Stritar's chronolog

The Web is becoming just another television

Tue, 11 Feb 2014 15:06:44 GMT

A few months ago, I managed to bookmark my 20.000th link. I always imagined I would be able to say something really inspiring when it would finally happen, but after years of collecting and tagging content on Delicious like mad, proud of the amount of information I've consumed, I ended up feeling a bit empty. Categorization schemes, mashups, systematic repeating of essays and articles, it seems nothing could help me grow anymore. What else can you expect from a passive observer of a world, overwhelmed with unlimited knowledge?

In February 2011, when I saved my 10.000th link, I felt great, full of power. This means I've made around 10 bookmarks per day on average since then, which translates into a lot of read material. But when I reflect on that, I can't bypass the feeling I haven't actually learned that much. Most online content seems recycled and without added value. The feeds I'm subscribed to are all the same, and I don't know how to break out of them. The amount of information out there is simply astounding, making me read everything diagonally. I feel like everybody is just trying to control my attention.

Then I noticed the (social) Web is becoming like television. We are all just drones, consuming unimportant information we are being fed on a daily basis. Passive readers actively choosing sources that lead us to the facts - but how is that different from choosing which television channels to watch? Not only that, we've become advocates of this situation by passing on "interesting stuff" on our timelines, a part of the infinite loop of content creation, curation and consumption.

----

Almost half a year ago, when I wrote these words, I became so depressed I've decided not to publish them. Luckily, I've had enough time to think about the problem and came up with a plan to turn myself around. I decided I need to do everything I can to become a proactive consumer of information (again). Forget social, I'm returning back to search. Web 1.0 FTW!

Together with more in-depth studies of specific topics that I do these days, I managed to achieve something even more important. I started reading books, I've read about five in the past few months. Fiction and scientific. You won't believe the effect this has had on my concentration and habits. I noticed I don't spend that much time on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit anymore, becoming the master of my information intake. By taking time to read / watch more complex work, everyday news finally started to show itself as trivial as it really is.

What we have here now, is just another television, which we passively consume for amusement, without much mental effort. But to evolve personally and professionally (what the Web was invented for!), we'll need to do more. Read books, listen to podcasts, study specific fields, concentrate on individual subjects. Because it's that focus that is crucial for one's evolution. Nobody wants generalists anymore. And believe me, 20.000 "random" articles don't make you that smart anyways.

One of the most important things ever written

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 12:51:28 GMT

Every once in a while your read something that takes you to another level. Something that can change the way you've been thinking and doing things for years already. Which means looking for ways to optimize everything, drilling yourself, studying every day of the year, gathering knowledge, battling procrastination and low energy, looking for new ways to grow. Lifehacks whenever possible, fixes and improvements that come on a daily basis. And then one day your find out that you've perhaps been doing it all wrong. Not possible? Let me tell you a story about a great idea.

tl;dr: The article.

You've probably heard about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where people need to fulfill their primitive requirements, like food and intimacy, to reach higher needs like self-actualization. Classic psychology. Which is perhaps also doable the other way around.

A few days ago Salim Virani wrote a great post about the perceived causality between self-improvement and self-confidence. We usually think we need to improve ourselves first, to make it to the next step. Well, he made me believe it's rather the opposite. The problem these days is, at least in the technology startup environments, that we are all hyper pumped up do crazy shit everybody drools over, while the competition is fierce and global, tight schedules and stress are everywhere, most clients expect you to overdeliver things, better, cheaper, faster. A never-ending story, sucking every bit of blood you have, leaving you empty. Which makes you not evolve as much as you would like to, both professionally and spiritually.

But wait, what if we try to self-actualize first, could that help us find the energy for self-improvement?

Read the article now! Yes, forget about how to do this and how to improve that, you've been doing it all wrong! You've read tons of shit like that, just like me, and what happened - nothing. You are still the same. No matter the technique, you can't change how things are, you can't be happy at work if you're not, you can't force yourself to do things you don't want to do.

From this day on, I'm doing it the other way around. Focusing on the things that make me happy first, believing other things will magically become more pleasant. Because this guy is right, I can see the way self-confidence can help me towards self-improvement. I will do all the things I really want to do besides my job, and those things I hate about my job will become a piece of cake, since they will be downgraded to just another activity required to reach the higher goal of finding my self-confidence and self-actualization.

