archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Here’s a few examples of how Gmail has fared at matching the content of email messages to my Gmail address with advertising content.
A forwarded review of King Arthur gives me “King Arthur Competition” and “King Arthur – Was He Real?” For something this easy and contemporary, I would have expected to see suggestions about movie times and locations, offers to publish my screenplay, and collections of King Arthur collectibles.
An anecdote about Eamon de Valera delivers Shillelagh (sic.), “Irish Clan Aran Sweaters”, and “Classic Irish Imports”. This truly an easy one, since it’s a small pool of similar source terms to sort through. “No, I meant Eamon de Valera, the famous Irish ballet dancer…” Will Gmail suggest links with correct spellings at some future date, or offer correct links to things that you’ve mis-spelled?
A message about another forwarded email sent a few moments before brings “Groupwise email”, “Ecarboncopy.com”, and “Track Email Reading Time”. These are accurate by topic, but not interesting.
A recent email exchange on how to use an excel spreadsheet template card sorting analysis offers four links. Three are sponsored, the other is ‘related’. The sponsored links include “OLAP Excel Browser”, “Microsoft Excel Templates”, and “Analysis Services Guide”. A related link is, “Generating Spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR”. These are simple word matches – none of them really approached the central issue of the conversation, which concerned how to best use automated tools for card sorting.
Last month, in the midst of an exchange about making vacation plans for the 4th of July with family, Gmail offered “Free 4th of July Clip Art”, “Fireworks Weather Forecasts”, and “U.S. Flags and patriotic items for sale”. Given the obvious 4th of July theme, this performance is less impressive, but still solid, offering me a convenience-based service in a timely and topical fashion.
Most interesting of all, a message mentioning a relative of mine named Arena yields links for “Organic Pastas” and “Fine Italian Pasta Makers”. Someone’s doing something right with controlled vocabularies and synonym rings, since it’s clear that Google knows Arena is an Italian surname in this instance and not a large structure for performances: even though it only appeared in the text of the email once, and there was no context to indicate which meaning it carried.
Beyond the obvious – you send me a message, Gmail parses it for terms and phrases that match a list of sponsored links, and I see the message and the links side-by-side – what’s happening here?
Three things:
1. Gmail is product placement for your email. In the same way that the Coke can visible on the kitchen table during a passing shot in the latest romantic comedy from Touchstone pictures is more an advertising message than part of the overall mise en scene, those sponsored links are a commercially driven element of the experience of Gmail that serves a specific agenda exterior to your own.
2. Gmail converts advertisements (sponsored links) into a form of hypertext that should be called advertext. Gmail is creating a new advertext network composed of Google’s sponsored links in companion to your correspondence. Before Gmail, the sponsored links that Google returned in accompaniment to search queries were part of an information space outside your immediate personal universe,
3. Gmail connects vastly different information spaces and realms of thinking. Google’s sponsored links bridge any remaining gap between personal, private, individual conversations, and the commercialized subset of cyberspace that is Google’s ad-verse. You will inevitably come to understand the meaning and content of your messages differently as a result of seeing them presented in a context informed by and composed of advertising.
The implications of the third point are the most dramatic. When all of our personal spaces are fully subject to colonization by the ad-verse, what communication is left that isn’t an act of marketing or advertisement?

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From the good peo­ple of the EFF:
Sen­a­tor Orrin Hatch’s new Induc­ing Infringe­ment of Copy­right Act (S.2560, Induce Act) would make it a crime to aid, abet, or induce copy­right infringe­ment. He wants us all to think that the Induce Act is no big deal and that it only tar­gets “the bad guys” while leav­ing “the good guys” alone. He says that it doesn’t change the law; it just clar­i­fies it.
He’s wrong.
Right now, under the Supreme Court’s rul­ing in Sony Corp. v. Uni­ver­sal City Stu­dios, Inc. (the Beta­max VCR case), devices like the iPod and CD burn­ers are 100% legal — not because they aren’t some­times used for infringe­ment, but because they also have legit­i­mate uses. The Court in Sony called these “sub­stan­tial non-infringing uses.” This has been the rule in the tech­nol­ogy sec­tor for the last 20 years. Bil­lions of dol­lars and thou­sands of jobs have depended on it. Indus­tries have blos­somed under it. But the Induce Act would end that era of inno­va­tion. Don’t let this hap­pen on your watch — tell your Sen­a­tors to fight the Induce Act!

