Facebook, you don't know me.

Facebook has unveiled a mockup of their new home page, which looks like an improvement at first glance. There's new features for filtering out the noise and showing just what means most to you. I like that.

Then I saw the new "Hilights" section and rolled my eyes. It's not surprising that Facebook would move towards pushing content to its users. It's more surprising that it's taken them so long to get around to that. It's the way that they're doing it that makes me cringe.

Featured photos, events, notes and more that you don't want to miss. Stories are chosen based on what your friends have interacted with.

[My emphasis]

In the early days of TiVo, users complained about the heavily played up profile feature that automatically recorded programs that it thought its users would want to see, without them explicitly specifying such programs, based on what they had watched before. It sounded like a good feature, that is until TiVo decided they were gay.

Look, Facebook, here's the thing. You don't know me. And you're not going to find out what I like using some algorithm that analyzes what my friends click on. I don't really have much in common with my friends (even the real ones, not just the ones I recruited to help me kick ass in Mob Wars). I like my friends exactly because of our differences. I tried to hang out with people who are like me and it was just annoying, probably because I often annoy myself.

I've got some weird friends too, into some weird things. It's fine that they're into weird things, they're my friends, but I don't really go there myself, you know? No, you don't know. And that's the point. You're just a super-computer sitting out there running statistics to see how many of my friends watch a certain television show. If enough of them are lesbians and watch The L Word, somehow that means I'm a lesbian too?

Dude, you seriously don't know me, so stop pretending that you do.

Oh, and by the way, you suck at pushing content anyway. All those people you think I might know sitting over there on the side of your old home page... I didn't know any of them. That creepy looking guy with the mean mug that you left up there for three months thinking I might know him, though after hundreds of page loads your algorithm should of guessed that I didn't, well, he's just creepy. Please don't push me any content he clicked on.

Thanks.

Mark Cuban's rules for a successful start-up

Mark Cuban is an Internet billionaire who owes a substantial portion of his fortune to start-ups. How successful is he? Well, he's listed as #133 on Forbes' "World's Richest People" list, with a net worth of $2.8 billion, and The Guinness Book of Records credits Cuban with the "largest single e-commerce transaction," $40 million for his Gulfstream V jet in October 1999.

Wouldn't you like to get inside his head? Well, you can. Mark Cuban keeps his own blog at Blog Maverick. Here's his twelve rules for start-ups:

Of course, anyone who has started a company has their own rules and guidelines, so I thought i would add to the meme with my own. My "rules" below aren't just for those founding the companies, but for those who are considering going to work for them as well.

1. Don't start a company unless its an obsession and something you love.

2. If you have an exit strategy, its not an obsession.

3. Hire people who you think will love working there.

4. Sales Cures All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales.

5. Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but are cheap

6. An expresso machine ? Are you kidding me ? Shoot yourself before you spend money on an expresso machine. Coffee is for closers. Sodas are free. Lunch is a chance to get out of the office and talk. There are 24 hours in a day, and if people like their jobs, they will find ways to use as much of it as possible to do their jobs.

7. No offices. Open offices keeps everyone in tune with what is going on and keeps the energy up. If an employee is about privacy, show them how to use the lock on the john. There is nothing private in a start up. This is also a good way to keep from hiring execs who can not operate successfully in a startup. My biggest fear was always hiring someone who wanted to build an empire. If the person demands to fly first class or to bring over their secretary, run away. If an exec wont go on salescalls, run away. They are empire builders and will pollute your company.

8. As far as technology, go with what you know. That is always the cheapest way. If you know Apple, use it. If you know Vista... ask yourself why, then use it. Its a startup, there are just a few employees. Let people use what they know.

9. Keep the organization flat. If you have managers reporting to managers in a startup, you will fail. Once you get beyond startup, if you have managers reporting to managers, you will create politics.

10. NEVER EVER EVER buy swag. A sure sign of failure for a startup is when someone sends me logo polo shirts. If your people are at shows and in public, its ok to buy for your own folks, but if you really think someone is going to wear your Yobaby.com polo you sent them in public, you are mistaken and have no idea how to spend your money

11. NEVER EVER EVER hire a PR firm. A PR firm will call or email people in the publications, shows and websites you already watch, listen to and read. Those people publish their emails. Whenever you consume any information related to your field, get the email of the person publishing it and send them an email introducing yourself and the company. Their job is to find new stuff. They will welcome hearing from the founder instead of some PR flack. Once you establish communications with that person, make yourself available to answer their questions about the industry and be a source for them. If you are smart, they will use you.

