Preoccupations

Edward Said, 1935–2003

In The Guardian, Daniel Barenboim remembers his close friend, Edward Said — an excellent pianist who, Barenboim believes, drew deeply on his love and knowledge of music in formulating his judgements about literature and post-colonialism:

In recent years, due to his terrible illness, he was unable to maintain the level of physical energy necessary to play the piano. I remember many unforgettable times that we spent playing Schubert pieces for four hands. Two or three years ago, I had a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York and he was going through a very difficult period of his illness. The concert was on a Sunday afternoon. Although he knew that I had arrived that very morning from Chicago, he showed up very early at rehearsal with a volume of Schubert's pieces for four hands. He told me: "Today I want us to play at least eight bars, not for the pleasure of playing, but because I need it to survive."

As you can imagine, at that moment, just in from the airport and with one hour of rehearsal before the afternoon's concert, the last thing I wanted to do was to play Schubert for four hands. But, as is always the case, when you teach you learn, and when you give you receive. And you learn when you teach because the student asks questions that you no longer even ask yourself, because they are part of the almost automatic thought which each one of us develops. And suddenly, the question addresses something that forces us to rethink it from its origin, from its very essence. ...

His concept of inclusion also derived from music, as well as the integration principle. The same could be applied to his book Orientalism. It speaks of the idea of Oriental seduction versus western production. In music, there is no production without seduction. Productive as a musical idea may be, if it is lacking the seduction of the necessary sound, it is insufficient. This is why I say that Edward Said was, for many, a great thinker, a fighter for the rights of his people, and an incomparable intellectual. But for me, he was always, really, a musician, in the deepest sense of the term.

Said's Guardian obituary can be found here, and Tom Paulin's celebration of Said's life and work (another Guardian piece) is here. Other articles and tributes about Said, published since his death, are listed here at 3quarksdaily.

New film site

The Telegraph launches its own film website.

Google Desktop

Google Desktop:

• Find your email, files, web history and chats instantly


• View web pages you've seen, even when you're not online


• Search as easily as you do on Google

Reviewed by Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly Network):

The Google Desktop is your own private little Google server. It sits in the background, slogging through your files and folders; indexing your incoming and outgoing email messages, listening in on your instant messenger chats, and browsing the Web right along with you. Just about anything you see and summarily forget, the Google Desktop sees and memorizes for you.

And it operates in real-time.

Beyond the initial sweep, that is. When you first install Google Desktop, it makes use of any idle time to meander your filesystem, email application, instant messages, and browser cache. Imbued with sense of politeness, the indexer shouldn't interfere at all with your use of your computer; it only springs into action when you step away, take a phonecall, or dose off for 30 seconds or more. Pick up the mouse or touch the keyboard and the Google Desktop scuttles off into the corner, waiting patiently for its next opportunity to look around.

Its initial inventory taken, the Google Desktop server sits back and waits for something of interest to come along. Send or receive an email message, strike up an AIM conversation with a friend, or get a start on that PowerPoint presentation and it'll be noticed and indexed within seconds.

Update:

• Jason Kottke: 'Could this be Google's portal play? If they've got info on all the files on my computer, why not display my latest calendar items, emails, online buddies, etc. right on Google's home page?'
• Search Engine Lowdown: 'After testing Google Desktop for a couple of days, it is clearly a tool that will become a normal part of many users everyday searching habits. The only thing that was of any concern to us was Google Desktop's ability to store documents in its cache long after you have deleted them from your hard drive. This should cause concern, especially for companies whose employees download the tool.'
• theunofficialmicrosoftweblog (Marc Orchant): 'I’m disappointed that Gmail is not supported in this first release; I’m even more disappointed that there is no image search, especially for Picasa users. The speed (so far - I’m still indexing) is just what you would expect from a Google search tool - which is to say instantaneous. You can combine desktop and web search results or keep them separate. The privacy policy is crystal clear.'
• John Battelle: 'I have not had a chance to play with this, as it is limited to Windows/IE, but that's OK, Danny has, and his very thorough write up is here (see below). What I'm interested in is what this all means for the big Chess Game That Is Search, and frankly, this is A Very Big Move on the part of Google. ... This is the part that's important: As far as the user is concerned, Google's Desktop Search seamlessly integrates your hard drive into Google.com. "Desktop" becomes another tab, right next to "Web", "Images", and the like (your data stays on your hard drive, of course, but to most mere mortals, it might seem like in fact it lives "out there on the web.")
  • One, it means Google will have a major beachhead on users' computers - an index of *everything on your hard drive.* Yes, this raises privacy concerns, but Google has outlined their stance on this in the documentation, and (compared to Gmail) seems ready to handle this issue this time.
  • Two, it means that index will be viewed *in the native Google interface* - for all intents and purposes, it treats your hard drive as an extension of the web (or, vice versa...it hardly matters which). MS Word, Powerpoint, Excel files? Just results in the Google interface. How's that for a lightweight OS?
  • Three, it means that Google can build upon that knowledge of your personal data to make *all* search more relevant for you - this is Google's first major foray into truly personalized search.
  • Four, it means that everything is now searchable: your email, your Word documents, your music, your IM sessions, and - pay attention here - your SEARCH HISTORY. That's right, the Google Desktop Search automatically hoovers out *every site you visit* from the IE logs and adds it to you overall searchable index as cached pages. "Take that, A9, Yahoo, and Ask," Google is saying. "We're playing here too...Oh, and by the way....we're Google."
  • And Five, this provides Google a major new platform to build upon - a client application that integrates with the web. Can I imagine upgrades to that app that include spiffy new features like - oh - a lightweight word processor so you can take notes on your searching, or a calendar? Better yet, can I imagine Google opens this platform up to third party developers, to do what they do best? Yes, I sure can.

