Mobile Engineering: Why Coders with Old World Discipline Have the Advantage

A month or so ago, someone (I can't remember who) said to me that mobile engineering was hard for web engineers to do because it was so different. I've worked over the nine months on product development for several mobile applications at Apisphere, and more specifically the last couple of months seen coding for handsets up close. I can see why those who are great at coding the front end of websites that will go out to people with beefy computers might have trouble coding for tiny devices with limited memory, harddrives and processors. Even smart phones are no competition for the latest desk or laptop.

Working with engineers on Android, iPhone and Blackberry apps, where GPS data is involved, and each of these phones' quirks are being exposed, I've come to realize there is much more to this than just the difference between webcoding and mobile engineering. I started in tech in the 90's working on boxed software. Huge projects with 60 engineers making things for big machines of the time. Those kinds of projects required enormous specs, Market Research Docs (MRDs) and Product Research Docs (PRDs), etc. When I later switched and started writing algorithms for web apps, building little classification systems, and working closely with engineers on web apps creating the information architectures and meaning on sites, through interfaces and algorithms, I didn't think all that much about the differences between installed boxed software and web development, other than the specs I was writing were far smaller and we iterated a whole lot more on the web development in tighter cycles, and often the usability was built in a bit more from the beginning instead of bolted on at the end.

But now seeing development for mobile and creating mobile apps, I realize engineers who learned to code way back when have a huge advantage over web and large app engineers who've never been forced to economize. Those early coders know what it means to optimize for tiny amounts of ram and hard drive space, to create truly elegant code that is compact, efficient, and doesn't take over a device or machine.

In contrast, I find my Firefox usage often pushes my laptop out of control as javascripts go crazy on tabs in the background. Those pages were written by programmers unschooled in the art of system management, who may believe the system resources are unlimited or worse, dedicated *only* to the running of the browser+their webapp. They don't even seem to know they ought to be considering users and their resources based upon the pinwheel of death I regularly experience. I'm often climbing through FF tabs on pages open for work and play as I go through my day, trying desperately to locate that one tab that's going crazy, pushing FF to 125% according to Top. When I get it shut down, after massive frustration and system hangs, waiting to see if the next tab is it, I realize another tab is out of control. And so on until I get my machine back.

Building mobile apps, there is no way we can put that sort of strain on a smart phone, much less a little tiny phone. At this point after watching 9 months of mobile development, I'm realizing the preferred mobile developer is someone who has hardcore coding experience with languages like Java and C++/C#, who had to optimize for old computers with minimalist ram, hardrives and CPUs. People who code as if their program will be the only one open or up in a browser need not apply.

In fact, I would say that older coders with this sort of discipline will often have a distinct advantage over the young new web-only coders, and will be the ones who help us move mobile forward as a viable industry. Of course, those who embody all of these skills for all environments will have the best chances to work in mobile going forward, as I see mobile delivery of webpages as also key to this industry.

She's Geeky Again! Jan 30-31, 2009

The second She's Geeky will happen at the end of this month! The first was held 14 months ago in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum, and this year it will happen there again.

Here are all the important links to get you going:

Website: http://www.shegeeky.org
BLOG: http://shesgeeky.org/sg/blog/
WIKI: http://shesgeeky.org/wiki/

Registration:
on site: http://shesgeeky.org/sg/register/
on eventbrite: http://shesgeekybayarea.eventbrite.com/

Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=5010135719
Event on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=53885344492
LinkedIn Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=39189

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/shesgeeky

PLEASE be sure to register for one day $59 or two days $108 and get the early bird price.

Let's face it, this conference is just covering costs with those prices... if you are only able to come on a weekday, you'll be able to come Friday, and if weekends are all you can do, Saturday is it, or even better, come both days!

Also, check out this totally great video shot at the last She's Geeky:

Eniac Programmers Documentary at Computer History Museum

Check out the notice below about the documentary showing on October 22, 2008 about the Eniac Programmers. Should be a fantastic night!

The Computer History Museum Presents
An Evening with Jean Jennings Bartik - 1945 ENIAC Programming Pioneer
7:00pm
Computer History Museum | Hahn Auditorium
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd. Mountain View, CA 94043
Wine provided by The Mountain Winery
To register: click here or call (650) 810-1005.

We hope to see you at this celebration of pioneering women in computing -- an event 60 years in the making!

Kathy Kleiman, Historian & Executive Producer, ENIAC Programmers Project
eniacprogrammers.org

About ENIAC Pioneer Jean Bartik. Jean Jennings Bartik was one of the first programmers of the groundbreaking ENIAC computing system in 1945. She later assisted in converting the ENIAC system into one of the first stored-program computers.

Born on a farm in Missouri, the sixth of seven children, Bartik always went in search of adventure. Bartik majored in mathematics at Northwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Northwest Missouri State University). In 1945, at age 20, Bartik answered the Army's Ballistics Research Lab's call for women math majors to join a project in Philadelphia calculating ballistics firing tables for the new guns developed for the WWII effort - she joined over 80 women calculating ballistics trajectories by hand (differential calculus equations) - Her title: "Computer."

Later in 1945, the Army circulated a call for "computers" for a new job with a secret machine. Bartik jumped at the chance and was hired as one of the original six programmers of ENIAC, the first all-electronic, programmable computer. She joined Frances "Betty" Snyder Holberton, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence in this unknown journey.

With ENIAC's 40 panels still under construction, and its 18,000 vacuum tube technology uncertain, the engineers had no time for programming manuals or classes. Bartik and the other women taught themselves ENIAC's operation from its logical and electrical block diagrams, and then figured out how to program it. They created their own flow charts, programming sheets, wrote the program and placed it on the ENIAC using a challenging physical interface, which had hundreds of wires and 3,000 switches. It was an unforgettable, wonderful experience.

On February 15, 1946, the Army revealed the existence of ENIAC to the public. In a special ceremony, the Army introduced ENIAC and its hardware inventors Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. The presentation featured its trajectory ballistics program, operating at a speed thousands of time faster than any prior calculations. The ENIAC women's program worked perfectly - and conveyed the immense calculating power of ENIAC and its ability to tackle the millennium problems that had previously taken a man 100 years to do. It calculated the trajectory of a shell that took 30 seconds to trace it. But, it took ENIAC only 20 seconds to calculate it - faster than a speeding bullet! Indeed!

The Army never introduced the ENIAC women.

No one gave them any credit or discussed their critical part in the event that day. Their faces, but not their names, became part of the beautiful press pictures of the ENIAC. For forty years, their roles and their pioneering work were forgotten and their story lost to history. The ENIAC Women's story was discovered by Kathy Kleiman in 1985. Bartik will discuss what it means to be overlooked, despite unique and pioneering work, and what it means to be discovered again.

In conversation with Linda O'Bryon, Bartik will also discuss:

* Leading the programming team to convert ENIAC to one of the first stored-program machines (and working with Dr. John von Neumann on ENIAC's first instruction set)
* Working in "Technical Camelot" at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, as programmer of BINAC and logic designer of UNIVAC
* Sexism and stereotypes at Remington Rand and her first-hand experience with the abuse of women and the misuse of technology
* Friends and pioneers computing history should not forget, including tributes to Betty Holberton, Kay Mauchly Antonelli, the other ENIAC programmers, Dr. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert
* Some pieces of advice to live by.

About the ENIAC Programmers Project. Founded in 1997, the ENIAC Programmers Project is dedicated to recording, preserving and sharing the stories of women computer pioneers. Its founder, Kathy Kleiman, discovered the ENIAC Programmers as a passing reference in an computing pioneer's autobiography, sought them out, researched and recorded their oral histories. Her nomination of Jean Bartik for the Computer History Museum's 2008 Fellow Award led to this special recognition -- after 60 years!

The Computer History Museum's VIP reception honors Jean Bartik and recognizes the ENIAC Programmers Project's long quest to make a feature-length documentary about the women of ENIAC, WWII Rosie the Riveters who invented many of the concepts of modern programming!

To learn more about this inspiring story and opportunities for documentary support and sponsorship, please go to www.eniacprogrammers.org or contact Kathy Kleiman at Kathy@eniacprogrammers.org.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The ENIAC Programmers Project
Honoring Computer Pioneers and Preserving Their Stories
Feature-length documentary "Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers" now in development & fundraising.
www.eniacprogrammers.org

The NY Times on Girl Geeks: They are Fashion, Not Technology

The
NYTimes Stephanie Rosenblum has an article in today's *Fashion* section on Girls in Tech. Wo. Not in the *Technology* section. In Fashion.

Sorry, Boys, This Is Our Domain talks about how girls are coding up more content online: webpages, web art, blogs and podcasts.

And then they decorate it with an image of a girl at her laptop with a devilish tail. But instead of asking one of the girls they interviewed to make the artwork, they ask Adam Strange to do the art for the article:

So when they interview people like Doc Searls, Loic Le Meur or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section or business, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical in this article than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion. I've never seen coverage with Doc or David or Loic in fashion. Maybe they should be there depending, but they aren't put there by the editors that I know of....

This is not about David or Loic or Doc (all extremely supportive of women in tech, btw), and certainly they don't choose the section the paper puts them in, but rather the way the editors and writers at the NYTimes see them, verses the girl geeks in this article.

My point is that the NYTimes puts men who talk tech and trends or social impact in tech/biz, and women who code web art / pages in fashion.

Can you tell I'm pissed? WTF?

However, the number of women in tech isn't great (Which is why we need more articles in the Tech section about this people!)

The article says that less "...than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2006, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2000 to 2005, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology."

The FAA TRACON Information Experience Live

Earlier today I had the delightful experience of touring the FAA's Northern California TRACON facility.

Basically, TRACON, which stands for terminal radar approach control, is the air traffic control center which, in this case, handles Northern California. TRACON handles traffic outside of each local control tower a plane might ultimately deal with as it lands. There are TRACONs all over the US for other regions. We weren't allowed to bring in cameras so I'll instead show you a news photo from SF gate that was representative of what we saw up on the wall of the facility. You get the idea there of what they are seeing on some of their screens.

Chronicle photo by Mark Costantini

This photo only shows traffic into SF, because it's a visualization from SFO traffic control, but just imagine more planes going into San Jose, Sacramento, and other smaller airports like Modesto. Also, these screens are synced between TRACON and the air traffic controllers who are local. And if anything happened to one TRACON, others would instantly fill in, as the system works somewhat like the internet in that sense.

TRACON is housed in a big, windowless building, extremely modern and cool with an air of serious importance about it (I always find that at say, buildings in Washington DC, and I kind of like it even if they do take whatever it is they do a bit too seriously sometimes). Our tour guide, a woman who is a trainer for other air traffic controllers, at one point said, "You have 10 seconds or so to make contract with a plane and move on. If you screw up, there are hundreds of lives on the line." That's pretty serious.

TRACON's building is basically an octopus design, where each leg has 20 or so terminals with about 10 people in each, manning a particular physical area (like planes coming into Sacramento) in order to follow planes as they enter the region first. All commercial flights must fly IFR -- Instrument Flight Rules -- which means they have to be in contact with TRACON, in case they can't see or there is bad weather, or there is simply a pile up of planes that need to be moderated into an airport. Planes that fly VFR -- Visual Flight Rules -- don't have to contact TRACON, but some do anyway for a variety of reasons. TRACON has longer range radar than the local air controllers, but the longer range radar updates more slowly. So that is the trade-off between regional (TRACON) and local control.

Once TRACON has the plane logged, they make a little block of data on their screens (a different type of screen than the one shown above) that shows the flight number, its altitude, and other information that will help them keep planes apart, on track and moderated as they reach the range of the local control towers who then take over moderating the planes.

In the cycle of life for a controller (who has to quit at age 56 and can not be considered after age 31 to start training), they typically have military training or attend a special school after college, and then are trained at the local site. Our host said that for the first few years (maybe up to 10) controllers are pretty tense on the job, but after 10 years they relax some. She said the most dangerous situations come when people are relaxed, and less is going on around them, rather than more. That's when mistakes are made.

