The GMail Man and More From Two Gmail Users Just Trying To Understand

This morning my friend, Alex Conner,  a programmer at nFrame in Indianapolis,  sent me a link to the Mashable article about the Gmail Man.  I wondered for just a moment why I was getting this link first thing in the morning, well, first thing in my morning which begins a bit later than I’d like.  But then our background on the subject hit me: our ongoing conversation about switching  from GoogleApps to Microsoft 365.   A lot of people I know have been having the same conversation in light of a number of sub rosa activities being implemented by Google against certain groups they don’t like.  It does get people a little nervous and thinking a little bit more about their future with Google.  Especially in light of Google’s recent Gmail intervention campaign.

Alex and I have quite a philosophical history when discussing the state of tech and current tech news.  Out of those conversations comes some great blog fodder, which both of us being so busy, we often let slip into the ether.   And I thought the the Gmail Man would be no exception.   This time, though, I decided not to let that happen and share some of the narrative of our conversation with you.

The line that really grabbed me, I told him, was this: ”Maybe Google had it coming, particularly after its own recent snarky video offering a Gmail Intervention.”  It’s a pretty definitive take on the situation.  I didn’t see the video myself  but I was pretty much turned off about the arrogance of the campaign on face value.  I’m thinking to myself:  Right. Like I’m going to help you, Google,  get people onto a product that you may turn off and discontinue without warning at any time. As an IT Director, this doesn’t sound like a good plan to win clients and influence people to me.

I have always been appalled, I told Alex, -which I reminded him from our past discussions – about the way the hi-tech community in general conducts business.  It’s never been good and it comes back to bite you….eventually.  It broke the standard consumer/business model that most people knew and had a history with.  People didn’t like buying licenses for software at ungodly prices for something that was perceived as a thin CD (those are the things you get music on right?) packaged strategically in a big empty box to make it look substantial and not get real live support for it.   You add  on to that the constant updates that ‘shoved the chicken around the plate’ for special interest users but often frustrated the main consumer and even a respectable group of developers.  Then guess what?  The bite came as web services and SaaS came and undercut a lot of that market. There are other examples, too numerous to to mention,  that followed.  I then reminded him of yet another evidence of the same troubles in tech land with the article he had previously sent: “Now the tech market will take a further hit based on your article from Tech Republic the other day.”

Yes,  there is a growing awareness that its not all that pretty and slick behind the keyboard anymore.  You had an industry that was predicated on constant and sudden changes that strangely thought it could conversely create longevity for its core.  I said in conclusion: ” I think they’re all drinking some kool-aid out there in Google land.  Because its obvious they don’t “get it”.  They are not the end of the trail.   They can’t start enacting draconian changes irrespective of the trust they’ve engendered and not get some pushback from the public.  Some one else (Microsoft 365 maybe even)  will come up with a different idea that the disgruntled masses will see as better (It may even be better).   But the point is that they (the masses) will change.  Capitalism and The Abolition of Man will see to that.”

Alex’s response was: “Yep.”

We both laughed.  I wondered at that moment, like the people in The Gmail Man, if Google were reading our email.

“Hey, Google, you out there?  Read this and weep.  And stop being evil!”

We both laughed again.  I had to say that because it was Google who told us long ago  in their unofficial corporate motto:  ”Don’t be evil” .

So what happened?

I’m not sure of the details.  Life is so complicated anymore.  But I am reminded as I watch videos like  ”Google intervention” and “The Gmail Man” that Malcolm Muggeridege was right: “There is no new news.  Just old news happening to new people.”

Will we pay attention this time and learn from it?

ADDENDUM 8/7/2011

Last night TechCrunch released a story titled,  With Google, There Will Be Bad Blood, a riff off the Daniel Day-Lewis film “There Will Be Blood“.    As I read it, I couldn’t help but think of the blog post I had just written, “The Gmail Man”.   As usual, Alex and I were sharing links fast and technically curious on this one, too.  I share below our comments (with his permission, thanks friend!):

Alex:  ”Increasingly, Google is trying to do everything. And they have the arrogance to think that they can. And it’s pissing people off.”