  This is a major initiative for Google (they ain't rolling this one out quietly through Labs!), and it will be very, very important to the company that this be widely adopted by millions and millions of users (privately, Google employees have told me they were disappointed with the number of their Toolbar downloads over the years). If it is, it will set the stage for a very Web 2.0 battle for the hearts and minds of searching consumers - and that means all consumers - everywhere. In the end, if search becomes the interface for how we navigate our computing space, regardless of where that space is, there is no doubt the power of Microsoft will be diminished. On the other hand, there is no way Microsoft, which bought a desktop search company earlier this year, or Yahoo for that matter, will stand still. This move, I sense, is the true starting gun of a major race to win in search, and at the interface level for all of computing. It should be a fun few years!

• Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Watch): 'Overall, I love the tool. ... Having said this, and bearing in mind it's still a beta release, I've already got a wish list.

  Most annoying so far is that you can only see 10 results at a time. Though the tool has a Desktop Preferences option, that doesn't yet include an option to increase the number of results seen at one time. Google said there's nothing to announce about potential changes to this yet.

  Also missing is an advanced search page. On that, it would be nice to have drop down boxes as with Google itself letting you limit searches to particular file types, phrases or especially date ranges.

  For example, getting back a long list of matching emails, then having to use the result page numbers at the bottom of the results list to browse to a particular date is a pain.

  You can use some of Google's search syntax to get around this. To narrow to file type, use the filetype command. For example, this:

  cars filetype:email

  would bring back only email matches with the word cars mentioned. A list of known file types we've tested to date and found work are:

  • Word: filetype:word or filetype:doc
  • Excel: filetype:excel or filetype:xls
  • PowerPoint: filetype:powerpoint or filetype:ppt
  • Text: filetype:text or filetype:txt
  • Email: filetype:email
  • Chat: filetype:chat
  • Web History/HTML Files: filetype:web or filetype:html
  • Images: filetype:jpg or filetype:gif
  • Acrobat: filetype:pdf
  • Windows Media: filetype:wma or filetype:wmv
  • MP3: filetype:mp3

  For email, chat and web history, you can also narrow by clicking on the count numbers, as described above. As for images, Acrobat and other files, keep in mind that only text in the file names will be matched, not any meta data or actual text contained within the files.

  Images, Acrobat, Windows Media and MP3 files are also not officially supported by the product as searchable content. While I did find it capturing some of this content on my computer, the bulk of it was not retrieved. Why some but not all of it was found is unclear, especially given that the index process appeared to have completed OK. But since this isn't even promised, I can't complain much.

  Google, of course, purchased the Picasa photo indexing solution earlier this year. Perhaps it will be that Google Desktop Search will evolve some integration with that in the future.

  Google Toolbar/Deskbar integration would be nice. At the moment, I can use the Google Toolbar to specifically search for just images, news, shopping, the web and so on. But desktop search isn't an option. Google says this may come for future versions.

  A real personal wish is for indexing of content of compressed/zip files. I constantly zip up data -- right now, none of that gets indexed by the tool.

  I desperately want the search memory features to mature. I want this tool -- or some other system -- to keep track of what I actually have searched for and track that in association with pages I've found. So far, Yahoo's implementation of these types of features are the best I've seen (but those at a9 and Ask Jeeves are great as well).

  Finally, password protection and encryption of data compiled by Google Desktop is important. I hope that will be added soon. More on why that's important and other search privacy issues are covered in the companion to this article: A Closer Look At Privacy And Desktop Search.

• David Galbraith: 'Whatever Microsoft do, Google have shown the way forward, their desktop search makes your desktop just one more search tab. It brings your desktop to the web rather than the web to the desktop and this seems like a much more logical UI experience.'
• Doc Searls: 'cool, but Windows-only. So are Picasa and the Google Toolbar. I understand why, but the strategy ignores the big influencers who happen to be on a platform that's in a minority — but only with the masses. Does Google have any plans to make this stuff work with Linux and OS X desktops?'

