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December 11, 2006

Web 2.0 or Captcha?

Call them fads, trends, or memes, there's a type of idea that resembles kudzu. It may have evolved to conquer the requirements of a particular intellectual landscape, but eventually it becomes so wildly well-adapted that it spread way wide of its origin.

Case in point: Web 2.0. Starting as a carefully crafted intellectual framework for understanding emerging trends in the architecture of websites, it evolved into a lucrative tech conference and publishing juggernaut, and from thence into a wriggling and omni-present ecosystem of blogs, pundits, technical gurus, and commercial come-ons of all kinds.

When plants like kudzu reach truly far-flung places they begin to become a real problem, choking out native varieties and reducing the richness of the local ecosystem. At this point, the epithet 'invasive species' tends to get attached to them and people start to get t-shirts for participating in efforts to eradicate them.

So, in the spirit of doing a little bit of activist gardening (or at least some jocular mockery), I present:

Web 2.0 or Captcha?

It's a quiz! Below, you'll find ten strings of letters. Half of them are the names of Web 2.0 companies; the other half are the text of captchas I encountered on Blogger (captchas are those little distorted images of words that websites use to make sure that you're really a person before letting you submit information).

See if you can tell which is which. When you've got your guesses, click the links to find out if you're right. Ready…go!

Not that I mean to seriously argue the similarity between Web 2.0 companies and computer-generated bot prevention devices, but don't captchas even look a bit like web 2.0 logos (especially this one)? At least a few fit in each category from The Font Feed's ontology of Web 2.0 logo aesthetics. There are Softies, Futurists, and Classics.

Have we somehow reached a point where all of the barrier-lowering factors which Tim O'Reilly described in his original essay have actually created a kind of Web 2.0 assembly line that grinds out social networking, photo uploading, and information tagging sites so quickly and uniformly as to rival the growth of weeds? And if so, isn't it about time for a higher form of life to emerge and get to grazing?

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Posted by Greg at 7:51 PM | Comments (3)

December 9, 2006

Getting ComputerKrafty: Arduino, Ruby, and Blurry Video of Some Blinking LEDs

(Arduino Serial Ruby on YouTube)

For the last month or so, Brett and Marcus from Tables Turned and I have been meeting weekly to teach ourselves Physical Computing, the use of micro-controllers like those found in cell phones and Roombas to build all kinds of interactive projects, from multimedia installations to scientific equipment.

We're using Arduino, a cheap and simple micro-controller chip and programming framework that's great for beginners. Between the three of us, we've got lots of ambitious projects we'd like to build, from immersive sound installations to wifi-enabled street walking robots, but in order to learn the basics, we're starting with a pretty simple project: building our own version of the children's toy Simon. If you're interested, you can follow our progress on the ComputerKraft wiki.

The two videos I've posted here show some early experiments we tried out while learning the ropes. The one below is amongst the first things we ever tried: reading the analog input from a knob and using its position to light up a changing number of LEDs.

The video at the top is from this week and I'm pretty proud of it. It shows a Ruby program running on my computer that reads input from a user and then lights up a different LED depending on what number it receives. This doesn't sound too impressive; after all, it's just another 'hello world'. But the elements involved are really exciting to me. With them in place, pretty much anything you can do in Ruby scripts, Arduino can know about -- reading RSS feeds, looking for files, user input, etc. Plus, from here, it doesn't take much more to get the interaction to flow both ways: when Arduino does something or senses something, it can get sent off to a Ruby program and from thence to files, the web etc.

If you're curious to know more about the technical details, you can check out the Ruby/serial demo page on the ComputerKraft wiki. It's got both the Ruby and C source code as well as an explanation of the hardware and links for downloading the ruby/serialport library (which does, in fact, work on OS X even though their documentation gives you little confidence that it would). Or, if Ruby's not your thing, you can check out Todbot's C code for doing this manually from the command line to accomplish something similar.

(Dancing LEDs on YouTube)

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Posted by Greg at 4:47 PM | Comments (7)

December 5, 2006

Why "I'm A PC" Works

With rumors flying around about the replacement of Justin Long, the actor playing The Mac in Apple's current I'm A Mac ad campaign, there's been some debate as to the campaign's effectiveness.Actually, "debate" is probably too mild a descriptor.

'Vitriolic spleen venting' might do a bit better.

From Slate to the TWiTs, commentators on all sides seem convinced that the campaign is, at best, ineffective, and at worst, insulting and alienating to exactly those viewers who it is most specifically trying to sell: PC users.

The logic goes like this: humorist and Daily Show contributor John Hodgman, who plays The PC, is so damn lovable that, by contrast, The Mac comes off looking like a smug know-it-all. TWiT's John C. Dvorak even went so far as to attribute this misstep to the innate arrogance of Apple employees who, themselves resembling Long, missed the strength of Hodgman's appeal to ordinary (read: non-Mac using) computer shoppers.

I think this gets it exactly backwards. Hodgman's folksy charisma lies right at the heart of the ads' effectiveness. The campaign is aimed squarely at PC users -- it's the more informal inheritor of the somewhat stuffy Switch campaign that proceeded it -- and Hodgman's portrayal flatters them. His PC is neither evil imperial storm-trooper nor gray corporate drone, as in the iconic image from Apple's legendary 1984 spot. Instead, he's a normal, if somewhat hapless, well-meaning guy beset on all sides by misfortune. His problems don't seem the result of some failing on his part -- or some flavor of just dessert -- but instead are imposed on him from outside.

This is exactly how 'normal' people often see themselves, especially those in corporate or especially bureaucratic jobs. And the ad offers them hope: you can do something about your unlucky lot, replace your PC with a Mac and your haplessness can become Long's easy competence.

For the Hodgmans of the world the 'cool guy' himself is always kind of repellent. His nonchalance and comfort in the world are, of course, objects of envy. But he doesn't deserve or appreciate them. That's why the twinge of hate towards The Mac guy that these commercials inspire is their final touch of genius. That feeling gives the PC users this spot is aimed at room to retain their superior image of themselves while simultaneously framing a story in which a switch is an improvement.

It's an amazing tightrope act of signification the ad team's pulled off here and so it's not surprising that many commentators missed it. It's also not surprising that Apple is selling Macs like hotcakes.

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Posted by Greg at 10:06 PM | Comments (5)