the tweney review

1. It’s a complicated issue. A really complicated technical issue. The simplistic rhetoric of “demanding that ISPs treat all traffic equally” is a nonstarter, because ISPs have never done that. Peering arrangements, cacheing networks like Akamai, even the fact that you can get slow DSL for an average of $38/month or faster cable service for $41 or a really fast T1 for $250 all point to tons of variation in the way that Net traffic is handled, charged for, optimized, and delivered. Until you understand how this works you can’t even talk intelligently about net neutrality.

2. In an environment where ordinary folks can barely understand the issue, and congressmen even less, legislation is a bad idea. Even if it’s well-intentioned, legislation that attempts to control the course of technological development can have unintended consequences down the line. So today’s defeat of a Net neutrality amendment is probably a good thing, not a setback for democracy.

3. The Internet is not going to end tomorrow if ISPs start prejudicially carrying IP traffic. It may get harder for, say, AOL users or Cox Cable subscribers to do certain things. But break the Internet? Not so easy to do. There are always alternate ways of getting your data from point A to point B.

4. It may not be that urgent. Even AT&T’s Ed Whitacre, who kicked off this whole firestorm with some stupid comments a few months back about charging Google to deliver video, is backing off and says that AT&T isn’t planning to prioritize packet delivery.

5. It’s terribly named. No movement since the fight against “global warming” has given itself a worse name right out of the gate (and using the term “global warming” instead of “climate collapse” probably cost us 20 years). The fact is, “net neutrality” sounds bland, like nothing at all to get inspired about, unless you’re some crazy net geek. “Save the Internet” is a bit better but it sounds wacko and alarmist. Anyone got a better moniker? God knows they need one.

More info: Susan Crawford’s FAQ on Net Neutrality.

The free Democracy Player from the Participatory Culture Foundation is a slick tool for finding and downloading Internet videos. Unlike, say, YouTube, you don’t have to sit around and wait for a semi-crappy video to buffer before you watch it. Instead, you browse through single videos or channels that look interesting, mark them for downloading, and then come back later after the downloading’s done.

The videos are high quality, with high framerates and enough resolution that they look good in fullscreen playback (which Democracy supports). Unfortunately the software’s still beta, so it’s buggy — it can run slowly, and crashes occasionally. Democracy is also missing some user-friendly features, such as a note next to each video that says how long it is in minutes (all it currently shows is the video’s size in MB). There’s no easy way to get info about a video’s title, origin, and so forth, after you’ve downloaded it or while it’s playing. But the array of excellent video that it provides make Democracy worth the occasional hassles.

Hey, kids, it’s Digg for girls! BlinkList | Your personal start page and social bookmarking engine

Like BASIC, PHP will destroy your future as a programmer (and I should know; I programmed in BASIC as a kid and all I can deal with is PHP now): Why the light has gone out on LAMP

I’m at risk of getting a reputation for pissing on Web 2.0, but here goes. The problem with “microformats,” which Technorati is pushing pretty hard, is that they seem to be no more than poorly implemented metadata standards.

Take the rel=tag specification, for instance. This is a snippet of code you can add to a hyperlink that tells sites, like Technorati, that the page where the link appears should be categorized a certain way.

In other words, you’re tagging the current page (where the link appears) by linking it to a tag page (which presumably collects many similarly-tagged pages). The meaning of the tag comes from the linked page, and is applied to the linking page.

Confused yet? It gets worse.

One of the stated goals of rel-tag is that its tags should be visible. Unlike the META tags we’ve all been putting on our web pages for years, tags are easily spotted and read by humans. Except the specification undercuts even that, telling us: “The last path component of the URL is the text of the tag.” So this link:

fish

is a “tech” tag, even though it looks like a fish. And this link:

poetry

is a tag for “haiku,” not “poetry.” And this:

genius

is not a tag for anything, it’s just a link. So much for visibility.

And encoding content as part of a linked page’s URL? How much more inflexible can you get? This is supposed to be an improvement over META tags?