Yep.

Me: Yeah. Didn’t know if you saw “There Will Be Blood” and remembered Daniel Planiview’s straw-sucking speech at the end.

If they (Google)  had just concentrated on making their UC top notch it wouldn’t have been such a blood bath. But its like they can’t focus on any one thing (or don’t want to). I could understand the ‘can’t focus ‘because there is so much talent within. You can’t blame a man or an organization for the depth and breadth of its talent. But its this driven push to copy others rather than get out in front that defines to others the “evil” that has fired the ire of their competitors and a growing number of their users.

Alex: Yeah; if Google was really trying to do what they say with releasing technologies like Android and the like the would have incubated separate startups. Instead, Android is saddled with being a great Google product instead of a great Mobile product. It goes on and on.

Yes it does…

Wordbooker: Promote your entire website on Facebook

Recently I was assigned the task of promoting our yearly signature event: FHL Week.  It’s an entire week of ‘Backyard Missions’ outreach to the neighborhoods and people of the city of Indianapolis and its outlying areas.   Anything from cleaning gas stations bathrooms to light construction renovation is offered to businesses and private dwellings alike.  Project ideas are generated by area church leaders and supported by FHL International, Inc. (Faith, Hope and Love International) beginning around April and May and in July everything is ready to go to kick off the spontaneity of outreach that follows during FHL Week  in July.

FHL is a very mobile organization.  We podcast, vodcast and gather pictures about our work in real time and then post them to our various social media.  On a daily basis that can be a lot of work without some automation, during FHL Week its almost next to impossible to keep with the flow of incoming posts that have to be edited before being posted to the web site.  With Facebook we have both our president’s  profile page plus our org’s “fan” page.  Having a tool that can post to both simultaneously or to either is a godsend.  That’s where WordBooker comes in.

Wordbooker is a social media tool that allows you to do simultaneous auto-postings to two Facebook pages and updates those pages when ever they are edited.   It’s an extremely robust application that allows a great deal of control at the poster level.  The settings page is huge and can be a little intimidating to the novice user because it allows for a great deal of customization and over-ride but Wordbooker provides some helpful documentation and they have a Facebook Fan page of their own where you can report any issues.  One thing to remember is the settings are a little tricky at first.  Incorrect settings can cause you to double post and you’ll want to avoid this by making sure the republish settings are correctly configured for your needs.

Author’s Note: As of this posting , Facebook, is having some problems on their end and have been reporting since Thursday (9/2/2010) that the API was experiencing Key errors and today WordBooker reports that there is trouble with sessions expiring without warning.  Indeed, I had to reconnect to Facebook only moments ago on the WordBooker settings page.  Happily, everything is back to normal and Wordbooker is publishing!

VaultPress: No Hassle Online BackUp For Your WordPress Blog

It’s been some studying for a final, a project proposal done, container gardening, house cleaning, social media management, other WordPress blogging, school starting, and some web site maintenance (also WordPress) in between the time of my last post and now.   In all that busyness, there are a few things that I tend to forget.   Backing up files is one of the easiest things to forget and but one of the things you should never forget. All that hard work online could be easily lost.

You could DIY with your hosting provider, but why take on one more hassle when your “To-Do” list is piling up?

There’s a relatively new service out there that claims to do the trick (more on that in a moment) called VaultPress.  Matt Mullenweg announced it back in March.  Since that time, VaultPress has established itself on Twitter, its own blog, and been heralded by TechCrunch.   VaultPress is brought to you by the makers of WordPress and designed especially for WordPress blogs and sites.  But right now its still in Beta so you have to get a golden ticket and its one neat sign-up form.

They have an intriguing video intro and a testimonial page, but the reason I got interested is that a twitter friend who is the CEO of a very large publishing company and who blogs frequently posted this tweet:

Well, ok then!  An endorsement just like they advertised.  I guess I better sign-up.