12. Make the job fun for employees. Keep a pulse on the stress levels and accomplishments of your people and reward them. My first company, MicroSolutions, when we had a record sales month, or someone did something special, I would walk around handing out 100 dollar bills to salespeople. At Broadcast.com and MicroSolutions, we had a company shot. Kamikaze. We would take people to a bar every now and then and buy one or 10 for everyone. At MicroSolutions, more often than not we had vendors cover the tab. Vendors always love a good party :0

These are all off the top of my head. But they have worked for me so far.

Chasing the Long Tail, Part I

The Long Tail is a term coined by Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson to describe the tendency of companies such as Amazon.com and Netflix to realize a significant profit from adding large quantities of less popular or obscure items to their inventory right along with widely popular ones. These thousands of inexpensive obscure titles often collectively match the popularity of a mega-blockbuster, for the same price or less. Anderson describes the effect in his (must-read) book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. According to the Wikipedia article on the topic:

Anderson argued that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Anderson cites earlier research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, that showed that a significant portion of Amazon.com's sales come from obscure books that are not available in brick-and-mortar stores.

In other words, quantity over popularity (or even quality), a model where so-called "B" movies collectively equal a blockbuster in revenue.

*****

The Long Tail isn't just applicable to ecommerce. Bloggers, for example, see the same effect the longer they blog. One really popular post that generates an enormous amount of traffic may become overshadowed by years of boring, less-popular posts, your very own long tail. Each page on a website of any type becomes yet another entry-point that gets indexed by Google. Your posted pic of Paris Hilton's boob slippage may end up with less traffic on a day-to-day basis than the hundreds of articles you've written about your cats. To Google it's all the same. While keywords such as "boob" may be more popular and generate a hundred hits in a day, various combinations of keywords that generate a few hits, let's say one each, collectively outshine your Hilton exposé if there's enough of them. In a nutshell: One thousand blog posts with one reader each per day generates one thousand hits for your site, far outshining your popular post that generated one hundred hits.

This is why you should stop procrastinating and go start your blog already, just to get that long tail growing. Fret not my blogging friends if your blog sucks. The more you post that garbage the more traffic you'll receive, even if it does suck something fierce.

In Part II we'll examine an experiment I'm conducting on the Long Tail concept.

All the little ants are marching

I quit my volunteer job/addiction of editing Wikipedia articles. Normally when someone quits, they write up a departing essay pointing out all the things wrong with the web sub-culture of wiki, namely all the things wrong with pages anyone can edit. Some of the popular critiques of social media are the lack of expert opinion and the opportunity for special interest groups to push a particular point of view, two things traditional media tries to avoid (often failing). I don't know about any of that. After two years of editing on a regular basis, I'm still a fan of the idea of Wikipedia. As I wrote in an essay some time ago:

Wikipedia is a mainstream encyclopedia, wrapped up in and documenting popular culture. It also has the unique characteristic of being an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, which means that it is edited by the masses who draw on their experiences of living in popular culture.

I'm personally fascinated by the dynamic between the established popular culture, and counterculture movements. MediaWiki itself is an experiment in countering the culture of traditional publishing. Though I was born decades later, I enjoy reading histories of the counterculture movements in the United States during the 1960s.

It really is fascinating, a system designed to chronicle pop culture, built on counterculture concepts. What a mashup! I am still, totally, a fan of the site. You won't be hearing any rant coming from me.

No, the reason I quit is actually one of the things I think is a plus of social media; it's just something I'm not personally cut out for. While at Wikipedia, through my (ahem) superior writing skills, I assisted in getting one of the articles to Featured Article status. By assisted I mean I wrote a significant portion of it myself. I had contributed towards a number of articles, hundreds of edits actually, but this one held a special place on Wikipedia, the highest status. I was rather proud of my accomplishment and set back to marvel at my work.

