February 23, 2022

s11e01: Fifteen Minutes Or Less

0.0 Context Setting

Hello, I’m back. It’s been a while. There’s been gestures: all this going on, and I suppose enough people have collectively decided that we’re done. Ho hum.

I’m trying an experiment for this season, or a challenge, even. I’m setting myself 15 minutes to write each episode, maybe this will help deal with the crushing writer’s block that I appear to have (you would not believe how many unfinished newsletter drafts I have here).

On with the show.

1.0 Some things that caught my attention

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot: Designing Speech Interactions from the Imagined Ideal of Star Trek¹ is a paper presented at CHI 2021 and exactly what it says on the tin, so be still my beating heart.

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The Digital Public Goods Alliance sprang up in my feed as if from nowhere (which is a lie, it clearly sprang from somewhere, it’s just that attribution is a mess and search is a mess given the never-ending firehose. The source, to me, is gone now, like tears in the etc etc.) It is about more public digital infrastructure!

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Speaking of public digital infrastructure I had a great chat with old friend Ben Cerveny of the Foundation for Public Code and one of the analogies that struck me in the realm of “open source civic digital infrastructure” (I am making up that term, it is before 9am) was Wordpress but for Parking Meters, because, well let me tell you the reasons! Wordpress² is:

a) a thing that maybe in municipal government may be familiar with now;

b) Wordpress is open source;

c) and yet Wordpress also offers an officially hosted product/service;

d) the fact that Wordpress is open source allows other people to offer hosted products and services based on Wordpress, too;

e) there is a thriving ecosystem of Wordpress Consultants;

f) never mind Wordpress plugins;

g) those Wordpress Consultants are everywhere, like there’s probably one within 50 miles of you? They’re like rats, but, you know, will help you blog or publish on the internet? Perhaps rats were not a great comparison. Sorry.;

h) if you can imagine using open source software that you pay for and is looked after for your municipal website or otherwise government website, then maybe these days it’s not too hard to imagine using open source software that you pay for and is supported for other things?

i) but of course the market for “publish stuff on the internet” is not as big as “software that runs your parking meters for you and lets people pay on their mobile phone”.

But still, it was an interesting thought. Oh, and crappy plugins and parking meter botnets, but that’s just how the world works now.

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I’ll probably go into this later or again here, but in case you missed it, here’s how I went from Asking Dumb Questions As A Service as part of my work to “What If What I Do, But Columbo”:

Ta-da, a realization:

Majel Barret voice: And now, the conclusion:

It’s a thread. You can probably click on it if you want to. There’s a bunch of Columbo / “what it’s like to work in tech” jokes. If you’re ind despair, I don’t know, it might give you a brief laugh.

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Michael Tsai collected together the evidence that Google Search is dying³, roughly based on the argument that Google’s front page is full of either explicit ads or SEO that’s as bad as ads and just trying to sell you something. That the money in advertising and SEO is so good that, well, there’s clearly enough incentive for it to drown out “useful signal”.

One of the remedies suggested by a commenter somewhere is that you can use Stack Overflow (a community question/answer site for programming), or Reddit (an… online community?) because in those places you have a higher ratio of humans talking to humans and answering questions for each other.

Which prompts the thought: Google’s current search results are what happens when people talk to, or perform for, bots instead of other humans and the Money Pendulum has, again, swung too far.

Or: SEO is people peacocking to b ots for money.

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And that’s a wrap. 15 minutes! Not bad. I’ll see you on the other side.

How have you been?

Best,

Dan