Mashable: “WordPress Theme Thesis Maker Backs Down, Adopts GPL”

With the relaunch of NanoWeek, I started out with coverage of the WordPress/Thesis debate not expecting an end to the debate quite so soon.  But having had to rest up from my previous day’s exposure to the 104 degree  heat index in the midwest, I might have “missed this train” except for my good geek pal, Alex Conner, who sent Mashable’s link my way.

Reading Mashable’s  headlines was like a nice cup of hot coffee to start the day. But as the article goes on to state about the start of the issue between Thesis and WordPress,  I wasn’t the only one sleeping.  As reported by Jolie O’Dell, Pearson was able to do what he did because the community didn’t step in until the number of users of Thesis collected attention enough to get an interview:

The sleeping dog was lying quite peacefully until Mixergy’s Andrew Warner conducted an explosive interviewwith Chris Pearson, creator of Thesis. We say “explosive” in the sense that the blogosphere (and other social media spheres) exploded as the video racked up views. As Pearson revealed the financial success he’d seen from his should-have-been-at-least-partially-free-and-open-source software, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg fired back on Twitter. This testy exchange culminated in another Mixergy interview, this time a face-off between the two gents. A lawsuit was a-brewin’(1)

Well, the sleeping dog, like myself, though eventually did awake with an explosion of  debate.  And in just a week or so, has, because of the power of social media, settled into a new day with a nice peaceful resolve.

In this case, WordPress remains open and free to all…and can now be fully supported by WordPress.  As Matt Mullenweg puts it:

“This has taken a lot of my time over the past few days and was going to consume more if it went forward,” he wrote on Twitter today. “Thrilled, however, that Thesis is now legal and in compliance… What’s going to be far more useful to Thesis is the fixes we can send him now — which is the most beautiful part of open source.” (2)

That’s the beauty why Open Source is what it is and why all of us in that community support it.

And it’s always good to wake up to a good end to a ticklish problem.

Resources:

(1) “WordPress Theme Thesis Maker Backs Down, Adopts GPL”, Mashable, Jolie O’ Dell

(2) Ibid

The Relaunch of NanoWeek

I started this blog originally as a commentary on the huge changes happening to the Internet and Education.  These things still interest me but since then I’ve taken a different path in IT.   After some encouragement from a few mentors, I have decided to relaunch NanoWeek as a blog about my WordPress tips, tricks, and struggles.   But along the way I’ll share what I’ve learned these past 5 years about:

• Web Design and Development in the age of CMS
• Social Media Management for Faith-based Non-profits
• CMS Management with a focus on Information Architecture
• Unified Communication on a shoestring budget

It’s been a useful five years to me and I hope what I share will be useful to you.

The Anatomy of a Meme: What Goes Viral?

“Making things go viral on the Internet is an elusive art…” according to an article run on Tech Crunch in August of 2010.  I would still have to agree with that.  I’d even use the term “magic” for attempting to make something go viral without incorporating what John Peretti suggests are the 5 Rules For How To Make Things Go Viral.   With the release a few months back of Facebook’s “Insights” more and more netizens are aware of a new definition of what gets our attention: “virality” – Facebook posts that go “viral” with some percentage of that being quantified.

So what makes something go viral?  What is it that grabs our attention AND gets our friends’ attention (Reed’s Law or the Social Media Effect) as well?  The something is a meme and how it propagates so quickly on the Internet I think is best understood by qualifying what kind of things make a meme go viral.  What is the anatomy of a meme?

Having a client drive me to give a clearer definition of this “elusive art” and talking that over with a friend who suggested the title of this article after looking at my categories, I decided to write this post.  And as I promised, attribution for the title idea goes to my friend and fellow geek, Jeremy Hodges, former graphic artist now evangelist living deep in the heart of TX.

So without further ado and much hope that these insights will prove helpful in your understanding of what goes viral, here is my list.

