-
World IPv6 Day
This week’s CBC tech column is all about World IPv6 Day. A copy is up at cbc.ca/tech, and below, for posterity. Audio to follow.
===
‘Twas the night before World IPv6 Day, when all through the net, sysadmins enabled 128-bit addressing, without breaking a sweat…
O.K. World IPv6 Day may not have the same poetic potential as other days of the year. But on Wednesday, June 8, technologists and network operators around the world will be watching internet traffic especially closely.
For a 24-hour period on Wednesday, several large companies – including Google, Facebook and Yahoo – will enable support for IPv6, the internet’s next-generation addressing scheme. It’s the first large-scale “test flight” of the new system, and another step in the internet’s slow transition away from the decades-old IPv4 standard.
On Feb. 1, 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) handed out two of the very last IP address blocks to APNIC, the internet registrar for the Asia-Pacific region. At the time, I called it “the beginning of the end of IP addresses as we’ve known them.”
There’s been a recognition from many large companies and the governing bodies of the internet that the switch to IPv6 is necessary. Part of this has to do with the limitations of the old system, and the number of addresses that are available. Essentially, we’ve run out of the old style of addresses, so we need a new system with more addresses. But worldwide IPv6 adoption has been slow. For instance, Google currently estimates that only 0.33 percent of all internet users are IPv6-ready.
World IPv6 Day is an attempt to promote awareness of IPv6, but also to iron out some of the potential bugs. On Wednesday, network operators and content providers like Google and Facebook will have a chance to measure the real-world impact of this transition.
So, from the end-user’s point of view, what will happen? If everything works as intended, you won’t notice a thing. If your connection is properly configured for the older IPv4 system, you’ll be fine. If your connection is properly configured for the newer IPv6 system, you’ll be fine. But if any part of the chain between you and any of the participating sites is wonky, you may have trouble accessing their online services.
Paul Andersen, who’s with the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), outlined two possibilities: “The most likely scenario is that you might see a delay. You click on your bookmark, or punch in the website, and it would just seem to be that spinning icon. There is a possibility, too, that the site would be completely unreachable, but I don’t think that’s very likely on any widespread basis.”
According to Google’s estimates, “the vast majority of users (99.95%) will be unaffected.” But we won’t really know until Wednesday, when the test flight goes live.
So, what should you do if you wake up tomorrow and can’t reach Google (or Facebook, or Yahoo)? My advice: first, take a deep breath. It’s going to be OK. But, your problem could be difficult to diagnose. That’s partly because a misconfiguration could be anywhere along the line between you and the server you’re trying to reach. It could be with your computer hardware, your router, your ISP’s equipment or the destination server. And the problem may very well be out of your control. If the problem is with your ISP, there’s not much you can do on your own computer to fix things.
Anderson recommends starting locally. Check your computer to see if there are any obvious misconfigurations. Then, escalate as needed. If you’re at home, that might mean calling your ISP. If you’re at work, it might mean calling the IT department. Andersen says, “People who configure these devices might not be aware that there are misconfigurations. So from that standpoint, we’ll be building awareness where there could be kinks in the system. The good news is that it’s only a 24-hour experiment.”
Wednesday’s World IPv6 day is mostly focused on large content providers and network operators. But there are ways individual end users can prepare, too. Online tests such as Test-ipv6.com or Google’s IPv6 test page can help you determine how well equipped your computer is for connecting to IPv6-enabled sites.
World IPv6 Day will likely go unnoticed by most internet users. But for those of us interested in peeking underneath the hood, it’ll be a fascinating test.
So, my final suggestion: even though you’ll probably (fingers crossed) have no trouble connecting to your favourite sites on World IPv6 Day, if you have mission-critical tasks to do — like watering your crops in Farmville — I’d get them done today. Or Thursday.
-
#1book140
My CBC tech column this week is all about The Atlantic’s new Twitter-based book club: #1book140. A version is up at cbc.ca/tech and below for posterity. You can listen to the audio version or download the MP3. [audio:http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/misenerontech_20110531_75338.mp3]
Even better, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d subscribe to the brand new Misener on Tech podcast in iTunes.
===
Online book clubs are nothing new. CBC has one. NPR has one. The Guardian has one. Until recently, Oprah Winfrey had one. And long before the web, the rec.arts.books usenet groups were home to literary discussion of all kinds. But a new initiative from The Atlantictakes the online book club and adds a twist.