Another thing our host said was that they have to keep the chit chat down, because if there is an accident, they don't want to have some controller chatting away on the transcript, just before it happens. They are pretty businesslike when talking to pilots. She talked pretty fast, she said, due to the edgy situation needed to quickly regulate the flow and placement of all the different planes they are watching, and that's how she trains people. I know from riding in a friend's plane frequently where I can listen to lots of this talk, that they are pretty succinct, and yet both pilots and controllers have a kind of cultural humor that is pretty funny, in those few words they exchange, and this allows some kind of personality to come through often. If you want to check out what happens, here are some example live sound feeds from a bunch of different air control areas.

So.. what were the information systems like? Well, I thought they were fascinating. The premise in building, training for and using them is very different than say, the web based systems I typically work on in my day to day life. In fact in many ways, they had the exact opposite goals and metaphors I use to build systems and interfaces. First, they train their people between 6 months and 5 years on these system -- but our guide said 2-5 years is typical.

Think about that. Training your user for 2 years. What would that mean to interface architecture and design? You could certainly do a lot different with it than what we do now on the web.

Their top menu, interestingly, is literally a series of very-1993 buttons, big squares, in rows, maybe 8 across and 12 down, though all those gorgeous 22 inch screens are touch screens. Each controller has two of them, not horizontally placed, but vertically, in the workspace. Some of those buttons go to pages that help track planes, but I did note one, placed furthest away from the user's sitting position, for that day's cafe menu. It appeared that all possible items were options at the top level. Nothing appeared to be pushed back to a lower level or made less important or secondary in the interface other than two items described below.

When you go into the main menu items, there is little to cue you back, and in fact many of the screens were missing back buttons. Some had them and some didn't. But with that much training before you can even get into a real working station, it doesn't seem to really matter. You know the system inside and out, as well as how and what to do with it and all the planes you have to manage (typically 10 - 20 at one time).

A lot of information is stored in the user's head, and as new plane info comes up, only the abbreviation or shorthand block code describing the plane is on the screen along with various map-based data to place the plane. This means that instead of giving lots of data on one plane on the screen, the data is offloaded to the user and the screen just has the shorthand.

That shorthand for a plane is shown in the middle screen (below the menu in the top screen), which has the map with blocks of data representing planes. Their systems look much like map systems we use online in a way but with way cooler visualizations because they have radar and more info about airspace restrictions and well.. I don't know any web service that has radar. Imagine "Google Radar" overlaid on Google maps? That would be a cool product launch.

So in other words, what the information systems metaphor seemed to be was the exact opposite of what we do in web systems: TRACON systems are built with high mental overhead -- you have to know a lot to use and understand both sets of systems before you start to navigate because nothing in those buttons really helps you know what is below, other than the word on top. During actual use, when you enter and track planes, you get that overhead in the years of training you do before you can operate the system in play. The information systems below those button also have little style that would take any one piece of information and make it more important than any other on the same screen. Information is chunked or grouped a little on those secondary pages, but that's it. So there is no expectation that anything is pushed back or pushed forward, other than the menu, where each little button represents a page/function, and each page has the function represented.

Instead of the software deciding what is most important at the moment of use, and emphasizing it in some formated way, the user just has all of it equally represented and therefore has to decide what's necessary or relevant. In some cases, there was a mini system below a secondary page via a link, to find backup documentation on a plane (if the controller asked the plane to do something, and the plane wasn't built for it, they could check the specs on the plane) or on a small airport (to get backup data on landing strips and landing directions). But these seemed to be relatively rare use cases that allowed the backup information to be lower down to a third level.

Our other tour guide, a man who'd checked us in, did an introduction presentation in power point to explain the basics, and then finished up at the end. He told a couple of stories like what happened on 9/11. He said they grounded every plane everywhere coming and going anywhere in the country. It was eerie, because all their screens (which we were seeing, depending on scope, with somewhere between 20 and thousands of planes) were almost completely empty. Black. With little white map lines showing various air, altitude or other restrictions and weather. They spent three days watching military jets fly around, and that was it. Nothing else.

My take on this sort of system was that it could stand visual and architectural improvement, but that without a lot of study and planning, it would be dangerous to change it. And, the users are so adept at the system they have now, and have so much responsibility and pressure to perform quickly, that changes would likely be unwelcome. Extensive study of user behavior and needs would have to happen, and then extensive testing would have to follow before anything could be put into practice. I can see why they maintain the same system (it's not from 1993 though.. it's much more recent), and just update it with new air space data and plane info, and don't do much to mess with a working system.

But it was still fascinating to see the TRACON information and understand the motivations for its construction and use. And comparing that to what we do building web systems? The best!

Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers.

UPDATED: THE DINNER HAS BEEN POSTPONED TO JANUARY, 2008.

Thursday night at Google in Mountain view there is a fundraiser dinner for the making of the documentary about the ENIAC prgrammers, and one of them will be attending and discussing their story.

They happened to be 6 women, and when Kathy Kleinman was getting her computer science degree, she found a photo of them, in front of the ENIAC. Her CS professor sent her to a computer historian to ask about it. He told her the 6 women in a photo she'd found, taken in front of the ENIAC were models. In fact, they were the programmers of the ENIAC and it was the first demonstration of it. She's now making a documentary about these 6 women, and the funds raised at the dinner will go toward the film costs.

If you have any interest, you should join in and attend the dinner.

Here are the Event Announcement and Links:
Did you know that sixty years ago, six young women programmed the ENIAC, the first all-electronic programmable computer?

And when LIFE magazine published a post-ww2 story about the ENIAC, the women were not mentioned. The article only featured information on the machine, not the engineers who made it work.

Today, Kathy Kleiman, a software engineer who was inspired to stay in computing because of the success of these 6 women, is making a documentary (using Adobe software, naturally!) to highlight these achievements. Google heard about it and kicked in support, Laszlo Systems is behind it, and I think we should be, too.

How we can help:
1. Buy a ticket (or better yet, get some friends and buy a table) to the fundraising event to help get this documentary made.

Information about ENIAC can be found here
http://eniacprogrammers.org/index.html

Information about the event can be found here:
http://www.google.com/events/eniac/

Invisible Computers: The Untold Story of the ENIAC Programmers.
Thursday, November 8, 2007 6pm
Google Headquarters
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA

James Cicconi of AT&T On Net Netrality

James Cicconi, Senior Executive VP Legislative and External Affairs for AT&T was at Esme Vos' Muniwireless conference yesterday, spewing what I would kindly call the greatest of spin, and unkindly as BS.

Net Neutrality is not about people telling network providers what to charge for tiered service. That's bull. Net Neutrality says that video packets, no matter where they come from, will get through at the same rates. Same with text or photos or VOIP or anything else. The network can't under Net Neutrality distinguish and discriminate because it doesn't like where something came from or the place the packet came from didn't pay the telco's any money to prioritize the packet.

To quote muniwireless (emphasis is mine):

It's Day 2 of the Muniwireless Silicon Valley Conference and they have an executive from AT&T talking about municipal wireless networks.

AT&T has not changed its tune. It is still against cities using public funds to compete with private enterprise and believes that communications should be left up to private firms like AT&T.

James Cicconi, Senior Executive VP Legislative and External Affairs for AT&T claims that there is no duopoly and there is enough competition in the market for telecommunications services, so cities should stay out.

What is AT&T's position on net neutrality?

Net neutrality is a challenge for all companies. You spend billions to deploy your assets and net neutrality means someone telling you what you can do with your assets - what you can charge, tiers of service, etc.

"All bits should be treated equal" is a problem for network engineers because one bit is porn another bit is heart surgery, another is email, yet another is voice, another is spam. That everything should be moved equally end to end is ludicrous. It's a more costly way to do things. It's not efficient, according to AT&T.

AT&T cannot build and maintain assets quickly enough to meet the demand. They are spending $19 billion this year. Some of the demand is driven by video. What happens when people start delivering high definition film? They can't build networks fast enough! What's the answer? Effective traffic management.

The antitrust laws can deal with the problems of net neutrality (side note: unfortunately these are not being enforced today). Why should AT&T want to degrade traffic? They will go to someone else (side note again: in a duopoly, you've got Comcast which has been blocking Bittorent traffic).

I don't know about you but where I live and work, we have two choices: AT&T for dsl or Comcast for cable internet access. They are both Mid-band services, and not great but better than dialup. And we pay exorbitantly for them compared to other countries.

So of course they want to take their AT&T/Comcast duopoly and spin Net Neutrality as being all about people interfering with their pricing models for tiered service when it's really all about prioritizing packets. They want to divert attention from the reality which is that they want to put their videos through first, their media, their VOIP or media/VOIP from people who've paid them off. Instead of letting users have what they want. The telco's want to own the pipes and the content.

It's wrong and we can't let the telcos win on this.

She's Geeky Starts Tomorrow

She's Geeky is a unconference organized by Kaliya Hamlin with the help of Deb Roby, Melanie Swan, Susan Mernit, Julia French, Laurie Rae, Mary Trigiani and Heather Vescent among others. I've helped when I could but I think my major contributions have been minor compared to the rest of these women who've worked hard to pull this meeting of the minds together.

The conference will be held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It's an unconference in the sense that the attendees are going to make the agenda on Tuesday. Monday afternoon will consist of sessions set up ahead of time so that certain topics and speakers could be arranged in advance. The conference fee of $175 covers the cost of the location, insurance and food. And you can get a small discount if you use this page here, for $25 off.

The two sessions I'm organizing include one with Lura Dolas, a professional speaker's trainer. She's phenomenal, and my only regret is that she has to be there during my other session, on VC's and entrepreneurship, which means I can't attend both at the same time.

I have attended Lura's speakers training twice, once for a two hour session that was the taste I needed to know that she was amazing and I needed a lot more help from her. The second was a full day held at Citizen Space, where 20 of us practiced speaking techniques and talked through what's needed for great presence and interaction.

Look for the schedule for Monday here at this link. And here's some information on the VC session:

VCs and Women in Tech: A Brainstorm with Women VCs and Entrepreneurs

Session Leaders:
Jodi Sherman Jahic
Angela Strange
Patricia Nakache

Moderator: Mary Hodder

This session will engage in an open discussion between VCs and women entrepreneurs and those thinking about entrepreneurship. We will start with a short information sharing about what VCs are, how people become VCs, how they make their funds, where they get the money, who they are responsible to, and what they think about in their capacity as VCs. We'll hear about why VC's do what they do, what they like and dislike, why they think there are few women in the business, and how it affects funding and the kinds of technologies developed. Next, we'll get to the meat of the problem: addressing what an entrepreneur needs to know about funding when starting a company. And we'll brainstorm with everyone there about how to solve problems, who to go to for information, what elements are needed for a presentation, what gets funded, and how to get a VC over the line to get something funded.

Dabble is Video Search

Note: Dabble is a company I founded a year and a half ago.

Dave Winer at Scripting News notes that Dabble is like Flickr, Odeo and Podshow:

Have you noticed that there's a formula out there, for Flickr-like sites, that, instead of providing social networking around pictures, try to do it for podcasts or videos. Examples include Odeo, Podshow, Dabble.

Others are repeating this, which is incorrect.

While I absolutely love Flickr, Dabble is *not like* an image hosting site. Just to be absolutely clear, Flickr, Odeo and Podshow either *host* or *make* content. They do not search all images, or all audio, or across video or even the web. Sites that would be comparable to Flickr include YouTube, VSocial, Revver, Blip.tv, and the other 300 hosting sites for video that Dabble searches. There is a very big difference between a site that creates or hosts content, and search engines.

Dabble searches all video content across all hosters, as well as other sites on the web, and we continue adding more results to our search engine every day.

As to the second point in the Scripting News post:

However, none of them are gaining traction like Flickr did, and I think I now understand why. A picture is something you can appreciate at web speed. Go to a page with a photo on it, and it loads slightly slower than a page without a picture. Hit the Back button, leave a comment, link to it, whatever you want to do, it's all over quickly and that fits the pace of the web. However, podcasts and videos don't work like that. It takes a long time to "consume" one of those media objects. So why did YouTube catch on? Simple -- free storage.

Dabble launched 3 months ago, and is doing just fine. Flickr launched 2.5 years ago, Podshow and Odeo launched well over a year, and while I don't know their stats or situation, I would also imagine that they are in different spots as well, though without knowing or asking I won't assume they are doing well or not. Since Dave didn't ask us where we are after 3 months, I'm assuming he didn't ask them either.