Things that go viral (true viral memes) fall somewhere under these categories:

• the unexpected (ex: great but unexpected performances from previous unknowns like Susan Boyle at 48 and (then) frumpy (and what’s wrong with that, I ask?!) singing like a Broadway star in a jaw-dropping performance. Ted Williams, the homeless man with the “Million dollar voice” was another “unexpected” )
• the super hilarious (slapstick and the uber-cute, political parodies, etc. Ex: Medieval Help Desk  )
• rubber-neck accidents and atrocities (ex: the little chinese girl  who gets run over  twice and is passed by 18 people who do nothing to help her. This is a category where a news story gets run by several different content producers which defines it as viral)
• anything in the OMG category: horrendously bad singers and performances, famous people trying to get attention doing the outrageous, the disgusting etc. Ex: Chris Crocker’s ‘Leave Britany Alone‘  Disclaimer: Vulgar language)
• the RickRoll effect: self-explanatory (google it)
• the educationally mind-blowing (ex: the ever-popular and once prophetic “Shift Happens” More recently, the Known Universe)
• the “gifted” ( can be great but not necessarily great ( perceived as great is often good enough)  - the latest releases from pop and rock stars come under this one)

Some I have not listed here because they come under the category of  Peretti’s “Big Seed Marketing” (Rule #3).   These would include movie campaigns and the like that are paid for.

What makes a meme go truly viral?  With the above categories in mind, maybe you can grab that elusive quality!

New BuddyPress Plugin: Better Membership Directories

Telegistic today reported on the new BuddyPress plugin being developed for the  CUNY Academic Commons.  This is exciting news for educators who are building and developing self-sustainable LMS apart from what their universities provide through what used to be called Global Learning Systems (GLS) such as OnCourse, BlackBoard and Angel.   It’s also a boon to  those who believe in the democratized education movement and see  BuddyPress along with ScholarPress as coming a long way in filling the customization gap that instructors need.

The new BuddyPress plugin is only in Beta right now so its not recommended for general public use just yet.

I’ll be discussing more of the newer ScholarPress/BuddyPress goodies  and what you can do with them to deliver a customized course experience in an upcoming post.

Hamming It Up With Grandpa: Where My Interest in Technology and Music Started and How I Miss Him

I used to wonder where I got my interest in technology and music and writing. But I didn’t have too look to far to know from which direction the answer came. The writing comes from my Aunt Faris, but that’s a subject for another day. It was from her brother, my Grandpa Eddy that I got interested in technology and music.

He used to work on his Ham radio up in the attic of the house on Wildwood while I would sit patiently in the corner so as not to interrupt him from this magical conversation across the airwaves. I was buried deep in old books that belonged to my aunt and my mom when they were little girls. So we usually didn’t speak and most times no one spoke back from those big black boxes with the tubes exposed that he had built himself from spare parts. But every once in awhile, in-between the static and the occasional “CQ, CQ”, I would hear him say, the magic would happen. There would be a voice from far away. Then he would put me up on his lap and let me speak into that amazing chrome grilled upright microphone. Later, with pride in his voice, he would tell me we were speaking to someone clear across the country. That was just magic to me then. When my brother and I stayed overnight, I couldn’t wait to go up and listen in. But then other things happened in my life: school, band, summer music camp, friends, and soon Grandpa and the little attic at the top of the stairs on Wildwood faded into the static of history. Now when I sit and muse on those times, I realize just how much I miss him.

He was a dark man. So dark they used to call him an Hawaiian. And yet when he was five years old he had long blond hair like the Buster Brown boy. His father was a railroad man and he was killed when my grandpa was five, caught between two cars coupling on the tracks. I often wonder what that really did to Grandpa on the inside. I’ll never know. People in our modern day seem less tough, unable to see a thing through these days. But my grandpa was a steady man and took care of his family by going to work every day at the Chrysler plant as an Inspector. It meant so much to the family that most of them have never bought another make.

He gave all his pay checks to my grandmother because he knew she’d take better care of them. He took a big, black pitched-roof lunchbox, the kind where the thermos fits in the top, to work and brought it home everyday and laid it on the top of the refrigerator in Grandma’s kitchen just as soon as he got in the door. Then he was off to his recliner and some wrestling on TV, adding his wicked-fun commentary on all the commercials in-between.

