With blogging was introduced “the Internet of thought.”
With ubiquitous computing, we’ve got “the Internet of things.”
And with Myspace, “the internet of Your Extended Network!”

Yahoo launched a new pixel-happy, lower case named, and Web-2.0 chic “fire eagle” a few months back.  Their launch advertised the beginnings of, go figure, a new kind of Internet.  Web sites that get your location from your cell phone tower, your laptop, your wireless Internet connection, your text message, and whatever else they get their filthy paws on.  There are just as many web sites for sharing your location with… well, whoever.  They cite all manner of noble causes like coordinating medical activity, business activity, and gathering all your people together mentally to do it physically.  “Geoscrobbling,” they call it.  It’s just a little way of saying “oh, by the way, dear Internet, I’m over here.”  The guys even provide you with a simple diagram just so you don’t get confused.

Copyright 2008 Yahoo

“But wait”, you say, “this all sounds familiar.  Little updates sent to large groups of subscribers?  An interface so simple you can update from anything?”  It starts to sound a lot like a certain someone else who’s already got the “oh, by the way”-market cornered.  When fire eagle launched, I really wanted it to be relevant. I really wanted to figure out some way to use it and have it be a day-to-day tool.  Come to think of it, I mostly really wanted it to be something new so I could justify spending a half hour watching that guy talk about it on Vimeo.

If fire eagle really is a new idea, one of their shining stars in the starting lineup of supported sites, BrightKite, puzzles me a bit.  Yes, you can update your location on the go with BrightKite.  Yes, you can share random thoughts and amusing pictures along with your location. And yes, you can do it all with Twitter.  No, you don’t need a fire eagle account if you don’t already have one.  In fact, I have yet to see any applications for this that can’t be done just as well if not more easily with Twitter, which is already insanely well established and really popular to boot.  Yahoo did spend a lot of money on this, though.  There’s a reason why, right?  Did they reinvent the wheel again?  What did I miss?

edit:

I was thinking today.. and fire eagle doesn’t deserve this sort of chewing out.  It’s an api.  It relies on other things to provide its usefulness.  From the perspective of the avid mini-blogger, a la twitter for example, yes, this is useless.  But you don’t build an API immediately knowing that it will become relevant.  It’s a concept.  We don’t know where the concept is going yet, and we can’t presume to.

Good eagle.  You didn’t do anything wrong.

On RainyDawg’s server as root:

darude:~# uname -a
Linux darude 2.6.18-6-686 #1 SMP Mon Aug 18 08:42:39 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
darude:~# history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -r
n | head
166 ls
66 date
46 net
37 nano
30 crontab
16 df
11 exit
10 cd
9 ifconfig
8 ssh

As samwr:

samwr@darude:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | s
ort -rn | head
57 sudo
14 ls
9 locate
7 ssh
7 nano
5 tail
5 su
5 ping
4 /usr/sbin/useradd
4 groups
samwr@darude:~$

This time I’m back in full form.  I’m sorry if you missed last week’s show, but if I get around to it it may be available in “podcast” feed form soon.  It would be better if I made that available for all DJs though, on that note.

Pretty equal pickins from Peter and I this week.  On that note, he’s doing like a show and a half each week.  Check out “Hot Dolphin!” Mondays 9-11 AM on RainyDawg.org.  Featured heavily this week are bleeps, bloops, and rainbows  (read: Chip Tune, IDM, and the Wham City scene).

Make sure to fast forward 30 minutes.  I was late this week :[

Tracks listed in handy reverse chronological order after the gap!Time Artist Title Album

