Hello to the Boys in the Truck

I have to admit I was a little taken aback in class the other week when our guitarist/vocalist/search-engine-optimist friend, Greg Markel, told me I was in surveillance denial.

This came after I asked him how Google or any other search engine could possibly rejigger its search results to match my interests when it would have no idea that I was the one doing the searching.

A bemused grin creased his rock ’n’-roll face. He said search engines know all about me because they track where I go after I log in.

Heh-heh, I thought, I don’t log in, smart guy. I just type stuff into the search box and go.

At this point I do not imagine you are nodding in agreement, and I now know why.

Earlier this week I launched Firefox browser and when my Yahoo home page materialized I noticed over on the right side the greeting, “Hi, edwardcohen.” It didn’t take long for me to figure out what was going on. If you log in to Yahoo Mail – or, I assume, similar services – you stay logged in, even after you quit the browser. A surveillance team in a panel van across the street awaiting your return.

I don’t know how I feel about this.

On the one hand, it’s harmless, right? What is Yahoo going to do, blackmail you by threatening to make public how much time you’re spending at www.sexwithreptiles.com (note to squatters, this domain name is still available)? Let them try it once, and when word gets out a billion people will switch to another search engine overnight.

On the other hand, I can’t help feeling that I am somehow being made a tool for The Man.

Which is why I initially felt a perverse pleasure when I Stumbled Upon the site BugMeNot.com. (More about why I’m capitalizing stumbled upon in a bit.)

BugMeNot helps you supply disinformation to sites at which tell-us-about-yourself registration is compulsory. You just type go to BugMeNot, type in the address of the nosy site, and BugMeNot provides you one or more user name and password combinations that have proven to work. The site claims to have accumulated bogus log-ins/passwords for -- get this -- 208,523 sites. For example, to get into the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com), try annoying@sogetthis.com and the password “annoy.”

These log-ins let you bypass all of that rigmarole of typing in registration information and then waiting for a confirmation email. And you don’t have to worry about the site deluging you with spam or selling your address to spammers.

Note: BugMeNot says it doesn’t give away log-ins for pay-content sites or pay-content areas within otherwise free sites. So you’re really just screwing the free sites out of marketing data they would find useful in selling ads.

And that brings me to why I said I was initially delighted to find BugMeNot. Since then I’ve been reconsidering. Do I really want to make survival harder for sites like the nytimes.com and IMDB, which provide immense amounts of quality information without charge?( For more on this debate, check out these comments at the journalism site Poynteronline.)

I wrote above that I Stumbled Upon BugMeNot, and here’s why: On the recommendation of a friend I've installed StumbleUpon, which is a browser plug-in that helps you discover new Web pages. You just check off various boxes of categories that interest you (satire, technology, politics, etc.). Then when you press the Stumble button on the browser it takes you to a new page it thinks you will like.

Another button lets you give the page a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, which supposedly helps fine tune the selection of future destinations. I’ve discovered all kinds of cool stuff.

But wait a minute. Tracking of preferences? Fine-tuning of content? This sounds a lot like what Greg warned us about.

Sure enough, as Wikipedia explains, StumbleUpon uses the knowledge it gains of user preferences to deliver targeted advertising: “A small proportion of the 'stumbles' users come across (typically less than 2%) are sponsored pages matching their topics of interest. For example, those signed up for photography will occasionally see an ad related to photography.”

So it's tough to escape from surveillance on the Web. But you tell me, isn’t it all still a bargain?

I'll Take That Free Hamburger Now

Here’s my idea: We’re going to open a chain of fast-food restaurants serving hamburgers, french fries, shakes and assorted other tasty, health-endangering foods. We’ll keep the bathrooms sparkling and inspect our kid’s-meal prizes to minimize the lead content.

I know what you’re thinking: That market is saturated -- ever heard of McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King? But here’s the difference: Those places charge for their food. We’re going to give it away.

Uh … OK, and how are you going to make any money?

Isn’t it obvious? We will be deluged with customers day and night -- advertising! We’ll sell ads on the restaurant walls, the floors, the tables, the crew uniforms, the parking spaces, the bags and wrappers – every inch of the place. Companies will pay big money to have their messages exposed to the kind of traffic that will be moving through our restaurants day and night.

Does this idea sound ridiculous or just familiar? A little of both?

Here’s why it should sound familiar:

Think about all the commercial sites on the Web. Now take away the e-commerce retailers like Amazon.com, eBay and Best Buy, the places where money is actually exchanged for goods and services (usually goods). Almost everything you have left -- Facebook, Yahoo, NYTimes.com, WebMD, etc. -- is pursuing the model of our revolutionary burger joint above.

