[HN Gopher] Shirky.com is gone ___________________________________________________________________ Shirky.com is gone Author : lkrubner Score : 229 points Date : 2022-04-15 10:49 UTC (12 hours ago) (HTM) web link (web.archive.org) (TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org) | chubot wrote: | I also noticed recently that Philip Guo's site is gone, and was | taken down on purpose. I remember a few great articles that | showed up on HN. My interpretation was that the ratio of effort | to reward just started to skew, which is understandable and sad | embit wrote: | I was one of very early subscribers of his NEC mailing list. Just | found this article he had sent out and now on archive.org. It's | another prescient article which now seems obvious | | https://perma.cc/9ESH-V2YE | donohoe wrote: | The site has been effectively down since November 2019 when it | started showing up as parked | | https://web.archive.org/web/20191130082649/http://shirky.com... | rmbyrro wrote: | Calls my attention that the most valuable content on the web is | designed with simplicity, in HTML, without moving bells and | whistles. | ChrisMarshallNY wrote: | Aw, man. | | Clay Shirky's stuff was a regular "go-to" for me. | legrande wrote: | Same. Watched many of his talks on Youtube. Refreshing to hear | an academic grade description of Internet & blogging culture. | uwagar wrote: | crikey clay shirkeyed on his duty to keep up a | webshitey | [deleted] | eric4smith wrote: | I suppose we can look at this with nostalgic eyes. | | I was a big Shirky reader back in the day. | | But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the time | in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all. | | Take my dad for instance - a quite profilic and famous mid level | artist. It's coming to the point where not much people remember | him. And when my siblings pass on that will be that. | | Let's not get too nostalgic. If someone is interested they should | try to preserve the writings and keep them going. | | That's why certain groups have taken it upon themselves to | preserve old important films. And as we know they are always | fighting for more donations to keep things going. | | Because in the end... no one really cares. | | 50 years from now children will be asking who was Van Gogh. | hvs wrote: | I don't think Van Gogh is a good example. There are certain | artists whose work outlives them by centuries, not many, but we | still talk about Michelangelo, da Vinci, Monet, etc. The rest | of your post is accurate, though. | cbozeman wrote: | Who was the most famous artist of Mesopotamia? | | No one really cares. | | We simply haven't had enough time pass. Eventually, some day, | people will forget who Julius Caesar was. It may take 50,000 | years. It may take 500,000. They'll forget. | feoren wrote: | Counterpoint: an ancient Babylonian copper merchant is | remembered to this day for being a no-good swindler due to | complaints against him recorded in stone tablets [1]. | Remembering things is only getting easier with better data | storage. I guess you could just move the timeline out to | the heat death of the universe, though. | | [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complaint-tablet-to-ea- | nasir | chrisco255 wrote: | The Mesopotamians were more preoccupied with writing down | contracts in cuneiform than writing down historical fiction | to last through the ages. Maybe because they were one of | the first civilizations to thrive and to invent writing at | all, they didn't know their oral traditions and history | would be lost to the sands of time without writing them | down. | | We do have more insight into ancient Egyptian pharaohs and | architects, however, as these details were more carefully | preserved. | | That being said, I'm sure 500K years from now, these | details will all be buried on some thumb drive in an | underground archive and our descendents will lack the | drivers to decode them. | [deleted] | legrande wrote: | > But the truth is that all kinds of things disappear all the | time in all aspects of life. The web is no different at all. | | Glad we have the Wayback Machine then. But if you don't want | your blog mirrored by Wayback you can declare that in your | `robots.txt` file. Do this: User-agent: * | Disallow: / | | But that doesn't mean crawlers/bots will honor that request and | presume any content you post publicly will be backed up | _somewhere_. If not somewhere on the net, then on someone 's | hard-drive! | hexis wrote: | The Internet Archive does not respect robots.txt - | https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for- | sea... | dewey wrote: | The blog post you are linking is outdated. They are | honoring robots.txt files. From the FAQ: | | > Some sites are not available because of robots.txt or | other exclusions. What does that mean? Such sites may have | been excluded from the Wayback Machine due to a robots.txt | file on the site or at a site owner's direct request. | | If you exclude them in your robots.txt file they will also | absolutely retroactively remove your site from the index. | | - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16965575 | | - https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/ | hexis wrote: | I hope you're right! The lack of an update on that