Yes, Grandpa had his wild side, too. He used to play drums they say for the strippers at some dives in downtown Indianapolis and also for small gigs at the Indiana Roof Ballroom for a few dollars. When he was retired he got a banjo for his birthday to remind him of those days and he would often sit out under the elm tree at Wildwood and pick a few chords as he chewed on an old toothpick and stared intensely into the fret board, squeaking his fingertips across the strings.

You see, Grandpa smoked for most of his life, Camels, until the doctor told him they’d kill him one day. Then he came straight away home and gave his last pack to my grandmother and told her to get rid of them for him. It was the last day he ever smoked. After that he took up the toothpick habit. He “smoked” toothpicks like a 3 pack-a-day man. He used to tell the joke on himself that he was going to die of Dutch Elm’s disease.

I can see him almost right now walking out into the cold midnight air reaching into the sleeve of his suit coat, one sleeve half on one arm and the other empty sleeve hanging in the air while he put a toothpick from the restaurant we had just eaten at into his mouth and begin to chew on it. Odd, how a child codifies the gesticulations and movements of an adult and somehow years later emulates them in programmed homage. I know whenever I pick up a toothpick, my memory banks look up the data and send back the request so that I know just how its supposed to be chewed on.

Sometimes, when I get to missing him a bit, I watch the end of The Shawshank Redemption where Red gets out of prison and walks through the gates of Shawshank with that suit on, that rumpled brown suit hanging on that tall, lanky body. The tie is pulled away from the neck for comfort and the brown fedora brim is creased sideways like a sailor’s cap and set back on his head as if he’d been out after church service too long on a warm day and the clothes were ready to get back on the hanger. I want to run up beside him and grab that arm and hang on him as I used to do. Just to feel the magic of his presence. Morgan Freeman reminds me a lot of my grandfather with his slow, laconic ways and ambling gate. Eddy Myers was a slow man, too. A slow man with a mischievous sense of humor almost like a five year old little boy who was still looking to tease his older sister but he just had too many chores to get done. I sure do miss him.

Open Source vs. Open Enough (to trap you inside): The WordPress/Thesis Theme Conflict

“Pearson argued that rather than hurting the WP community, Thesis has enhanced WP and WP themes by attracting “thousands” of new users to WP.” (1)

Prima Facie (on the surface of things).  That’s where the popular argument for “I’m breaking your rules but look at the benefits to you” comes from.  It comes from looking at the short term benefits….usually first to the person breaking the rules who then wants to convince you that you will benefit, too, by breaking or compromising those same rules. But the reality is that those rules were there for a reason, maybe in some cases not a good reason, but a reason worth looking into before removing it entirely. And usually, the way to do that is not the way Chris Pearson, creator of the Thesis Theme for WordPress , has done by openly flouting it and then claiming in so many words to Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress: look what a marketing favor I’ve done you!  By Pearson’s logic in the quote above  should he think he is entitled to a cut from the WordPress marketing budget?

If you have not been following this recent WordPress/Thesis debate, it first started on Twitter between Matt and Chris 3)

RT @copyblogger: @photomatt You better watch it Matt. We invited you to sue us to settle the GPL, but libel gets you a new world of hurt.(4)

Doesn’t sound any different than the schoolyard bully drawing a line in the sand, does it.  And yet, Pearson would not have any Thesis theme  at all to charge his users for if it weren’t for the hard work of all the other contributors to the  WordPress Open Source Community who gladly adhered to the Open Source GPL.  This debate has been carried by a number of blogs in the development and WordPress community and for back story I encourage you to read them.  IT World’s Brian Profitt does a straightforward job of illuminating the GPL/Derivation nuances  issue. And Promomusings penetrates more deeply into the conversation with Matt and CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark as well as others with an opinion and argument, both for and against this debate.

I’m not a GPL expert, which is why I point you to the other blogs who have already covered this aspect better than I could.  My purpose here is to be of support to the WordPress Community and the standards that started it and brought everyone this far.  So I’m throwing out some things to think about when you are looking for the easy way around developing for your clients with WordPress. Think about balancing whether its worth learning and coming up to speed so you can contribute back against getting more clients out the door with something that may not be well supported in the future because it has been sold off.