Regardless, I want to be sure that we are understood as a video search with a social community around search and are doing just fine, thanks.

Slides from Blog Business Summit on Live Web Search

Yesterday, I gave a short talk on live web search at the BBS.

Here are the slides in pdf.

Earlier today, Robert Scoble, Ben Edwards and I talked about video tools and helpful ideas for businesses promoting or engaging with video online. For that one, I had no slides, as instead I showed examples of companies like the Little Mismatched video ad contest and the Zany category winner: Rockin' in Stockins or the BottomUnion Carp Caviar video blogger ad campaign.

Both companies did really creative things and people were quite interested in them. I played the Rockin' in Stockins video, which is quite funny. Take a peek!

Thought Fashion: Are You In or Out?

It's true. I peeked.

Yes, I downloaded the AOL files. And I peeked. Why? Because I wanted to write this blog post and I wanted to see for myself what sort of gestures people were making as they searched for porn or socks or how to bury their pet birds or wives they'd just killed. I also needed to see the form the data was in. And I'm a voyeur just like everyone else in and around this story, and I wanted to rubberneck my way into other's private intellectual spaces.

But it's not right. The part where I and every news outlet, blogger, reader and looky-loo has been engaging in, judging people by their searches, making assumptions and behaving as if we ourselves have never made any searches or expressed any thoughts that would not look funny to someone else.

It's also not right because the data is personally identifying. Reporters have been tracking down people based upon their searches. It's not that hard, if you yourself are a good searcher.

What was it Bob Blakely said? About how "dragging all human behavior into the public is literally totalitarian." He is the chief security and privacy scientist for IBM's Tivoli Systems. "If you erode privacy, you erode liberty, because people don't tolerate things going on in front of them that they don't approve of." I was struck by how succinctly he answered the question that is always asked of people who object to the government or some other large and powerful entity as compared with you: What do you have to hide? If you're not doing anything wrong?

Every article on AOL's mess up that says something like AOL's Disturbing Glimpse Into Users' Lives is buying into this whether they know it or not. Thank you CNet for reaffirming our intolerance.

Let's get clear on the definition of "aggregated" data. For us geeks, we use this term often, as we reassure those whose data we work with that aggregation means we are removing anything personally identifying, and placing it with other user's data, so that it's just a pile of anonymized data that could never be distinguished by the person. An example might be the aggregation of all the searches on "dog," where who did them is removed but we know that 38 people searched on that term during a particular hour and day.

But users don't think that way. They hear the word, aggregated, and they think the data handlers are aggregating everything the system may know about just them, specifically and personally, and lumping it all together. Talk about miscommunication. And it terrifies the non-geeks.

What we really should be saying is that the data is "anonymized" and therefore you are safe. AOL's data was not safe because it was not anonymized, and for users, it was their definition of aggregated.

The AOL data which lumped each user's searches together with a user ID over three months, making profiling and finding them easy, meant that AOL provided enough data in some cases to indicate a lot about who the data related to very specifically. Leading to judgments by the rest of us. About the people who do or think things on the edges of society.

And why is this wrong? Because it hurts people. It makes them feel defensive about their own thoughts and ideas.

So, well, if you aren't doing anything wrong, what *do* you have to hide? Well, everyone has something they do or think about that would be an edge thought or that in one context would be in the middle, but in another, must be defended as it resides on the edge. And that would be disapproved by someone. Something the rest of society might not tolerate.

Intolerance leads to the totalitarian. We, the human race, have been intolerant since the beginning of time. What we are intolerant of is a moving target depending on the fashion of the day. In the 30's in some places it was fashionable to be intolerant of Jews and gays. In the 40's it was Germans and the Japanese, and in the 50's communists and socialists. In the 60's it was civil rights proponents and hippies and in the 70's liberals. In the 80's we were back to communists, and in the 90's it was Hispanics (remember all the state propositions outlawing them from medical care?). And what is it today? Islam? Are thoughts you think today and the cultural references associated with them that are in the middle going to fall to the edges in the next decade?

We have used the fear of all these intolerable people and their thoughts as excuses to hunt for more proof of their intolerableness by surveilling everyone in society and searching through all the detritus of our lives. With digital data more available, we think we can find the proof we need in these edge thoughts. And then we will persecute the people having them. And what better way to do it now that the internet, ISPs and heavily used search systems can provide one or another level of very personal, thought data. Search terms, or a database of intentions as John Battelle has talked about so much, are one slice of your data that tell a lot about you. And if we can get it in a neat little file, machine readable and searchable and quantifiable, then well, why not?

If you believe that sacrificing freedom to keep freedom is the way to go, then you probably don't see any problem with demonizing people who have thoughts you don't like. Especially if those thoughts are in the form of passing gestures such as search terms plugged into a browser.

But until we decide (or default) into a Minority Report society (and change our constitution), we are not yet convicting people for thinking things. Everyone has had the thought that they'd like to kill someone once or twice in their lives. But people, the vast vast majority, don't do it. The idea that we demonize someone for searching on this, which is a gesture I would put into the fleeting thought category for almost everyone, is taking an edge thought, which we all have from time to time, and putting it firmly under the scrutiny of the middle. I believe we really only want to find people who make serious plans to hurt others, or actually carry it out. That is what our law it based on, and the premise of our society. But to track everyone, their searches, their every digital gesture, and expose it in one or another ways is going to be troublesome. And it begs a question I've asked before: is your digital identity your personal intellectual property? Is your Google identity yours or someone else's? And by extension, is your clickstream a personal expression (carefully chosen and shaped by you)? In other words, can you copyright your clickstream and exert ownership?

There are at least two choices. One of them is to do what we are doing now: have ISPs and search services collect this data, and when asked by the government, have it turned over. But that means the data is still in many ways secret. Of course the companies don't want the data getting out because it is proprietary. And neither does the government, because they don't want anyone to know quite how much is out there about you, in case you are trying to cover your tracks or you want to defend yourself. But having all the data, the government has the upper hand. And secrets are powerful. How do you show, if you are being accused of something based upon your searches, that everyone else searches on those same things too? That it's actually a social norm? If you can only ask for your own searches to defend a case against you, and not everyone else's, in order to compare yourself to it, you won't be able to argue social norms which judges rely heavily on when making decisions.

But there is another choice. And that brings up the Attention Trust premise (I'm a Board Member) which is that people own a copy of their own data, no matter where they do things: Amazon.com purchases, Google searches, or AOL clickstreams, or anywhere else you might land in a browser on your computer. As a co-owner of your data, you can take it anywhere and do what you wish. There could be many business models built upon this data controlled and shared by users. Google takes all the data they collect and plugs it into AdSense. If lots of users took their own data and made it available voluntarily, a new and more 'open source' style AdSense could be created.

But much more importantly, something like Steve Gillmor's Gesture Bank, where users opt-in their clickstream information, in an anonymous form, exists to open up this kind of data. The Bank will make the aggregation of anonymized data available to anyone for any purpose. While this may lead to businesses working from this pool of searches and clicks, it also means that a growing pool of data is there to show the edge thoughts and potentially unpopular ideas people may exhibit. The pool can be used to defend against totalitarian efforts to single out in secret those who are out of fashion politically. Which may turn out to be you. Or someone who uses your computer.

That I think is far more important than an open source AdSense, though a business built upon this data would likely justify and make a better case for us to have a Gesture Bank of ideas and thoughts that support political freedom.

Seth Goldstein and Steve Gillmor already offer Root. net users the opportunity to put their data into the Gesture Bank if they wish, though any person can contribute to this anonymous pool of user data. And for that matter, attention streams can be sent to multiple services.

And, at the October 4 Attention Conference, Steve and Seth will announce Attention Soft. Stay tuned.

We Didn't Build the Internet to Turn It Back Into Cable Tv

You know, the kind of cable TV where big entertainment companies pay off cable companies to get their channels on your set top box?

Congress didn't accept it, so net neutrality lost.

So we are keeping the system that started a year ago. It's the one that will make the internet like Cable TV.

It's critical to innovation, our companies (mine is Dabble.com) and to freedom of speech that we have a neutral net, where anything can move across it, where there is no fee to get some piece of information through to someone who wants to see it.

This isn't about tiered pricing. This is about who's packets paid the telco's fees.

This is about Hollywood keeping us from speaking, because if I'm watching my friend's video, I'm not watching Disney. Hollywood stands to benefit the most, after the telco's who charge the fees.

And Disney can afford to pay off the telcos to pass through their info, but my friends can't.

The Conversational Middle: Maturing of the Blogosphere

On Saturday at Kinnernet, the last session I attended before leaving was led by an Israeli guy named Uri Baruchin who asserted that something had changed in the blogosphere, and we were starting to have a problem because a meme (my word, not his, and it's what I called it as I disagreed in the session) would not spread so fast in the blogosphere now that A-list bloggers were waning in link counts (a popularity scale because it uses a single digital social gesture, the link, and does not weigh at all the many other conversational gestures of a blog over time -- that would require multiple digital social gestures and a much more complex "algorithm" than just counting links). He was worried that the number of smaller discussions required to spread news would make the blogosphere as a whole less effective in broadcasting news, and somehow this meant there was some loss of power bloggers had been holding and was now waning.

I disagreed with his thesis, and gave some obvious statistics but also some ideas. First, I said that the blogosphere's purpose was not singular. This goes for both individual bloggers and on the whole, if there can be a "unified purpose," which I don't think there is because there are too many different kinds of blogging. Remember blogs are tools, and each person takes it and uses it in whatever way makes sense, which probably means there are 33+ million slightly different to extremely different variations of blogs now.

Anyway, back to disagreeing with the "unified purpose" idea. So, if you look at this from one view -- through the State of the Blogosphere reports put forth a in October 2004, where counts for the NY Times and MSNBC were in the neighborhood of 17 or 18 thousand links, and top 100 bloggers like Boing Boing and Instapundit had 6 or so thousand links.

At that point in time, Technorati tracked 4 million blogs and 400 million links, and now, a year and a half later, Technroati tracks 33+ million blogs and 2.2 billion links. In January, 2006, the NY Times has 55,000+ links and CNN has around 53,000+ but Boing Boing has 18,000+ and Instapundit has 5,600 links (the are no longer the number 2 blog, as that position is now held by Engadget at 15,600+ links) you can see that while the blogosphere has grown 7x and the links 5.5x, the inbound link counts of the top blogs and media has grown 3x.

Also, take into account that Technorati changed its methods of link counting last August, after several things occurred (Robert Scoble complained about its link counts in comparison to Bloglines which counts every link since it started counting, and I had reported on how link counting worked across 5 services and then other's reports of frustration with the Top 100 and A-list counts where sparce posters' links were favored over frequent posters' links). So Technorati changed from counting just links on the top pages of a blog (those posts that linked but dropped off the front pages were dropped from link counts) to any link that had occurred in the past 6 months. Technorati still counts one link only per blog, no matter it's location on the blog posts or blogroll, no matter how many links come from one blog, but all link types age out after 6 months. So these statistics for the later time frame are different and not exactly comparable, but let's do it for the sake of argument here.

So, what does this mean? Well, since there are 5.5 times more links in this 1.5 year time frame, I believe it means that there are more links made to non-A-list bloggers than bloggers further down the power law curve about , that are in what I call the "conversation middle of the power law curve" (the curve for specifically link counts), than those A-listers at the top are receiving. It means to me that while a year and a half ago, when I explained the conversational middle to people like Peter Hirshberg and Francis Piscani and thought it was far more interesting than what most people were discussing then (the top of the power law, or the existence of the power law curve at all), that now there is some evidence that as the blogosphere goes main stream, it is moving more to the middle, at least as link counts go, to more personal conversations rather than pointers to a few top media sites or the blogs that are act more like broadcasters. The broadcast model for links in blogs means that many more links went to a top blog, than they were able to link back to, because it was just physically impossible. Those top bloggers are 1-to-thousands in their distribution, and yet for inbound links counts, they have thousands of inbound links as opposed to far fewer outbound links to others.

From February 2003, here is one distribution curve showing bloggers inbound link counts in the Shirky article on power law curves:

But the conversational middle, then, and now, is both say, 12-to-12 for distribution and receiving links, or 50-to-50, or for larger blogs, maybe 500-to-200, depending on the size of the conversation verses those listening and linking back. And now the mainstreaming of the blogosphere supports this hypothesis more.