2008-10-16 10:59:00	Dan Deacon	Wham City	Spiderman of the Rings
2008-10-16 10:52:09	TV on the Radio	Staring at the Sun (In Digital Time Remix)
2008-10-16 10:45:45	Shelley Harland	In the Dark (Tito-Tito Remix)	Tito-Tito: Early Unreleased
2008-10-16 10:38:19	Aphex Twin	Come To Daddy (Pappy Mix)	Come To Daddy
2008-10-16 10:35:12	The Red Light Sting	...and Then I Grew Pubes	Our Love Is Soaking In It
2008-10-16 10:32:45	Adventure	Loredo	Adventure
2008-10-16 10:25:15	El Ten Eleven	Jumping Frenchmen of Maine	These Promises Are Being Videotaped
2008-10-16 10:20:06	Fujiya & Miyagi	Pickpocket	Lightbulbs
2008-10-16 10:18:07	Acidwolf	Valley Shuffle	Legacy 1995-2005 (Visual Chicago Acid Edition)
2008-10-16 10:06:47	Ted Leo and the Pharmacists	Timorous Me	The Tyranny of Distance
2008-10-16 10:02:00	SJ Esau	Cat Track	Wrong Faced Cat Collapse
2008-10-16 09:57:09	Good Shoes	Morden	Think Before You Speak
2008-10-16 09:55:15	They Might Be Giants	Why Did You Grow A Beard	the else (disc 2)
2008-10-16 09:52:34	Kettel	Kingsize Car Feast	Making Gentle Love to Famous Ladies
2008-10-16 09:47:06	Feist	I Feel It All	The Reminder
2008-10-16 09:44:39	Lymbyc Systym	Notations	Field Studies split EP

Yeah, it’s one of those days.

Catch me live, Thursdays 9-11 on ASUW’s Rainy Dawg Radio @ http://rainydawg.org)

Here it is, the first post in what will hopefully be a sustained series of podcasts.  Except they can’t be actual podcasts, because they contain copyright material.  I’ll think of something, maybe a highlights reel of sorts that apple would be happier to list.

This last week was an experiment.  I had my pal and Rainy Dawg newbie Peter Smits on the show, contributing a 1 gigabyte thumbdrive of awesomeness.  Despite how tired we both were starting off, a pot of unnervingly black coffee sustained us through the show, and me through the rest of the day for that matter.

Conversation includes the nature of time, carbohydrates, and songs for friends who cook in the morning.

Tracks listed in reverse chronological order for ease of reading after the gap.

1. CHR15TPUNCH3R - Beef Coax - Sielle [rn2008-10-09 10:57:48]
2. At The Drive-In - Rolodex Propaganda - Relationship of Command [rn2008-10-09 10:51:47]
3. Sparta - Cut Your Ribbon - Wiretap Scars [rn2008-10-09 10:48:19]
4. Truckasauras - Supercopter - Tea Parties, Guns and Valor [rn2008-10-09 10:44:45]
5. Portishead - Strangers - Dummy [rn2008-10-09 10:37:13]
6. Q and Not U - Soft Pyramids - Different Damage [rn2008-10-09 10:33:08]
7. Eric Clapton - I Shot the Sheriff - 461 Ocean Boulevard [rn2008-10-09 10:29:34]
8. Meat Beat Manifesto - Flute Thang - At The Center [rn2008-10-09 10:23:02]
9. Mclusky - KKKitchens, What Were You… - The Difference Between Me and… [rn2008-10-09 10:21:12]
10. Menomena - Cough Coughing - I am the Fun Blame Monster [rn2008-10-09 10:17:57]
11. Los Campesinos! - Death to Los Campesios! - Death to Los Campesios! [rn2008-10-09 10:17:12]
12. Japandroids - Darkness on the Edge of Gas Town - Lullaby Death Jams [rn2008-10-09 10:15:42]
13. TE - anger kills all the idiots, and envy would torture foolish people and all the “instants” being involved. - If That is What is Being Thought, Liberated Sound Talks the Depth of “Musical” World [rn2008-10-09 10:15:25]
14. Zach Hill - Hindsight Is Nowhere - Astrological Straits [rn2008-10-09 10:00:53]
15. Madvillain - Can’t Reform ‘Em - Madvillainy 2 [rn2008-10-09 09:58:40]
16. Fleet Foxes - Drops in the River - Sun Giant EP [rn2008-10-09 09:54:30]
17. Television - Marquee Moon - Marquee Moon [rn2008-10-09 09:46:43]
18. The Rentals - Waiting - Excellent Stocking Stuffer [rn2008-10-09 09:44:42]
19. Broken Social Scene - Major Label Debut - Broken Social Scene [rn2008-10-09 09:36:53]
20. Subtle - Gonebones - ExitingARM [rn2008-10-09 09:33:20]
21. 8 Bit Weapon - Spacelab - 8 bit Operators [rn2008-10-09 09:30:41]
22. Andrew Bird - Imitosis - Armchair Apocrypha [rn2008-10-09 09:21:11]
23. TV on the Radio - Modern Romance - New Health Rock [rn2008-10-09 09:13:38]
24. Sigur Ros - Við spilum endalaust - Med Sud… [rn2008-10-09 09:13:31]
25. Lightning Bolt - Hello Morning/ Assassins - HyperMagic Mountain [rn2008-10-09 09:05:36]