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Five minutes after logging into my shiny new gmail account today and sending out a hello message toa few friends, I got a taste of new technology pranksterism: an old friend sent a reply to my hello loaded with keywords for everyone’s favorite flavors of spam. Naturally, my friend had read the Gmail intro that outlines their keyword targeted ad policy, stating that one of the conditions of participating in the beta was that Google would serve up ads related to the content of my messages within the new UI.
I don’t know how aggressively Google will match ads to content, but I haven’t seen anything tied to Scranton, PA on my screen yet. As a riposte, my friend should soon see plenty of discount remedies for embarrassing medical conditions, debilitating psychological illnesses, and other matters of questionable taste.
Funny or not, I find it a bit spooky that my mail is being parsed in order to drive advertising. Yes, un-encrypted email is basically as private as a post-card – but it’s highly unlikely that the local post office is going to slip a brochure for travel agencies and package vacations into friends’ mailboxes to accompany the post-cards I send them while I’m visiting Barcelona or Tenerife.
And then there are the inevitable followup questions: what kinds of patterns is Google building on top of this? Are they using geomatching to ID clusters of themes within zip codes? Maybe creating a history of my searching behavior and the number of times I follow the links placed by the engine, to establish a baseline for how susceptible I am to advertising? Or how often people in certain networks read and reply to messages with certain kinds of content?
I don’t think paranoia is appropriate, but there is a double-edged sword in every technology – especially one like this that combines accumulating personal data with tremendous interpretive power.
And even if I did sign up for the free account knowing that Gmail use implied acceptance of this practice, privacy remains a fundamental right. You can’t create valid and binding contracts that require or permit illegal activity.
Look out for travel guides to Scranton…