• Erik Speckman: 'So, Google has finally released their desktop search product. I'd like to get excited about it, but I just can't. Dave Winer seems pretty excited about the fact that GDS is basically a web application in that the UI is exposed through a local webserver. This is cool, as Dave obseves, "You can use it with any browser. Right on." Very cool, except that there is basically no reason I'd want to use it with another browser. GDS only indexes history on IE, and only indexes e-mail in Outlook and Outlook Express. I don't use IE, and I don't use Outlook or Outlook express. That leaves the filesystem indexing feature, which frankly isn't that interesting. Most of the stuff of interest locally is either stuff in my e-mail, or stuff i've already seen on the web and Google won't touch that for people like me who use something other than the dominant browser and mailreader. Of course, it could be that some clever dev at Google had the presence of mind to index Firefox cache and Thunderbird's mail, and their marketing people just aren't mentioning it. It makes sense for Google to be focusing on the biggest market. Still, its dissapointing to see Google ignoring the people who are probably most likely to embrace cool new technology and evangelize it. Very very uncool.'
• Om Malik: 'Google unleashed the desktop beta on the world today. And as expected there is a huge furor around it. Since I am using Windows XP for a few days, I put it to test against Blinkx. My tests, admittedly very unscientific, show that Blinkx is a Mercedes compared to Google which is like a yugo. Having said that, I think this release has been rushed. Google needs to learn one thing: what works as a web interface doesn't necessarily work as a desktop UI. Secondly, if you are going to release something, don't rush it. Blinkx found music files, photos, and all sorts of things on this laptop. Google found limited stuff, mostly Microsoft mail and documents. Getting ready to uninstall already!'
• Dave Winer: 'The excitement about Google Desktop Search is giving way to the reality. Their choice of file formats they will index is weird. And I don't care what everyone else uses, most of my valuable content is in the CMS I use to edit my blog, and they don't index that, and I doubt if they ever will. An open architecture desktop search app is a requirement. I must be able to write a plug-in that teaches it how to index formats it doesn't understand.'

Rhetoric

This online rhetoric, provided by Dr. Gideon Burton of Brigham Young University, is a guide to the terms of classical and renaissance rhetoric. Sometimes it is difficult to see the forest (the big picture) of rhetoric because of the trees (the hundreds of Greek and Latin terms naming figures of speech, etc.) within rhetoric.

This site is intended to help beginners, as well as experts, make sense of rhetoric, both on the small scale (definitions and examples of specific terms) and on the large scale (the purposes of rhetoric, the patterns into which it has fallen historically as it has been taught and practiced for 2000+ years).

The Forest of Rhetoric (silva rhetoricae)

The true significance of P2P

In all the coverage here in the UK of the British Phonographic Society, our equivalent of the RIAA, and its declared intention to prosecute a small number of big-time file-sharers, little has been written in the traditional press, or aired on traditional radio, that shows any commanding grasp of the issues and the technology involved. John Naughton, as ever, is a great exception and his Observer article (dated today) is a fine illustration of his knowledge and perspicacity:

... a UK start-up called CacheLogic has come up with technology that enables ISPs to get a detailed analysis of network traffic. Over the last six months, CacheLogic has used this technology in collaboration with a range of big ISPs, and from this has derived what it claims is the first detailed empirical analysis of contemporary net traffic.

The findings are fascinating. They suggest that P2P is now the largest single generator of traffic; that it significantly outweighs web traffic; and that it continues to grow. P2P traffic volumes are at least double those of web traffic during the peak evening periods and 10 times greater at other times. The significance of this is not that the efforts of content industries to plug the dyke are doomed (though they are), but that when people look back on the evolution of the net, P2P will be seen as the biggest innovation since the web's invention in 1990.

It may come as news to the BPS and RIAA, but the sharing of music files is the least significant application of P2P. For example, Skype - the sensational internet telephony software that enables anyone with a broadband connection to make freephone calls to anyone else similarly equipped - is a P2P application. So is instant messaging, which is spreading like wildfire. So is LionShare - a project started by Penn State University to create a series of networks for sharing scholarly information among academics. And BitTorrent - the best system yet devised for distributing large files (for example new releases of operating systems) - is likewise P2P.

P2P networking technology is taking over the net for one simple and compelling reason: it makes abundant sense. There are millions of PCs connected to the net. Most of the time they are doing nothing. But they represent a massive, untapped reserve of computing power and storage resources.

P2P is a way of harnessing these resources. Of course, like every other technology from the medical syringe to the camcorder and the automobile, it has unsavoury uses. But those abuses do not provide a justification for a few threatened industries to squash the technology. There are more important things in life than the bonuses of record company executives. P2P is the future; they belong to the past.