A stumbling block of mine has always been transitioning between activities.  My senior year I took four AP classes, was a member of like four clubs, came to school an hour early each day for jazz band and expected to get the most out of all of it.  I’ve yet to find a way to be happy with getting one thing done at a time.  If I could just work really hard on my Spanish accent and get that out of the way I feel like I’d have accomplished more than I did this summer.  The fact of the matter is that I want to do all of it.  The phrase “jack of all trades but a master of none” comes to mind.  Familiar for some reason.  You know.

That web site will probably be a good start.

I’ll keep y’all posted.

However, I’ve never constructed a site from the ground up before, and never studied design method beyond putting in buttons you can click to do things you want.  I know there’s more to the Internet than this.  You need something people can use, you need something they can cuddle up to when they don’t know what to do that will pat them on the back and tell them “there there, it’s okay, here, have some music, I’m sure Andrew Bird will have something to say that will make you feel better about all this.”  Then the world rejoices, everyone holds hands, and marvels together about how great this whole Internet thing is.

Meanwhile, I consider my greatest victory in web design to be a “To Do List” web app I made several months ago featuring gif animations of twinkling stars and Arnold Schwarzenegger dressed as Conan the Barbarian brandishing two glowsticks in lieu of his sword through the magic of what was presumably Photoshop.

Those of you who leave reassuring comments on blogs: help.

I could very well be overreacting to how delicate the whole user interface thing is, but I’m honestly kind of worried.  I just want to make sure as best as I can that the fact that we never get any more than 15 listeners at one time is NOT my fault.

Why do we have to go out of our way to stitch together all the parts of our scripting languages? It feels kind of like we need a back-to-square-one sort of movement to drag ourselves out of this Web 2.0 thing. Of course, the people who have to deal with the messy parts (read: programming) have no say in the matter. All these people online want to see who their friends’ friends are and what they’re doing. Maybe send a message. Look them up on google maps according to their flickr photos that they found on facebook via some poor soul’s third party Google Web Toolkit app that their company has demanded of them. The fact of the matter is that programmers now, more than ever before, have to know how three different compilers fit together along with some weird voodoo library to generate “good” javascript to design their pages. All that Web 2.0 seems to mean is finding the easiest way possible to automatically generate javascript.

Let’s face it, the internet is aging, as are all the languages that come with it.

I won’t deny that Javascript is a good, friendly language for doing fancy things with page layout and even includes some groovy methods for retrieving data to dynamically inject stuff into your page once in a while. The problem is that with the demand for all this new dynamic content on everyone’s pages, I find myself growing wary of even the web browser. Can anyone think of a solution for this though? Individual applications end up cluttering your computer, and quite frankly I don’t think anyone wants to have to think about keeping up with the latest version of facebook.exe. Widgets somewhat bypass the clutter, except that they’re meant to be an overview of information at best, and still experience the same amount if not more of the update blues. Of course, this update business is probably nothing compared to all the javascript downloaded and php requests made every time someone visits one of these newfangled web 2.0 sites, but the word of the day is “what the consumer doesn’t have to think about won’t hurt them.”

Suddenly, we are, indeed, back to square one.  But we can’t do anything to help our predicament. The way that people use the internet has almost as much of an infrastructure as the thing itself. Like the interstate highway system, everyone has started using the internet in full force. Especially with the help of the 3G wireless standards and the impending internet traffic-jam of 4G , every living soul in the USA could conceivably have an IP address, because they’ve found the way they’re used to sending information. People will not, in the foreseeable future at least, stop driving cars on the interstates in favor of some completely new and efficient transportation system either, unless they’re forced to out of either poverty or government regulation, either of which will have oh-so-many public figures, and in turn, the public, jumping mad. For as quickly as we develop new technologies and luxuries, we as a society aren’t used to giving up our ways.

Mozilla, Microsoft, and Macintosh all have their places cemented in the way we access information, for better or worse.

I guess I’d better start resolving those build dependencies.