Now that I think about it, I feel I've been intuitively going into that direction already, but now that I'm fully aware about the science behind it, I'm going all-in. Which means more fun, more blogging, more crazy prototypes, I've also decided to start working on this idea I have for a boardgame. Just because. Not really giving a fuck if these things actually make sense or if they will be financially feasible. I need to start enjoying life, I need to satisfy my urge to create, and confidence and growth will come. Thank you Salim, for discovering and pointing out this amazing perspective on life.

The Silicon Valley tour, part 6: A trip to the Internet Archive

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:28:09 GMT

Those that have read my previous post about visiting the technology giants of Silicon Valley, might have gotten the idea that organizations around here aren't that welcoming to strangers. Well, that might not be entirely true. One of my stops in San Francisco also included a visit to the Internet Archive, a foundation that is trying to preserve all the information our civilization possesses. And they were more than welcoming. Besides giving Andraz and me a full tour of their headquarters, they've also invited us to one of their staff meetings, where the Archive's members and volunteers present their activities and results from their specific fields.

The Internet Archive is located in a former church in San Francisco, so there's more than enough room for all the people and hardware. Two main projects are currently taking place; one is the Wayback Machine, which makes snapshots of websites throughout history, and the other is the Archive, which represents systematic digitalization of movies, music and books, manually done by its members. A never-ending task that can only be done by activists who genuinely want to protect the knowledge of mankind, and you can contribute to the effort as well.

During our tour, 2.5 petabytes (that's 2.5 million gigabytes!) of data was mentioned, but I'm not sure if that's just one of the projects or both. This data is well protected, with mirrors all over the world. Impressive stuff, good enough to currently make archive.org the 223rd most visited site in the world (according to Alexa), get to the front page of The New York Times, and receive various prestigious awards.

One of the most fascinating stops of my Silicon Valley trip was indeed educational and inspiring, and it got me thinking: If there's a modern Library of Alexandria in the making, this would be it. Thumbs up.

Internet Archive's Headquarters in San Franscisco. It goes well with the logo, even though they came here only a few years ago.

The staff meeting, where members from various fields presented their achievements

Everyone that is an employee for more than 3 years, gets its own figure inside the church

Brewster Kahle, the chairman, passionately presenting the Archive's servers. There is no air condition, since heat is used for building heating.

The irony: since consumer hard disks are cheaper, they buy those and get rid of the casings.

This is how scanning of videos, microfilms and books looks like

Are we there yet?

Trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners.

Check out the complete The Silicon Valley tour series.

The Silicon Valley tour, part 3: The magnificent Stanford University

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 03:21:33 GMT

There probably aren't many institutions associated with Silicon Valley the way Stanford University is. Its affiliates and graduates played a major role in the development of the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, which would later on become known as the Silicon Valley. The spirit of entrepreneurship, technology, science and research is felt everywhere, and Stanford University will surely be one of the most fascinating stops on my Silicon Valley trip.

Stanford University can only be described as the American educational dream. At least the way Europeans imagine it, thanks of pop culture and television shows such as Beverly Hills 90210. The perfect mixture of easiness and seriousness is manifested in the campus itself, which is filled with amazing parks and glorious squares and buildings. It's beautiful, but also tempting for a person like me, who is still playing around with the idea of being a student for a few more years.

We managed to spend some time with Jure Leskovec from Slovenia, who is an assistant professor there. His research is focused mostly on data mining and network analysis, very fascinating fields that I'm very interested in too. He gave as a tour of the campus and took us to the Institute of Design, an inspiring place where all sort of crazy things are researched and developed. Later on he proudly presented his lab, which was sponsored by Google. A great-looking place indeed, I hope he didn't notice me drooling all over it.

Stanford University - the mother of all knowledge, located right in the heart of Silicon Valley. Seeing it helps you understand why this region is miles ahead of anyone else in technology, and definitely makes you want to study there. It's simply magnificent.

