2011

There were 36 posts published in 2011 (this is page 4 of 4).

Seeking alternatives to the internet biggies

I’ve been making some headway in a quest to avoid the internet giants and seeking smaller alternatives. Having deleted my personal Facebook account, my next objectives have been Google and Twitter. That’s harder. I’ve been using Google for mail, search, news feeds, photo management, photo storage, IM and probably other things I can’t think of at the moment – both at home and at the office. I won’t be trying to tackle my professional use of any of either Facebook or Google, though I’m in charge of our organizational use of these services (and shifted us over to Google Apps in the first place). But at home I can afford to be innovative.

With regard to email, the first thing was to go over to FastMail.fm. I already had a paid account, but wasn’t really using it. In the past, I used FastMail extensively, and know that it’s a great service. In 2010 it was purchased by Opera, whose browser I’ve also been using lately. Opera have a nice IMAP client, so I can use that in conjunction with FastMail (whose IMAP protocol use is among the best). I simply set up automatic forwarding from my Gmail address, and will be able to gradually phase out Gmail.

A harder thing to forego is Google Reader. Reader is a great news feed aggregator in its own right and, what’s more, syncs with many of the other good feed readers on PC and my Ipod. One of my favorites is Feedly. There’s no service quite comparable to Feedly – a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome/Chromium. But Feedly does not work in Opera. So if I want to both use Opera and ditch another Google service, I need an alternative. I’ve tried Opera’s feed reader and don’t like it. Among its problems is not properly naming the source of the news feed being read. I’ve tried Liferea, a Gnome desktop application. This is better, but very slow (I have quite a lot of feeds). The best I’ve found so far is Lazyscope, a cross-platform Adobe Air application. Lazyscope mashes together both Twitter and news feeds, blurring the difference between them. It also offers a quick subscription to new feeds, and some nice sharing features.

A problem with the services mentioned (other than Feedly) is that they do not offer sharing with non-proprietary microblogging services. This matters to me because I would like to cross-post to Identi.ca. When I’m not reading news feeds, I now use Gwibber for this purpose – or TweetDeck or Spaz. Any of these are able to read and post to Identi.ca. Gwibber is my favorite since it is a natural part of Ubuntu’s operating system. So if I’m using Lazyscope, I don’t get to post to Identi.ca.

There’s no question that outside of Facebook, Twitter dominates the microblog market, but as other services like Identi.ca and WordPress use the Twitter Api, and as microblogging clients like Tweetdeck, Seismic, Spaz, Gwibber and others make it possible to integrate alternative services into our Twitterstream, our dependence upon Twitter can be reduced.

For search, a viable alternative is Blekko. I’ve written to their support now, to ask if they can provide a search string suitable for the Opera browser. [Update: they got back to me really quickly. The search string is http://www.blekko.com/ws/%s]

I am still considering what service to use for uploading photos. More on this later.

[update] OK for photos, I’ve decided to use the same solution as for email. Fastmail subscriptions come with additional file storage space. Their standard $20 subscription has 100 mb – about enough for 1,000 photos at 640 x 480. Another $10 buys 1 GB more. Fastmail’s photo gallery is more attractive than Picasaweb, Flickr and Facebook, and even allows a custom stylesheet. There are no commenting or sharing features built in. If I wanted a more social experience, I might choose my.opera.com (an all-round blogging platform), which comes with 2 GB of free storage.

The Arab Revolution of 2011

I don’t think anyone really understands at this stage what this Revolution means for the world. There were earlier periods in the region that shaped the future and geo-politics, and I’m not enough of a historian to know whether there were smart people who understood the meaning of these at the time. I think that many of us feel torn. We’ve a youthful hope that the Revolution will bring about real democracy and freedom to the masses who have been for so long ruled by cruel dictators who were proxy to western powers. And we’ve a cynical old understanding that the situation presents a fertile ground for opportunists and those same western powers to wangle new kinds of influence. I hope, in the interim period, that all discussions with governments and multinationals will be closely monitored for quick publication in the next Wikileaks release.

One middle-aged Libyan said today on Twitter that the situation today reminds him of the ideals of his father’s generation in shaking off the colonial rulers. But history is more of a spiral than a cycle. The curves resemble previous ones, but take us to a new place. The world and our position in it have since changed. Consciousness, knowledge, technology and many other factors have evolved in the meantime. The ripples of these events will continue to have effects in unexpected places. It was reported on Twitter today that demonstrators in Cairo had ordered pizza for demonstrators in Wisconsin.

We create and change the world out of our consciousness. The main feeling I am getting from the media and social networking sites is one of inevitability, resembling manifest destiny. Just as yesterday people felt that it was inevitable that they should be ruled by despots, now they share an equally powerful belief that these despots must fall – and quickly.  It isn’t so much “people power”, but the consciousness that moves them, that is the important factor. I’m not being spooky about consciousness here. It’s just the power of decision. But the leaders, like Gaddafi today, are definitely so spooked by what’s happening that they are seeking the usual suspects to explain it. Surely it’s imperialist agents, Zionist schemers, “bearded men” pulling the ropes.  It isn’t any of these. It’s just the force of decision.

A mass current of consciousness cannot be maintained for very long.  Quickly it will warp into disagreement or be shaped into new conventions.  But at the moment that this wave crests it is invincible – the force of history.

Another experience I had, while watching Gaddafi in his rambling speech was compassion, for this violent man. I felt a similar sympathy for Mubarak. From their point of view, they had brought change and honor to their countries. They had molded the lives of millions of citizens, created conditions of relative peace and stability. They had modernized their country and provided much for them to be proud of.  And now these citizens, whom they had surely feared for decades, had turned upon them, ungrateful and disloyal. And Gaddafi today pulled out the law books. Like judge and executioner he showed us what should happen to anyone involved in sedition.

At what point is it acceptable for citizens to rise up and overthrow their government? In a democratic country, we would say, this is unnecessary. There are free elections – we can vote for anyone we please. Gaddafi used similar arguments today. He said that in Libya the way to make reform is through the people’s committees. He went out screaming Revolution. How ironic were his words.

Gaddafi’s Jamahiriya system, according to the commentators, is a cruel lie, a mask for an unforgiving authoritarian regime.  And a few days ago the New York Times carried an op-ed which pointed out the ways in which democracy in America has similarly become a lie (“When Democracy Weakens”).  Should Americans too rise up to overthrow their government?  Gaddafi today had many crazy examples of what America and other nations do when the authority of their regimes is threatened.

There are no absolute answers to these questions. We all know that whatever comes of the Arab Revolution of 2011, the peoples of these countries won’t be totally free. Their societies will not suddenly become paradises in which there is equitable distribution of wealth, employment for all, protection of minorities, children and women, equal access to political power, etc. But at what point do the conditions on the ground grow so far apart from a nation’s potential that the normal mechanisms of preserving authority deserve to be torn asunder – through violence or non-violence? There is a point and a time at which we all become revolutionaries. Legitimacy for a revolution is not determined by some eternal principle. It is rather the sense that an invisible line has been crossed, or that the time has now come. Enough Gaddafi. The people demand the fall of the regime.

An awful lot of paper

Lao Tsu, riding a water buffalo

Watched all four episodes of Al-Jazeera’s Palestine Papers. The reporting occasionally bordered on sensationalism. The timing was odd (as the PA was quick to point out) in view of increasing global acceptance of Palestine as a virtual state. Al-Jazeera or Qatar seemed at times to be going beyond the journalistic role to engage in pure advocacy for overthrowing the PA. But there is no further doubt that the “peace process” towards a two-state solution is dead, will never happen, and perhaps never had a chance.

The process that replaces it will be fundamentally different: Jews and Palestinians are in for a wild ride that will grow steadily more wild as the way proceeds. Those who make it to the destination will have been changed by the journey.

They should take along a copy of Lao Tsu.

Social network minimalism

Free software leader facebook not your friendRichard Stallman predictably advocates a boycott of Facebook: “…don’t put your personal information in Facebook. If you use Facebook at all, just tell people how to contact you in other ways.”

After another experiment with fairly intensive use of the network, I’ve dropped it again as a vehicle for personal sharing and removed the remaining data, leaving only a link to my Gravatar profile.

During my latest experiment I was mainly using it to share links from my news feeds and twitter stream. A few people picked up on these links, but really not enough to justify the bother of sharing them. In addition, a couple of times I received notification that content was blocked due to notification of it being “abusive or spammy”. That’s a very interesting message, about which I haven’t been able to learn further from the web. Both of the postings blocked were “political” in nature: one was about the demolition and evacuation of a Bedouin village in the Negev; the other was about human rights abuses by Israel. Perhaps posting about abuse of Palestinian rights is considered “abusive” by Facebook or its readers. Or it could be that these messages result from the actions of personal friends on Facebook who lazily or irritably click the spam button, when a better choice would be to block a user’s content. Anyway, the effect is the same, i.e. to discourage political conversation on this ostensibly “feel good” network of old and fake friends. Use of the service seems to be evolving. A couple of years ago, at least among my crowd, messages of protest and social change news were more prevalent and evoked more interest than now, and I did not encounter attempts to censor them.  (Note: Jillian C York writes a lot about such issues in her blog.)

Facebook would define its strategy as attempting to provide us all with “the best possible user experience”. In order to achieve this, it works on our news feed through various devious ways – some of which were described in a recent TNW article. However the effect is to create a network that feels like it’s tightly and stiffly controlled. This makes Twitter’s approach look ingeniously simple by comparison. Everyone can follow everyone. There’s no need to ask anyone’s permission. Anyone can post anything. Filtering is all left up to the user. While we wait for alternatives, Twitter is still so much better.

Update: Facebook new messaging service finally came to international users.  I clicked through the introductory screen but opted out before being assigned a name@facebook.com address.  I wouldn’t want that, and don’t know what it might expose me to.  In addition, there are articles on the web about Facebook’s censorship of certain content.  Why should a network have the right to intervene with personal email?  There’s just too much about Facebook that is maddening.