post, | combined with the FAQ saying the opposite thing, makes it | even harder for me to know what their policy is. | Respecting robots.txt is a civilized thing to do and I | hope they do it. | JadeNB wrote: | > Take my dad for instance - a quite profilic and famous mid | level artist. It's coming to the point where not much people | remember him. And when my siblings pass on that will be that. | | Why not say his name here, to give him a bit more memory? | | > 50 years from now children will be asking who was Van Gogh. | | This seems a strange cut-off. Van Gogh is an artist who died | 130 years ago; why should the next 50 years be the ones that | forget him? There are plenty of artists today whom we remember | from earlier than 200 years ago. | mkl wrote: | > Van Gogh is an artist who died 130 years ago; why should | the next 50 years be the ones that forget him? | | Indeed. I think he will more likely become even better known | as people use style transfer and such to generate many new | pictures in his style. | enobrev wrote: | One thing I always loved in any old sci-fi that dealt with | internet-like spaces was that most of them had a concept of a | public internet. They generally sort of felt like the "slums" of | the internet filled with trash and spam and stashes for hackers, | but the concept of a public space to which anyone could post | anything always appealed to me. I'm quite sad that we don't have | something like this. | | We've had plenty of things that had that general appeal, but | they've always been owned, run, and eventually shut down, but | companies of some sort. I'm not opposed to companies having | websites, but I'd love to see a public space as well. The idea | that we could post our content to that space and expect it to | live far longer than us would be a huge deal. | otachack wrote: | IPFS is one way, I believe. Archive.org has been pretty | dependable too so you can technically post on Twitter or a blog | post then have Archive take a version of it. | | I still see your point, though. Maybe mixing in IPFS with some | public solution, like a guest book, might be something? | dgellow wrote: | I don't really see what stops you from having your own site | with static content you want to publish. Get a domain for like | 10 years, with auto renewal enabled. Get a box somewhere, serve | you static content. You can publish whatever you want for | almost no maintenance for decades. | | (Of course, that's unless you're talking about sharing the type | of content that would make interpol want to track you down) | enobrev wrote: | And once I'm dead, broke, or have simply moved on from the | tech universe? | | The ephemerality of the thing is the issue I'm speaking to. | We've lost something here. | | The requirement for books to last is physical space, and | those shelves and boxes continue to exist far longer than the | publishers, authors, illustrators, etc. We don't have that | with this medium (except, of course, archive.org which is | excellent and not nearly enough). We've built something | that's lighter than books and easier to store in smaller | spaces, but we've [collectively] given no thought to | maintaining a proper archive. | | The freedom to publish to the world in an instant is as | magical as it is fleeting. On a longer scale of time - and | not a very long one - it's practically worthless. | bityard wrote: | Why do you say archive.org is not a real archive? | enobrev wrote: | I didn't say it's not a real archive, I said it's not | enough | Fwirt wrote: | You can even use a box on your home network (or even your | router itself with a little elbow grease...) Many routers | support popular DDNS providers, and most ISPs don't block | port 80 or 443. It may be against your ISPs TOS because they | don't want you hammering their upload capacity, but if you | put it behind a free-tier CDN that soaks up the spikes (e.g. | Cloudflare) then they're unlikely to care. Setting the whole | thing up only takes a couple hours (if you're inept like me) | and you're in complete control. | legrande wrote: | > Get a box somewhere, serve you static content | | Good luck having a VPS 'box' that has an uptime record of 10 | years. I know through personal experience that your VPS | instance _will_ go down, no matter how much you try to | mitigate that. There will be bots and bad actors either | trying to DDOS it, or trying to brute force ` /wp-admin`. | | You could go for some obscure CMS to try and thwart that, but | you run the risk of having vulns in that software because it | doesn't have the eyeballs of vanilla Wordpress. You could | always go for the shared hosting approach but the caveat | being: there is no guarantee the shared provider will provide | 100% uptime either. (And it will go down at the worst | possible moment, like during a HN hug of death) | | Your best bet is to have your content distributed and | mirrored across multiple services such that any attempt to | take it down is impossible. I would go into details about | that, but due to op-sec reasons I won't. Tip: Plaster your | content all over the web such that a removal of one piece of | content does not affect the others. | keerthiko wrote: | um...we still have, like, the internet? You can make some html | file, post it on a computer exposed at a port, connect