The bottom line, as those for the “just business” view of this debate should acknowledge, is that they wouldn’t have a framework to build themes on if it weren’t FREE to begin with.  The only “payment” that was asked back was that you contribute and/or license what was going to reap you financial benefit.  This is readily  summed up in this comment:

But yeah, when it comes to development frameworks, I’m absolutely a GPL/BSD/MIT-style sort of guy. Come to think of it, I’ve never paid for a development framework, but I tend to get a lot out of them and contribute back once I’m up to speed. It’s a nice way to work and build community. (5)

Scott A hits the nail on the head.  His fellow commenter, Danny, epitomizes the “business is business” attitude that reduces previous business agreements, policies and rules such as the GPL to nothing more than  “feelings” when they get in the way of your money-making.  But isn’t that why they are there in the first place? To make the community safe from predatory practices, that only at first, cross the line in a seeming beneficial fashion only to keep pushing the line past the next few hundred miles.  Nice to know that the next time you draw up your company’s mission statement, vision, 5 year plan, and policies. Remember that in the future:  if someone wants to break what you both agreed upon to make money all they have to do is define your agreement as “feelings”.:

Standing up for WordPress’ core freedoms and the GPL might make you feel good at the end of the day. However, business is business and there is no place for “feelings” there.(7)

Agreements are there for a reason.  Boundaries drawn are there for a purpose.  They create trust and they make for a stable way to make a living for the greatest number.  As Matt himself states:

However you can vote with your dollars and your feet and move to a GPL alternative. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, those who would trade freedom for convenience deserve neither. It’s a better choice in the long run anyway, history has shown just like WordPress passed up its proprietary competitors, the same will probably happen in the theme world. (6)

He’s right.  Our economy is in the mess its in because too many people listened to the Chris Pearsons of this world who skirted agreements in order to make the faster buck….and then locked people into an “open enough” deal that was in essence a trap that, in the end, caused them more trouble than it was worth for the small conveniences and easy wins up front.

Author’s Note: Here is an excellent breakdown of how WordPress Themes derive from WordPress by Mark Jaquith

Resources:

(1) Brian Profitt, “WordPress/Thesis Conflict Highlights GPL Nuances”, http://www.itworld.com/open-source/114247/wordpressthesis-conflict-highlights-gpl-nuances , July 16, 2010, IT World

(2) Image Source: Technically Personal; http://techpp.com/2009/05/12/thesis-wordpress-theme-no-big-deal-about-it

(3) Jeffro, “How To Screw Up Your Image”, http://www.wptavern.com/how-to-screw-up-your-image

(4) Matt Mullenweg, http://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1656087626

(5) Scott A, Commenter, http://www.weareinstrument.com/

(6) Matt Mullenweg, Commenter, http://ma.tt/

(7) Danny, Commenter, http://dannyarr.com/

Personal SuperComputers, AI, and What Does That Have To Do With the Future of Education In A Web 2.0 World?

Online Education, AI, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0

We’ve already discussed Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, in a couple of previous NanoWeek blog entries and we have briefly mentioned the subject of Intelligent Agents. And while this week’s entry is not about Intelligent Agents, per se, it is about another kind of machine intelligence…Artificial Intelligence or AI for short. So what’s the connection between Web 3.0, online learning in the Web 2.0 and 3.0 age, and AI? The “glue” or connective tissue between these three concepts (and of interest to educators now living the reality of these concepts) is discussed in a book written a decade ago By Roger C. Schank.

Tell Me A Story
It’s called: Tell Me A Story – A New Look At Real and Artificial Memory, a very fascinating work considering how we index and construct stories, how we use stories as metaphors for understanding the context of things and relate to others and how this relates to computers and artificial intelligence. It’s a concept that noted writers and authors, G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, hit upon in their day when realizing that we tend to place our ideas not in the construct of the abstract but in clear mental images. This realization has a great impact on the way we design computers to “think” and this innovation in thinking was picked up on by Professor Schank in connection with his research in the field of AI. I don’t know what he is up to now, but Schank was at one time (and may still be) a John Evans Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Psychology, and Education at Northwestern University. He used to be the Director of The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Yale University. But back to our story…..

