Diversity in a complex system is the best means of survival. In the market place this is called choice. Unfortunately humans tend to think in terms of controlling a resource, and excluding all else. This problem exists over control of the internet.

Rusty Elliot Harold's Cafe Au Lait and Cafe Con Leche have been favourite sites of mine for many years. I love the relevant technical or political quote up the top of the page which changes each day. I have also used one of his books online, and then emailed him saying I would like to pay for him offering that service for free. I thought he should be rewarded for it, as I found it of great value when I needed it quickly. He replied saying donate something to Doctors Without Borders . I did so; donating the cost of the book.

His quote on Cafe Con Leche for the 13th of October is by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America and is taken from a news.com.com article titled, "Net blackout sparks talk of new rules" ;

There comes a point where some of these functionalities, such as the seamless interoperation of the Internet, are too important to leave to the private interest of businesses. We like to think that people won't do antisocial things, but when push comes to shove they will defend their economic interests even at the expense of the public.

Both the corporate thinking, and the public thinking is of the internet being unitary. Being indivisible. Incapable of replication, modification, renewal, duplication etc etc etc. This is wrong.

There is already an internet2 , developed partly to increase the throughspeeds of decentralised networks, but also because all the riff-raff (read non-academic population) was starting to jump on the internet.

The military and government has their own internet, and manner of interacting with the internet. This is probably why George Bush made a popular gaffe of the saying "the internets". Considering he is probably relatively new to the technology, he probably doesn't understand the nuance of decentralised networks.

There is also an open DNS system that exists outside of InterNIC. The OpenNIC DNS system, others of this type include AlterNic and Pacific Root. To view the internet as unitary is already a mistake.

What we call the internet today will only fragment more. System will be able to see inside each other, and communicate between each other. An example of this is the cell networks able to jump on the internet. A counter example is applications like VoIP being able to use the internet to connect to the phone system.

Networks do not exist in isolation. Their greatest facet is their ability to mix, inter-communicate, and disperse into new networks without losing the ability to talk to existing networks.

The internet is an abundance resource, that is capable of fragmenting in infinite smaller networks. This is its strength. Treating it as a unitary resource is not only wrong, but self-defeating.

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Too many journalists seem to get upset at the public opinion making abilities of the internet. The Washington Post's Business section posts one such screed today . The internet is only following the market dynamic of segmentation. This naturally stems from commodification - and the internet is the ultimate form of commodity publishing.

From the article by Frank Ahrens;

Thursday was a bad day for critical thought. It was amazing, frankly, how quickly some bloggers were ready to believe that Wal-Mart linked its "Planet of the Apes" DVDs to black-themed DVD titles on purpose. Aside from kiddie porn and e-mail scams, this is perhaps the most troubling trait of the Internet: Rather than opening minds, it can close them, thanks to echo-chamber Web sites and blogs.

Which, coincidentally, works on the same premise as retail-site mapping. We like to read Web sites and blogs that we agree with and that reinforce our opinions. Aside from the few of you who practice "know your enemy" browsing, how many of you liberals read http://www.nationalreview.com/? How many of you conservatives frequent http://www.thenation.com/?

The internet represents the ultimate in commodification of publishing. Anyone with an internet connection, for zero cost, can publish to the same audience as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian. The hard part is gaining an audience and keeping them. Eyeballs are the point of scarcity in internet publishing. Segmentation is one way to develop and retain an audience. We often think of these sites as spear-chucking or echo-chambers. But that does not deny that it is a valid marketing strategy to expand an audience while retaining the existing readers.

But how is this different from mass media? In the US cable television commoditised the publishing of television programs. The television stations responded by segmenting their media. For instance, the cable channels are ESPN which is sport only, CNN which is 24 hour news, the Action Channel which only shows action movies, and of course Fox News. The latter only showing cheerleading for the American Republican party.

Any industry which faces commodification will segment its content in order to appeal to a base audience that can be relied upon to remain with them. The internet is just responding to market and human dynamics. Frank Ahrens might wish for a media that has such high barriers of entry, that only an editorial priesthood can determine what is public opinion and what is not. We tried that over the last fifty years, and it is being blown out of the water by the commodified and decentralised form of internet media.

Ahrens also assumes that we are helpless in the face of echo-chambers, and will only inhabit the areas that make us happy. This assumes all humanity is inherently biased to the point of irrationality. Which is not true. There are more good sites publishing quality media than there are spear-chucking sites. The echo-chambers just tend to be louder and noisier about it.

Ahrens misses.

From a Rusty Elliot Harold entry titled, Comment Spam Gets Trickier :

Comment spammers are copying sentences out of legitimate comments and resubmitting them with a link or two changed. If you're not careful, this can even fool a human inspection since the spam is thereby on topic and relevant. If it comes a couple of months after an original article was posted that received a lot of comments, it's very easy to miss.

There was a time when email spam filters were atrocious and all manner of spam got through. The internet arms race has largely closed that hole. I use gmail for my business email as they are more efficient than I am, or any system I can set up, for filtering email. I am basically outsourcing it - at no cost to myself.

SSR is a closed system and had anonymous commenting for a while, but scoop's filtering of comments is pretty poor. IIRC hillct has done an akismet plugin for scoop. Akismet is another example of the internet outsourcing the filtering and taking advantages of information of scale (in bad information in this case) to get better results.

One of the more recent tricks has been images as email filters didn't check images too closely. The method reported by Elliot Harold is pretty slick, there will come a time when this arms race between filters will lead to the electronic humans that answer your video phones which Greg Egan loves to pepper his novels and short stories with.