it to | the internet, assign it to a static IP, and tell other people | the address? | | Unless you are specifically referring to someone providing | general purpose hosting that you don't need to think about | administering -- well that isn't a feature of our present-day | landscape simply because it wouldn't be a profitable venture | given the risks and liabilities from the messed up things | people _could_ stash there, along with the inherent costs of | admin and hosting. | | But if you are willing to set up your own box and procure | sysadmin for it, what you suggest exists. | enobrev wrote: | How are libraries a profitable venture? And why is setting up | my own library the only reliable answer? I'm speaking to the | lack of posterity. | bityard wrote: | So you want a thing, but only if somebody else will provide | it? | enobrev wrote: | Yes. I also like subways, buses, indoor plumbing, garbage | collection, libraries, streets, sidewalks, police, fire | safety, postal service, and all sorts of things that we | share as members of a society. | chrisco255 wrote: | Check out Arweave: https://www.arweave.org/. It allows for | 200-year storage of data, compatible with IPFS. It uses an | endowment-funding model to achieve this: | arweave.org/technology#endowment | webmaven wrote: | _> One thing I always loved in any old sci-fi that dealt with | internet-like spaces was that most of them had a concept of a | public internet. They generally sort of felt like the "slums" | of the internet filled with trash and spam and stashes for | hackers, but the concept of a public space to which anyone | could post anything always appealed to me. I'm quite sad that | we don't have something like this._ | | Usenet still exists, and it is definitely filled with trash and | spam. There are various projects working on similar sorts of | public (or sometimes private but open) spaces without those | downsides, it remains to be seen what will end up filling this | niche. | micromacrofoot wrote: | does anyone know why he took everything down? I noticed this when | I was looking for one his presentations last year | sumtechguy wrote: | Most of the time it is time and/or money. | | Vulins found every other day in some obscure package you | thought you were one and done with. You get to spend a couple | of hours fixing it. Oh new update on the java core you are | using few more hours. Oh that update breaks 2-3 things. More | time. You float the idea that someone else takes it. But those | who step up have 'other ideas' what they want the site to be. | Oh and your base OS is 2 releases back better get on that. | | Then the actual cost. While you can get a cheap site up and | going for not much. If you get even slightly popular you are | now looking at a decent amount of money for many people. You | may not see a couple hundred a month as 'no big deal' but many | people do. You can pay a provider to take some of that patching | work out of your hands but you pay for that. | | The programming world is very ephemeral. We get bored easy. We | move on quickly. Sometimes we are just cheapos. Things that | cost time and money get left to rot or turned off. | | What I find interesting in my 'internet' life. Is I always seem | to find out about the really interesting places as they are | being closed out :( | BrS96bVxXBLzf5B wrote: | > Then the actual cost. While you can get a cheap site up and | going for not much. If you get even slightly popular you are | now looking at a decent amount of money for many people. You | may not see a couple hundred a month as 'no big deal' but | many people do. You can pay a provider to take some of that | patching work out of your hands but you pay for that. | | Agree with the whole message and tone of your comment but | wondering about this bit. We run a bunch of Wordpress sites | with decent traffic and a bunch of badly optimised front-end, | heaps of old plugins from decades passed: we can hit 20k | uniques and a million requests per day, with nightly backups | for $30/mo. It could be less if we didn't care about | completely surviving every traffic spike and bot crawl. | mattlondon wrote: | This is where static sites help a lot. | | No maintenance upkeep, minimal server costs. | rmbyrro wrote: | Not even server these days. One can dump it on S3, | configure a CDN in front of it and pay pennies a month to | never have to think about it again... | bombcar wrote: | Even having to pay pennies a month is something that has | to be maintained (do you remember to update your credit | card info, are the emails correct, etc). | | It would be nice for something like the Internet Archive | to offer "perpetual hosting" where you pay upfront for | enough to fund hosting "forever". $100 would generate $1 | a year in interest which would be enough to host small | data. | rmbyrro wrote: | On AWS you can pay in advance and forget it. [1] | | The provider of your choice probably has a similar | billing feature. | | [1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge- | center/prepa... | MandieD wrote: | Surprisingly, endowedhosting.com was available, so I | bought it. If IA or comparable ever decided to offer such | a service, I'd happily hand the name over to them. | DonHopkins wrote: | How about enrapturedhosting.com? | | https://www.wired.com/2008/06/service-lets-yo/ | | >Website Lets You Send a Post-Rapture E-Mail to Friends | 'Left Behind' | | >If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the | face of the Earth as the opening act for Armageddon, | Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy | freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they | do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture | needling from their missing friends and loved ones, | courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com. | | [...] | | Good thing the sysadmins are loving trustworthy | Christians: | | >Users can also upload up to 150 megabytes of documents, | which will be protected by an unidentified encryption | algorithm until the Rapture, then released to up to 12 | nonbelievers of your choice. The site recommends that you | use that storage to house sensitive financial | information. | | >"In the encrypted portion of your account you can give | them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, | and powers of attorneys," the site says. "There won't be | any bodies, so probate court will take seven years to | clear your assets to your next of kin. Seven years, of | course, is all the time that will be left. So, basically | the Government of the Antichrist gets your stuff, unless | you make it available in another way." | | There was a pretty good Law and Order episode where one | of those sites accidentally triggered, sent an email | confessing to somebody's crimes prematurely, which led to | an unfortunate chain of events and salty remarks. | | https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343619/ | | >The owner of a Rapture website is killed by a man | working to return Soviet Jews to Israel to fulfill | Biblical prophecy. However, the killer seeks shelter at | the Iranian embassy, leaving the DA's office in an | unenviable position. | | https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/LawAndOrderS | 19E... | | >Van Buren wonders why the emails were sent at all. | "Yeah, but the Rapture didn't occur." "As far as | we can tell." "I'm still here." "You | mentioned." --Anita Van Buren, Cyrus Lupo, and | Kevin Bernard | sumtechguy wrote: | Do not disagree at all... | | It is just setting it up. Also sometimes people just lose | interest in it. Even a couple of bucks a month would be | not worth it. Then if you stand it up and 'forget about | it'. What happens when your CC expires? It goes away. You | do not care anymore so it is probably not something you | care to fix. | | For me 50-100 bucks a year is not something that is that | big of deal. But if I have totally lost interest in it. | It would be on the list of expenses to get rid of. It is | one of those things a lot of clean up your financial | problems people talk about. Look at all of those little | charges. They add up to decent money sometimes. Not | saying that happened here. But it probably does happen? | rmbyrro wrote: | AWS allows you to pay in advance. [1] | | A static website hosted on AWS S3 and CloudFront would | need to serve a LOT of traffic to generate a $100 bill | per year. | | But if you pre-pay for the next 50 years, will AWS exist | until there? | | Will the internet exist? | | Would Putin have already f** humanity up before that? | | Hard to guarantee... | | [1] https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge- | center/prepa... | crispyambulance wrote: | > why he took everything down? | | I think that's a good question. It's just a bunch of articles | and perhaps there were some videos linked to youtube? I find it | hard to believe that Shirky just abandoned it given how media | savvy he is, but stranger things have happened. | | There's some weird stuff on it if you look at Aug-3 2019: | https://web.archive.org/web/20191102024012/http://www.shirky... | | Looks as though it's been defaced with cialis garbage copy? | clay_shirky wrote: | Yep, it became a spot for all your erectile dysfunction | needs. And the constant pattern of "I fix it, spammers break | it' wore me out, so, despite media savvy, I just stopped | caring (though this thread convinces me that was the wrong | answer...) | DonHopkins wrote: | I can't seem to find the erectile dysfunction solutions on | your web site any more, can you link me to a reputable | reliable source, please? I so miss your site. Good luck | getting it back up. | zackmorris wrote: | I hadn't read this before, but I think I have a new guidepost for | innovation: real tech flattens the power law for everyone, | whereas phantom tech amplifies the power law. | elevation wrote: | Clay Shirky's essay, "The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and | Worldview:" [0] is a powerful warning about the pitfalls of | global efforts to categorize information. | | In the early 2000s I had a manager who evangelized "the semantic | web" to our team as being just years from taking over the world. | He was convinced that we needed to integrate RDF into every | product to remain relevant. Shirky's essay persuasively | articulated why this would have been a waste of effort for us. | | Years on, these ideas still influence my analysis of elevator | pitches, business plans and requested features. | | edit: | | Thank you, Clay! | | [0]: | https://web.archive.org/web/20150323162650/http://www.shirky... | [deleted] | geuis