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I’ve loved my shiny new iPod since November of last year, when I gave in to an acute case of technolust and bought the 40GB model. Six months on, despite the entry cost, the inability of Apple products to live happily in a PC universe without loads of expensive accessories, and the disconcerting set of scratches that appeared on the display almost immediately, I’d still say I was very happy.
That is until last week. Apparently, while I was running a standard firmware update (to the 4/28/04 release), the basic file system on my iPod became corrupted without warning, and everything on the pod was — erased. *38 GB* of all sorts of personally and professionally important files evaporated without so much as an unhappy face…
As it so happens, I was planning to wipe and rebuild anyway, so I’ve decided to look at this incident as an example of pre-emptive self-cleansing on the part of an exceptionally eager to please iPod, instead of a catastrophic file system failure.
But I’m still pissed. I have strong memories of using a Mac at a design studio in ’99, and deciding that I should wear a helmet to work because it crashed so often. This reminds me of that in a more personal and equally frustrating way.
And it’s going to cost Apple some money, to boot. I just decided that I’d replace my aging Dell laptop with a tasty new Powerbook – and now I think I’ll be buying something else. Great design and marketing don’t make up for unreliability.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to read the Word of the Day emails that I get from the good people at Merriam Webster and Yourdictionary.com: long enough that I’ve set up a filter directing their daily contributions to the betterment of my vocabulary into a one of those dead-end Outlook folders that you see highlighted in bold, but never manage to do anything other than bulk delete every few months when you recognize the number of unread messages has crossed from two to three digits. (The count of unread words of the day in my folder is now 91 – just about time to purge again.)
But now, thanks to the atrocious epidemic of spam that’s raging without surcease, I don’t need to feel bad about ignoring the latest juicy word to drop into my Inbox.
Now instead of knowing that it will only be shunted aside and ignored for months before its’ summary termination, I can calmly watch as it’s disposed of without ado.
Now all I need to do for a rich and unusual lexical lesson is peruse the subject lines of the dozens of spam messages that the layers of filters deployed by my ISP haven’t corralled as parasitic trash.
Thanks to the pertinacious conclave of spammers who’ve found the means to pollute the Internet with offers of discount medicines and penile enlargement disguised behind word combinations generated by dictionaries and scripts, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of uncanny solecisms gracing my inbox every day.
Things like, “libidinous plutarchy”, “inconspicuous megohm”, “charcoal expectorant”, and others not even worth mentiong despite their remarkable incongruity bring me unforeseen verbal richness.
Aside from the surrealists and their experiments with automatic writing during the 30’s, who but a spammer would ever think to send out a message about “albania seethe pfennig columbia” – which by the way would make a great name for comic book villainness “You haven’t won yet, Albania Seethe! Justice will be done!”
My day is already good when I can look forward to reading about “erosible integument”, which I seem to remember overhearing the last time I was within fifty yards of a geochemistry lab.
“Systemic cohomolgy” sounds like a pretty cool degenerative disease, or maybe a death metal band.
“Afghanistan surname baboon” is the sort of thing I’d expect to hear coming from one of those early artificial intelligence programs trying to recreate human speech: the sort that you used to see on Nova in the early 80’s; you know the scene – lots of twenty-something guys who haven’t been out in the sunlight enough even though they’re at UC San Jose are all standing around a radio-shacked amateur version of a speaker cabinet looking intently at an amber monitor, while one of them types “Hello. How are you today?” on a keyboard without a cover, only to end up visibly crestfallen when a tinny synthesized voice spits out something akin to gibberish above, and in the end they utter the inevitable combination of exuberant pronouncements regarding natural language processing, and conditioned realism about the fallacies of science fiction expectations.
Some of the spammers no doubt prefer to take a more Zen minimalist approach to fomenting palaver, using single words that bespeak a substantial degree of amphiboly; “gasify”, “archfool”, “deciduous”, “involute” and “burg” are examples of this tradition.
Then there are the imperatives, not to be casually ignored without some measure of trepidation: “deconvolve”, “rebut”, “throb”, and “migrate” for example.
With all these SAT words flowing uninterruptedly into my mailbox, there’s practically no excuse for not doing the Times crossword in pen.
So I say “Thank You Spammers!” Spam On! Whenever I want a tasty linguistic morsel, I’ll just shut off my spam filters…

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Seen a lot of movie trail­ers? Always been curi­ous about who owns the voice?
Thanks to JV for the answer:
”…Don LaFontaine, who is lov­ingly referred to in trailer cir­cles as the ‘Voice of God.’ A vet­eran of 40 years and more than 4,000 trail­ers, his rum­bling basso has enticed mil­lions with dra­matic into­na­tions like “In a world where …’”
Here’s the full arti­cle, from the WSJ.