Google News

From Buzzmachine:

I think this is new: GoogleNews now has a pulldown ontop letting you switch among 15 nations' news.

Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004

Jacques Derrida, father of Deconstructionism, has died (BBC News).

"Deconstruction" is the name given to a radical and wide-ranging development in the human sciences, especially philosophy and literary criticism, initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a series of highly influential books published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including (in translation): Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. "Deconstruction," Derrida's coinage, has subsequently become synonymous with a particular method of textual analysis and philosophical argument involving the close reading of works of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and anthropology to reveal logical or rhetorical incompatibilities between the explicit and implicit planes of discourse in a text and to demonstrate by means of a range of critical techniques how these incompatibilities are disguised and assimilated by the text. In one of its typical analytical procedures, a deconstructive reading focuses on binary oppositions within a text, first, to show how those oppositions are structured hierarchically; second, to overturn that hierarchy temporarily, as if to make the text say the opposite of what it appeared to say initially; and third, to displace and reassert both terms of the opposition within a nonhierarchical relationship of "difference." ...

The concept of difference is crucial to Derrida, who uses it to "deconstruct" Western philosophy, which he argues is founded on a theory of "presence," in which metaphysical notions such as truth, being, and reality are determined in their relation to an ontological center, essence, origin (archè), or end (telos) that represses absence and difference for the sake of metaphysical stability. The best-kept secret of Western metaphysics is thus the historical repression of difference through a philosophical vocabulary that favors presence in the form of voice, consciousness, and subjectivity. Derrida calls this philosophy "logocentrism" or "phonocentrism" in that it is based on a belief in a logos or phonè, a self-present word constituted not by difference but by presence (Writing and Difference 278-82). Logocentrism, for Derrida, represents Western culture's sentimental desire for a natural or Adamic language whose authority is guaranteed by a divine, transcendental signified. On the surface, language seems unwilling to face up to its human arbitrariness, yet on closer inspection it also appears to call attention to its differential structure: language at once posits and retracts its own desire for presence.

Derrida's deconstructive method proceeds by means of slow and ingeniously detailed close readings of texts, focusing on those points where a binary opposition (e.g., signifier/signified, presence/absence, nature/culture, literal/figural, outside/inside), a line of argument, or even a single word breaks down to reveal radical incongruities in the logic or rhetoric. Unlike ambiguity, irony, or paradox, these incompatibilities cannot be harmonized in the service of textual "unity" or "integrity," terms that for Derrida would be synonymous with "self-presence." Instead, the contradictions expose the text to the force of its own difference, its displacement from a univocal center of meaning. They show that what a text says and how it says it do not converge but simultaneously strive toward and defer convergence. Deconstruction always reveals difference within unity.

The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism

Web 2.0, music & digital rights

DJ Danger Mouse speaking at Web 2.0 (via Jeffrey Veen):

Mashing is so easy. It takes years to learn how to play the guitar and write your own songs. It takes a few weeks of practice with turntable to make people dance and smile. It takes a few hours to crank out something good with some software. So with such a low barrier to entry, everyone jumps in and starts immediately being creative. I don't understand why that is illegal.

Artists are responsible, because for some reason we think we should be millionaires for making people smile. But I don't worry too much, because it will be over soon. There won't be a market for making people smile because kids will just do it for free.

Google SMS

Google SMS (Short Message Service) enables you to easily get precise answers to specialized queries from your mobile phone or device. Send your query as a text message and get phone book listings, dictionary definitions, product prices and more. Just text. No links. No web pages. Simply the answers you're looking to find.

Right now, Google SMS only works in the U.S.

What is the web for, anyway?

J M Tyree, 3quarksdaily:

What is the web for, anyway? I'd like it to be a kind of new 21st century encyclopedia, where information is exchanged freely, and where digital archives of great writing can endure. The Atlantic wants it to be an advertisement, essentially, for their "real" product. I think that in the end magazines like The Atlantic and The New Republic will lose out on their internet strategy, at least with readers like me. One reason why: savvy readers know that writers are not ever, ever paid a dime more for a story that is published online as well as in the print version of a magazine. So there is no guilt about not paying.

Obviously, magazines could not long endure if they made all their content available for free online and everybody stopped subscribing as a result. But would this really happen? If a magazine is worth subscribing to, it is worth having around the house; it is worth supporting and paying for. Did the e-book kill the book? I think the system of The New York Times makes a good compromise. Most everything it publishes is available via a free online registration while it is current, and then on a paying basis after its topical relevance has expired. I haven't noticed that The Times has collapsed financially as a result. The Atlantic - and the most arrogant offender, The New Republic - should follow suit or risk losing increasingly web-savvy younger readers over the long haul. At any rate, the system of internet magazine archiving has not reached its philosophical bedrock yet.