a protocol droid for computer programs - MeglOne half of a piece of computer velcro ;) - Warren
A set of sockets for other programs to plug in to. - Josh Wand
Superglue your cat to your dog. Meowoof. Except useful. - Jim Lindley
Makes your app a server, and other apps its clients.
“An API lets my code get at your data.”
First, let's get one thing straight: the Long Tail is indeed full of crap. But it's also full of works of refined brilliance and depth--and an awful lot in between. Exactly the same can be said of the Web itself. Ten years ago, people complained that there was a lot of junk on the Internet and, sure enough, any casual surf quickly confirmed that. Then along came search engines to help pull some signal from the noise and finally Google, tapping the wisdom of the crowd itself to turn a mass of incoherence into the closest thing to an oracle the world has ever seen.On a store shelf or in any other limited means of distribution, the ratio of good to bad matters because it's a zero sum game. Space for one eliminates space for the other. Prominence for one obscures the other. If there are ten crappy toys for each good one in the aisle, you'll think poorly of the toy store and be discouraged from browsing. Likewise it's no fun to flip through bin after bin of CDs if you haven't heard of any of them.
But where you have unlimited shelf space, it's an infinite sum game. The billions of crappy web pages about whatever are not a problem in the way that billions of crappy CDs on the Tower Records shelves would be. Inventory is "non-rivalrous" and the ratio of good to bad is simply a signal-to-noise problem, solvable with information tools.
Which is to say it's not much of a problem at all. You just need better filters, such as good search engines. The fact that screens 10 and beyond of your Google search results are unhelpful doesn't matters because screens 1-3 are so useful. The noise is still out there, but Google allows you to effectively ignore it. Filters rule!
The following is this expressed graphically. As you go down the Long Tail the signal-to-noise ratio gets worse. Thus the only way you can maintain a consistently good enough signal to find what you want is if your filters get increasingly powerful.
Darknet Mini-book chapters...the vast, gathering, lawless economy of shared music, movies, television shows, games, software, and porn—a one-touch jukebox that would rival the products and services of the entertainment companies...Story: The tech and CE industries get cozy with HollywoodFor the most part, the Darknet is simply the underground Internet. But there are many darknets: the millions of users trading files in the shady regions of Usenet and Internet Relay Chat, students who send songs and TV shows to each other using instant messaging services from AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft, city streets and college campuses where people copy, burn, and share physical media like CDs, and the new breed of encrypted dark networks like Freenet...
The Darknet is less a place or a thing than an idea. On a mundane level, the Darknet is about getting free stuff. On a deeper level, it’s about millions of people engaging in a shared media experience and finding a clandestine way to detour around restrictions imposed by the entertainment industries...
Certainly, much Darknet conduct is illegal. Clearly, many underground activities are ethically dubious or flat-out wrong. But much of it is also understandable as people look for ways to restore balance to a system that has become stacked against digital culture...
Darknet index, the whole thing...
Two books to explore further:
McLeod, Kembrew, 1970-
Freedom of expression : overzealous copyright bozos and other enemies of creativity
New York : Doubleday, 2005.
KF2979 .M348 2005.Lessig, Lawrence.
Free culture : how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity
New York : Penguin Press, 2004.
CALL NO. KF2979 .L47 2004.
(says Siva Vaidhyanathan: "the best book ever written about intellectual property" [American Scholar 2005 Spring, pg 132])
a visualization of the locations of Google News stories, letting you quickly see how litle of the world is actually covered by the news. This visualization complements Ethan Zuckerman's arguments about news coverage. What we need now are two maps - what the news covers and what the blogosphere covers. As much as Ethan's stats are useful, there's nothing like a map to let you viscerally get it.
(http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/05/19/visualizing_news_bias.html)
disintermediate fabrication and fabjects