As modified from Chris Anderson's Long Tail article here is a representation of what I'm postulating:

The top of the power law curve has been referred to as the A-list, and certainly last summer, when Blogher discussions erupted at the last and well packed session of the day, and so many women expressed extreme anger and frustration at Technorati's link counting methods and particularly the there was a lot of interest in figuring out ways to reveal topic communities lower down that power law curve.

At Blogher, I suggested we work on something that would show not just a few bloggers in topic areas that were at the top, but rather sift the entire blogosphere, using as many as 22 different metrics, though some are not currently available but tool builders were welcome to build some of these out, to show "conversationalness" and "influence over time" instead of the "popularity" of link counts as the Top 100 or Top 500 that was subsequently built by Feedster, currently shows. Lots of people responded with lots of interesting ideas on the subject of how to approach this. A system like this could more accurately reveal the conversational middle, to make it much easier for more than just the participants in smaller communities of say 50, to find and expose their interests and conversations. This would also, for some of the women at Blogher, make them feel more validated or exposed as leaders in their topic areas (not politics or tech stuff), or if that was not their interest, make the Top 100 less validating and congratulatory of those who by virtue of being on the list seemed dominant, which clearly was their desire.

The idea that bloggers are not passing memes as effectively because there is less influence by broadcast style bloggers, even though more small conversations are experiencing more links going blogger-to-blogger, further down the power law curve, is silly. If people are genuinely interested in something, and have something to say, they'll blog it. These conversations occurring in the middle pass and discuss memes just as before, but the linking and diffusion of the conversation is evidence of a more mature, and interesting use of the internet, not less so. And now, if a meme crosses lots of blogs in the blogosphere, I believe it's a sign of far more interest by people, than under the earlier broadcast mode of meme spreading in the older, more early adopter blogosphere. And this certainly isn't a problem. The internet as a medium is more supportive of spread, edge conversation, than the amassing of top down broadcast distribution. The act of blogging is the act of subverting old broadcast methods of communication.

The maturing of the blogosphere with less broadcast distribution and more conversation between people spread far and wide is a welcome and more democratic way of bringing together people who want to discuss like interests. Certainly there are still bloggers who are more highly read with more inbound links that resemble broadcasters in some ways, and who PR people will continue to try to manipulate, but still, there is a shift to conversation with more symmetric linking, and that is positive overall.

Our next challenge now is how to see how small conversational communities and the attendant tools that sift these conversations can use more than one or two digital gestures, and create topic awareness of blogger groups with more than just the early adopter or blog-tool favoring metrics that post categories or tag indicators do now. These metrics too are subject to power law curves and the current uses of them one or two at at time only reflect top bloggers, or early adopters, just as link counts did before, emphasizing them over the conversational middle. When the tools of exposure change, the conversational middle will become accessible and apparent not just to those in and around a particular conversation but to those outside it.

Upgrading to Web 2.0

Yes.. folks, it's time for your upgrade for the internet.

So.. I met these very sweet folks from Dalla, Texas at SXSW at a party late Saturday night, and I asked what they did. They said, we're web designers, and right now we're working on upgrading all our clients from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

So I asked, what does that mean? And they said, well.. they have all these clients who haven't changed their websites in years and years, and now, with this concept of an upgrade, are open to improving and spending the money.

Well.. that just changed everything for me.

I thought Web 2.0 was some amorphous, meaningless, ridiculous term that no one could possibly take seriously except those VCs who write checks for fancy executive conferences. And a term that when used seriously, would tip you off to the fact that they didn't know it meant nothing and was silly.

But shoot. Now I get it. This term means something to IT consultants across the land, as they work with their clients to take them from the static web to the live web (my terminology, not theirs.. I don't think any of them will ever use those terms).

But it makes so much sense, and now I don't hate the term. I feel like well, if this is helping little mom and pop shops get a few people into better, more usable websites (we hope... they kept mentioning ajax over and over, plus blogs and wikis, and my highest hope for them is that they do it well, making things more usable for their client's users) then who can hate that? How can we begrudge them this terrific opportunity to explain the new social web to their clients, simply by putting it in terms of a software upgrade they can understand. I mean.. they all went from IE 5 to IE 6, yes? Well.. now it's Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

So I now have complete respect for "web 2.0" in this context. Live long and prosper.

And now there is a certifier. How handy. (Note that 'humor' is one of the things that will get you certified by the Certifyr.) Too bad I didn't get their cards to send it along.

Attention or Eyeballs.. Attention or Intention.. Attention or Identity

"The eyes are the window to the soul." - Unknown
"If the eye is a window to the soul, then, the heart is the doorway to love." - Unknown.
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

What's the difference between the static web and the live web?
Participation.

What's the difference between consumers and users/amateurs?
Participation.

What's the difference between attention and eyeballs?
Participation.

What is attention? Lot's of people have discussed it, including Nick Bradbury, Steve Gillmor and Seth Goldstein, all of the Attention Trust. I'm on the board too, but my interest in joining it was a little different, though I believe in the core idea just as they do. To quote Seth's blog: "Attention is the substance of focus." The idea for the Attention Trust is that "users own a copy of their data" or attention stream or intention stream or whatever you want to call it. I'm going to leave the intention debate to others because while I agree with John Battelle, that these kinds of recordings can form a sort of 'database of intention' it's not my interest in this post to pick that apart.

Caterina Fake also blogged about this idea of users owning their data.

Etech's theme this past week was attention, though I don't think anyone there except maybe Michael Goldhaber really got anywhere near the idea that the difference between the eyeballs of old (10 years ago) and the attention question is really about participation, at least as far as users collecting it on themselves and reusing it, or sharing it as they desire. Not to mention the digital social gestures that people can now make, and collect, through participatory media online that go much further than the simple mouse over or clicks that were all that could be collected before. Now the aggregate of both, clicks and gestures that are much more participatory in nature are richer and much more meaningful, and quite a bit different than "eyeballs".

And what is participation? As far as the AT, it's about user control and choice, and an absolute right to participate. Or not.

Surprisingly enough, since last August, when the AT was formed and announced, it's been just so easily accepted by anyone asked, from the top to the bottom of those "database of intention" makers, that you should own a copy of your data. They own one copy of course, but we really thought it would be much harder to gain acceptance of this ideal. And yet, here we are. Pretty much everyone has said, "...er, yes, users own a copy of their data." The hard part is, how, how much, when, in what way, will all these companies share a user's data with the users.

So the reason I joined the AT board was because I feel strongly that users should own a copy of their data. But I also feel strongly that users should be able to keep that data private, have complete control over their copy, and shared control over other copies depending on circumstances, and those users have the absolute, unequivocal right not to participate in the attention economy, at least as far as sharing their own data goes, if they are asked to by some vendor or company or other entity. No question.

If Visa wakes up one day and decides to tell me I must give them my attention stream or kiss my credit card good bye, well.. the AT would need to step into the middle of that one pronto. I cannot abide by that sort of coercion, and so, my real interest in the AT is making sure that it's as much an advocacy organization for user's privacy and security from coercion, as it is for making a place for people to come to learn about how to own and user their own data and possibly interact with entities that might trade them for it, or share the rewards of turning over leads for marketing.

Omidyar, the foundation established by Pierre Omidyar to fund both for profit and non-profit ideas, has given the Attention Trust its support to explore this idea of having a non-profit, independent group supporting user's rights.

I'm also going to work with EFF (and hopefully EPIC and Markel) to make sure the AT work and the recorder tools are the most user-friendly and affirmative of user-control, privacy and security as possible. I would also appreciate any help from people in covering this as well, so if you have thoughts, please send them to me in email to mary at hodder dot org .... or comment below.

Tonight there is a talk on attention, at SD Forum if you want to come check out some attention ideas. I encourage you to attend if you are interested and in the area.

Mash Up Camp Progress

So, Mashup Camp is moving along. To recap...

Dec 15, David Berlind said the idea in a meeting we were in, and later Doc Searls and I agreed to help.

Dec 22 David wrote about it on his blog, announcing it. Lot's of folks blogged about it and very very interested.

Jan 9 The domain was purchased and website set up with lots of help from Ross Mayfield.

Jan 13 After much discussion and coordination with very helpful people like Ross Mayfield and Lauren Gellman, of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, I managed to get the Computer History Museum (thanks to Peter Hirshberg too!). To date, without a venue or time, we had 245 people out of 250 spots signed up.

On Jan 16, we "sold out" and started a wait list.

I think this is the fastest organized event I've seen, with this breadth of people and concerns. There is a fantastic group of people, including all the mashup developers and folks from big API provider companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, etc.

Now David and Doug are working on getting lunches and the evening event paid for, the site details and costs worked out (big thanks to the Museum for donating the site at a non profit rate, since this is a community event and costs $0 to attend -- consider joining the Museum here). Others are helping to get some hotels lined up for out of towners, and people are thinking about sessions they might lead and dinners.

Symposium on Social Architecture

Update: I changed the name of the post to reflect the actual title of the event and Stowe's comments below.

Next month (in three weeks actually) the Symposium on Social Architecture will take place at Harvard. Stowe Boyd and David Weinberger have been working hard on this event, which is intended to be a fairly high level discussion about social spaces online. Terrific folks are coming, and the program includes Kevin Marks and me talking about Engines of Meaning: How Will We Scale Our Understanding:

"Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they'll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won't be surfing with search engines any more. We'll be trawling with engines of meaning." – Bruce Sterling

How will we keep up with the "dark, expanding ocean of data we spew"? Algorithms? Social filters? Faster memex-like gadgets? Do we need open algorithms in future search, so that each person can tweak their own preferences? Will we become dependent on social networks to filter the world for us, and if so, are the current representations of social relations too coarse? Will we be spending more and more time creating explicit metadata, like tags, in order to help channel the "expanding ocean"? What does it mean to be smart, today?

Kevin and I are planning to work from an brief framing of the issues with a short outline for a led discussion. If you have any ideas, please comment below. Would love to hear your ideas.

Also, if you are interested in attending, there is a registration form here.

symposium+on+social+architecture

SBC Global Does it again

.. in the worst way. (I've blogged about this before, but lately my DSL service has been okay.) But my brother just got DSL from SBC Global Yahoo. And it's been challenging for him.

I gave him my old windows laptop to use, which he did for a month, and then brought back to have me help configure stuff, and set up things like the Flickr uploader, AIM, and get his pop mail going on outlook.

I also set up a hodder.org email for him.

Well... the fun began with SBC Yahoo's site links which were broken, on their mail options page. Specifically, the pop mail configuration link, is broken. YES, BROKEN.

Click on help, from the mail page. Get a phone number for SBC Yahoo. Call it. Give loads of info. Get a person, and just as she's beginning to get what the problem is (not our email, but their mail options link, is broken), she disconnects us (we did give her a number to call us back but she never did.)

Call back, and get go through many phone menus and requests for info, to get some other woman who tells us we have to call Yahoo about the link, and gives us a number that turns out to be for Yahoo dating tech support.

Decided to try the online chat since clearly, the phone support doesn't work well. They have an extensive form of questions about the amount of ram we have, or our processor speed, type of OS, modem model (SBC sent it to my brother.. so for god sakes, they should know what it is without asking, and yet, they ask repeatedly on the phone and in the form for live chat, as if this all we might have a problem with..), and then they give us 70 (YES, 70) characters to explain our problem.

Then you hit enter, and guess what? They give us a message saying that something, though they don't tell us what, was incorrectly entered in the form, and when we close the error pop up, the form is returned to us BLANK. Oh yes. Blank. So we try again. And guess what? It happens again, even though all info is entered correctly.

So we call back, and beg, BEG, for the correct URL to reconfigure his settings so that he can have not just webmail, but popmail as well. You'd think that would be the default, having both. You'd think, they would fix the URLs on their mail options page for account holders.. after all these are paying customers.

But we get a woman who tells us we have to go to second level tech support to get a freaking correct URL. To configure the pop access. Which consists of a radio button. I saw it on the screen shot on a help page. Geez. And then, they have to get supervisor approval to go to second level tech support. And we are on hold again.

This has been going on for 1.5 hours.