You Gotta Let Them Create Pictures in Their Mind

In her article Read Aloud, Virginia, Patricia Muller states one of the corrolarry discoveries being made as technology was making greater advances in “streamlining” visual communications: “Recent brain research confirms that optimum brain function and development is still dependent upon storytelling. In fact, it is the most effective stimulation for young developing brains. This is because brain development in children is dependent upon induced imagery. That is, in order for the brain to develop properly, it must be stimulated; instead of “use it or lose it,” it’s “use it or never get it.” Induced imagery means creating pictures in the mind.” (emphasis mine)(1)

Recall, that the writers G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis (who were well versed in the field of apologetics) had come to the realization that people tend to think in mental images. Chesterton consistantly used the imagery of language when forming logic arguments from the 2nd level which is Drama (Level 1 is Theory and Level 3 is “Kitchen Table Talk”). For example, he illustrates that when we rely on reason alone, we tend to overlook the problem of the individual becoming trapped in the “clean and well-lit prison of one idea”. And in order to break a person thinking that way out of that “prison”, the writing cannot successfully argue from an abstract position but must “snap the spell” because we, as listeners and readers, think naturally in metaphoric images, in stories. (2) Thus, Schank’s research into story indexing has a great impact on how we design a computer to “think” as artificial intelligence. As Shank writes: “Stories give life to past experiences; stories make events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves.”1 In other words, memories are really stories which can be recalled at a later time. Children who are exposed to information in the context of a story can better recall it later.” (3)

Indexing the Story

Now this explanation of recalling is very important to the idea of indexing information for later recall when it comes to complexities in thought and deriving connections. A good illustration of what I am talking about is one in which I used Schank’s observations on memory and indexing while analyzing one of Shakespere’s most complex plays The Winter’s Tale:

“The Winter’s Tale is an invocation of the oral tradition, the narrative act to expose the power of what we are told when we are young and without the predisposition to doubt. (Lamb) Some of the stories we are told are, without a doubt, true and sustain us throughout a lifetime and some of the stories we are told (and we tell ourselves) do not last much further than the damage they cause. Stories seem to be an inconsistent form to convey truth, don’t they? But we still need stories. Why? Schank asserts people need a context to help them relate what they have heard to what they already know (15). He goes onto to relate: “When a decision-making heuristic (a rule of thumb), is presented to us without a context, we cannot decide the validity of the rule we have heard, nor do we know where to store this rule in our memories.” So how do we learn to distinguish what is true and what is false? How do we train our perceptive powers to distinguish between right and wrong? (NWT)” (4)

Why is this seemingly disparate piece of information important and pertinent to our discussion? Because it illustrates the point Schank is making about indexing. Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale is to complexity of idea illustrated in words as Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Piano Concerto is to complexity of idea illustrated in music. The Winter’s Tale is considered the most difficult of Shakespeare’s plays to understand. Likewise, The Rach 3 Concerto is considered the most difficult of musical pieces to play. Both the play and the musical piece are as one professor of mine put it: “a big rambling barn of a context” used to distill a very deep and complex concept/answer within the context of a verbal story or musical story. This is the crucial point on which designing artificial intelligence hangs: searching for facts is not searching for stories. It’s an entirely different matrix we need to address and connect with. The semantics are vast. Schank further outlines the matrix of storing stories in memory by referring to their framework as “story skeletons”:

“The key point here is that once we find a belief and connected story, no further processing, no search for other beliefs need be done. We rarely look to understand a story in more than one way.” (p.73) “The skeletons we use indicate our point of view. Storytelling causes us to adapt a point of view. With this adaptation comes a kind of self-definition, however. We are the stories we tell. …As we come to rely upon certain skeletons to express what has happened to us, we become incapable of seeing the world in any other way. The skeletons we use cause specific episodes to conform to one another. The more a given skeleton is used, the more stories it helps form begin to cohere in memory. Consequently, we develop consistent, and rather inflexible points of view.” (P.170)

