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I'm in Waterloo at the moment, and next available to work in September 2008.

Accessible Celebrities

April 21st, 2005

Every kid has heros. And we never really lose them, we just start calling them something more mature-sounding, like ’star’ or ‘role-models’.

I amazes me when I step into someone else’s world and see their heros, how frequently they’re incredible people who I’ve never even heard of.

There are heros in every niche. Ever heard of Jeffrey Zeldman? Go out on the street and ask 100 people who Zeldman is. If you’re a web-developer reading this, you know that The Z is like the founder of modern web design. Hundreds of thousands of professionals and followers read his website every week. But who beyond the field knows that?

What about Kurt Browning? Out of a hundred people, how many would remember that he’s even a figure-skater, much less a four-time world champion? I know this because my sister skates, and through her I have a small window of exposure to that world.

Accessibility

Both a skater and a designer create a work that is an extension of their own personality. Neither is direct, but in watching a marvelous performance or seeing classy design, it’s possible to get a glimpse at the character of its creator.

So what’s the difference between a figure-skating celebrity and an Internet celebrity?

It’s the accessibility. Sports heros and movie stars have publicists and managers and all other sorts of nasty tangles that keep them away from their fans. Yes, you can write them a snail-mail letter and they’ll maybe reply once it’s been screened. But you can’t really have a decent conversation.

Contrast this with the communication available through the Internet. When I had a question for Paul Graham about a controversial statement he’d made in an essay, he sent me a thoughtful reply a few days later. When I was curious about re-release possibilities for The Neverhood, I shot off a quick email to its creator, who shortly responded.

Both of these guys a millionaires. They don’t need to talk to a first-year student. But I enjoy the correspondence, and I’m sure they appreciate hearing from a fan.

Visibility

Is there a dark side to all this? Sure. It’s clear that the availability of private contact information on the web is a double-edged sword. What does it mean when Shia Labeouf has a MySpace account? It means he’s suddenly directly accessible to his fans… including the creepy stalkers.

Corporations like Microsoft have discovered the value of having bloggers give them a human face. Perhaps more traditionally aloof figures will make themselves available this way. It won’t be for everyone, but imagine the power as a buzz-machine!

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 4:10 am to Internet.

Discussion

  1. As a matter of curiosity, what was the question you sent Paul Graham and what was the statement and response?

    Posted at 2:27 pm on April 23rd by Jeffrey Aho.

  2. In ‘Beating the Averages’ and a few of his other essays, he’d talked about how the Viaweb Store used flat-files and directories instead of databases. He even said that when a competitor advertised for hackers with Oracle experience, they immediately considered them no threat at all.

    I asked him if he felt that relational databases had no application at all, or if it’s just that they’re over-deployed in situations where 99% of the queries look like “SELECT * FROM table WHERE id = ‘x’” (sites like this one, for example)

    He said that he felt they are not necessary at all, since they were originally devised to a) not lose your files and b) allow quick retrieval. Since modern OSes and filesystems don’t lose your files anyways, particularly if you’re running something like RAID-5 on your server, plus they do a lot of caching and so on for you, he said that that’s adequate on its own.

    Of course, you need to know what you’re doing as far as creating indexes and so on, but that’s not rocket science… it’s just that a relational DB normally does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

    I’m not sure I completely agree, since there’s a lot of sophisticated queries easily possible with SQL that could take a fair bit hassle with files and directories. Also, if you’ve got multiple applications all trying to access the same information, DBs like PostgreSQL give you extremely fine-grain control over what operations may be performed on which tables and indeed columns. Yes, you could have a desktop client tunnel in through SSH and then set file permissions, but I’m not persuaded that it’s quite the same thing.

    Anyhow, as an experiment, I’ve been fiddling with creating a simple forum structure with flat files and directories. All the current file-based forums I’ve seen are called ’slow’ in reviews, so I’ve been trying to figure out how to make on that’s blistering fast.

    We’ll see.

    Posted at 2:53 pm on April 23rd by Mike Purvis.

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