One of the supporting experiments for the Big Bang theory is the isotropic cosmic microwave background radiation. It is the residual energy for our universe existing the way it does as a system. What of the internet? It is a complex system with all sorts of network effects. Does it have an isotropic background energy or activity level? With the change over to the new software system for South Sea Republic there is some data to explore that question.

South Sea Republic went onto the new software about a month ago. The previous software, scoop, did not record page views for each article. I could have added it in, but didn't. SSRBlog does store page views, it is how the 'most popular' article is determined at the foot of each page.

The interesting thing is that only the most recent articles have page views from regular users. The rest of the page views should be a mix of google/yahoo/ask searches, spam attempts; and bots, crawlers, spiders, etc looking at pages.

Which gives these two interesting graphs. The first is page views versus articles where the articles are in numeric and creation order.

Round about 841 is where the software change over occurred so that is the normal energy of South Sea Republic's day to day activity. Prior to that should be the background or residual energy for a website on the outer rim of the blogosphere's popularity.

There appears to be some consistent activity between about 221 and 821, but before that it drops off to one and is far less consistent.

The second graph is with the views ordered largest to smallest. Ignore the x-axis labeling, that is an artefact of how I sorted the dataset.

This graph looks logarithmic in character, definitely isn't linear. This graph also shows where the activity drops off to zero which suggests if there is residual activity it is in a timeframe and doesn't include older (greater than two years) content.

Does the internet have a background activity or energy? Undoubtedly IMO. Not sure these graphs really prove it though. We would expect a base 'activity' or energy, but the graph line is more logarithmic than hitting a flat base point which is greater than zero. Maybe too much noise, or maybe just too small a sample, or maybe SSR is too far flung on the outer galaxy's rural arm.

It may mean that the (uniform) background energy only reaches back as much as one or two years, and isn't isotropic.

Umair Haque asks:

Let's revisit the spectre haunting venture capital. Why aren't there more Googles?

This is disingenuous. It is easy to forget that prior to google there were numerous search engines all vying for people's attention. I can recall changing from Alta Vista to Hotbot as the competing products got better and better. Google basically won on interface. In other words they didn't innovate so much, as improve an existing product.

This is the normal trajectory for a successful business. There is nothing unique about Google in that respect.

Haque continues:

The answer's very simple. Because every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out long before it ever had the chance to revolutionize anything economically.

Think about that for a second. Every single one: Myspace, Skype, Last.fm, del.icio.us, Right Media, the works. All sold out to behemoths who are destroying, with Kafkaesque precision, every ounce of radical innovation within them.

Meh. Google's much vaunted market dominance and verbing has come because they have improved existing products. Online ads existed before google, I can recall doubleclick doing quite well in that market, well enough that they survived the crash and were recently bought by Google. Gmail, Calendar, etc etc, they are all improvements on existing products. This is the normal path for a successful company.

Haque's thesis is reliant on the internet community forgetting its own history. He may as well ask why aren't there more General Electrics?

From here:

If statistics on popular searches are anything to go by, it looks like many people aren't bothering with that inconvenient "www" and ".com" and are just going straight through Google.

I do that. Apparently someone has already argued for the dropping of the .com on the internet. Not sure what that would leave for .org or .net sites.

Fortunately it appears that it may be stopped. There are companies that are actually registering a million sites and then dumping them in the five day grace period.

Last week I was at Tempe Marketplace; a large sprawling new mall that contains indoor and outdoor public spaces. It has plenty of outdoor furniture and the misted water which is popular in Phoenix that helps keep the body's heat down.

Americans have a sophisticated view of freedom of speech and other political rights. Courtesy of these political rights being entrenched in the US Constitution as amendments the civil understanding of them and the political reproach of them is quite detailed.

These are political rights though, not property rights and are areas of liberty that the government cannot intrude into. So public spaces related to government control, such as a park, tend not to extinguish freedom of political speech. The other aspect is that the censoring of political views is often democratically impossible in a country that is used to the liberal nature of free speech. It can be done, and often is in secret ways, but for the most part it is hard to remove.

Anick Jesdanun has an article which argues that these rights are not only political, but inalienable to the individual and necessary for a healthy and functioning civic society. He argues that companies are making the political arguments impoverished by over-cautious removal of political and social speech.

From the article:

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services -- from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video -- become more central to public discourse around the world. It's a fallout of the Internet's market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.

One of the complaints is that the policing of these guidelines can be arbitrary and frustrating. Governments and other bodies, rather than going after an individual, will go after a company such as youtube with a blanket complaint and have them remove a user. Consequently the idea of speech rights get squeezed between the competing interests of consumerism, government demands, company demands, special interest groups and so forth and so forth. Not to mention legislation.

I am not seeing there being any great extinguishment of political speech by the internet. People can, and do, create their own sites outside of the wider guidelines of internet behemoths like yahoo, flickr, google, myspace, youtube, etc etc. Nothing is really stopping an individual doing that and being sovereign over their own view of what a public space is.

I has it.

Back in business again without the need to go to work or internet cafe to get run of the mill things done like shopping, banking, etc. This house is in an older development before there was planning for things such as digital networks. Consequently all the wires are run through the air from the telegraph poles at the back of the house. I recall when I was in San Francisco that all the wires ran in tumbled messes between poles, houses and streets.

The dim and dark sky is because a monsoon storm was about to hit when I took the photograph. The monsoons last between June and August and usually consist of a hot humid day followed by an afternoon storm that is huge though of short duration. The rain that comes down is usually heavy raindrops and dirty.