1book140 is a monthly “read-along” that launches June 1, and its defining characteristic is that it takes place almost exclusively on Twitter, organized around the #1book140hashtag.
“Twitter is the thumping heart of 1book140. It’s where most of the conversation will take place,” says author and journalism professor Jeff Howe.
1book140 is the follow-up to Howe’s 2010 project One Book, One Twitter. Howe told me that with One Book, One Twitter, “12,000 people from all around the world read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.”
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin has been chosen as the first title to be discussed in 1book140, and structure of the online conversation will benefit from lessons learned during Howe’s previous effort. For instance, avoiding spoilers: This time, Howe says, “[we’ll] divide discussion up by chapters so that people aren’t giving away plot points.” This is accomplished by using hashtags for each chapter of The Blind Assassin: #1b140_1, #1b140_2, #1b140_3, etc.
Why Twitter?
When I first heard about this project, I had to wonder: isn’t Twitter simply too short? Is it possible to have a meaningful, nuanced discussion about a piece of literature through a medium that puts so much value on brevity and pith?
According to Howe, that’s not really the goal. “What you don’t get is long, meditative, reflective discussion. You have to think of Twitter as an episodic medium. If you have a complex argument to make, it’s something that you break down into bursts of 140 characters.”
For Howe, discussing a novel on Twitter mirrors the conversational back-and-forth nature of a meatspace book club. “If you think about it, when you’re sitting at a book party, you may not say a whole lot more than could be expressed in 140 characters before someone else jumps in and gives their 140-character response. Then you start again.”
The episodic nature of Twitter offers two things, says Howe: scalability and spontaneity.
Scalability means that you can have many people from many places all engaging with a book at the same time.
When it comes to spontaneity, “there’s an ability for people to log on, day or night, and there’s always people discussing.”
The spontaneity of Twitter is something I can completely relate to. There’s something very compelling about the “now-ness” of Twitter. For me, the now-ness is most apparent during large-scale events that unfold in real time: protests in Egypt, election results, and sports. If you’ve never watched Saturday Night Live with Twitter open, it’s worth a try. As videoblogger Steve Garfield says, “Watching TV with Twitter open is like having all my friends on the couch with me.”
Turning books into events
Though I’m not completely sold on the value of Twitter as a medium for literary discussion, I completely understand the impulse to use it to turn books — static, fixed works — into events, complete with real-time analysis, commentary and arguments.
Now, I would be remiss if I failed to confess that aside from a youthful stint in a summer reading program at the Sackville Public Library (for which I was awarded stickers), I have never been a member of a real, face-to-face, sit-down book club. But the desire to join a topic-specific club isn’t lost on me. And I recognize that the now-ness of social media, coupled with a feeling of mass participation, can prompt people to reconsider older works that they mightn’t otherwise.
For instance, when the hosts of one of my favourite podcasts decided to watch all the James Bond films in order, one per week, I started watching along with them. Am I a die-hard Bond fan? No. Was I terribly interested in re-watching Dr. No, From Russia With Love, andGoldfinger? No. But the feeling of “playing along at home” was enough to entice me. As I watched, I felt like I’d joined a sort of club.
For me, that’s part of what’s so appealing about keeping one eye on Twitter and the other on a TV set. Or why joining a global, real-time book club sounds fun. Or why I’d fathom re-watching cheesy James Bond films from the 1960s.
In an increasingly on-demand, random-access world — when I can watch, read, or listen to whatever I want, whenever I want —there’s still value in a shared collective experience. I think the success of 1book140, and projects like it, will depend on their ability to tap into that.
-
Bake it in
According to Tony Schwartz, the key to getting things done is habit, ritual, and routine:
Most everyone I meet feels pulled in more directions than ever, expected to work longer hours, and asked to get more done, often with fewer resources. But in these same audiences, there are also, invariably, a handful of people who are getting things done, including the important stuff, and somehow still managing to have a life.
What have they figured out that the rest of their colleagues have not?
The answer, surprisingly, is not that they have more will or discipline than you do. The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.
I wholeheartedly agree.
For instance, when we do pre-taped radio interviews for Spark, immediately after the interview, we record a “wrap” — a quick, 30 second web-only audio intro and extro. We tidy up the ends, then drop the audio file onto a script that encodes an MP3, adds metadata, uploads the interview to the web, and spits out a URL suitable for blogging. Because it’s part of the routine, and highly automated, putting full interviews online requires only a small amount of extra work.
In other words, it’s easy because it’s been ritualized, or (as I like to say) “baked into the process.”
-
The Bookbinder
Honestly, I haven’t paid as much attention as I’d like to the Toronto Standard, the newish web-only daily. But yesterday morning, one of their video features really caught my eye.
It’s a short feature on Don Taylor, a local bookbinder who’s been in business for 31 years.
Directed and Edited by Tate Young. Produced and written by Ian Daffern.
Really lovely portrait of a craftsman.
-
Mozilla’s quest for better comments
My CBC tech column this week is all about the Beyond Comment Threads challenge run by Mozilla and the Knight Foundation. There’s a copy up at cbc.ca/tech, and one below, for posterity.
You can also listen below or download the MP3. [audio:http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/podcasts/misenerontech_20110524_76594.mp3]
Even better, I’d sure appreciate it if you’d subscribe to the brand new Misener on Tech podcast in iTunes.
===
Not to put too fine a point on it, but comment sections on blogs and news websites can be pretty terrible. All too often, they’re filled with fragmented, off-topic discussions and unconstructive, anonymous attacks. But an online challenge from the non-profit Mozilla Foundation (makers of the Firefox web browser) and the Knight Foundation aims to improve the state of web comments.
The initiative is called Beyond Comment Threads, and its aim is to re-imagine online news comments, which Mozilla’s executive director Mark Surman describes generally as “broken.”
“They’re just a bunch of noise, a kind of blather,” Surman told me. “And certainly, they’re a magnet for trolls and people who have nothing better to do than complain and bitch.”
To date, the challenge has received almost 200 submissions. The deadline is June 5, and after that a panel of journalists and programmers will choose 60 of the best participants and put them all together in what they’re describing as an online learning lab to further workshop the ideas.
Some will win a trip to Berlin to collaborate with Mozilla’s team, and the most viable ideas will be turned into actual working software projects.
In addition, “We’re going to take the cream of the crop, the very best people, and we’re going to place them in newsrooms around the world,” says Mozilla’s Ben Moskowitz. “So we’re going to have embedded fellows at Al Jazeera English, the BBC, the Guardian, ZEIT Online, The Boston Globe.”
Promising ideas
Browsing through the submissions, I came across several promising ideas, many of which challenge the traditional model of online commenting. In his submission, Enric Senabre Hidalgo writes: “Why should comments usually be at the end of the article? Let’s link them to any sentence or word, like Google Docs let you do now.”
Other submissions talked about the role of personalization technologies, using social filters and sentiment analysis to let relevant comments rise to the top.
One of my favourite suggestions comes from Travis Kriplean, based on an existing project called Reflect. Kriplean’s submission asks the question: “Can an interface nudge people to listen better? What if there were not just a comment box, but also a listen box?”
The idea is that part of the commenting process could include restating someone else’s opinion to show that you had read and acknowledged it, prompting a more thoughtful, reflective responses.
An intriguing idea, for sure, but definitely more complicated than, “Fill out this text box and hit submit.”
Root of the problem
As I browsed through challenge submissions, I had to wonder: are the issues with comments a technical problem? Or a human behaviour problem?
According to Mozilla’s Mark Surman, they’re both.
And perhaps that’s what makes improving web comments such an interesting challenge, one that brings together geeks, journalists and newsjunkies alike.
Dealing with cranks, complainers and trolls is most definitely a human dynamics challenge. But it’s also a technical challenge, particularly when viewed through the lens of comment system interfaces and design. Do people have to log in to leave a comment? Do they have to use their real names? Is there a reputation system? These are definitely technical considerations.
According to Surman, how you ask people to participate through comments or online conversation can have a big impact on the quality of responses.
A boilerplate “What do you think?” question followed by a large empty text field and a submit button may not necessarily produce fruitful discussion, he says. “Whereas if you give people a much more directed task like, ‘Help us find facts around this story,’ or, ‘Help us see the different sides to this story,’ or, ‘Help us find other stories that are related to this,’ people will come and participate and comment in a much more productive way.”
Striking a balance
To me, the real challenges with online commenting have to do with balance. Balance between the advantages of using real names versus pseudonyms (or leaving anonymous comments). Or, the balance between the desire for personalization in comments, and the risk of living in an echo chamber. Or, the balance between filters and information overload.
As more of us turn primarily to the web to get news, information, and opinion, the opportunities to collaborate and participate are huge. We just need the right tools to participate in a meaningful way.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go comment on a few comments about commenting.