I have nothing against the notion of pro-life, I am an atheist liberal who is pro-choice, who admired Mother Theresa.

Mother Theresa practiced what she preached. She said that she would personally look after any child brought to her that would have been aborted.

I would not ask everyone who is anti-abortion to become Mother Theresa, however I would say that they are immoral if they do not also support raised taxes and a larger welfare budget. You cannot be a Republican and pro-life.

Sadly, issues promoted by most pro-lifers cause more people to die.

Pro-life means 'erring on the side of life', unless it means killing people guilty of pre-meditated killing - by means of pre-meditated killing.

Pro-life means no abortion, but it does not mean raising taxes and providing welfare to keep abandoned or neglected children alive.

Pro-life means spending money to keep people alive using a feeding tube but it doesn't mean spending money feeding helpless millions.

Pro-life means supporting missionaries migrating to South America to urge against contraception but it does not mean supporting immigration to North America when resources are no longer enough to support large populations.

Congrats to Joshua on delicious funding. [delicious-discuss] big news

Having now looked at the way people are using tags on wists, it seems like the most useful way to avoid tag overload is to bundle tags into search so that search is the gateway to both full text search and tags i.e. tags are a way of narrowing down structured searches.

This means that we can probably drastically simplify the Wists interface.

Currently working on full layout control via the url so that you can create cut and paste javascript code to place Wists galleries on your site, rather like Flickr's badges. More details on the wistsblog.

The long tail is jagged, fractal – perhaps as any market achieves maximum efficiency it starts to look like everything around us in nature, no matter how hard (or close) we look.

Networks tend to create 'stars', movie stars are bigger than theater stars because their audiences are larger - but not just because of that.
Movie stars, like Valentino, appeared almost as soon as there were movies because the network effect increased the head of the curve, not the tail. Some actors became very well known while most 'rested'.

A tell-tale sign of the star effect is a large gap between the average and the median. The average earnings of actors are much higher than their median income. Broadcast media is an asymmetric form of communication where both creation and distribution require large amounts of capital but for the audience it is cheap. Mainstream broadcast culture created a product which was affordable to the masses, but was created by the few. As such, although the culture of capitalism did more for the masses than the Bolshoi did for the Bolsheviks, there was no long tail of minor celebrities whose total income exceeded the stars’.

When I first heard of the long tail I thought it was profound - the most interesting thing I'd read in ages - but I didn't buy it. If the world becomes more networked, then the network effect should become stronger and the tail shorter, or at least the total area under it, reduced; and the Internet and modern telecom infrastructure makes the world more networked. The early signs of this seemed to back this up, from the natural re-grouping of the Baby Bells to the rapid emergence of Internet monopolies like Ebay.

The difference here is that Ebay and the telcos are distributors, not manufacturers/publishers. Although controlling a customer gives enormous power, in the long term the role of the distributor will diminish - overall revenues cut as competitors, leveraging new technologies, arbitrage the price down. Phone customers will be unhappy, wondering why their calls aren’t as cheap as VOIP, just as sellers on Ebay are increasingly complaining about listing fees and music buyers wonder why an album with no packaging or distribution costs is the same price as CD. In short, playing the role of a distributor in a medium where the economics of scarcity don’t always apply, means that the power of monopoly is all that stands in the way of decreasing revenues. – But that is another story.

In any medium, network, market, there are three primary components: buyer, seller, marketplace; sender, receiver, router or artist, audience, distributor.

If the role of the networked marketplace, router and distributor do tend to create natural but less lucrative monopolies over the long term, and the buyer, receiver and audience has already reaped the benefits of broadcast culture from the daily post to the penny post, then what happens in the truly networked marketplace is that the cost to the: sender, artist or seller is massively reduced.

The difference, however, is that the new networked economy is symmetrical, it is accessible to people without large amounts of capital at both ends of a message or transaction. Unlike a letter, neither the sender nor receiver pays for an email, anyone can become a store owner on Ebay and anyone can become a radio star with a podcast (although I doubt it).

This symmetry or evenness produces a meritocracy of creation, which would lead to a smooth ‘short tailed’ curve of, albeit more deserving, megastars were it not for one simple fact – from the asymmetric ripples of the big bang to us and everything around us, we are not all the same and therefore don’t always subscribe naturally to the same, bland, monolithic, mainstream culture unless it is constantly stoked with marketing fuel.

These natural differences, the ripples in time and place that produce different tastes and sub-cultures, are what create the long tail. But, in the same way that not everyone is the same, some people are similar and these sub-groups have their own stars, and so on. The curve is jagged or fractal, and looks the same no matter what resolution you view it at.

This would seem to be disappointing at first, if a simple smooth curve had been replaced by complexity, but the seeming complexity of a fractal shape is more elegant than a smooth curve – not only is it produced by a simple equation, but it is the type of equation that has literally evolved the shapes of everything we are surrounded by.

The jagged edge that stretches the long tail, as each minor spike reduces the height of the bigger spikes, is the shape that makes it natural. The fractal nature of the long tail makes it pass the Occam’s Razor test in both mathematical and cultural terms, and that is why I now buy it.

The Long Tail: Microstructure in the Long Tail

Instructions on chopsticks are always fascinating, but this was a classic:

From disposable chopsticks in a Thai restaurant:

"Welcome to Chinese Restaurant.
Please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticke the traditional and trpical of Chinese glorious history and cultual" [sic]

Having sold our cars and packed all our belongings into a massive truck we moved to NY this week.

The curious thing is that it feels better to have a bag of clothes, a cellphone and a laptop and nothing else, which begs the question as to why I ever buy anything.

Now that I'm here I'll be working on Wists in earnest - have setup a blog: wistsblog and will be fleshing out faq's and general Wists info, over the next week or so.

From Joshua's list, looks like delicious have added 'metatags'. del.icio.us/joshua

Although we implemented from get go in Wists - Joshua said that he had been thinking about this for a while - so is good news all round.

Hopefully sharing metatags amongst multiple systems will be good for everyone, since its looks like some standard metatags such as location= are emerging.

Delicious continues to rule!

Thanks to some fantastic work by Adam Michela at Axentric, there is a much improved 'add to Wists' bookmarklet which can be installed from here, or reinstalled via the help menu in Wists.

The new 'wistlet' has the following features:

Now grabs CSS background images.

Removes duplicate images.

Allows choosing a thumbnail screenshot of the page itself, if you don't like any of the images shown.

Best of all, it is remotely updatable - so we will be able to add new features with you having to re-install.

NB: the new bookmaklet works with most browsers and versions, except for Safari - the original bookmarklet is still available via the Wists help menu, for Safari users.

Ahem – what follows is the sort of thing that I can’t imagine discussing in New York. So in honor of leaving San Francisco am posting one of the things that I’ve been mulling over for quite a while, regarding SETI.

Much SETI activity has resolved around looking for messages, in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Shouldn't we start by looking for the reverse, a conspicuous absence of electromagnetic radiation, if we want to look for alien intelligence?

”Misconceptions Regarding Dyson Spheres and the Fermi Paradox” discusses the central idea:

“almost all advanced technological civilizations should not have a "visible stars"! If we had the technology to conduct extensive surveys of brown dwarfs we might find that many of them are being disassembled to supply fuel and construction materials for meta-minds. The unresolved problems of the missing baryonic dark matter and the gravitational microlensing observations, suggesting 200 billion "masses" orbiting our galaxy, hint at the possibility that such entities may exist.”

The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system entropy increases over time, entropy being a measure of disorder, where such things as information are, in theory, low entropy. In the case of planets revolving around the sun, the sun burns out and entropy increases over time. Planets that get in the way of the sun absorb some of its heat and then re-radiate it, over time. On our planet, at some point the energy received from the sun (possibly indirectly via geo-thermal activity) resulted in generating molecules that self-replicated. Of all the number of possible states in a system, once you get self replicating things, something strange happens – life, order, information, buildings, cities. From genotype and phenotype to extended phenotype, there is a conspicuous local decrease in entropy, if the number of living things or their manufactured byproducts continues to increase as one generation dies or crumbles.

Because the state of a system which results in self replicating things, will inevitably continue once going, it is the most likely end state for any system with constant energy input, over time (albeit infinite time). In other words, if life is possible, and it is, then it should be inevitable, and the more life the more order. And with energy input from a star, or indirectly via things like oil, the more life, the more life. As Fermi pointed out, if this seems inevitable – where is everyone when it comes to little green men. It would seem more profoundly weird if the universe were not infested with other life, since it would require a more complicated explanation.

Because of this, and our insatiable urge to explore, we figured that perhaps someone somewhere may want to send us a message. Since the quickest messages travel at the speed of light, then we should look for a light beacon, or more specifically a radio beacon. (Since one would imagine that a message has low entropy, one would think that there is an apparent paradox with a message being contained in an electromagnetic wave which by definition carries energy – as with any measure of entropy, the entire system has to be taken into account – and so the entropy or information contained in a message may depend on the energy used by the encoder and transmitter of the message, or even the history of previous messages).

There may, of course, be messages out there waiting to be picked up – the urge to communicate does seem to be a trait that we and higher organisms have, but there is an instinct which every living thing shares - survival. As human beings go to war over trapped solar energy in the form of oil, our long term existence relies on direct energy from the sun. Taken to an extreme this would involve letting none of the sun’s energy go to waste, and is the idea behind a Dyson sphere, a theoretical construction designed to allow a civilization to absorb all of the suns energy by surrounding it entirely. Without taking things to extremes, however, one could imagine that an ever growing civilization could reach a point where it would slow down the rate of increase of entropy of a solar system, and may indeed significantly reduce the normal detectable energy output of the star from beyond it.

Without suggesting for a moment that the surprising amount of dark matter in the universe is in fact dimming caused by aliens crowding round the fire, as it were, with Dyson spheres blocking out suns. If it does turn out that the biggest sign of life is a lack of signal, it does beg the obvious question of how would we know?

(According to Dyson himself, a Dyson sphere would re-radiate its energy in the infrared - I don't understand why this re-radiation would necessarily happen unless the sphere and its population had reached a steady state)

It’s possible that a star hugging civilization would also send out a message – and perhaps this message would be intermittent, a fluctuation between lights out and lights on, to conserve energy.

(It would be hope that intermittent would not be too short. When pulsars were discovered, their regular radio wave pulses were thought to be candidates for an alien message, instead of radiation directly from a star. Which poses a serious question as to how we would detect the difference between regularity caused by inanimate objects vs. animate ones.)

In any case, I believe we should be looking for a message not just in the spectrum where it is normally quiet, but in a direction where there appears to be a conspicuous nothing.

Am selling my car for the move to NY, its a 66 Mustang convertible. Mail me if you are interested!

(Also using the out=plain layout parameter and forsale= metatag to experiment with using wists to create galleries of things for sale)

Wikipedia now has an entry for Web 2.0.

Call me old fashioned, but since everything on the web seems to be in Beta for years, shouldn't Web 1.0 now be called Web 0.9?

I think I'll call Wists, Wists Gamma.

Nick Aster, who is doing an MBA in sustainability has launched Triple Pundit which covers business from an eco-aware perspective.

The really strange thing about the Durst scandal is that they are suing for copyright infringement for 'linking' - posting a link to something that may infringe copyright.

So lets get this right, if that is indeed against the law then the everyday business of:

Google
Yahoo
MSN

er... the entire web, is illegal.

Fred Durst Sues Over Stolen Sex Video - March 4, 2005:

"the Limp Bizkit front man has filed a $80 million lawsuit against web sites that posted the footage and stills from the singer's X-rated romp with a former girlfriend."

We've added a global search feature to Wists.

The search will look up users, tags and individual item titles and descriptions all at once - returning the results for each, separately. - So there are no parameters and advanced search settings. Again the rule is: have the user do the least work.

Because tags tend to have multiple variants with the same stem, e.g. Lifehacker, Lifehacks, Lifehacking, Wists search will return everything starting with 'Lifehack'. However, because people have tagged things separately you can still filter by one tag in particular.

I can see that perhaps using search and tags with extensions to common word stems might evolve some interesting patterns.

For example, if I wanted to start a list of restaurants for my friends I coud tag as 'restaurant_dgfriends' and filter by that in a search for restaurant. I'll have to think about it - but the next step for Wists will be how we look at groups and community and hopefully there is something that involves minimal effort for users there too.

New Features:
(The overall aim is to make as much as possible one or two clicks or automatic, based upon normal interaction with the product, from building a network of friends and groups of tags, to publishing - as things like tags fill up we'll overlay tag management on top - again hopefully making that as automated as possible.)

» Automatic friends networks.
If you click on items to add to your wists from other users or someone else adds from your wists, they automatically become part of your network of friends.

» Automatic groups.
Beneath you friends list, all the tags in your friends network are shown. Click on any friend and the tags in their network are shown in turn.
Click on friends' tag and you will be shown all items from your network, other than your own items.

» Speed improvements.
Wists should be much faster now! The volume of traffic at launch caught us off guard. Oops.

New publishing features coming soon - courtesy of Adam Michela.