A key difference, in case you don’t see it, is that it costs the same amount for the Times to produce a story that’s read online by one person as one read by 1 million. Not so with giving one person a free hamburger versus 1 million people.

But the idea is the same. The free-service sites are saying, Here’s something we know you need or enjoy. We’ll give it to you for free. And the way we’ll make money is by bringing in more ad revenue than it costs for us to provide what you came here to mooch.

I want to say a few things about this.

First, life is good in this matrix, and I don’t want to leave. I love getting stuff I want or need for free. I remember back when I started using MapQuest (Google Maps, etc.) and thinking, something isn’t right about this. Why am I being given unlimited free access to something so useful, something I’d happily pay, well, something to use?

I was forgetting about television. This same business model brought us old-fashion over-the-air TV. Fifty-some years ago companies started sending us hours and hours of occasionally entertaining and informative programming at no cost -- other than the cost of a TV set, which eventually became affordable to most households. The commercials, in aggregate, not only covered the cost of production and transmission but made network executives, actors, directors, investors and others rich.

What I’m wondering is, can this model be sustained forever on the Web?

What if traditional ads go the way of the woolly mammoth? As Professor Schaff alluded to last week, traditional advertising –the “Hey, everybody, look at this and buy it” kind – is ridiculously inefficient. Advertisers could wise up and devote more effort and money to viral marketing, word-of-mouth and search-engine optimization. This could make Prof. Schaff very rich.

I also wonder if we’re not already in a house-of-cards scenario. Many of the ads I see today in the margins of sites like Facebook point to websites that, like Facebook, provide something for nothing, paid for by ad dollars. And many of the ads on those sites take you to other sites doing the same.

It will be interesting to see how long we can continue to get good stuff online for nothing, other than the nuisance of ads in our peripheral vision. Maybe forever. But if our sugar daddy, display advertising, takes a shine to something else, I don't see how.

All Are Welcome, Some May Enter

“There is no there there,” the writer Gertrude Stein famously observed in her autobiography, which is curiously titled “Everybody’s Autobiography” (1937). She was talking about Oakland, Calif., where she’d gone looking for her childhood home. She couldn’t find it. I don’t understand why this quote is so well known, possibly because I haven’t read the book.

At the risk of stealing from the dead, let me state that there is no there here, either, and I don’t mean Ms. Stein’s ancestral bungalow. I mean There, capital T, the Massively Multiplayer Online Game. It’s no longer here, on my hard drive, because I uninstalled it.

If you have been keeping up with your reading assignments, dear classmates (Hint: Don’t look for them under “assignments” on the wiki) you know that There is “a world of unending leisure and pleasure” with a “melon and aqua color palette” and “cheerful, perky font.” Or so gushes Betsy Basket, who, my guess, is not a person at all but an avatar who skips around gum-drop land in blue-checked gingham.

“There” wouldn’t let me into its utopia of sensibly priced brocade dune buggies. First it didn’t like my browser. Then, after unpacking approximately 80 billion files onto my hard drive, it wouldn’t let me past the log-in page. No, it recognized my user name and password as valid, it just wouldn’t load.

A message suggested I check to see if the domain itself was down – as if anything so cheerful and perky could ever be down. (It wasn’t.) The next suggestion was to go to the help page. This turned out to be a list of queries from other hapless souls whose symptoms didn’t match mine. The registration confirmation email had included a link to a “Live Help,” page, so I clicked on that. It loaded a page divided into two categories: Abuse Issues and Billing Issues. Billing? Nobody said anything about paying.

I mention this frustrating episode because this is not an isolated incident. Overwhelming circumstantial evidence now indicates that I am not welcome in virtual reality. Who is? Substantial experience in computer gaming seems to be one prerequisite along with a computer no more than a year old.

The first unwelcome mat I encountered was at Second Life, which I downloaded some weeks ago. This reportedly fantastic – dare I say remarkablized – virtual world displays on my computer as a muddle of gloomy silhouettes, like some dreadful intermediate phase between Picasso’s blue period and cubism. Our esteemed instructor and Second Life cofounder Cory Ondrejka diagnosed the problem as an outdated driver for my graphics card, but a search online uncovered no available updates. So I may never get to tie up at Radio Shack Island or experience other destinations I hear tell are neat-o.

The explorer moves on.

World of Warcraft warned that it would take 38 hours to download its 16 gigs onto my hard drive. But an hour after starting this process, I had barely received 3 megs. A message said I apparently had a firewall in the way. I was ushered to a page that, worryingly, promised instructions on how to disable my defenses. None of the virus protection software listed , however, matched what I had (newly) installed on my machine. Goodbye. I was only going to advocate for truth and reconciliation anyway.