In the meantime, I'm cleaning spam, popups, and spywear off of the laptop, which I stupidly gave to him, with administrator level access, and then said, don't install anything. I believe himm when he says he didn't but due to the level of access from the general login.. it means that every website he or his girlfriend surfed by with some spywear, that asked them to click on something, came with an install file for some evil crap. So I'm reconfiguring the permissions too.

Ack! I hope this ends soon.. I have other work to do. But most of all, I'm thanking God for my mac. And next time he gets a computer.. it will be a mac. Cause the nightmare of being a window's user is too much for a newby, not to mention a new DSL / email / AIM / flickr / etc user who is having trouble getting to the fun part of this, because of all the technical barriers.

Update: after a half hour on hold for 2nd level tech support, we did get someone who helped with the URL and configuration. This problem is solved, but I'm not sure my brother, as a new user, would really slog through it all, or be able to articulate it all, to the various support people. One problem SBC has is that they try to route everyone through issues around modems, when not all the issues have to do with that... which is why they ask what OS you have or what modem, even after you say the problem has nothing to do with that, as in this case, it did not. If their website had more usability testing and better forms and interaction, we likely could have solved it all online with having to call.. which is my preference.

Update to the Update:
A guy from SBC Global (who asked that his name not be blogged) happened to notice this post, and has been emailing me, trying to get additional information. In the email, I tried to encourage them to look at this as not one specific problem, around my brother, but as an overall usability issue.

This is what I sent him:

The real issue is that your web pages are set up for one kind of problem, regardless
of whether you start by calling or IMing (your version of chat -- which I was never
able to access due to the form). The questions you ask, and the links and information
don't server uses beyond a small set of problems to do with modem issues etc.

Our problem was that the link to the Pop configuration was broken. We were not
able to get help, for almost two hours, to just change a setting, and the people we
called couldn't comprehend that a user might have another kind of problem,
or listen when I explained that this was not a hardware issue. They instead kept
asking for modem model numbers and OS info, and ram quantities, instead of
getting to the real issue, which was that your link was broken, and we had
no other way besides contacting you, to change the POP configuration.

In fact, I think it would be very reasonable of you to simply make the combo of
web access and pop access the default setting for all your email uses. That way
people don't have to change a setting in order to pull down mail locally.

Secondly, i would suggest user testing and usability heuristics for your chat system.

I can understand wanting to to know the user's OS, etc for modem issues, but once
a user says the problem is related to email config up top, the form questions should change,
and then if the user incorrectly fills out the form, the system should not delete all the entries
the user just filled out (20!) but instead should highlight the incorrect entry and give the user
the chance to correct it. Also, if users use AIM or YahooIM, you should simply allow us to
IM you directly instead of using that irritating form, and then requiring that we install a program
to chat, when in fact we already have two highly used chat programs to begin with
(the height of arrogance on your part to ask us to install a chat program that only works
with your system.. like I have CPU and RAM to burn on programs that only work with you,
and that I will likely use once or twice.

As it is, due to the one month in which my brother had the laptop without spyware protection
or user permissions that would block the installation of spyware, he got 7 new spyware
programs. So to protect against this, I made him a different user on the system that won't allow
installation, without a special password. I don't think at his new level that he should be
able to install. And therefore, asking him to install software at all, when a large company
such as yours could easily license web chat software (I can direct you to a number of
software developers that would license it to you) that doesn't require installation is another
option for you, when dealing with new users, that will have issues and need to communicate
with you. There are also at least ten open source web based chat code bases you could
use to accomplish this, which also would keep your uses from having to install web chat
software that only works when talking with SBC.

I appreciate your looking into this problem and trying to solve it, but really, there is a long
way to go before your system is really usable and stupid simple.

That Sounds Just Like David Weinberger!?!

We're (Greg Elin, Jerry Michalski and me) sitting here working and listening to Chris Lydon's new show.. streaming live now, called Open Source. The inaugeral show has David Weinberger (Chris introduced him as "blog philosopher"), Dave Winer ("father of RSS") and Doc Searls, ("of Santa Barbara").

What are the social values of this new world (Lydon)
It's that we get to say whatever we want.. we get to connect to each other.. when I was on vacation recently, there was a poor internet connection, and I felt cut off.... (Weinberger)
Does that mean that your addicted? (Lydon)

I know just how David feels.

I just IM'd Doc and asked "if we IM you code words.. will you weave them into sentences on the live broadcast?"

Okay, now we're being pills. Getting off IM.

Good show... Oh, Dave Winer is getting introduced.

There is a thread that connects all these things together.. blogging, podcasting, etc.. (now he's comparing RSS to sushi boats..) where stuff comes down as it's published.. it's called 'disintermediated' (Winer)

Greg just IM'd Doc and said he would pay him $10 to mention his name online.. and I offered $15 and Jerry offered $20.

We just made an IRC here: irc.freenode.net #radioopensource

They are saying things bloggers have known for years.. we are expressing ourselves, we are talking and connecting, we are making things, disagreeing and that's good, participating, supplying for our own demands, telling stories.

Choicepoint Scandal Unspun

Tara Wheatland over at bIPlog has the definitive post on Choicepoint, their culpability over the cracking of their systems and people's data, and what's really going on. Many of the news stories were apparently inaccurate, and she dissects the spin Choicepoint put out to minimize their responsibility and some of the activities they engage in that are very unsettling. Check it out!

Also, check out EPIC's pages on Choicepoint. There's lots more background on this company that has been, for example, providing data to government agencies that those agencies would be barred by law from collecting on their own because of privacy laws that came out of Watergate. Well worth knowing what is happening with the company that stores all the information it can aggregate on you.

Open Source Usability Sprint

I just participated in the F/Loss Open Source Usability Sprint. My group was amazing, including Matt Mullenweg and Greg Elin, where we brainstormed a new way to use Greg's Fotonotes app, and then played around with it, did some usability work on it... and thought up some really cool ways to play with photos.

The people who put on the sprint were awesome, doing an amazing job, especially for the first time out at this. The other projects included:

My only regret was that I was so busy doing either my project or the more formal group activities designed by the Sprint organizers, that I didn't spend much time with people and their individual projects. However, it was really cool to get a little taste of the other projects, see where they are at with development and get to see them working. Really great stuff!

Aspiration Tech and Blue Oxen Associates organized this and did a great job. Thanks Gunner, Eugene and Katrin!

Collection of the Origins of Cyberspace Up For Auction at Christies

The Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking & Telecommunications
Sale 1484
23 February 2005, 10:00 am
20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York

One thing to note is how text based all the artifacts and memorabilia are... Looking at these documents, the heritage of computing science is about textual understandings, not images or visually based communication, and this perspective still weighs heavily on development today.

This program from a play (c. 1920) which was the first use of the word, Robot, is one of the items for sale. (click on the image to read about the play and author.)

Some items go back to the 1600's. The guy selling the stuff, Jeremy Norman, published a catalog in 2002 with Diana H. Hook called Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and Telecommunications (see his website for more information).

I can't help thinking that he probably doesn't need the money, and the collection is valuable for other reasons, especially together, for science history and socio-technical study. It's too bad it's going to be parceled out, instead of kept together in some institution for academics, students and innovators to learn from and compare across the collection to see how past scientific and computing development occured. Maybe it could all be scanned in detail for a virtual museum?

TDG Last Night

The first Technorati Developer Group was last night in SF. I really wanted to go, but had a house guest, and so instead, went with her to a dinner with the Dogster man, and his lovely bride. Delightful people, who are going to SXSW to speak, along with the houseguest, so we'll all meet again in Austin for our talks.

Photo here... and Dave Sifry blogged it. Niall Kennedy, who instigated it, gave out two books and did a presentation for Technorati developers. I'm really sorry I missed it!

The Last Linux Show

As we speak, Doc is on The Last Linux Show. Marc Torres, Joe Barr and Brian Proffitt are scheduled .. but Doc is apparently the surprise guest.

Cool.. except that it's the LAST.

Treo 650? Don't Buy It

I purchased the Treo 600 last year. I love the integration in a single device. Camera, Palm Pilot for calendar and contacts, MP3 Player, web access, all with the phone. One device. The camera isn't great, but in a pinch.. you've got it, and the web access is slow.. and the palm OS is funky a lot of the time.

But the phone itself, the four phones I've had since I bought it one year ago today, have never been right.

* All four broke in the same way: the up/down volume on the phone is right in the spot where you hold the phone as you talk. During a call, after a while, it's easy to push the volume up, not realize it, and at the top level, the next time the person speaks, the outgoing speaker blows out. After that, you can only talk using a headset. The fifth one is on the verge of breaking... I can tell the speaker is on it's way out... it's getting funny even as I try to keep the volume on low.

* The Infrared worked on the first phone... which I had from last December through Jan 15 when the speaker blew. The following three have never had working inferred.

* Calls have to be dialed at least three times before they actually "take" and are put through to Cingular, starting with the firmware that came with phones 5 and 5, which is 03.05.

So here is what happened to the phones:
Phone 1: Dec, 03 - Jan 04.. replacement came in mid Feb 04. For one month, I could only talk using a headset. Incredibly frustrating and annoying. Treo 600 Serial no: HAAAD3463A00V

Phone 2: Feb 04 - May 04.. replacement came in June, 04. Serial No: HAAAD3463A0BL. Inferred never worked. Speaker blew in May, 04. Could only talk on headset.

Phone 3: June, 04 - July 04.. Serial No: HAAAD3453A0GB. Infrared never worked so I couldn't trade biz cards. Speaker blew -- so could only talk on headset. Replacement in September.. was busy and just couldn't deal with the whole nightmare again.

Phone 4: October 04 - Nov 04. Serial No: HAAAD4366A1VR. Speaker is going out on it now, infrared has never worked. Most called have to be dialed three times before the phone will attempt to connect to the network. Web access is hard to get going. Also, the phone jams constantly, and I am continuously resetting the phone by putting a little pin Palm provideds into the back of the machine. This is really annoying too, especially if the phone jams on a call or in the middle of something important. The whole thing just freezes. Resetting means redialing whatever call you were on, and if it's somewhere where you already waited on hold, you have to start all over.

Interestingly, when I called on the most recent phone, and they looked up the old serial no.s, they were registered to other people. Which means that Palm fixed the problem and sent the phone on to others, probably as a refurbished model. But they were mine first, and even though they were defective. In fact, these phones are so prone to breaking in the speaker on high volume, that when I call, they don't even ask me to check the phone. They just offer to send another.

However, since I'm at the end of the warranty, with a partially broken phone that will be fully broken shortly, I'm returning the last one and demanding a refund.. based on this information California Bureau of Electronic and Appliance Repair MANUFACTURERS, DISTRIBUTORS, RETAILERS AND WARRANTY SERVICE DEALERS Advisory - Warranty Disclosures - May 2004 which is more fully stated in the CA civil code:

Please Note: As previously required, work orders and repair invoices must still contain the following specific wording in 10-point boldface type:

“A buyer of this product in California has the right to have this product serviced or repaired during the warranty period. The warranty period will be extended for the number of whole days that the product has been out of the buyer’s hands for warranty repairs. If a defect exists within the warranty period, the warranty will not expire until the defect has been fixed. The warranty period will also be extended if the warranty repairs have not been performed due to delays caused by circumstances beyond the control of the buyer, or if the warranty repairs did not remedy the defect and the buyer notifies the manufacturer or seller of the failure of the repairs within 60 days after they were completed. If, after a reasonable number of attempts, the defect has not been fixed, the buyer may return this product for a replacement or a refund subject, in either case, to a deduction of a reasonable charge for usage. This time extension does not affect the protections or remedies the buyer has under other laws.”

Though I should note that the original phone, and all the replacements, never came with this disclosure.

So, why not buy the Treo 650? Well, the 650 does apprently fix the speaker problem, but does not have compatible connectors.. in other words, everything you bought for the Treo 600, like a car adaptor, or keyboard, or USB power/sync for your laptop, won't work on the Treo 650. How cynical is Palm anyway? That's ridiculous. This phone is a year old, and if I wanted to upgrade, I would be out of luck on all that stuff. And frankly their answer for all my problems is to just keep replacing the phone, instead of actually fixing the defect and giving me a good phone.

They don't care about customers. I now regret the 20 or so people I got to buy the phone, including my doctor, who bought one for her daughter, during a checkup I had. They are incredibly unreliable, and throwing more money at Palm for the 650 would be a real mistake.

