This is still pretty cute tho. Heh. Daddy’s little wookie…

So the other significant contributing factor to my *sabbatical* from blogging is the birth of my daughter Ilse Mae in September. Cute huh? She’s upstairs screaming like a banshee right now so I’ll have to make this quick.

I shot this about a week ago on my crappy BlackBerry Pearl (which, by the way, crashed this afternoon and is refusing to reboot. w00t!). It’s pretty much the first time I’d ever seen Ilse smile, and it kinda burns my ass that the footage is so grainy. They say the camera you use is the camera you have, so now I don’t go anywhere without my Flip Mino HD. Watch your ass, Scorsese!

This is something I’ve been meaning to post for a while, a collection of old home movies I had digitised a couple of years ago and then forgot about. Highlights include my parents’ wedding, what I hope was my first beer, and – most surprising – footage of my uncle’s old Austin Cambridge in motion.

Lawrie’s dirty old Cambridge rotted in my grandmother’s driveway for over a decade, and until I got my hands on this footage I think I’d forgotten that rusty piece of shit actually used to be a car. That started. And went places. Fun places. Almost makes me regret that time I [redacted]. Almost.

I’ve gotten a lot of flack lately for the horrendous lack of blog activity, and I can’t say it’s undeserved. What can I say – I’ve been busy.

A big part of the bloggy silence has been due to some shameless technological infidelity on my part. A while back I decided to give Twitter the benefit of the doubt, and see if I could overcome my initial misgivings. 2,500 tweets later I’ll happily concede that there is more to it than I first thought, but at the same time there are lingering reservations.

As a means of sharing ideas, discoveries, sentiments in real-time, Twitter really is in a class of its own. It’s a great world to be immersed in, and I really can’t see myself kicking the habit anytime soon. My problem isn’t with what Twitter is, does, or doesn’t do. It’s with what I’m not doing. I may be alone in this, but to me Twitter is a shoot-from-the-hip kind of deal. The operative question is ‘what are you doing right now’, not ‘what have you been up to lately’. Streaming my life and thoughts in real-time is fun, but so too is mulling over a whole bunch of ideas, forming a considered opinion, and sharing it with you fine folks.

This isn’t a benevolent thing, on my part at least (although your forbearance with the dick and fart jokes is appreciated). I just get a kick out of thinking about stuff, however trippy, chasing random thoughts down a rabbit hole and hopefully emerging unscathed with something worth sharing. The act of blogging (or rather, the thought process behind it) is really pleasurable. There, I said it. I gets my jollies on the Interwebz.

For someone who actually enjoys writing, Twitter is like junk food and I just haven’t been getting my veg lately. After six months of a Twitter-only diet I feel like a literary Morgan Spurlock. Like I said, I can’t see myself quitting Twitter anytime soon, so my only option then is to get my shit together and start blogging again.

So I’m back. Some of you will be thrilled, and others disgusted. Either way, I’m wearing a big smile right now. Feels good to be back.

There’s an inorganic rubbish collection in our area next week. There is so much I could write about this – the van-loads of ’seagulls’ pouring in from all over Auckland for some al-fresco shopping are a reality TV show just waiting to happen – but that’s a post for another day.

I walked past the rubbish pile below, as I was out walking the dogs this afternoon, and was so gutted not to have a camera with me that I jumped in the car and drove back, just to capture that beautiful scene and share it with you fine folks.

A full set of Encyclopedia Britannica, strewn out on the curb alongside a broken TV and a piss-stained mattress.

Welcome to the 21st century, people.

Fantastic juxtaposition of articles on the Herald website.

A couple whose bank screwed up and deposited $10m in their account are being hunted by Interpol after fleeing the country with some of the money, while NZ’s power companies face no consequences after fleecing consumers to the tune of $4.3b in just six years.

If you’re going to rob somebody in this country, make sure you wear a tie.

I don’t want to sound like a hater. I think Wolfram Alpha is a beautiful execution of a unique approach to search, and I’m glad the Mathematica folks have been able to bring it to life. Unfortunately, it is subject to two critical flaws:

1. It isn’t what people think it is; and
2. What it is really isn’t that flash

Let’s start out with the obvious. Wolfram Alpha isn’t a Google killer. It doesn’t even come close. Actually, it really doesn’t have much to do with anything Google does. Putting aside a whole lot of peripheral activities, Google is a search engine, an advertising network, and a bank. It helps people to find authoritative websites on topics they are interested in; It provides advertisers with a cost-effective means of reaching prospective customers; and It facilitates transactions between advertisers and publishers, and is effectively the Reserve Bank of the Internet. Wolfram Alpha does none of these things – it doesn’t lead you to authoritative sources of information, it assumes that role itself; It doesn’t help advertisers reach new audiences; and It sure as hell doesn’t help to monetise other properties.

The latter two alone would seemingly be enough to ensure Google’s continued dominance over newcomers, but even if that wasn’t the case – even if all Google was was a search engine – Google would win hands down. Why? Because this *smarts*, this unique approach that sets Wolfram Alpha apart from its predecessors and competitors is the answer to a question nobody asked. It is different more for the sake of being different than as a response to a real need, and it smacks of the ‘build it and they will come’ mindset that has lead to some of the Internet age’s greatest failures. Louis Border’s ‘Webvan‘ immediately springs to mind. Assuming people wanted to buy their groceries online, and assuming that a completely automated online-only supermarket was the best way to satisfy that need, Webvan was the best possible response to that opportunity. Problem was, both of those assumptions were tragically flawed and billions of investor dollars were lost. In the same way, Wolfram is assuming that all people want is a direct, concise response to a direct, concise question. Problem is, people don’t ask those kinds of questions or accept those kinds of answers.

Wolfram seems to misunderstand how and why people really use search. Sure, we search for information, but we do so in order to be able to do something with it. We search for hotels so we can find somewhere to stay, not to find out what a hotel is. And when we do want to find out what something is, context and referenced, authoritative sources are essential for validating what we are being told and furthering our understanding. The ’source information’ link accompanying Wolfram results provides a list of sites used, but with no indication of which *facts* came from which sources. Even Wikipedia - whipping boy of research purists the world over – has higher standards of transparency, which is kind of ironic when you consider that Wolfram Alpha was designed by a respected scientist.

Wolfram’s reference material is also alarmingly Americentric. For example, no New Zealand websites are referenced in response to queries about ‘New Zealand‘. I agree that there are always three sides to every story, but I’d back our own over the Library of Congress, any day.

The contextual deficiency of Wolfram results reminds me of John Steinbeck’s meditation on the problems of measuring a fish:

The Mexican sierra has 17 plus 15 plus 9 spines in the dorsal fin. These can easily be counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our hands are burned, if the fish sounds and nearly escapes and finally comes in over the rail, his colors pulsing and his tail beating the air, a whole new relational externality has come into being – an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus the fisherman. The only way to count the spines of the sierra unaffected by this second relational reality is to sit in a laboratory, open an evil-smelling jar, remove a stiff colorless fish from the formalin solution, count the spines, and write the truth. . . . There you have recorded a reality which cannot be assailed – probably the least important reality concerning either the fish or yourself.

It is good to know what you are doing. The man with his pickled fish has set down one truth and recorded in his experience many lies. The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, nor does he smell that way.

- Steinbeck, John. 1941. The Log from the Sea of Cortez

So Wolfram Alpha isn’t what people think it is. It isn’t a Google killer. It isn’t a better search engine than Google, Yahoo, MSN or even Wikipedia. It isn’t really a search engine at all.

It is also pretty uninspiring. A lot of attention has been directed towards how *different* it is, and much has been made of the various witty responses returned by some search phrases. Sure it’s different, and its novelty value is enough to ensure we’ll all check it out at least once. But is different better? Is different enough to change our habits? Is different enough to make us persevere with a lesser solution that offers to human understanding what KFC offers to human nutrition?

It can’t be. It shouldn’t be. And it won’t be. Expectations are too high and substance is too low. Wolfram Alpha will never make it as an alternative or successor to traditional search. At best, it will become a new feature or algorithmic enhancement to Yahoo, Google or Microsoft.

But maybe that was the plan all along.

Yeah, sorry about that (I’m not really). I’ve been deliberately silent for the past couple of months, a combination of experimentation with Twitter (shock and horror – I’ve been cheating you with another publishing format!) and also just to give myself some time to reflect on some pretty major life changes in the works. In case you hadn’t heard already, I’m gonna be a dad. That’s right, sports fans, Parker 2.0 due for beta release on September 21st. It’s set to be a girl, apparently, but I couldn’t care less so long as she (a) is healthy and (b) doesn’t grow up to date guys like me. If there’s any karma in this universe she undoubtably will, but I’ll shoot that fucker cross that bridge when I come to it.

Anyhoo, time to get back into some bloggy goodness. I’ve accumulated a lot of random crap to rant about over the past few months, so stay tuned for a tidal wave of rage, inappropriate humour and ill-formed opinion over the next few days. First on my shit list: Wolfram Alpha

It’s good to be back.

Bwahahahahahaha!

We all saw it coming, but frankly I’m amazed it took so long.

The news media have been circulating the usual clichés from insiders citing external factors such as ‘the current retail environment’. Bullshit. The fact of the matter is, Ferrit never had a viable business model and seemed hell-bent on throwing money at a problem that could only be solved with smarts and balls.

A wee word of advice to any cash-heavy corporates looking to speculate on the next Interweb bubble: if you don’t believe in your product, neither will anyone else.