VMTV actually downloaded and opened on my laptop. I entered and patiently listened as Zach and Jen (I’m making up their names) explained how to walk and talk and teleport and shop. For the next hour or so I roamed VMTV looking for someone to talk with or something to do. I saw only two avatars. The first was a comely blonde in a white bikini. She stood behind a lectern looking as confused as I was. And by “I” I mean my blond male avatar in a red hoodie. I typed “Hi.” She ignored me.

About an hour later I found myself repeatedly walking into the closed door of a shop on a deserted city street. Someone typed into my conversation rectangle, “You can’t go in there.”

I typed back meekly that I was new in these parts and wondering where everybody was.

“Do you have a car?” the mystery typist asked. I typed no.

“Do you have any money?” I located a button in the lower right corner of the screen that informed me I had 1,000 of something. I disclosed this information.

Just then I got the idea to turn Red Hoodie around and see if someone was there. I was startled to find that there was, a guy wearing some kind of creepy cat mask. He didn’t type anything more. He just stood there staring at me. I started to wonder why he had asked about my car and money.

More staring.

I suddenly and irrationally had this sense of impending … I don’t know … homosexuality. I hurriedly found the exit arrow in the bottom right corner of the screen. A second later I was back on the familiar green rolling hills of my Windows XP default desktop.

I’m probably going to have nightmares about Creepy Catman tonight. Best that I uninstall his world too.

Friendster or Foester?

Some people have asked me to explain why I call this blog Thus Spake Shibboleth.

Actually, that’s false, no one has asked me to explain it, but bear with me for a few paragraphs.

The “Thus Spake” comes from “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” an orchestral piece by Richard Strauss that is much better known as the theme from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Good film, but I’ve never understood the ending.

Shibboleth is a word I had neither heard nor seen before I came to USC but now encounter daily. It appears in that ominous Shibboleth Authentication Request Processed message I get -- and I assume everyone else gets – from the USC server when logging into a password-protected area like Blackboard or email. The term actually predates email by about 3,000 years and has a number of different meanings, only one of them related to computer security. Wikipedia can explain further.

So, what I have here is a geeky title worthy of small talk during a break at a Star Trek convention. But after my first two reflections postings and what I’m about to describe this week, people may think I should change the name to Curmudgeonly Complaining.

Am I a curmudgeon, or worse? Thursday night Professor Dmitri Williams called me a Luddite because I hadn’t watched TV in three weeks and for other reasons, one of which I’ll get to in a sec. But, c’mon, would a Luddite have a blog? And just look at all these nice hyperlinks I’m embedding this week, including that one for people who don’t know what a Luddite is.

Did I have it coming from Professor Williams? You be the judge.

I’m sitting in his Social Dynamics of Online Communities class and our learned professor asks if we know who Dank and Martha are and why we should care about them. D & M were in our readings from last week. They’re two people on Second Life who got into a huge fight because Dank’s make-believe dog ate Martha’s beautiful-but-poisonous make-believe flowers, which resulted in Dank’s pooch “dying” in make-believe pain.

So I say, “They’re two people who obviously have way too much time on their hands.”

And Professor Williams replies, “Welcome to the next 12 months of this program.”

I hope not. I can’t be the only person who believes that online communities can be so much more than the fun and games, self-promotion and virtual panty gifting afforded by the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and Second Life.

Actually I know I’m not alone because I just read about Bryant Choung. He’s a software engineer who in an interview with Wired magazine a couple of years back said he thought social networking sites seemed like a good idea at first, but their usage often devolved into “an attempt to get as many fake friends as possible.”

Annoyed by a deluge of friend requests from virtual strangers, Choung launched a social-networking parody site called Snubster. There people can list people and things that bug them. Several similar sites exist, including Enemybook. One of our assignments this past week was to register at some smaller social networking sites and have a look around, so I chose those two.

Both of the sites have their droll elements. Enemybook’s add-an-enemy form asks whether you are adding this person or thing because this entity killed your (choose one): family, friend, buzz or dog. But Enemybook is in many ways just another kind of social networking site. Its home page, for instance, invites users to “see who lists you as an enemy and . . . become friends with the friends of your enemy.”

As we’ve learned in one of our classes, new communication media inevitably spawn a backlash. These parody sites are more of a countermelody than a backlash, but they serve as a call to imaginative and technically savvy people to push online-community building beyond the adolescent level at which it seems to have plateaued.

That will be one of our goals when we tackle our final projects this fall, I suppose. At least it will be one of mine.