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Courtesy of the media awareness and activism group Freepress.net:
1. A handful of companies dominate
Five media conglomerates – Viacom, Disney, Time Warner, News Corp. and NBC/GE – control the big four networks (70% of the prime time television market share), most cable channels, vast holdings in radio, publishing, movie studios, music, Internet, and other sectors. [Consumers Union/Parents Television Council]
2. Big Media are a powerful special interest in Washington
Media companies intent upon changing the FCC media ownership rules have spent nearly $100 million on lobbying in the last 4 years. FCC officials have taken more than 2,500 industry-sponsored junkets since 1995, at a pricetag of $2.8 million. [Common Cause, Center for Public Integrity]
3. Consolidation fosters inferior educational programming.
After Viacom purchased the independent KCAL in Los Angeles, children’s programming plunged 89%, dropping from 26 hours per week in 1998 to three hours in 2003 (the minimum requirement set by Congress). TV stations air programs like NFL Under the Helmet and Saved by the Bell, claiming they meet educational programming requirements. [Children Now, FCC]
4. Cable rates are skyrocketing
Cable companies lobbied for and won deregulation in 1996, arguing that it would lower prices. Since then, cable rates have been rising at three times the rate of inflation. On average, rates have risen by 50%; in New York City, they’ve risen by 93.7%. [US PIRG]
5. Big Media profit from a money-dominated campaign finance system
In 2002, television stations earned more than $1 billion from political advertising – more than they earned from fast food and automotive ads. You were four times more likely to see a political ad during a TV news broadcast than an election-related news story. [Alliance for Better Campaigns]
6. Big Media use the public’s airwaves at no charge
The total worth of the publicly-owned airwaves that U.S. broadcasters utilize has been valued at $367 billion – more than many nations’ GDPs – but the public has never been paid a dime in return. And the broadcasters claim they can’t afford to be accountable to the public interest! [Alliance for Better Campaigns]
7. Independent voices are fading
Since 1975, two-thirds of independent newspaper owners have disappeared, and one-third of independent television owners have vanished. Only 281 of the nation’s 1,500 daily newspapers remain independently owned, and more than half of all U.S. markets are one-newspaper towns. [Writers Guild of America, East; Consumer Federation of America]
8. Consolidation is killing local radio
The number of radio station owners has plummeted by 34% since 1996, when ownership rules were gutted. That year, the largest radio owners controlled fewer than 65 stations; today, radio giant Clear Channel alone owns over 1,200. [FCC]
9. Consolidation threatens minority media ownership
Minority ownership – a crucial source of diverse and varied viewpoints – is at a 10-year low, down 14% since 1997. Today, only 4% of radio stations and 1.9% of television stations are minority-owned. [Writers Guild of America, East]
10. The free flow of idea and information is being stymied
No copyrighted work created after 1922 has entered the public domain – an incubator for new ideas – due to corporate-sponsored legislation extending copyright terms. If laws being considered today had been in effect a few generations ago, you wouldn’t have access to products such as VCRs and copy machines. [U.S. Copyright Office, FCC, Electronic Frontier Foundation]

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It is dif­fi­cult to antic­i­pate what one is sup­posed to take away from just the first half of an eclec­tic and heav­ily styl­ized movie released far away from its con­clu­sion. Nev­er­the­less it’s safe to set this qual­i­fier aside when review­ing it, since some com­bi­na­tion of direc­tor, pro­ducer, stu­dio, actors, and dis­trib­u­tors obvi­ously believed the first half of Kill Bill Vol­ume I was solid enough to stand on it’s own as an offer­ing, and released it with all the cus­tom­ary fan­fare.  I was dis­ap­pointed (even after estab­lish­ing low expec­ta­tions in the first place). The action and fight­ing set pieces were fine (Yuen Wo Ping did a much bet­ter job cre­at­ing inter­est­ing chore­og­ra­phy for Kill Bill Vol. I than for The Matrix: Reloaded), but the story used as Kill Bill’s skele­ton is so flimsy it is almost in the way — espe­cially when pre­sented in the dis­jointed plot / nar­ra­tive we’re accus­tomed to from Taran­tino — and aside from a few scat­tered moments of inspired cin­e­matog­ra­phy ( the water bucket and foun­tain in the zen gar­den), I found the film flat.

As an homage to samu­rai movies, it was largely faith­ful: Taran­tino man­aged to con­vinc­ingly recre­ate the feel of a Sat­ur­day after­noon B-movie on cable tele­vi­sion. But from a Hol­ly­wood direc­tor in 2003, that’s a loos­ing gam­bit. What made the orig­i­nal Samu­rai movies Taran­tino apes in Kill Bill a sat­is­fy­ing experience was their essen­tial for­eignness, and the very dif­fer­ent view­ing con­texts and asso­ci­ated expec­ta­tions that enveloped them. Lack­ing both of these key sup­port­ing ele­ments, I’m left won­der­ing about the point of the exer­cise for the moment.