The Oval: a beautiful park, located in front of the main entrance from Palo Alto

The view on the campus from the Hoover tower

One of the beautiful streets

Arches are practically everywhere

The Institute of design: some students programming robots

The Institute of design: results from a few intense brainstorming sessions

Jure Leskovec's lab, where he and his students do their magic

Check out the complete The Silicon Valley tour series.

Why Web 2.0 is so important

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:10:53 GMT

The influence the Internet is having on our every day lives is reaching almost unimaginable levels. The extent of the information revolution can only be compared to inventions of speaking, writing and printing in the past, which are all major achievements that allowed new ways of sharing thoughts and ideas between people. Web 2.0 is the next step of this information (r)evolution, and to understand why it's so important, we have to observe all the significant applications it represents (according to Wikipedia). This will hopefully give us a better insight into the potential they bring to our personal and professional lives, besides their impact on the whole humanity which we still perhaps don't fully comprehend.

Social networking

Social networking sites enabled probably the greatest migration of people to the virtual world. People have a new opportunity to interact not only in real life, but also in cyberspace, where geographical and other physical barriers don't exists. I'm not saying this is a promising thing overall, some people are obviously overdoing it, but it's still useful for keeping in touch with people. Together with the implementation of feeds and streams which enable dynamic information, social networking could represent the biggest and most important component of Web 2.0, reshaping business, marketing, politics and just being plain amazing.

Video sharing

Yesterday we read the newspaper, listened to the radio and watched television. Today, we have a super-medium that supports all of it at once. Video, as the most complex form of multimedia, is something that you can record with your telephone and publish online in minutes, from where it can go anywhere. If distributing a video is easy, anything else surely has to be a piece of cake. This fact obviously holds massive potential for science and arts in general.

Wikis and folksonomies

Wikis and folksonomies are tools which harness the amazing effect of participation and collaboration of millions of people to create information and knowledge. Wikipedia is the biggest encyclopedia in the world, holding knowledge whole mankind can benefit from. Folksonomies, such as tools for collaborative tagging and social indexing enable structured knowledge, while recommendation engines help us get information from massive quantity of data available online. Today, if something important is discovered, everybody knows it in minutes.

Blogs

Most people have the need to express themselves, and blogs (and microblogs) are the perfect tool for that. Plain and simple: anybody can be a journalist and if you have something smart to say, people will listen. Those who are influential enough can even break out of anonymity and become opinion leaders.

Web services and mashups

Web services and mashups enable and use open flows of data from one online service to another, from one online platform to another. System integration used to be one of the most complex things in IT, but thanks to new standards, protocols and technology, data can freely travel from and to different sources. This provides a perfect ground for exchanging information and enables evolution from software services to software platforms.

Perhaps we should also mention cloud computing, which makes hardware requirements irrelevant – the processing power and memory is around in plenty – but computer grids with shared resources have already been around for decades. All the better to understand that Web 2.0 is more about concept than it is about technology.

Web 2.0 is important and revolutionary, both in a good and a bad way. It brings a new perspective and new opportunities to different arts and sciences, such as business, education, sociology, psychology, literature, politics and many other. My professional and academic work focuses mainly on it's influence on information science and technologies, but it's clear that this new paradigm has a huge global effect, whose scale we still can't fully estimate. Now we just have to hope younger generations don't get too overwhelmed because of it and will be able to adjust to this new reality without abusing it too much.

What's hot on the web - Part 4: Performances gone wrong

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 14:03:09 GMT

A lot of time has passed since our last What's hot on the web broadcast, so I bet you are already eager to see more. The series is doing quite well, but the time has come to do a bit of specialization. This part will be focused on weird (and therefore funny) performances from around the globe, turning into epic fail. Looks like some people think they are ready for the spotlight, but they aren’t. Youtube, you can make our day.

Model takes a tumble twice

I don’t know what's funnier about this one, the commentators who can't stop laughing or the model who does the boogie woogie. We all know fashion has it's price, but the price for this one is a new type of dance nobody can reproduce.

Staying on stage fail

If you have a public performance and you actually do choose to play on playback, make sure you stay on the stage. Otherwise, everybody will know what you're doing...

Ken Lee

This one already became a legend. A girl, performing at a Talents competition in Bulgaria wanted to sing Mariah Carey's Ken Lee, a song which nobody heard of. It turns out she got the lyrics of Without you a bit wrong, which is amusing the jury. Later on she tried to repeat the performance and do it again with the right lyrics, but the original version took the most applause. The extensions of this meme went so far that even Mariah herself made a comment about it.

Is Europe a country?

Stereotypes have it that Americans suck at geography and that blonds are a bit, well, you know... This one proves them right. In a show where people compete against fifth graders, this girl fails miserably when she thinks Europe is a country.

American educational system

On beauty contests, answers of the competitors are always a bit interesting. In this case, it looks like Miss South Carolina didn't quite understand what the question on American education was and she answers a totally different thing. Besides, even if she answered something, nobody knows what that was. A sad irony.

Exclusive nightclub fail

There are a lot of interesting moments on TV shows and quizes, so we won't even try to go through all of them. We’ve all seen The wheel of fortune, where people have to guess the right letters and words. The following competitor almost had it, but not quite. Check your spelling capabilities before you go playing a game like that.

Wrong price is right winner

Another cool quiz that produces a lot of awkward moments is Price is right. This one is twice funny. First, this woman makes a really stupid bet, putting her in a situation where she has almost no chance of winning. Besides, when the price is told, she thinks she actually won. Twice. Triple fail for that one.

Coconut breaking

People do all sorts of crazy shit to get noticed. Like this guy, who sets out to break a few coconuts with his hand. Hm, even before you see the footage you can tell this was a bad idea...

I hope these perfomances make you think before going public. Once it’s online, you’ll be marked forever.

Check out the complete What's hot on the web series.

The decline of web forums

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:05:53 GMT

The Internet, specially the World Wide Web as we know it today is all about interaction. The first generation of web applications supported little of it. Most of the web was "official" authorial content, but at some point the world was ready for a step forward. User generated content was manifested through forums or discussion boards, which gave surfers a newly discovered access to tons of "unofficial" knowledge. The boom was driven by user interaction and necessity of sharing ideas and thoughts. Looks like times are changing again and forums are dying, at least in the form we knew them. What the hell happened?

An important thing happened, and we call it Web 2.0. The new generation of services supporting networking, cooperation and higher levels of interaction made hierarchically structured knowledge repositories separated from authorial content obsolete. Today, the content became integrated with interaction to form even richer content. I think three types of services that did most of the kill: wikis, blogs and new types of user interaction. I wouldn’t put chats or instant messaging in the same category, because they were around since ever (f.i. IRC) and they leave nothing behind (at least publicly), making them useless for broader crowd and future generations.

Wikis

Wikis are actually some type of a forum, where people gather content and knowledge. Instead of having knowledge scattered around in threads with comments and replies, all the users are working on the same "article", making it better and better as time and knowledge progresses. Few people know that wikis are not just Wikipedia (which is by the way a great example of human interaction achievement), a lot of companies use the same engine to build their knowledge base and web portals use them to build their web presence.

Blogs

With Web 2.0, people went from anonymity behind nicknames to front row participation and ego building. Instead of participating in forums, millions of bloggers started making synthesis of useful forum threads to short and highly informative blog posts with an interesting side effect - building personal brands. Google’s page rank and other search engines did the rest, making forums less important and good blog posts better ranked and easily found.

New types of user interaction

There was a time when the only interactive thing you could do on the web was writing or replying (perhaps vote on a poll which had nothing to do with a content, at least technically). Today, you can post, view, like, dislike, support, comment, vote etc.. This fact gives users more flexibility on how involved they want to get with the content and the content becomes more informational. Knowledge is not hierarchically structured anymore, it’s rather scattered around the web in forms of multimedia (text, audio, video, etc.), with interaction activities attached to it (likes, comments, etc.). That makes it fun and more interesting, and if it’s good enough altogether, it will get synthesized and rebuilt into another form of information.

I think there is still space for forums on the web, but mainly in the functionality of huge chat rooms. On the other hand, general portals will probably be shifting more to combined approach, without the "Forum" link, but with integrated Web 2.0 services and approaches. This doesn’t have to mean using friends and connections, it can easily be the form of better support for different interactions and focus on participation of users around authorial content. Good news for users, bad news for portals.