wrote: | Its not like the guy passed away. Given the community, I'm sure | someone here can get in touch with him and let him know that his | site is down. | virgil_disgr4ce wrote: | I pinged him on Twitter a few hours ago about this discussion | and he acknowledged. Still not sure what the situation is | though. | VectorLock wrote: | I was scrolling down looking for some comment on what happened | to him or what he was up to now a days. | lkrubner wrote: | I read this essay in 2003 and it influenced how my business | partner and I built our startup. It influenced what possibilities | we chased after. But Shirky.com is now off-line: | | http://www.shirky.com/ | | I'm not sure when this happened but I see that Wikipedia has | adjusted to this and now links to the archive.org link: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky | | This is yet another example of the history of the early Web | disappearing. Shirky's early essays were fundamental to way we | understood the potential of the Web back in 1999-2008. | | I actually discovered this while looking for another old Shirky | essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the | Web. | clay_shirky wrote: | This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll | tell you how it happened. | | I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since | the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw), | but by the middle of last decade, all anyone wanted to talk to | me about was marketing on Facebook, which was the boringest | possible topic. | | At the same time, my wordpress host had lousy security, and my | site was getting frequently disabled because of some malicious | javascript uploaded through some hole they hand't patched. I | wasn't writing there anymore, so it was pure cost at that | point, and cost of my time, not just dollars. | | Then I moved to Shanghai for several years, working on other | stuff, and fixed the site a couple of times again, and one | time, my host was like "We disabled your site!" because of | their own security flaws had let it get hacked again, which, | the whole thing had entered 'ugh field'territory. | | I never decided to let the site lapse, I was just tired of | dealing with it, and the political circumstances in both China | and the U.S. seemed much more urgent than rescuing some | historical essays, so one day at a time of not dealing with it | became years. | | And here we are, me reading my own eulogy. Which is incredibly | flattering and touching, I have to say. | | I'm not even sure what of it can be resuscitated -- maybe if I | want it back, I'll have to copy it from Wayback (and will say | "Thank you Brewster", not for the first time), but if anyone | here has advice about competent and secure hosting for an old | Wordpress blog, hmu at cshirky@gmail.com, because reading this, | it makes me embarassed not to have just fucking fixed this a | year or two ago. | | And thanks, all, for this thread. -clay | lathiat wrote: | You'll never maintain a Wordpress site long term securely. | Need to convert it to static html one way or another. | dannyobrien wrote: | WP security has come a long way. I've had a site up for | over a decade, and while I used to be VERY nervous, now | with automatic updates and a fair amount of code-hardening, | it really hasn't been a problem. | egypturnash wrote: | 10y of http://egypt.urnash.com running on Wordpress with a | small set of plugins, including one for security, says | otherwise. | karjaluoto wrote: | Another approach might be to toss it on blot.im. (I'm in no | way affiliated with Blot, but I like how simple the product | is.) | wolrah wrote: | > You'll never maintain a Wordpress site long term | securely. Need to convert it to static html one way or | another. | | I'm in favor of static HTML myself where possible, but it's | not hard to maintain a secure Wordpress install. Keep | automatic updates enabled and don't install any third party | plugins. | | It's that second part that most people screw themselves | with. | rob74 wrote: | It may not be _very hard_ to maintain, but you still have | to maintain it. Whereas if you just have a collection of | articles that you want to keep around as an archive, if | you convert them to a static site, you can basically | forget about them afterward... | wolrah wrote: | > It may not be very hard to maintain, but you still have | to maintain it. | | When the maintenance is "ensure auto updates are on, and | don't do anything that would not get updated | automatically" it's not like it requires regular effort. | | > Whereas if you just have a collection of articles that | you want to keep around as an archive, if you convert | them to a static site, you can basically forget about | them afterward... | | Your web server, your operating system, etc. still | require at bare minimum the same level of maintenance. | | You can outsource that maintenance to someone else of | course, but you can do the same with WP as well. | | -- | | My point is that WP alone doesn't massively increase the | maintenance burden, it's what people tend to do with | (to?) WP that increases the burden and eventually leads | to unmaintained sites. | bryanrasmussen wrote: | >When the maintenance is "ensure auto updates are on, and | don't do anything that