1001 - Exposing Your Flickr Contact's Photos

With just a small box, sheer, discreet, a thumbnail in the middle... people you have as contacts upload photos into Flickr and as they do, you see them in the little box, which I keep in the lower right of my desktop. I first tried this little app three weeks ago, sent to me by DavidX.

At first, I thought, oh, another thing to pay attention to.. and clutter my desktop. But I'm so loving this. People are out.. doing things... taking snapshots and I see them, a few here, a few there... it changes the way I see my contacts... I know who is more active on Flickr without going to the site, what they want to save or share, what they are seeing, where they are (Esther was in Russia yesterday for example, or last week, David was on the bus in SF, and Jerry was visiting his mother in Washington, and so when the photos appear on Flickr, they also end up as the top photo in a little 1001 stack I can scroll back through). I feel much more connected to them in a way I didn't so much before.. because it's immediate, because I feel that I'm seeing what they are seeing closer to the time when they took the photos. Before I would just go to Flickr when I thought about it, and it would take time to click around, and so I realize now in comparison that it felt somewhat disconnected from their experience.

Only thing, it's just for the Mac, and so far, the 1001 beta is only good through November 30th. Bad. Very bad. I'm hooked and I want this always.

Open Source at the Hillside Club, Berkeley

Kim Polese, Kirk McKusick, Eric Allman, Brian Behlendorf, and Marten Mickos all talked tonight about Open Source.

Ideas like... open source is free as in free-to-be-changed, improved, reused. And that there is value to getting lots of people to look at code because it ensures that it's better than when only a few people. Also, forking of projects and licensing... commercial verses open source, collaboration between IT people in big companies and open source developers, openness in systems and with source code generally. In order for any OS project to succeed, a critical mass of developers is needed to make something.. and things like Open Office didn't have that.. but may get good enough soon to be a threat to Office. But then we talked about what applications are or are becoming open source (more and more, in almost every software category), that there are many more apps that are not. Some of this is about people with itches, who scratch their own, instead of buying proprietary or waiting to get it scratched.

There was a lot there.. and due to a lot of traveling and not too much sleep, I didn't get all that was said around this stuff. I really just wanted to listen and take in the stories about this area I'm getting more and more interested in, beyond just being all for it. However, the Hillside Club will put this up on their site shortly.. so we can all listen.

Slide Show Bob

Kinda like powerpoint with out the proprietary skittles / $$. To quote Craig Newmark (from Web 2.0), "... as the kids say, I'm giving a shout out to ..." Eric Meyer, who makes a simple slide show system in S⁵. Nice.

Open Source Gets Cooler

Kim Polese is introducing her new company, SpikeSource where she is CEO, at Web 2.0. Her presentation is great. Full of Hugh-train drawings.

Instead of top down, it's bottom up.
Instead of an industrial ego system, it's an eco system.

Web 2.0 arrived when demand began to supply itself.
Users pick up the tools. Like with Wikipedia. Like podcasting.

Process innovation is happening for software innovation, and Kim's new company, SpikeSource, is where they will make "automated systems for assembling open source software... with validation, integration, testing, and support".

Cool. Absolutely love seeing a really brainy smart, cool woman running a company like this. Go Kim!

Oh, and here's the link to the Linux Supervillian cartoon she showed.

Snap Back

Yesterday, late in the afternoon, at Web 2.0, we got an intro to Snap, a new search engine. It looked cool because of all the parameters available for sorting, even if the search results are a bit hard to grok and need some UI love:

But then, TrainedMonkey pointed out their linking policy:

Linking to the Site
Unless a User has a written agreement in effect with us which states otherwise, User may only provide a hyperlink to the Site on another Web site, if you comply with all of the following: (a) the link must be a text-only link clearly marked "snap.com" or "www.snap.com"; (b) the link must "point" to the URL "http://www.snap.com" and not to other pages within the Site; (c) the link, when activated by a User, must display the Site full-screen and not within a "frame" on the linking Web site; and (d) the appearance, position and other aspects of the link must not be such as to damage or dilute the goodwill associated with our name and trademarks or create the false appearance we are associated with or sponsor the linking Web site. Perfect Market reserves the right to revoke its consent to any link at any time in its sole discretion.

How absolutely clueless. Uh, seems they've lost their cluetrain ticket too. They must know about the Athens 2004 incident. I mean, at least with those guys, you could understand somewhat the utter cluelessness, because well, you know, they are all about old media. But Snap? Okay. Well, way to get on the Web 2.0-train, SnapBack.

Update 10/6/04: Apparently, Snap changed it's policy in response to the blog posts by Cory and others.

China's Digital Future Conference

Just started. Webcast there as well. First introductions....

Orville Schell, dean of the JSchool at UCB: Now in China, there is the question, what does it mean to be Chinese? The internet is one of those places where you begin to see the discussion, weblogs, chatrooms, txt messages.

Will China change the internet? This is an old theme in China: use technology from the west but then also reject politics, value, all the things that create revolution and radical change. Can China use what it wants but keep its own identity, keeping out what it finds too foreign? He quoted John Perry Barlow: the global space you are building will naturally be free of the tyrannies you are imposing... and then noted the posting on the internet in China recently with 14 questions for the propaganda department, why they exist, posing the kind of challenge that Barlow would have been proud of.

Annalee Saxenian, our new dean of SIMS: The Politics of Standards. Some people refer to it as the politics of protectionism.... And key for future development in China: applications, content, engineering and design. And the internet.

Panels on Internet Development in China and Regulation and Control of the Internet. Here are some notes from the second panel this afternoon:

Cindy Cohen, EFF: every time there is a new tool, a free speech mechanism, it has to fight for it's survival...
regarding privacy, the record of the internet has been more mixed... on balance. Architecture as policy - Mitch Kapor. That is an important observation, because the architecture will determine people's rights. In China we see the worst story around, where greatly accelerated internet use, 78 million users in China and 4 million broadband users.
Original strategy was filtering content. But the strategies to get around those are easy to implement and widespread. So now the reaction is not so much content filtering, but a distributed system of surveillance, with systems installed on users computers and used by ISPs -- often made by US companies and government who are trying to use those things here. And the US government has started this with Kalia, and forced it onto foreign governments through standards. China has taken the lead on doing voice recognition software for the purposes of surveillance and for doing video with almost instantaneous high speed transfer.

Bill Xia, pres of Dynamic Internet Projects -- and makes technologies that can get around the surveillance systems: He says the biggest challenge in China today is not technology, but the social issues. In China, surveillance occurs during the routing of packets where the to and from are watched. Also, the government claims that they are blocking things like porn sites, but in fact when you look at the blacklists, this is not true. There is severe overblocking of all sorts of things, including sites like 3dweb.com. Fear: truth or illusion? People say they don't worry because they have nothing to hide. But it occupies people's minds. And destroys traditions, as well as changes language: traditional Chinese characters have been filtered out of the culture. He thinks that there are cracks in the Chinese control system, and the fact that there are 500k users in China of his company's system to get around the control (out of 78 million users in China).

John Battelle (moderator) asked if users feel it's dangerous to use the product. And Xia responded no for regular users, but yes for some others, but then got cut off on the next presentation.

Jonathan Zittrain: Gave a chilling effects example where a DMCA C&D letter caused Google to remove a site, where on the supply side, the links then went to the original info at chilling effects. But on the other hand, other sites are deleted entirely from French and German search sites.

On the demand side, if you go to Google.com in China, you are redirected to the University of Beijing search site. Also, some testing of sites showed they were blocked by China, as well as many key word searches like "std" or "revolution." Found a few thousand sites that were blocked, including news sites, UC Courts, British Courts, porn, etc.

Tracking filtering is becoming more difficult, because there are new forms of filtering including the client side stuff. Also, if you do the wrong search, you are blocked from Google for about 20 minutes. Including searches that are not subversive at all. Comparatively, in Saudia Arabia, it's more bark than bite, verses China, which is the opposite.

Opennet Initiative is Zittrain's latest project examining filtering, along with folks from other universities. Examples of filtering they've found: the word "ass" in any domain gets blocked, which ends up filtering the "US Embassy" site. He clearly relishes giving this example, as with the rest of the presentation. He's having a lot of fun here.

He also challenges the NYTimes to get involved, so that when things open up, they have established their brand, since they are now totally blocked in China.

Jie Cheng, associate professor at Tsinghua University Law School: talked about how the filtering standards need to be revised. The social norms are more important than what the normative law. Later at the cocktain party, she talked about how China needs to be better with filtering, so that they don't block so many harmless sites. Obviously she has a hard job, coming here to explain her country's actions and policies to this audience but she and the audience were cordial in explaining questions and positions. It's a difficult position she's in.

.........................................................................................................
Best quote of the day: Tom Vest, Packet Clearing House: "ruling a great nation is like hooking a small fish, a light touch might be best."

Revisiting Virtual Communities

This panel just finished, and here are a few noteworthy remarks:

Susan Mernit was live blogging from the panel, during the panel. Markos Moulitsas (Kos), Craig Newmark (there is a new documentary about craigslist called "24 hours on craigslist.org" and Fortune just did a story on them) and Mark Pincus of Tribe.

Mernit: Tools and technology adoption are key to what's happening with people and technology. Online communities are about people and people in turn drive technology development to support themselves and their communities.

Newmark: We've collectively managed to reach a few million people between social networks, blogs etc. but how do you get past that echo chamber.... When you grow up as a nerd, you learn what it feels like to feel left out, and when you gow up, you think about it and figure out how to include people, which is what craigslist is working on now.

Pincus: All leads aren't the same -- just like search results were too much on alta vista in the beginning, as we deal with each other now on social networking sites, we need filters and ways to qualify information so that we get better info. We also choose to expose ourselves to each other and we want to get good things back, not bad. The network is the database -- tell the network who we are and then automagically, the network will help us find a group that we could be a part of... the genesis of tribe was political - though I have no interest in public interest job. The process is the platform.

Kos: There is no fair and balanced media -- I think everyone has bias and it seeps into coverage. Fox has viewers for a reason, ABC, NBC and CBS are boring -- and newspapers lose readers for a reason, but newspapers in England are a lot more lively.

Pincus: Google has proven that if you put things in context, and clearly identify things people like it. They did tests, and people said they liked craigslist because it had no ads, but actually it's all ads, but the ads are content and they are where people expect the ads to be. If I see an ad before a movie, I'm annoyed, but I want to see them in the right categories on craigslist. We are in an age of "utility media" that moves away from "entertainment media", where it's like a free cab ride in Mexico to the time share, but then you have to listen to this ad.... Craig has proven that it's sustainable, Tribe hasn't proven it yet, but there is no reason to have it be an adversarial relationship.

Silicon Valley Lamented

Thomas Friedman writes that the SV folks (and I think more generally representative of innovators and developers in the greater US) he just visited think we are losing our edge. Can't disagree. Various reasons are cited, including universal health care offered in other countries, tax breaks, better education of the populace, getting bogged down in political issues like Iraq and a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle between India, China, Japan and their neighbors. Apparently we are sort of ignoring that last one in the US. Too complicated to address, no?

But what Friedman totally neglects, our fearless leader marginally gets, according to Jeff Jarvis: "We're lagging a little bit on broadband technology." Try a lot. Add to that mobile and wifi culture, and an understanding of digital media in all forms, possibilities, limitations and manifestations. This is knowledge that develops from using technology, interacting with gadgets and people, communicating and creating communities of shared digital media, ideas, people, interest. You have to play with the stuff to know it. How do you build on this digital culture, which is status quo in parts of Asia and Europe, but 5 years behind for people in the US, if you don't have the infrastructure, and open standards, and a critical mass of users playing and an IP regime that encourages the push and pull of data. Those users will take frameworks of technologies in their heads, then understand it enough to build on it, innovate, make something for sale. These communities exist in Japan, Italy, the UK, Finland, South Korea, India and on and on.

Graduate classes here in the US read papers about people in those places using these technologies. Better than nothing, for sure, but how stupid are we, to have such ridiculous closed standards and IP lock-down and backward networks and pricing structures. Can you say FCC and the BF? It's our own fault really. We're doing this to ourselves.