A few weeks later someone came in and changed a few words around. Not a significant change, but not the wording I would have chosen, and so it was mildly irritating. No big deal, so I let it go. A few more changes here and there. I let it go. Some other guy thought it needed to be rewritten completely, and I had to argue for the current version. He eventually let it go, and so did I. But more and more as time went on, the idea that I was somehow "finished" with the article became less and less true. Wikipedia is built on process, not product.

This is a very cool thing and the defining thing that separates web media from print media. You write, say, a book and have it printed. Once those presses start rolling that thing is set in stone, and you have to wait for a second edition (if ever) to correct any part of it or make any improvements. Not so on the web, obviously. Web documents can be updated, modified, fixed, all at a moment's notice. No more is this apparent than at Wikipedia, the "Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit". Thousands of editors participate in the process, and as such, Wikipedia is an ever evolving phenomenon. It is a living document.

I could hardly be pissed at that. That's beautiful. It reminds me of an ant hill after a storm has wiped through. You see dozens of little ants scurrying about, rebuilding, modifying, growing the hill, all so it can be wiped out in the next storm. It's about process, not product. Nothing is ever "finished" because that was never really the point to begin with. It's about the process of living, and big surprise, it's not that different in a living document.

I am a fan of the idea. It's just hard for me personally. Though it's not very Zen, I've always had trouble with the maintenance side of life. Mowing the lawn and watching it grow. Mowing the lawn and watching it grow. Mowing the lawn and... what the hell? I just mowed it the other day! I'm very product-orientated. I'm not saying any of that is better because it probably isn't. It's just more my style. I'd like to be in Zen harmony with the ebb and flow; I'm just not there yet.

So some guy came in and proposed an entire rewrite of my featured article and for the first time I thought, you know, I think I'm done here. Maybe I'd be more product-ive elsewhere. I thought all of that, and wrote up this departing essay in favor of processes, and as I was writing the words "I think I'm done here," I realized... that's the product. How narcissistic of me to have not considered that there'd be anything after. Has an ant colony ever been about just one ant?

Is this blog hot or not?

Subtitle: A Limitation in Value Judgments

A computer system can only evaluate objective facts. They are currently unable to form a subjective opinion. However, a human/computer value ranking system is also limited in the types of value judgments it can make, despite the values of the human being involved.

All open value ranking systems on the web, whether they are purely algorithm controlled ranking systems, like Google's page ranking system, or human based ranking systems like Digg.com, etc. end up only ranking the popularity value. Other subjective human value judgments are lost in the shuffle. The reason is because informed opinion is overshadowed by uninformed opinion in an open system. Experts, by definition, are always the minority.

Take, for example, a system that ranks art. Typically what you may find in an online art ranking system is a thumbs up or thumbs down button. Like it, or don't like it? Unfortunately this only reflects the aesthetic appeal, and not the majority of values incorporated into art theory. Composition, context, meaning, all those values are overshadowed by the popularity value. If a lot of people really like the way a crappy piece of art looks, it has more value, despite this being a shallow judgment.

When you rank videos the stupid dog tricks videos will alway be more popular than a video with a social message.

What do we do ten years down the road when all knowledge is defined in terms of popularity? News is going that way, with even major networks latching on to the Digg.com model. Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of the Internet, is solely a popular treatment of a topic. Search engines rank by popularity. It feels a lot like high school : )

It's hard to say which model is better. In politics, this is the debate over representative democracy versus direct democracy. I don't personally trust the "wisdom of the crowds" because the crowd is an uninformed majority (not to say it's all bad). Philosophically I mistrust authority as well, but I think it's safe to say that something is lost in turning value ranking over to the crowds. The only real value that can be ranked that way is popularity. How bad that loss is, or the ramifications, won't be known for a few decades.

The good and bad of crowd-sourcing

When Google unveiled their latest project, Street View, recently, I doubt anyone over there expected such a collective back lash from privacy advocates. I mean, the service is really cool. Available in select cities, Google now allows you to zoom in on their maps and see what things look like at street level. This isn't CG. I once rented Spiderman 2 for the Xbox just so I could take a virtual tour of New York and climb to the top of the Empire State Building like King Kong. I was a bit disappointed because it didn't feel "real" enough. Google's Street View doesn't disappoint. It's actual photos spliced together and is very immersive.