would not get updated | automatically" it's not like it requires regular effort. | | no dog in the fight here but I felt impelled to point out | that ensuring auto updates are on solves almost all | security holes except for the security hole it opens up. | DonHopkins wrote: | >it's not like it requires regular effort | | More effort that you'll be able to exert when you're | dead. | davidandgoliath wrote: | I assure you it'd be a whole lot easier for your | survivors to manage a WP install than it would be to | figure out your Jekyll configs. | boredtofears wrote: | Considering Jekyll's deployable assets are just static | assets, there's no reason they'll have to learn any | configs at all. | | Although I highly doubt learning a jekyll config would be | harder than managing a PHP daemon, web proxy and mysql | database. | cossatot wrote: | If it's just a collection of essays, what about a static | site? You can set one up on Github Pages or Gitlab Pages with | a minimum of coding. There are also virtually no security | concerns and maintenance is minimal. | | You'd have to take all of the text from the Wordpress blog | and format it into Markdown but that shouldn't take a huge | amount of time unless there is a lot of weird formatting or | different media types. | cxr wrote: | > You'd have to take all of the text from the Wordpress | blog and format it into Markdown | | No you wouldn't. Just dump it in as-is. | JPKab wrote: | Clay, | | Just want to thank you for your great work. | | I used to work on a lot of US Department of Defense projects, | mostly stuff I can't talk about. One very notable project I | CAN talk about was an initiative (pushed by utterly clueless, | insular, and frankly corrupt academics) to spend billions of | dollars in 2008-2010 timeframe on implementing Semantic Web | technologies in various military business systems across the | DoD. | | As an actual technologist who knew how to build things, I was | perpetually in the awful position of having to explain to | leadership that these highly credentialed academics were | selling garbage. I had tried to implement systems according | to their design. The graph databases they pushed (they hated | Neo4J, for reasons of purity because it didn't actually use | RDF/OWL in the database...... i get a headache just talking | about this...) were slow piles of dogshit that couldn't | scale. No amount of reality could dissuade the academics. | They had their theories, and any collision with reality was | merely an implementation detail that I and my team were | simply too incompetent to overcome in their eyes. Almost none | of them had actual technical experience. A smattering of Comp | Sci folks, and a ton of "Library Science" idiots. | | Your essays on why the SemWeb was utter bullshit were a | potent weapon I used with the generals the academics were | pushing, and I eventually got the generals funding the | project to see the light. Got them cancelled, and sent the | idiot egg-heads packing. I still see them on LinkedIn to this | day. They desperately continue trying to push that rock up | the hill, and only recently warmed to more practical graph | database solutions. | | They HATED YOU. It was hilarious, watching them try to refute | your obvious points and clear writing with jargon and hand- | waving. Utterly unconvincing to the generals. | | Thanks for your essays saving my ass back then! | Kye wrote: | Library Science is what librarians learn. It's a real thing | for a real job. Like most credentials and like most jobs, | some people try to over-fit experience and knowledge in one | field to another. | | You see the same with CompSci/tech people treating data | like there's no bias in its collection. | JPKab wrote: | As I learned from the people on that project with lib sci | degrees, the employment prospects are predominantly low- | paying, but these ones found a new boondoggle to employ | them as "ontologists" where they could get 6 figure | salaries to sit around and build models all day in a | piece of software called TopBraid Composer. (GUI program | built in Eclipse, where users would create diagrams that | would then be translated to an XML offshoot called OWL, a | W3C standard that's never been successfully used in any | meaningful project I've seen) I witnessed these people | sit around and create business models and knowledge | graphs of arcane Air Force business processes for 3 years | (there were literally 9 of them doing this) before the | project was cancelled due to its technical impossibility. | The ontologies they created were never used once, and | when I actually tried to provide them (in PDF form) to a | separate project where Air Force personnel were trying to | map out business processes, the personnel stated to me | (in writing, with a Colonel CC'd) "These are so | inaccurate that they are frequently misleading, and | cannot be trusted." The Colonel later pulled me into his | office and stated (rather comically): "You mean to tell | me I've been paying people to draw cartoons for 3 years? | We're not goddamned Disney here." | mdavidn wrote: | You could scrape the site, either from Wayback or from | WordPress, if you manage to get it working just briefly, and | then host the site statically out of an S3 bucket. wget has | an option to recursively crawl