It’s to be expected that punk cognoscenti (and — shud­der — would be punk cognoscenti…) would dis­sagree vio­lently over the influ­ences, ori­gins, qual­ity, rel­e­vance, and impor­tance of almost every band that any­one else arro­gat­ing the label ‘punk cognoscenti’ to them­selves has ever had the temer­ity to point to as “sem­i­nal”. (A term which, by the way, may be uniquely suited to punk music by virtue of its ety­mol­ogy). So it’s no sur­prise that even in a set of reviews of Young Loud and Snotty as trite as those offered by Ama­zon patrons, the infight­ing is rife and the gram­mar is bad. Frankly, it’s amus­ing. After all — if you’d buy the album in the first place, would you really care what any­one else thought about it? If ever a music was tor­tured by its own crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial suc­cess, and all the con­com­m­mit­tant dis­pu­ta­tional vagaries, it was punk…

Not nearly so the case with rap and hip-hop, which became wont to use mate­r­ial declaim­ing it’s stars mas­sive mon­e­tary prowess very soon after emerg­ing from the inchoate chaos of block par­ties and DJ duels in Brook­lyn, the Bronx, and many other places that sub­ur­ban white record buy­ers still fear to visit. So it was with­out any taint of gone-rotten-anti-capitalism that I picked up Full Clip, A Decade of Gang Starr at the same moment. I agree with the review on this one — there are sev­eral juicy cuts miss­ing, but the over­all pack­age is an excel­lent ret­ro­spec­tive of what Guru and DJ Pre­mier achieved between ’89 and ’99.

Lastly in the new acqui­si­tions depart­ment, Come With Us makes the drive home from work pos­i­tiv­ely invigorating.

Instead of a fun and furi­ous live set from an up and com­ing retro Mod punk out­fit, this was a frankly dis­ap­point­ing exam­ple of the mis­for­tu­nate mis­match­ing that occurs when the media appa­ra­tus deter­mines what it wants us to like. Friends loaned me their sec­ond album just as the pub­lic­ity wave was crest­ing a few weeks ago, and I was mildly excited by the energy I heard on repeated lis­ten­ings; their live per­for­mance didn’t sus­tain the feel­ing, how­ever, and given what I saw Tues­day, I wouldn’t rec­om­mend that any­one hop­ing for as much from them on stage as on disc take the time or trou­ble.

The basic prob­lem? Bluntly — Howlin’ Pete Almqvist wouldn’t shut up. I know it’s a chal­lenge to play a full set when your cat­a­log is as brief as theirs, but there’s just no excuse for stop­ping after every two-minute song to chat­ter about how won­der­ful your band is, and how ter­ri­bly enter­tain­ing you just were; espe­cially when it takes you longer to chat­ter about your song than it did to play it in the first place. At it’s worst, this is like musi­cus inter­rup­tus — it demol­ishes the nat­ural cycle of build­ing and releas­ing ten­sion that any dra­matic per­for­mance in the West­ern world not explic­itly billed as exper­i­men­tal should fol­low. I’ve never been this gen­uinely annoyed with a head­line act. I’ll con­fess to feel­ing a bit fraz­zled before I set foot inside the club, as I’d flown up from Atlanta only an hour before the show, after two full days of user research at an engi­neer­ing con­fer­ence (the joys of prac­tic­ing IA on a tight bud­get…), but I wasn’t alone in feel­ing the inter­rup­tions and dis­lik­ing them. On my left was a table of five frus­trated concert-goers yelling the inevitable “You SUCK”, con­tin­u­ously. I’d say it was lack of expe­ri­ence, given their age and new­ness, but I know The Hives have toured for years, and it seemed that their refusal to engage was more capri­cious than acci­den­tal.

Oh, Mooney suzuki was there as well. What’s with the Snake? I didn’t mind their prod­uct (and it had those sly “we’re art school kids lark­ing about with the iden­tity of musi­cians” tim­ber), but the vocal­ist looked and acted too much like Nicholas Cage doing his best Mod impres­sion of Elvis to allow me to sim­ply immerse myself in the music. The drum­mer looked like one of the Nerds from Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer…