Arteth’s parents phoned us at Christmas from Missouri, and mentioned that the previous night they’d had ten inches of snow. But that was it - despite a few deaths from traffic accidents, it wasn’t that big a deal for most people. London recently managed to gridlock after a few flakes. People were trapped in cars overnight. The rail network collapsed.

The old nationalised British Rail had snow clearing equipment and spare locomotives on standby in areas where snow could be a problem. The new, more “efficient” privatised rail service doesn’t.

Ben Hammersley sums up the current amazing weather of light snow and slightly freezing temperatures rather well:

“Minus 2! Minus 2! Minus 2c and the country shuts down? For fucks sake, people. Grit the roads, and put on another jumper. ”

The Vietnam War (the American one, not the French one, or the Chinese one) was started using a faked incident. The Gulf War (not the original Iran/Iraq Gulf War, the American one) was only passed through Congress after faked evidence was presented (the famous baby story).

Bush & Blair are quite clearly desperate for an excuse to invade Iraq. What will they find?

Link: The U.S. Is Looking for an Excuse To Fight

I’m running the Mandrake Cooker XFree86 4.2.99 packages, and the new cursors are just horrible. Mac OS X does shadowed mouse pointers very well. My XFree86 is not doing them well. The ‘insert text’ pointer is the worst - it looks like a stain on the monitor. How do I get rid of them?

A quick plug for a friend’s new blog:

Link: Samwise

Somehow most reports on the new Apple stuff missed this: an Apple X11 package for Mac OS X, with integrated Aqua window manager, Dock compatibility and Quartz Extreme Open GL acceleration for all windows, not just 3D apps. Good Apple.

Unfortunately, Apple’s new “Airport Extreme” 54mb wifi cards will not fit into iBooks. They’re smaller, but a completely different card type. Bad Apple, bad.

Link: X11 For Mac OS X

In LazyWeb and RSS: Given Enough Eyeballs, Are Features Shallow Too? , Clay Shirky writes about how developers could take advantage of the lazyweb by using sites like lazyweb.org to learn what people want.

Early in the article he writes: “The original formulation was “If you wait long enough, someone will write/build/design what you were thinking about.” But it is coming to mean “I describe a feature I think should exist in hopes that someone else will code it.””

I have to admit I’m more interested in the original lazyweb idea, but both perspectives are perfectly valid. Clay Shirky’s article has focused on the second formulation, on deliberately using what I refer to as “public invocation” in my personal take on the lazyweb idea.

In my post ‘Defining The Lazyweb’ I theorised that there are many separate lazywebs, each one forming around a particular subculture of Internet users. Normally the only people likely to notice a public invocation are those inside the same lazyweb as the invoker. This narrows the focus of the lazyweb, and it will produce products that closely match it’s member’s interests.

This is good for the lazyweb’s members, but it can often lead to products that may not meet the needs of the general public very well. The open source community is the obvious example, I suppose.

Clay Shirky believes that a system like lazyweb.org has the potential to bridge the gaps between different lazywebs by sharing information between communities, and more importantly, sharing information between the productive lazyweb and the general public. It would act as a source of both inspiration and feedback. The main point of Clay Shirky’s article is that this could bring the same benifits to open development as the “many eyes make bugs shallow” mass debugging principle.

Well worth a read, and there’s a Slashdot discussion too.

Updated: I managed to chop out the middle of this post while trying to get it finished during my lunch break, so if you read the earlier version of this and it made no sense, well, it didn’t. I’ve now just cut out the really wibbly bit.

Fits in perfectly with the LazyWeb and RSS article, and my “many lazywebs” ponderings.

Link: Bridging the bubbles

This is a great idea, but I do have some network engineering queries, especially with the practicalities of the “Fully Routable Addresses” paragraph.

Link: The Wireless Commons

I must emphasise that this is only my take on the lazyweb concept. The lazyweb is something I’ve been interested in for years, long before it had a name, and it’s about time I write something about it, even if it ends up as nonsense.

If you’re completely unfamiliar with lazyweb, you can read this earlier post about the origins of the word and lazyweb.org.

Invoking the Lazyweb: Lazyweb demand You can invoke the lazyweb by mentioning a new idea or need on the Internet. You could do this on your blog, on Usenet, a development site like Sourceforge, a bulletin board or forum, a mailing list, any social area of the Internet. You can choose to include your invocation in the www.lazyweb.org feed. By publicly invoking the lazyweb you may get a faster result, as someone could see your request and decide to produce it. They may be already working on what you need, or it may already exist and they can tell you where it is.

However, you don’t have to publicly invoke the lazyweb. You don’t have to tell anyone. You don’t have to even realise you are invoking the lazyweb at all. The lazyweb is the way you receive something, not how you ask for it.

All you need to invoke the lazyweb is an idea or a requirement. Something that you can imagine. It could be an idea for a new type of website, a new way to use XML, or software to do a chore for you. Whatever the idea is, from the ìinventor’sî perspective it’s something currently unavailable that requires effort to create. After you’ve had your idea, you could pay someone to create it, or you could create it yourself. You could persuade a company to create it. Or you could just wait for the lazyweb to provide it.

If you have an idea or a need for something, it’s very likely that there will be other Internet users thinking along similar lines at about the same time. If everyone using the Internet was just a consumer, nothing much would happen. Fortunately many Internet users are both consumers and creators. If ìyourî idea occurs to someone who is a creator/consumer, there’s a good chance they’ll try to use the idea, maybe for fun, profit or just because they need it. To use the open source cliche: other people will have the same itch, and will probably start to scratch before you.

If you start your big, “unique” project, the chances are that someone else will launch “your” idea before you can. So, if you have six good ideas and only have time to work on one of them, don’t worry - the lazyweb will produce the other five for you.

Lazyweb delivery: Lazyweb supply The lazyweb isn’t just about things you invent appearing soon afterwards. It’s quite likely that what you have ìinventedî or searched for already exists, but you haven’t found it. Google is not infallible.

The lazyweb can still provide the goods. Other people are probably searching for the same thing, maybe for the same reasons you are. When Internet users find something obscure and unusual, something they’ve found after a long search, they often tell other people about it. As they are likely to be similar to you, they are likely to announce their find where you will see it. The lazyweb hands you the information you are seeking.

To take advantage of the lazyweb you need to keep your eyes open. Unless you discover that your idea has been created, the lazyweb is useless. Anywhere on the Internet with news and announcements can act as a conduit for the lazyweb. If you publicly invoke the lazyweb someone may contact you with the good news, but it’s mainly up to you to stay aware of new developments.

The network of blogs is a major conduit for the lazyweb. Software announcement sites like Freshmeat and VersionTracker, archives like CPAN and development sites like Sourceforge are specialised but highly effective conduits. Mailing lists, forums, chatrooms and other social areas are also good conduits. Portals and RSS/RDF aggregation and syndication tools make the delivery of lazyweb benefits much less hassle.

The more actively someone uses Internet technology, the more they can benefit from lazyweb.

The Lazyweb is not just about Open Source The lazyweb works best when it delivers free, openly licensed and shareable goods and services. Lazyweb creator/consumers tend to use open licences, and this is what the lazyweb consumer will usually prefer.

However, if the lazyweb process leads someone to sell the idea or not open the source code, I think this still qualifies as a lazyweb effect. The non-creative ìinventorsî still get a product they can use, although it may cost them money or they might not have free use of it.

This is likely to happen with hardware products. It’s easy to supply software and content freely, and near impossible with hardware.

Precedents for the Lazyweb People seem to like arguing about who invented something first. Sometimes a famous scientist or inventor is accused of not really being ìfirstî, as if this is scandalous. Often the debate runs along nationalist lines: did the Americans, British or Germans invent the first computer?

The dull truth is that people working independently but with similar interests and knowledge can come to the same conclusion at around the same time. Usually it’s the person with the best media connections who is recognised as the inventor or discoverer.

This is the same process as the lazyweb. The key difference is scale. The Internet allows information and ideas to spread and evolve very rapidly. The 19th Century ìage of inventionî produced many parallel inventions from a relatively small number of participants with very limited communication. The Internet binds together very large communities of similar people with instant communication. The rate of creative coincidences accelerates as many people have the same idea at the same time. It only takes one person to have the idea and begin work on it for the lazyweb to provide all the others with what they were after, soon after they think of it.

Many different lazywebs I think that the lazyweb concept is more than just a neat side effect of the Internet. It can be seen as an economic system, a model of supply and demand quite different to that of free and planned economic models. It’s also more than just a gift economy, as it can accurately satisfy consumer demand.

The lazyweb cannot provide goods and services to everyone with equal effectiveness. The efficiency of the lazyweb depends on a number of factors. I don’t want to claim any definite list of requirements, but there are some things which are clearly important:

• The lazyweb effect has cultural boundaries. People need to share similar language, interests, and communication forums. This means that there are many separate or overlapping lazywebs with different characteristics.

• Gift culture. The lazyweb is not going to work very well if people aren’t willing to share. The higher a community’s tendency to hoard information and seek personal profit, the weaker the lazyweb will be.

• Low barriers to creativity. The lazyweb will provide software very effectively, as anyone with a computer has the means to write software and distribute software. The only cost is time. The lazyweb will not provide interstellar space travel very effectively, not unless a lot of people have a really, really good idea.

• A high proportion of creator/consumers to consumers. The lazyweb needs a relatively large proportion of consumers who are also able and willing to create what they consume. If very few people in a group are willing to act on their ideas, then the lazyweb will be very weak. Ironicly, if everyone relies on the lazyweb too much, it fails.

• The better a group uses the Internet, the more benefit they will get from the lazyweb. Portal and news sites, chatrooms, RSS channels, blogs and mailing lists all drive the lazyweb. The lazyweb is no use if you can’t find out what it’s offering you.

This means that the more confident and open early adopters of Internet technology will get the first and best lazyweb benefits. The strongest lazyweb economy is the Open Source software community. Over time, as more communities grow and make better use of Internet technology, they will also experience the lazyweb effect.

First, a quick summary of what the lazyweb idea is, and how it grew:

1) Matt Jones coins the term “Lazyweb” to describe taking advantage of a phenomena a lot of people have experienced: having an idea, and then, soon afterwards, finding that someone has just created it. Rather than thinking negatively that you’ve somehow lost “your” new idea, you should see this as a positive thing: your idea has become real without you doing any work.

2) The term bounces around various blogs and starts to settle into regular usage, gaining a wiki definition.

3) Ben Hammersley starts a neat site that in effect collates hyperlinks to people “invoking” the lazyweb, and bundles them into an RSS channel. That way, we can all watch it more easily, and maybe the lazyweb can be even more responsive. The funny thing is that Ben’s site is something of a lazyweb product itself.

During the Yule break I was reading about the lazyweb again, and then wandered over to register.com to make sure I’d renewed this domain. I checked if anyone had registered lazyweb.org, and no one had. I assumed that someone would soon. A few days later I looked again. It was still available, but I noticed that lazyweb.com had been registered by resellers. I then registered lazyweb.org, mainly to stop it going to the resellers, partly because I wasn’t thinking straight.

                                                                                                            Of course, the next morning I was clear headed enough to realise that I had no time to use the domain properly. I'm planning a short essay on the "emerging economic system" that the lazyweb represents, but I wasn't likely to get that finished anytime soon, and that's not much content for a site. I decided to just point the domain name to the first good  useful lazyweb site or utility that appeared. It was the lazyweb thing to do.

                                                                                                            I had to wait only ten hours before I noticed Ben Hammersley's lazyweb tracking site, so he got the domain. I invoked  the lazyweb to "get" content, and he got the domain name via lazyweb.

                                                                                                            The tricky thing now is explaining in more depth how "the lazyweb" is a symptom of  a very important new economic system which also resembles  religion and magic. Hopefully I've still got my old economic anthropology coursebooks somewhere. I can't hope to remember any of the correct terminology now. But I wouldn't be suprised if someone else is editing an article making the exact same points, right now...