and save a site, but there are | other tools. | | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/Websit. | .. | teddyh wrote: | If you don't want to talk about marketing on Facebook, | letting your own web site lapse and disappear seems like the | _last_ thing that you'd want to do. | | (See https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people_2021) | notRobot wrote: | > while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I | can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web. | | Do you remember the title or subject or any key words/phrases? | rwmj wrote: | I don't know if it's the one that the GP has in mind, but | this is a classic: | | https://web.archive.org/web/20060210230250/http://www.shirky. | .. _" Help, The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't | Get Up"_ | BolexNOLA wrote: | Wow this guy was straight up prescient. I've never read his | blogs until today - thanks for sharing this. | Alex3917 wrote: | I would honestly start with his presentations, they are | amazing: | | https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=clay+shirky | rwmj wrote: | I wasn't quite sure when he wrote this. The earliest | capture in the Internet Archive was January 2000, but it | could be from earlier than that maybe? I do remember that | it was quite prescient when I first read it, although | it's sort of obvious in 2022. | jp57 wrote: | The title of that article is now itself a comment on the | passage of time and the fading of things. How old do you | have to be today to get the "I've fallen and I can't get | up!" reference? | _jal wrote: | Sitting on the elbow of the curve describing the risk of | not getting back up after a fall. | Vivtek wrote: | My 27yo ("reference Millennial") even has a mental image | of the video (although has never seen it on a Tele-Vision | Device). It may have entered the meme reservoir on its | own at this point. | lkrubner wrote: | He explained that an expanding __________ (I can't remember | this word. Maybe he said "network"?) meant that each person | in the __________ was exposed to a greater variety of | choices, however, the total number of choices decreased. His | point was that separate niches each maintained some unique | offerings, but when everything was combined together into a | single market, and attention focused on certain items, there | would be a winnowing effect. The paradox was that everyone | could legitimately feel they were enjoying an abundance of | options, greater than ever before, while the total number of | options decreased. | sebastianconcpt wrote: | Good summary. The other day I was hearing a political | example mentioning that every little local detail, now with | social-media, it becomes potentially "a national issue" but | that never happen before. Surprisingly, the Founding | Fathers were aware of this issue back then and tried to | solve (actually mitigate) the problem by keeping the | central power as small as possible. | clay_shirky wrote: | Was this it: | | https://www.wired.com/2006/11/meganiche/ | | "Now that more than a billion people have access to the | Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and | specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an | immense pie is huge. A decade ago, reaching one-tenth of 1 | percent of Web users amounted to 36,000 people, a number | that compared favorably with the circulation of, say, the | daily newspaper in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Back then, | reaching a million users required a decidedly mainstream | offering (Amazon.com and MSN come to mind). Now, getting | niche can be the path to getting big; one-tenth of 1 | percent of today's Web audience is a million people." | bombcar wrote: | I was just thinking about this - I can go to the store and | have fifty variations of peanut butter at my fingertips - | but I get basically the _same_ fifty variations anywhere in | the US, and much of them anywhere in the world. | | Whereas in the past, my store might have 1 or even 0 | options on peanut butter, but travel 10/50 miles away and | there'd be an entirely different option. | | We have a little bit left of this with beer, as most places | have a "local" beer available. | teddyh wrote: | Someone once described the general difference between | European and U.S. grocery stores: They said that in | Europe, a store would have every kind of product, but not | very many brands of any particular thing, maybe 2 or | three for most non-staple products. But in the U.S., a | store would either have like 20 brands of something or | have _none_ of them; i.e. not carry that kind of product | at all. It seems to me like this points to "choice" being | an important scale by which stores are measured in the | U.S., but no, or little, negative associations are made | with no products of a particular kind being available at | all. | cratermoon wrote: | Ever stopped to ponder the laundry detergent aisle at | your local grocery store? Or the potato chip aisle? | Especially on detergent, what's there is a huge | proportion of the shelf space devoted to a couple of | brands (which may, in fact, be from the same parent | company) with very large containers taking up a lot of | space for relatively little actual product, but lots of | different choices for those