only three days after Le Thi Cong Nhan was released from prison after a three year sentence, she was arrested again. “Police took her to a Hanoi police station for allegedly violating the terms of the supplementary sentence of three years of house arrest that she is now supposed to serve,” according to From The Old, which has more information.

Germany blocks content country-wide, imitates China and Iran. Germany, according to the OpenNetInitiative, has instituted “block lists.” What starts with porn ends with you shutting the hell up. (What was that thing about the lessons of history? Ah, whatever. Let’s dance! Ganz toll!)

Google gets hacked in China. Intermittent hacking and other mysterious interference slows, and in some places, blocks Google. Google stammered in response. More from ReadWriteWeb.

Yahoo gets hacked. In China. Over a dozen Yahoo email accounts belonging to foreign journalists, activists and analysts in China were hacked. Effectively, the email accounts were shut down. More from ReadWriteWeb.

Still. Iranian blogger Hessam Firouzi‘s still in prison. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer is still in prison. Omid Reza Mir Sayafi (murdered March 18, 2009) is still dead.

Top photo by Adrian Van Leen
End photo by FreeKareem.org

The author was a co-founder of the March 18 Movement.

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Trumba, the shared calendar and events communications software company has added the ability for users to attach “custom objects” to their Web calendars and other websites. These “objects” are in essence tables that unfold graphically, keyed to links, or can stand on their own as pages.

Trumba’s customers use the company’s software to publish interlinked calendars and provide other modular features to their websites. Clients include media companies like the New York Times and Ottaway Newspapers, academic institutions like Kansas State and Emory Universities, and groups like the City of Seattle and the New Orleans Saints.

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The custom objects advance the inherent modularity of Trumba’s offerings. From Trumba:

“To quickly grasp the idea of an Object, think of it as a table. Each record is represented by a row. Each attribute is represented by a column. Because Objects are tables, you can use them to store any collection of data that you might want to publish on your website.”

Dan Hickman, Trumba’s president, wrote us:

“Some of our competitors offer a canned venue or performer features that let you track and publish that information along with your calendar but our custom objects feature lets you create any type of content that might be associated with your events. The feature can even be used to publish a connected database of information that’s not even related to your calendar.”

Examples include attaching venue descriptions and pictures to events, to provide detailed listings of departments in a sleekly retrievable fashion and the ability to solicit and utilize user-generated content.

Disclosure: The author helped Trumba start their first blog many years ago.

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Today Google introduced two new elements to its popular advertising system, a Search Funnel and something it is calling Ad Innovations.

The company’s VP of product management, Susan Wojcicki, described the Search Funnel as a “set of reports describing the Google.com search ad click and impression behavior leading up to a conversion.”

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The idea is that users of the Sales Funnel will, over time, tighten and focus their use of Google Ads to such a degree that they will be able to sell a grommet to an Albanian from outer space.

“The data you see in Search Funnels can help you understand how users search for your products before converting so that you can optimize these conversion paths.”

Ad Innovations is a specialist website Google has set up to “work closely with advertisers on what comes next.” They intend to use the space to debut ad-tech ideas and solicit user feedback.

Photo by Danny Sullivan.

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Today, YouTube migrated its user videos over to a new design. The design was available before now, and has been in development for months, but today was the day all the videos got their Sunday go-to-meeting clothes on.

In a January post, Julian Frumar, a YouTube user experience designer, commented on YouTube’s blog that the old design could appear “cluttered and a little overwhelming.” (Julian, by the way, is up for an Understatement of the Year Award.)

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In the intervening months, YouTube has experimented with a cleaner design that made “the video the star.”

Other changes besides the focus on the video include a thumbs-up/thumbs-down rating system to replace the 1-5 scale, a finessed up-next video list, an easier-to-find subscription button and integrated video and text comments.

Is it a hit so far? Er. Nuh-uh.

On today’s YouTube blog post announcing the change, there were… comments – hundreds of them as invested users chimed in. And the chimes sounded pretty discordant. As of this posting, the word “suck” was used 14 times, “terrible” and “shit” tied at nine times each, the word “crap” six times and “bad” five times.

Lies, damned lies and statistics? Maybe. Representative comments included the following: “Looks like crap, keep up the horrible work.”

Firefox Twitter sentiment analysis gave the changes a 15-12 positive-negative rating. But TwitterFeel disagreed, with real-time analysis overwhelmingly negative.

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The New York Times’ new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it’s an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer.

With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader’s fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer’s ability to annotate a story with “raw” information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer’s code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah.

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Want annotated source materials embedded in your kitty blog without having to churn code until the tears flow? You can do it.

This latest viewer by the New York Times is the latest iteration of a two year development process. The viewer allows reporters to augment stories by including evidentiary documentation and providing context to news stories. The viewer keys documents to words or phrases in the source story, allowing viewers to pursue the process to the depth they prefer. These “annotations” are similar to an old-fashioned “hot link” but with a new-fangled dynamic delivery.

Future versions will open up the annotation process to readers, instead of just the writers and editors. Additional features may include an embeddable version for blogs, a search-friendly version without JavaScript, variable image file type control and the ability to create custom annotation shapes. The open-source software behind Version 2.0 will be released “in the very, very near future,” according to the newspaper, and will be available on the Times’ Github page.

The key criticism to this undertaking, of course, is: so what?

BayNewswer quoted Aron Pilhofer, the paper’s editor for interactive newsroom technologies, as “recognizing that news organizations are slowly but gradually becoming more and more like technology companies.” They are, that is, more likely to triumph if they leverage a wider distribution of invested community members.

Alan McLean, interface engineer at the Times, says his focus is on the Doc Viewer as a reporting tool.

“Fundamentally what we are trying to do here is get as many tools in the belts of reporters as we can to assist them in telling stories online,” he told RWW. “Seeing it as a publishing platform is somewhat limited. It really depends on the kind of content that is being published.”

However, Chris Heisel, in a post on an earlier version of this viewer, said, “In a world where I can easily find more infor­ma­tion than I can ever pos­si­bly use does the public really need more access to raw infor­ma­tion.”

We read news in a politically and socially polarized environment. The most common charge against the NY Times – this most mainstream of MSM – is bias, that there is nothing more than a writer’s unexamined feelings or political secret sauce to support the angle of a given story. With foundational documents appended to the story itself, the reasonableness of the reporter’s approach should prove easier to determine.

But that is posited on the not-altogether-likely notion that reason and reality will overpower the desire to froth.

The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.

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Posterous, the integrated small blogging platform, announced the debut of one-stop custom domain registration today.

A new “domain purchasing feature” provides a one-click on-site way to avoid what Posterous’ Vincent Chu called “the geeky details” of securing and applying a personal domain to your account.

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“After you’ve purchased your own domain, we also make it super easy to set up your own personalized email boxes, calendars, and wikis using Google Apps.”

Instead of mucking about in the guts of your personal branding engine, this push-button domain machine avers to do it all for you. A big deal? Just a deal of modest proportion, in keeping with the simplicity the service emphasizes.

Tumblr, Posterous’ biggest competitor, also offers custom domains but not through its own site and not integrated with Google.

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Associated Press initially reported that three foreign journalists and one analyst have seen their email accounts hacked into today. The New York Times subsequently reported that there were “at least a dozen rights activists, academics and journalists who cover China,” including the author Andrew Jacobs.

AP:

“They were greeted with messages saying, ‘We’ve detected an issue with your account’ and were told to contact Yahoo, they said Tuesday. Yahoo technicians told one of the four that his account had been hacked and restored his access, but it was not clear if the other instances were related.”

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Jacobs reported that “hackers altered (his) e-mail settings so that all correspondence was surreptitiously forwarded to another e-mail address.”

Among those affected were Clifford Coonan of Variety magazine and Kathleen McLaughlin, a freelancer.

Agence France Presse reported that Yahoo! was avoiding directly addressing the hacks, saying only that it “condemns all cyberattacks regardless of origin or purpose.”

Yahoo! was roundly condemned for hurriedly turning over user information on reporter Shi Tao to the Chinese security forces in 2005. Their actions resulted in a long prison term for Shi for sharing Chinese media coverage policy with foreign sources. The late U.S. Congressman Tom Lantos called CEO Jerry Yang a “moral pygmy” for his collusion and subsequent slippery excuse-making.

Earlier today, intermittent blocking of Google was reported in the country.

China has the most sophisticated and widespread online censorship regime in the world, dovetailing social measures, criminal statutes and electronic measures. Additionally, some believe that government-sponsored, or at least encouraged, hackers have been behind multiple attacks on the properties of foreign companies, like the one that occasioned Google’s surprising announcement of its intended withdrawal from China in January.

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Automattic, the makers of WordPress.com, have introduced VaultPress, a plugin to plug the backup gap.

Users of WordPress’ hosted service have their blogs backed up automatically (so to speak). So if something goes pear-shaped, the content is caught before it hits the ground. However, if you use a self-hosted version of the software you must back up your content yourself, and heaven help you if you forget.

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Now, by downloading and installing a simple plugin, self-hosted users will have the same safety net as their hosted counterparts.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, announced the plugin on the VaultPress blog.

“Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups.”

In an email, he said, “In the past two hours we’ve had over 600 beta applications with an average of 9 sites each.”

The product alleges “real-time, continuous monitoring” of your site against dangerous and fraudulent activity. It also automatically updates fixes.

Interested users can sign up for VaultPress in private beta. Automattic plans to charge $15.00 per month for the service.

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