Here’s an example of the problem. The URL for my weblog’s “reviews” category is this:

http://dylan.tweney.com/category/main/

I can’t change that (old) directory structure unless I want to break all the inbound permalinks to it. But thanks to Technorati’s brain-dead tagging scheme, I can’t categorize it under the tag “review” either — instead, it should show up tagged as “main,” which is completely meaningless. And if I want to add some useful additional tags, like “technology” or “Tweney,” forget about it.

The result: I use Technorati tags when I want to make something show up on Technorati. But that’s it.

A decent tagging scheme would allow you to take any arbitrary text, with or without a hyperlink, and add one or more tags to it. It also wouldn’t commit you to using a single company to sort out all your tags. I’m sorry, but rel-tag just doesn’t cut it. The best I can say for this half-baked standard is that Google hasn’t supported it yet.

You want to make metadata visible? Write a browser plugin that lets you view META tags.

So, back to microformats: What makes them different from metadata? Or for that matter the much-maligned but nevertheless-growing semantic web? It seems clear to me that they’re the same thing–except microformats are less well thought-out. If a field was ever crying out in desperate need of a few good librarians, this is surely it.

Technorati Tags: metadata, microformat, microformats, technorati

Despite being a far inferior piece of hardware, the Nintendo DS continues to outsell the Sony PSP by a factor of 6. The PSP has a bigger, more beautiful screen. It’s got more sophisticated controls. It supports removable memory cards and works pretty decently as a video and audio player. And its graphics kick the Nintendo DS’s chunky 90s-era pixelvision into the gutter. When we reviewed the two platforms a year ago in Mobile, it was obvious which was the better choice. The PSP was revolutionary, cutting-edge, and inspiringly designed. The DS, by contrast, was a clunky, unlovely package of retread technologies.

So why can’t Sony get ahead in the market? Nintendo’s massive installed base of Gameboy players, huge library of Gameboy Advance games (which are playable on the DS), and a bigger library of DS-specific titles. Also, it helps that the DS is cheaper and more durably built. Considering Nintendo’s huge pre-existing lead in the handheld market, it’s amazing Sony is doing as well as it is.

It’s a story that you see again and again in the tech market. An inferior technology with a lot of content or applications and an early start easily trounces superior technology with little content. Betamax vs VHS. Mac vs PC. OS/2 vs Windows. MP3 vs Ogg, AAC, or WMA.

Still, I can’t help but hope that Nintendo has the sense to come out with a handheld that has decent graphics and a screen that’s a bit larger than a Post-It Note. Not likely, though–this company has its sights set on making everything smaller.

See how it happened: Graph of PSP vs DS sales through the end of 2005

Princeton Tec’s Scout headlamp ($22) has 2 white LEDs and three brightness settings: bright, very bright, and blinding. It’s easily the most powerful LED headlamp I’ve tested. The plastic clip on the back holds the light to a hat brim nicely, but it broke off when I tried to wedge it around a particularly fat object (my bike’s handlebars). The stretchy headstrap still works, though, if I feel like turning myself into a bionic Bjorn Borg.

200 liters of Diet Coke, 500 Mentos, and 1 great soundtrack: EepyBird.com

The Bake Shop Ghost, by Jacqueline K. Ogburn and Marjorie A. Priceman (Illustrator). Best new kid’s book I’ve seen this year–and I can say that despite having read it aloud at least 40 times over the past two months. The pictures are excellent, the story is original, and the hero triumphs by being clever, determined, understanding, and by using the library. Plus, there’s a recipe for chocolate cake at the back, which was simple enough that Clara could help me make it and delicious enough that we devoured it in about 1.5 days.

Brain Age for the Nintendo DS ($20) is a videogame masquerading as a brain-training tool. The exercises include rapid-fire math, counting syllables, reading aloud, and even drawing pictures from memory. The friendly bobbing head of Japanese neuroscientist Dr. Ryuta Kawashima explains what each exercise is good for (mostly stimulating your prefrontal cortex) while cheery music plays. Too bad this stuff doesn’t really make you smarter. But it is fun, and playing with a friend and comparing notes makes for great conversation and friendly competition.

(p.s. Here are some things that might actually make your brain work better, and a system for improving your memory that looks promising.)