brands. Or, as I like to say, | 31 flavors of Tide Pods. Same goes for potato and corn | chips. Lays and Ruffles dominate, which oversize bags | that are half air, relegating other brands to lower | shelves on one end. But consumers can "choose" from half | a dozen different flavors of the same brands. | | And it's the same all over the US. The only variation | tends to be that some flavors Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle or | Wasabi Ginger, e.g., appear more often in some markets | than others. | ipaddr wrote: | Sadly most places outside the US get one, two maybe 4 | options but that leaves room for other products. | influx wrote: | Great essay, how did it influence your startup? | lkrubner wrote: | We focused on the "unfairness" and we thought there might be | a technical fix, so we focused on new discovery mechanisms. | But our solution did not get traction, so we eventually | pivoted towards tools for building commerce sites, and there | we had more success. | xyzzy21 wrote: | NOTHING on the web can be trusted to last very long. It's the | deep flaw of digitalization of paper. | mxmilkiib wrote: | Also fairly hidden these days is Many-to-Many (also sometimes | referred to as Many2Many) | http://web.archive.org/web/20081229123241/http://many.corant... | where Clay Shirky, Liz Lawley, Ross Mayfield, Sebastien Paquet, | David Weinberger and danah boyd posted. | Alex3917 wrote: | This is terrible. But the upside is that most of them have | really good books you can still buy on Amazon, so if not the | actual historical essays then at least most of their ideas will | be preserved indefinitely. | | Clearly a lot of them have been looking back at that period | with mixed feelings over the last few years (and have said as | much), but even still it's shocking that something like Clay | Shirky's blog would disappear when he's very much still alive. | The fact that we apparently now have to worry about whether or | not something like Danah Boyd's MySpace vs Facebook essay could | disappear though is ridiculous; even with all the known | technical and social problems with the web it's hard to imagine | that it's come to this. | Bilal_io wrote: | > But the upside is that most of them have really good books | you can still buy on Amazon | | I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively | scan and archive books, even if they don't share them because | of copyright laws? Amazon is almost a monopoly when it comes | to books, and we cannot rely on it to preserve the books for | the next 50+ years, and not every purchased copy is | guaranteed to be around by then. | JadeNB wrote: | > I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively | scan and archive books, even if they don't share them | because of copyright laws? Amazon is almost a monopoly when | it comes to books, and we cannot rely on it to preserve the | books for the next 50+ years, and not every purchased copy | is guaranteed to be around by then. | | The University of Michigan and Google Books have something | like this, at least for the UM library: | https://publicaffairs.vpcomm.umich.edu/key-issues/google- | set... . I can't find much about whether it stopped | completely, or just went quiet, after the lawsuits. | Mezzie wrote: | In addition to the national libraries, it's extremely | common for librarians and archivists to keep things in a | personal collection on the DL regardless of copyright. | | I have every ROM released for pre-2000 consoles + a ton of | old software, OSes, and PC games on hard drives that I keep | backed up. I have friends who prefer to specialize in | keeping/archiving zines. Someone else does fanmade ROMs. | Etc. Most of us have a good understanding of copyright law | even where we disagree with it, and it's common to archive | 'grey' material off the record and then fight for the right | to make it official. | | Books are even easier than digital assets since the laws | around book archiving and preservation are much kinder to | archivists. So yes, there are definitely DRM-free, digital | copies of MOST books floating around and will continue to | be for quite some time. The main issue is whether or not | we'll be prosecuted if we open up our personal archives or | distribute them. | yesbabyyes wrote: | Sweden has the Royal Library, US has the Library of | Congress. I believe most developed countries have national | libraries, archiving books and newspapers as they are | published. | Bilal_io wrote: | That's good to hear. Thank you! | zozbot234 wrote: | > I am wondering, are there any organizations that actively | scan and archive books, even if they don't share them | because of copyright laws? | | The Internet Archive definitely does this. It's what powers | their controversial book borrowing feature. | stjohnswarts wrote: | Just curious, why didn't you capitalize danah boyd? :) | samastur wrote: | Because that's how she preferred (prefers?) writing her name. | mxmilkiib wrote: | Aside; 'member Technorati? | http://web.archive.org/web/20060509060807/http://www.technor... | the site gives me a you're-not-seeing-this-due-to-GDPR message | now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati | platz wrote: | The observable universe is also disappearing. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-15 23:00 UTC)