Perhaps that's the problem. It's a little too real. They are actual photos taken by Google crew driving around in this van, which was caught in a reflection as it was driving by a window. That's not the only thing caught on camera. I can imagine the guys in the van thinking it was funny when they also snapped photos of girls sunbathing, some dude going into an adult bookstore, some dude coming out of a strip club, and a guy breaking into a house (among others). Some photos have since been removed like the infamous guy peeing on the side of the road and the poor girl whose thong was showing as she was getting out of a truck. The privacy advocates raised the red flag when it was revealed that in some of the photos you could see into people's houses. I'm sure Google's photo-taking policies are in the process of being revised.

So how did all these photos in a haystack surface? That's the power of crowds. Google serves millions of users per day. Whole groups of users, right now as you are reading this, are scrutinizing every inch of Street View looking for interesting photos. In this particular case, that's come back to bite Google in the arse. Millions of judging eyeballs is the downside of having a huge user base. But when it works to their advantage, it's called crowd-sourcing. Huge tasks, like maintaining articles at Wikipedia and protecting them from vandals is turned over to the crowd itself. This greatly reduces the amount of time and money spent on paid moderators by replacing them with volunteers. Yahoo bought Flickr as a replacement for its photo service exactly because Flickr has self-maintaining crowd-sourcing features built-in. Though the deal cost them millions, they need less of a work force to work it, and end up saving much more in the short long-run.

It sounds like a lazy way of getting something for nothing, and it sort of is. Still, crowd-sourcing shows promise in solving real problems. Computers are great because they can automate tasks. Unfortunately computers aren't human, and there are some things only humans (currently) can do. For example, "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) can be used to scan books and turn them into digitized text that can be searched. It works great on clearly printed books, but when dealing with old worn manuscripts and handwritten journals, OCR starts encountering problems. Is that a lower-case "a" or an "o"? Only humans can currently tell the difference. This very same idea is used in CAPTCHA, or "word verification" spam deterrent systems. Spam bots can't tell if that's an "a" or an "o" either. It just so happens that about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. This few seconds of individual human deciphering translates to more than 150,000 hours of work each day. Imagine if that could be put to use somehow, like maybe translating characters OCR can't recognize. Well guess what, it is. Check out reCAPTCHA, a service doing exactly that.

Who knows what future problems crowd-sourcing will solve? Reading books while fighting spam is new way of harnessing its power, but crowd sourcing isn't exactly new. SETI years ago started using volunteer's excess computer processing power to scan the skies for extraterrestrials. Similar projects likewise borrow processing speed to crunch data on AIDS research. The "some dudes" of the world are probably planning really complex uses we can't even imagine yet. At the very least crowd-sourcing keeps us honest, as in pointing out Google's unintentional transition to Big Brother. I'm still trying to figure out how to crowd-source my finances. If only one million people would send me a buck...

Depth web versus shallow web

I've mentioned before (and will probably come back to) the idea that the web is all about depth exploration of a topic. No stand-alone topic is completely stand-alone, but rather linked to back stories and related information and virtually every side-notion imaginable. It can get really deep. Perhaps the best example of this is Wikipedia, where everything eventually ends up as a blue link to everything else. It's a seemingly endless click adventure that if pursued indefinitely will bring you back to the beginning knowing everything you could possibly know about a topic. Like I said, it's depth exploration.

That's the good web in a nutshell. Almost every web application is designed around this idea of seeing how many turtles down you can get.

Almost.

Some systems are better than others at depth treatment, but surprisingly there's at least one that doesn't even try. The opposite of depth exploration is flatland shallowness. It's called Twitter.

Twitter is instant updates in 140 characters or less of what you're doing at any given moment. You can share this log with your friends who (for some odd reason) might actually be interested in what you're doing at any given moment. Sounds kind of cool. It's totally webby in that it's broadcasting your life in real-time. It's also kind of creepy, but that's alright. It's not like voyeurism and the web haven't met before. I like it because it's challenging to continually express what you're doing in Haiku moments.

Example:
Went to Walmart. Bought a case of Dasani because local tap water tastes like pesticides. Wondering why the floor is sticky. <-123 characters

If every random thought that crosses your mind demands utterance, that's the idea behind Twitter. It's actually Twitter's saving grace. It's kind of a nifty concept keeping a log of random thoughts. Unfortunately it's also horizontal, flatland, and shallow.

The crucial feature that Twitter is lacking (Web 2.0 entrepreneurs take notice, as this is how to make a Twitter plus) is an automatic way of linking these random thoughts to other random thoughts, thereby creating a depth narrative. That's how the brain works, after all. No idea is an isolated thing. Each thought is intrinsically linked to other thoughts. Our brains automatically process information relative to previously stored information. Sticky floors instantly conjure up memories of that time you went to the movies, which is linked to that first kiss in the back row, which is linked to that trip you took with that girl you kissed, which is linked to the more mundane thought of buying Mountain Dew when you stopped to get gas, and now we're back to Dasani and water tasting like pesticides. Then we're off to explore another tangent. The whole process creates this depth story stemming from a seemingly shallow account of going to Walmart, expressed in a post of less than 140 characters.

That would be really cool, bordering on a blueprint for artificial intelligence, but we don't even have to stretch it that far. It's enough to say that if Twitter is to accurately represent the stream of consciousness of all us twits, it needs depth. Otherwise, it's just the Andy Warhol painting of Web 2.0. A bit of a novelty, but completely shallow.

Kevin Rose is a hero and Digg users should be buried

I support Kevin Rose as an Internet hero.

If you're the least bit interested, by now you've already heard the backstory. An Internet revolt hit Digg this week and hit it hard. Poor Digg went from innocent bystander in the debate over Digital Rights Management (DRM) to an active participant in a matter of hours, and not by their own choice. It was the will of their community.

A quick summary of what happened: Someone cracked the AACS scheme used to encrypt data on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. Someone posts the hex code to Digg. Hollywood sends out cease-and-desist orders to remove posts citing the encryption key from websites including Digg. Digg initially complies with the order, removing postings and banning users. According to a statement by Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, "We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code." Civil disobediance erupts and washes over Digg's front page claiming censorship and posting the hex code over and over. Within hours, every popular article on Digg is about the code, and administrators find themselves unable to keep up.

Here's the heroic moment: In the midst of this civil disobedience Kevin Rose decided to side with the vision of Digg, at risk of losing it all.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

This is no small thing. Conservative estimates last year put Digg's worth at $200 million, though by some estimates it may be worth as much as $500 million. That was last year. I'm sure it's worth much more now. To be willing to risk all of that on the idea that Digg is ran by its community is heroic. That is the vision, after all. Community submitted news stories, ranked by the community, and moderated by the community. It is entirely community. Unfortunately, as Wired put it, "Live by the community, die by the community." The heroic moment is when Kevin Rose agreed.

I haven't seen anything this inspiring in some time, considering the woes of the world. Kevin Rose is a hero because when put to the test, he sided with his original idea even after the idea became more than it originally was. While other Web 2.0 companies cave to other interests as soon as the money starts rolling (MySpace comes to mind), Digg has remained true to itself through its founder.

Unfortunately, the situation isn't all-inspiring however...

Digg users are assholes

Kevin Rose is the hero, not Digg users. Digg users are assholes. They proved that pretty clearly.

Rose came up with the idea for Digg back when he was hosting Screen Savers on TechTV (I was a fan then and I am now). Digg was founded as a tech news site in response to Slashdot, where content is controlled by the editors. Rose had met with the Slashdot people while working on Screen Savers and asked why they couldn't just let the readers decide what content they want to see on the home page. For whatever reason, Slashdot rejected the idea that is now the core feature of Digg. A short time later, the first version of Digg appeared based on this idea that news could be social. The other essential idea is that, when given the responsibility of controlling what news is placed on the front page, users would act responsibly. For the most part this has been the case, and Digg is generally seen to be successful. As such, Digg has become an important mark in the history of the Internet and the publishing of information as a whole.

How sad is it then that when put to the test, Digg's user base ends up behaving like a bunch of children crying over their toy being taken away. DRM is a hot controversial topic in tech. Many tech enthusiasts are against it. Naturally some person would eventually post the code, but it's not the end of the world if Digg removes it. The response was very childish. How so? Instead of revolting against the MPAA, instead of revolting against DRM in general, instead of pressing Congress or traditional media to get policies changed, users revolted against the very site that is more in line with their way of thinking, ie. openness.

I mean the whole idea behind Digg was that users could responsibly control front page content. You don't even see user controlled front page content at Wikipedia. That's controlled by a few select editors. Slashdot is controlled by editors. All the other news sites are also controlled by editors. Why attack the very guys that are most on your side? The blog posts as this all went down reflect the childlike response. It was a schoolyard frenzy. "Look at what we're doing, ha ha" and a bunch of patting themselves on the back. Did anyone stop to think that they were potentially destroying one of the most open networks available? It's kind of absurd to think that this was supposedly done out of the notion that content should be more open. It came off looking more like a temper tantrum.

A lot of asshole behavior is what I saw.

Kevin Rose is the only hero in this. When he stood up and said, for better or worse, and with millions on the line, we will side with the users, that's pretty amazing especially since the users turned out to be assholes.

Feeding the machine

I have a love-hate relationship with technology.

I once worked in the dishroom of a large cafeteria serving hundreds of the rudest people imaginable. As they left, they would sling their trays in through a window and my job was to [get covered in slop] stack the trays and load them onto the conveyor belt of this large silver cleaning machine. No matter how many trays I stacked and loaded there were always more coming. Stack. Load. Stack. Load. Every day the same thing. Feed the machine. Before long I couldn't tell where the machine left off and I began.

Some devices were built to make our lives easier. They serve us. They're an accessory. This monstrous steam tray cleaner wasn't one of those devices. It was large, clearly in charge, and hungry. I was but a cog in the machine feeding it endlessly. To pass the time I even took to chanting in my head: "Feed the machine. Feed the machine. Feed the machine." I was a module — the human component of a machine designed for the greater goal of clean dishes.

And today?

Today I'm partly a software coder working on Web 2.0 applications. This came about because of an early love of print, old manuscripts, and the power of the written word. I learned a long time ago how to design for and run printing presses, but when the web hit the world I was the first in my little circle of friends take an awestruck gasp. It was amazing how comparatively inexpensive you can put any strange notion you had out there. In the early days, the web was just a digital version of print, a top-down publishing scheme but nonetheless amazing, and truly revolutionary.

Web 2.0 is the natural evolution of that idea. It is the same concept that any crazy idea can be put out there, but now in critical mass. The technology that coders have assembled has reduced the complexity of publishing and collapsed the hierarchy into a horizontal model. That was the idea behind Web 1.0, but it has only just come about in any real sense. Now every crazy idea that is put out there is tagged to other crazy ideas. Links evolved from hyperlinked documents to hyperlinked everything, up to and including people. No crazy idea is a singular phenomena, it is now a part of the collective of a bigger crazy.

That's the love. In all this madness, we are building something completely new. It's something the world has never seen before in any period of history. Unless the Library at Alexandria had some system I'm not aware of for user-generated content that automatically linked the content to everything else related, including the librarians themselves, we have stumbled upon something that is the envy of philosophers, mystics, and Kings alike — no matter what the age. This machine is being constructed by everyone, not just the programmers. You, I, my seventy-something-year-old grandmother, we're building the largest human endeavor ever constructed.

In the Wired article "We Are the Web", Kevin Kelly writes:

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

It doesn't even matter if people read this crap we post. We are programming the machine itself. It's learning from it's fathers and mothers, ourselves. We are here. We are giving birth to this machine. It's exciting times because when they look back, for good or ill, it all starts right now.

That's the love. It's also what scares the hell out of me.

Maybe it's a narcissistic/nostalgic yearning to remain at the top of the food chain, or a struggle to hold fast to the distinction of a boundary between man and machine. Maybe it's that I fancy myself an artist as well as a programmer and as such I'm duty bound to promote the human condition. Or maybe it's just flashback nightmares of loading trays into the Big Silver Machine. Whatever it is, I cringe at the thought of this massive machine that is more than any of us, ourselves. As father to it, the same as any of you, I wonder if I'm not one of those deadbeat dads that marvel at the birthing but want to skip town on eighteen years committed serving the creation.

One thing is clear. We can rage against the machine all we want. At some point, however, we have to step out of denial and realize the machine is now us. Whatever line there was is blurred.