Dodgeball? Your Stalkers Can Kick Back and Take it Easy

"It's like Friendster for your mobile phone."

But do I really want Dick who is a friend of my friend Jane's dog Spot to know that I'm standing at the corner of 24th and 3rd right now, blogging this? I mean, I guess that anyone reading this on their web phone could run over, but then I'm choosing to blog this info, and of course, my friends can call me because I've given them my number, and the can see when I'm on IM. But I choose that too. I let it happen because they are my friends and I know them. But everyone on Friendster three degrees out? That was the last time I checked in the hundreds of thousands.

I'm thinking dodging the ball seems like the right metaphor. I can see it now, people suddenly realize that so and so can "see" them, turn off their phone/web access and make for the nearest unlikely location (I just discovered the Hell's Angel's SF house a block away from here... I bet you wouldn't suspect I'd be there, right? And they are probably a whole lot nicer than that stalker you're running away from....) Okay, I probably wouldn't run away, but geez man, get over this YASNs/FOAF+something thing already. I don't want to be tracked everywhere, even if I am boring and go to the same places most of the time -- work, school, home.... I like it when I serendipitously run into people, love it, happens a fair amount, but it would drive me crazy if dodgeball were behind it.

Cost Sharing Your Computing Load Across Your Neighborhood Community Flashmob

A few thoughts from yesterday:

2pm, In the Parina Room, they have both exhibit booths for event sponsors like Clusterworld and HP, as well as a LAN party where 16 guys are playing Halo.

"It's a bloodbath down there," said Monica Ortiz, who does marketing for ClusterWorld. I met her first in the exhibits area, but an hour later she was taking refuge in the media room across campus in Koret Gym. A few journalists were in there, restless, about 3pm. One guy just said, "I want it to be more of a horserace." Parker Thompson told him that if one machine goes down, the whole test will be ruined, but it's 3:10pm and they are still doing the test across what we've been told is now 750+ machines. Parker then joked that he was betting some guy who had a machine with a broken fan, not understanding the situation, figured he'd lend it, and eventually, poof! We hoped not. But that's what they were dealing with at this event.

3:30pm, In the gym, where the computers are running, there is a loud hum echoing off the blond wood floors. There's a platform in the middle which is command central for the people running this, and a few other folks around them, but mainly it's just rows and rows of laptops and boxes.

Parker took this one of neatly arranged cables. More pix here and here.

The class that originated this project are all wearing black t-shirts with the project logo, sitting to the side of command central, at a row of tables that didn't get filled with nodes/computers. They too are playing xbox games. They all look very happy, pleased with the event and the fact that in the middle of the hum, they can pass the time with group video games while the test runs.

4-5pm, Brewster Kahle talked about his cluster setup at the Archive. He was his usual funny, enjoyable self with nice insight into the issues ("the future of anarchy net") they have putting together archives located around the globe. "Giving away something for free, if it's popular, can cost a lot. One slashdot can ruin your whole day." So he focuses on distributed bandwidth.

6pm. the results:

FlashMob I was very successful and a lot of fun. Over 700 computers came into the gym and we were able to hook up 669 to the network. Our best Linpack result was a peak rate of 180 Gflops using 256 computers, however a node failed 75% through the computation. Our best completed result was 77 Gflops using 150 computers. The biggest challenge was identifying flakey computers and determining the best configuration for running the benchmark. Each of the 669 computers ran Linpack at some point in the day.

Also, watched them breaking down the setup, returning computers to owners. Impressively accomplished in about an hour or so. (Sorry about the blurry Treo 600 pix; it's just doesn't take great shots, esp inside in low light.)

One of the shared computers came in a little box:

Afterward, at the event party nearby, a lot of the students, sponsors and organizers congregated. They said they learned a lot. If nothing else, they realized they need to gather a more reliable set of nodes to do something like this but also plan more for the lack of reliability. As always, it's the little things.

Flashmob Supercomputing at USF Now

The project came up in a class around 6 weeks ago, where John Wichel, a grad student at USF, asked why not? By the end of class after a little arguing, they figured it was possible and put out a call for 1200 systems. Today they are flash-testing whether they can make a supercomputer that can compete with the top 500th biggest computer in the world which cost around $25 million. But this one is essentially free, because it's made up of 600+ computers lent to the project by students, faculty and the community. Mostly over the last month, he said they, the students in the class this project originated in, have been trying to figure out how to architect the software, to get all the computers connected. Some students were up all night last night still writing code. They did a lot of small scale testing the past couple of weeks until yesterday when they tested about 100 computers.

It's "super computing in a flash," says Andrew Bolles, hired documentarian for this project. A media science undergrad, he's been filming, tagging along behind the makers of this supercomputer for a month. He's doing all the editing and storyboarding too, and will make a documentary so that the makers of this project can show people what they did to pull this event and supercomputer together.

The idea has been out there for a long time, and one example is the SETI@Home program, which I've been doing for the last 5 years. Users donate their systems when not in use to SETI which harnesses the processors using highspeed bandwidth connections across the internet. The Flashmob Supercomputer in the middle of Koret Gym is doing the same thing today, all at once but all in the same location.

At the end, the project makers want to hand out CDs to laptop donators and post an image of the software to the web so that people can do the same thing with small groups of computers at home, etc. Also, they are licensing it open source so that people can modify and improve it.

Grey Tuesday is Today

The album is great. Download it here and check it out. Free the grey album! I think if you have or buy both albums already, black and white, you should be able to hear the grey. Grey Tuesday is in support of the Grey Album. Also look at EMI's C&D on Grey Tuesday.

(ps, I had wanted to host it but having just changed hosters, have not figured out how to get it up there on the new stuff, but if I do, I'll update....)

Update: as noted in the comments the link to the Grey Album was shut down Tuesday night.

A Thought About Orkut, Privacy and Google

Free Cell Phone For All

On The Radar

Jacques Vallee as quoted by Om Malik.

The big companies need culture change; especially the cable companies which need to learn the concept of digital media.

This new networking service is not very subtle; type in IBM and its useless. Only small networks that you know are small would be useful. They need a more nuanced way to derive networks.

If your business is search, and you rely on the linking universe to tell one thing apart from another... one technology can undermine another. Meg Hurihan says weblogs *are* ruining Google.

While these blog survey results might be less than scientific, it's interesting nonetheless to see how people responded.

On The Radar

Jacques Vallee as quoted by Om Malik.

The big companies need culture change; especially the cable companies which need to learn the concept of digital media.

This new networking service is not very subtle; type in IBM and its useless. Only small networks that you know are small would be useful. They need a more nuanced way to derive networks.

If your business is search, and you rely on the linking universe to tell one thing apart from another... one technology can undermine another. Meg Hurihan says weblogs *are* ruining Google.

While these blog survey results might be less than scientific, it's interesting nonetheless to see how people responded.

On The Radar

Jacques Vallee as quoted by Om Malik.

The big companies need culture change; especially the cable companies which need to learn the concept of digital media.

This new networking service is not very subtle; type in IBM and its useless. Only small networks that you know are small would be useful. They need a more nuanced way to derive networks.

If your business is search, and you rely on the linking universe to tell one thing apart from another... one technology can undermine another. Meg Hurihan says weblogs *are* ruining Google.

While these blog survey results might be less than scientific, it's interesting nonetheless to see how people responded.

Digital Media Redux

Two thoughts before we get into the meat of it:
Pixel Power! (Linda Yablonsky/NYTimes)
David Byrnes Alternative PowerPoint Universe (Veronique Vienne/NYTimes)

And now for the meat of it:
Frank points to this: Finally, the video revolution in art has led to the Napsterization of it as well: When Fans of Pricey Video Art Can Get It Free by Greg Allen/NYTimes.

Not so long ago, the idea that video could be a medium for artistic expression was radical fringe; today, as Mr. Barney's success shows, it has become conventional cultural wisdom. And so, increasingly, is the idea that video, along with film, animation, and slide-based work, can be sold in the same exclusive manner as painting and sculpture. Through the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Mr. Barney sold each "Cremaster" film in a limited edition of 10, numbered and encased in table-size vitrines. These pieces have since sold at auction for as much as $387,500. Other emerging stars like Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss installation artist, or Pierre Huyghe, the French recipient of the 2002 Hugo Boss Award, also now command five- and six-figure prices for their video work.

But while artists and dealers are limiting the supply of videos, and placing them in the private homes of wealthy patrons, a new breed of collector has staged a quiet revolt. These aren't the people who keep auction prices afloat, or whose lavish support turns struggling newcomers into art-world celebrities. Instead, these are journalists, gallery staffers, professors and art students who trade bootleg copies of the coveted videos - just as Napster users did with MP3 files. Because digital technology makes these bootlegs so easy to duplicate and distribute, and because they are so close to the "original" editions sold in galleries, they pose an intriguing challenge to the authenticity on which art's value is traditionally based.

[...] Even if it's for love and not money, though, copying and distributing work without the artist's permission is against the law. "Whether it is video or a painting, the principle is the same: artists own and control the copyright to their work," explains Dr. Theodore Feder, president of the Artists Rights Society, which manages and monitors copyrights for artists. None of these underground traders have been prosecuted - yet - but the music industry's recent legal pursuit of online file swappers prompts most traders to keep a low profile.

Nevertheless, Chris Hughes, a 25-year-old artist and self-taught video art expert, has put his entire catalog online, at www.freehomepages.com/crhughes/. With 1,500 works, representing early pioneers like Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono as well as current stars like Mr. Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Gillian Wearing, the breadth of Mr. Hughes's collection rivals those of many museums. The difference, however, is that he got almost all of it through unsanctioned trading.

[...] But some critics - even some video artists themselves - have argued that such a business model, useful in the sale of prints, cast sculptures and photography, is meaningless for video. "For videos, editions are fake," says Pierre Huyghe, in a comment seemingly designed to alarm his dealer. "When Rodin could only cast three sculptures of a nude before the mold lost its sharpness, it made sense. But all my works are on my hard drive, in ones and zeros." His dealer, Marian Goodman, has nonetheless sold certified copies of Mr. Huyghe's videos for prices estimated in the high five figures. Artists have the same right as anyone else to make a living, she points out, and limited editions represent a "logical, established tradition" which makes that possible.

[...] Loss of control can also yield fortuitous results, however, by allowing video artists to experiment with one another's work in much the same way that musicians sample and remix one another's songs. (Because the experiments are artistic projects in their own right, they may not violate copyright law.) In an editing tour de force, the Swiss artist Christian Marclay combined over 600 sound and film clips from over a hundred classic movies to create an intense, 15-minute musical composition, synchronized over four 10-foot screens. In preparing the work, which was commissioned by SFMOMA and the Grand Museum of Luxembourg, and exhibited in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Mr. Marclay didn't bother to pursue the rights to any of those films. Instead he pulled freely and without permission from whatever movie tapes or DVD's he could lay his hands on.

And a young Baltimore video artist, Jon Routson, whose work explores bootlegging itself, has tackled Matthew Barney's work head-on. In April at New York's Team Gallery, Mr. Routson showed his "made for TV" version of "Cremaster 4." He cut a grainy VHS bootleg of Mr. Barney's 45-minute film down to 22 minutes, dropped in actual commercials, compressed the end credits and even floated ABC's logo in the lower corner of the screen. The result: a hilarious, smart, and brazen work, which drew critical praise and which may be a sign of things to come.

Why troubling? The art world, as it embraces digital technologies, seems not to have given any more thought to the implications of digital delivery than any other industries have. And each successive industry that goes into these technologies without thinking through the implications is going to add their voices to the chorus of the RIAA's and MPAA's songs of woe. [emphasis mine]

Why, yes. They do get it, there at the end, don't they?

Digital Media Redux

Two thoughts before we get into the meat of it:
Pixel Power! (Linda Yablonsky/NYTimes)
David Byrnes Alternative PowerPoint Universe (Veronique Vienne/NYTimes)

And now for the meat of it:
Frank points to this: Finally, the video revolution in art has led to the Napsterization of it as well: When Fans of Pricey Video Art Can Get It Free by Greg Allen/NYTimes.