This is why some have espoused the old Julius Caesar quote: “Experience is the best teacher” as a maxim, if rather flawed. That perception is based on the filter with which we may see a certain situation, event or person. And that filter may (and often does) lead us to many erroneous conclusions and labels

In regards to the memory concept of labeling, Schank states: “An incident is remembered in terms of how it is seen in the first place. That is, labeling is in many respects an arbitrary process. He goes on to apply this to the concept of categorization which we would naturally do in a relational database of singular facts for which a particular query would define the results as facts combined in the form of information. But with stories the categorization is much more complex as in the following statement which recognizes the effect of perception on information gathering:”…And, of course, even that last categorization is arbitrary since one person might characterize the victim as being blond, while the other might characterize him as being fat.” (P.222)

Intelligence Depends On Clever Indexing

The process of learning for an artficial intelligence, then, is much more complex than we might imagine. “A good memory, then means an attentive labeling facility during processing or you aren’t going to remember what you don’t find interesting, so the more that interests you the better memory you are likely to have.” (emphasis mine) (P.223-224) “Yet what we learn is still entirely up to us. No one teaches us how to index after all. We make up our own way of seeing the world,…” (P.113) “Knowing a great deal about a subject means being able to detect differences that will reflect themselves in differences in indexing. In other words, intelligence depends on clever indexing.” (Italics mine) (Schank uses an example of a man who had a well-read background that included military history for one observation:” Our expert is intelligent about military history. He sees nuances where others would not. He analyzes new stories well enough to be able to relate them to old stories that might not obviously be the same.” (P.113)

Creating New Stories By Making New Connections

The intelligence we are looking for then in Artificial Intelligence (and the path that Schank alludes to in his book) is one that works off the capacity of random access/case-based connections which allow for both lateral and vertical nuanced thinking. Years ago, there was a memory game called Trivial Pursuit that was quite popular. It worked off the premise of a knowledge-based thought pattern. Call and response-question/answer regurgitation. Access the right memory bank in your brain and you won. But later on another game came out that took the Trivial Pursuit idea one step better and combined 2 ways of accessing information and was a more precise illustration of what Schank is talking about and a step in the direction of what AI needs to do: 7 trivia questions were asked as if in a sequence, all seemingly disparate in nature, but had a commonality which pointed to a final answer. Use sequential, knowledge base memory to answer all the separate questions correctly. Discover the commonality and you won. I loved this game because I was good at it. It required the kind of random access/case-based reasoning that comes from being able to see connections over vast territories of seemingly unrelated factoids, disciplines, experience, and histories. The game led your mind through the process of creating new stories by making new connections. That’s the territory AI has to conquer.

The Need To Mentally Index Our Own Stories

Even with this grandiose ambition, wisdom should caution us as was illustrated in the famous children’s story Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, that we will only be able to get the machine to appear to do what we can do…faster. Yet more important questions remain for us: what really was going on in the human mind in those moments when we were doing those same mental computations more slowly? Have we discovered all there is to the process? Those are the questions that are going to get answered in the coming years of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. And if the speed of information delivery is a worry to many of us now when it comes to getting students to reflect, to be pedestrian for a purpose, on what they are doing (which is the process of learning as we have understood it up till now), what might be the price paid to society when we don’t have to mentally index our own stories at all?

That’s it for NanoWeek. Keep Clicking….

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©NanoWeek, M.S.Reed 2008

(1) Read Aloud, Virginia; Patricia Muller, 2000

(2) Orthodoxy, The Maniac, G. K. Chesterton, Editor, Craig M. Kibler, 2002, p41

(3) Read Aloud, Virginia; Patricia Muller, 2000

(4) Knowledge and Belief Aided By Time: The Winter’s Tale and Shakespeare’s New World of Faith, M. S. Reed, 2004, Epsilen ShareIT object and uploaded under class wiki