Not so long ago, the idea that video could be a medium for artistic expression was radical fringe; today, as Mr. Barney's success shows, it has become conventional cultural wisdom. And so, increasingly, is the idea that video, along with film, animation, and slide-based work, can be sold in the same exclusive manner as painting and sculpture. Through the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Mr. Barney sold each "Cremaster" film in a limited edition of 10, numbered and encased in table-size vitrines. These pieces have since sold at auction for as much as $387,500. Other emerging stars like Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss installation artist, or Pierre Huyghe, the French recipient of the 2002 Hugo Boss Award, also now command five- and six-figure prices for their video work.

But while artists and dealers are limiting the supply of videos, and placing them in the private homes of wealthy patrons, a new breed of collector has staged a quiet revolt. These aren't the people who keep auction prices afloat, or whose lavish support turns struggling newcomers into art-world celebrities. Instead, these are journalists, gallery staffers, professors and art students who trade bootleg copies of the coveted videos - just as Napster users did with MP3 files. Because digital technology makes these bootlegs so easy to duplicate and distribute, and because they are so close to the "original" editions sold in galleries, they pose an intriguing challenge to the authenticity on which art's value is traditionally based.

[...] Even if it's for love and not money, though, copying and distributing work without the artist's permission is against the law. "Whether it is video or a painting, the principle is the same: artists own and control the copyright to their work," explains Dr. Theodore Feder, president of the Artists Rights Society, which manages and monitors copyrights for artists. None of these underground traders have been prosecuted - yet - but the music industry's recent legal pursuit of online file swappers prompts most traders to keep a low profile.

Nevertheless, Chris Hughes, a 25-year-old artist and self-taught video art expert, has put his entire catalog online, at www.freehomepages.com/crhughes/. With 1,500 works, representing early pioneers like Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono as well as current stars like Mr. Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Gillian Wearing, the breadth of Mr. Hughes's collection rivals those of many museums. The difference, however, is that he got almost all of it through unsanctioned trading.

[...] But some critics - even some video artists themselves - have argued that such a business model, useful in the sale of prints, cast sculptures and photography, is meaningless for video. "For videos, editions are fake," says Pierre Huyghe, in a comment seemingly designed to alarm his dealer. "When Rodin could only cast three sculptures of a nude before the mold lost its sharpness, it made sense. But all my works are on my hard drive, in ones and zeros." His dealer, Marian Goodman, has nonetheless sold certified copies of Mr. Huyghe's videos for prices estimated in the high five figures. Artists have the same right as anyone else to make a living, she points out, and limited editions represent a "logical, established tradition" which makes that possible.

[...] Loss of control can also yield fortuitous results, however, by allowing video artists to experiment with one another's work in much the same way that musicians sample and remix one another's songs. (Because the experiments are artistic projects in their own right, they may not violate copyright law.) In an editing tour de force, the Swiss artist Christian Marclay combined over 600 sound and film clips from over a hundred classic movies to create an intense, 15-minute musical composition, synchronized over four 10-foot screens. In preparing the work, which was commissioned by SFMOMA and the Grand Museum of Luxembourg, and exhibited in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Mr. Marclay didn't bother to pursue the rights to any of those films. Instead he pulled freely and without permission from whatever movie tapes or DVD's he could lay his hands on.

And a young Baltimore video artist, Jon Routson, whose work explores bootlegging itself, has tackled Matthew Barney's work head-on. In April at New York's Team Gallery, Mr. Routson showed his "made for TV" version of "Cremaster 4." He cut a grainy VHS bootleg of Mr. Barney's 45-minute film down to 22 minutes, dropped in actual commercials, compressed the end credits and even floated ABC's logo in the lower corner of the screen. The result: a hilarious, smart, and brazen work, which drew critical praise and which may be a sign of things to come.

Why troubling? The art world, as it embraces digital technologies, seems not to have given any more thought to the implications of digital delivery than any other industries have. And each successive industry that goes into these technologies without thinking through the implications is going to add their voices to the chorus of the RIAA's and MPAA's songs of woe. [emphasis mine]

Why, yes. They do get it, there at the end, don't they?

Digital Media Redux

Two thoughts before we get into the meat of it:
Pixel Power! (Linda Yablonsky/NYTimes)
David Byrnes Alternative PowerPoint Universe (Veronique Vienne/NYTimes)

And now for the meat of it:
Frank points to this: Finally, the video revolution in art has led to the Napsterization of it as well: When Fans of Pricey Video Art Can Get It Free by Greg Allen/NYTimes.

Not so long ago, the idea that video could be a medium for artistic expression was radical fringe; today, as Mr. Barney's success shows, it has become conventional cultural wisdom. And so, increasingly, is the idea that video, along with film, animation, and slide-based work, can be sold in the same exclusive manner as painting and sculpture. Through the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Mr. Barney sold each "Cremaster" film in a limited edition of 10, numbered and encased in table-size vitrines. These pieces have since sold at auction for as much as $387,500. Other emerging stars like Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss installation artist, or Pierre Huyghe, the French recipient of the 2002 Hugo Boss Award, also now command five- and six-figure prices for their video work.

But while artists and dealers are limiting the supply of videos, and placing them in the private homes of wealthy patrons, a new breed of collector has staged a quiet revolt. These aren't the people who keep auction prices afloat, or whose lavish support turns struggling newcomers into art-world celebrities. Instead, these are journalists, gallery staffers, professors and art students who trade bootleg copies of the coveted videos - just as Napster users did with MP3 files. Because digital technology makes these bootlegs so easy to duplicate and distribute, and because they are so close to the "original" editions sold in galleries, they pose an intriguing challenge to the authenticity on which art's value is traditionally based.

[...] Even if it's for love and not money, though, copying and distributing work without the artist's permission is against the law. "Whether it is video or a painting, the principle is the same: artists own and control the copyright to their work," explains Dr. Theodore Feder, president of the Artists Rights Society, which manages and monitors copyrights for artists. None of these underground traders have been prosecuted - yet - but the music industry's recent legal pursuit of online file swappers prompts most traders to keep a low profile.

Nevertheless, Chris Hughes, a 25-year-old artist and self-taught video art expert, has put his entire catalog online, at www.freehomepages.com/crhughes/. With 1,500 works, representing early pioneers like Vito Acconci and Yoko Ono as well as current stars like Mr. Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Gillian Wearing, the breadth of Mr. Hughes's collection rivals those of many museums. The difference, however, is that he got almost all of it through unsanctioned trading.

[...] But some critics - even some video artists themselves - have argued that such a business model, useful in the sale of prints, cast sculptures and photography, is meaningless for video. "For videos, editions are fake," says Pierre Huyghe, in a comment seemingly designed to alarm his dealer. "When Rodin could only cast three sculptures of a nude before the mold lost its sharpness, it made sense. But all my works are on my hard drive, in ones and zeros." His dealer, Marian Goodman, has nonetheless sold certified copies of Mr. Huyghe's videos for prices estimated in the high five figures. Artists have the same right as anyone else to make a living, she points out, and limited editions represent a "logical, established tradition" which makes that possible.

[...] Loss of control can also yield fortuitous results, however, by allowing video artists to experiment with one another's work in much the same way that musicians sample and remix one another's songs. (Because the experiments are artistic projects in their own right, they may not violate copyright law.) In an editing tour de force, the Swiss artist Christian Marclay combined over 600 sound and film clips from over a hundred classic movies to create an intense, 15-minute musical composition, synchronized over four 10-foot screens. In preparing the work, which was commissioned by SFMOMA and the Grand Museum of Luxembourg, and exhibited in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery, Mr. Marclay didn't bother to pursue the rights to any of those films. Instead he pulled freely and without permission from whatever movie tapes or DVD's he could lay his hands on.

And a young Baltimore video artist, Jon Routson, whose work explores bootlegging itself, has tackled Matthew Barney's work head-on. In April at New York's Team Gallery, Mr. Routson showed his "made for TV" version of "Cremaster 4." He cut a grainy VHS bootleg of Mr. Barney's 45-minute film down to 22 minutes, dropped in actual commercials, compressed the end credits and even floated ABC's logo in the lower corner of the screen. The result: a hilarious, smart, and brazen work, which drew critical praise and which may be a sign of things to come.

Why troubling? The art world, as it embraces digital technologies, seems not to have given any more thought to the implications of digital delivery than any other industries have. And each successive industry that goes into these technologies without thinking through the implications is going to add their voices to the chorus of the RIAA's and MPAA's songs of woe. [emphasis mine]

Why, yes. They do get it, there at the end, don't they?

Napsterization of the Movies On Trial

Laura Rich and Hane Lee's Analysis: Napsterization: Music was just the beginning covers the movie industry's fight over DeCSS, and their attempts to stop the posting of the code, that frankly, is all over the internet.

For now, the MPAA is wading through constant legal battles in an attempt to stave off video piracy. But increasingly, consumers are capable of trading film files the same way they've been trading songs. Such activity could begin to impact the $8 billion video-rental market within a year if online distribution isn't properly addressed.

Well, we know that didn't happen (this was written in 2000). In the past year or two, there are a few who download movies, but broadband doesn't have the home penetration yet, to really have the impact that has occured with music. So far, few people seem willing to spend 20-30 hours downloading one film, via KaZaa or Gnutella.

Check out Sight Sound mentioned in the piece, though. They sell downloads of movies over the internet. Thank goodness somebody's trying to work legitimately, with the interent, instead of against it.

Napsterization of the Movies On Trial

Laura Rich and Hane Lee's Analysis: Napsterization: Music was just the beginning covers the movie industry's fight over DeCSS, and their attempts to stop the posting of the code, that frankly, is all over the internet.

For now, the MPAA is wading through constant legal battles in an attempt to stave off video piracy. But increasingly, consumers are capable of trading film files the same way they've been trading songs. Such activity could begin to impact the $8 billion video-rental market within a year if online distribution isn't properly addressed.

Well, we know that didn't happen (this was written in 2000). In the past year or two, there are a few who download movies, but broadband doesn't have the home penetration yet, to really have the impact that has occured with music. So far, few people seem willing to spend 20-30 hours downloading one film, via KaZaa or Gnutella.

Check out Sight Sound mentioned in the piece, though. They sell downloads of movies over the internet. Thank goodness somebody's trying to work legitimately, with the interent, instead of against it.

Napsterization of the Movies On Trial

Laura Rich and Hane Lee's Analysis: Napsterization: Music was just the beginning covers the movie industry's fight over DeCSS, and their attempts to stop the posting of the code, that frankly, is all over the internet.

For now, the MPAA is wading through constant legal battles in an attempt to stave off video piracy. But increasingly, consumers are capable of trading film files the same way they've been trading songs. Such activity could begin to impact the $8 billion video-rental market within a year if online distribution isn't properly addressed.

Well, we know that didn't happen (this was written in 2000). In the past year or two, there are a few who download movies, but broadband doesn't have the home penetration yet, to really have the impact that has occured with music. So far, few people seem willing to spend 20-30 hours downloading one film, via KaZaa or Gnutella.

Check out Sight Sound mentioned in the piece, though. They sell downloads of movies over the internet. Thank goodness somebody's trying to work legitimately, with the interent, instead of against it.

Artists Sound Off On Napster

Here. And a couple of the representative comments...

"Most people I know who use Napster listen to stuff they've never heard before. And then they get psyched and go out and buy the damn records. It's more like a sampler."
- Ian MacKaye, recording artist, Fugazi and co-owner of Dischord Records, Salon.com, 1/8/2001

"The cool thing about Napster is that it...encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do."
-- Thom Yorke (Radiohead), 10/9/2000

Artists Sound Off On Napster

Here. And a couple of the representative comments...

"Most people I know who use Napster listen to stuff they've never heard before. And then they get psyched and go out and buy the damn records. It's more like a sampler."
- Ian MacKaye, recording artist, Fugazi and co-owner of Dischord Records, Salon.com, 1/8/2001

"The cool thing about Napster is that it...encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do."
-- Thom Yorke (Radiohead), 10/9/2000

Artists Sound Off On Napster

Here. And a couple of the representative comments...

"Most people I know who use Napster listen to stuff they've never heard before. And then they get psyched and go out and buy the damn records. It's more like a sampler."
- Ian MacKaye, recording artist, Fugazi and co-owner of Dischord Records, Salon.com, 1/8/2001

"The cool thing about Napster is that it...encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do."
-- Thom Yorke (Radiohead), 10/9/2000