seamonkeyrodeo

Seamonkeyrodeo Doesn't Live Here Anymore

2006-09-01T13:53:00.000-04:00

Greetings, casual visitor. seamonkeyrodeo lives a a new location (one that's actually updated regularly these days), but thanks for visiting.

Technorati Tagging: seamonkeyrodeo

The Digital Content Executive Shuffle

2006-06-01T09:09:00.000-04:00

Phil Wiser leaves Sony.
Jason Hirschhorn leaves MTV.
Ted Cohen leaves EMI.

And the possibility of Big Content doing anything that's not stupid with digital content may well have left the building.

Technorati Tagging: music bigcontent nightmare

InfoAdvisor Curiosity

2006-05-26T09:14:00.000-04:00

Greetings, all -- for 99% of you this is just an irritating administrative post, so please feel free to ignore. I'll come up with an interesting and/or entertaining post this weekend to make up for it.

So anyway, if you're the Techdirt InfoAdvisor user who pops up periodically, I'd be interested in talking to you to learn a little more about how you use InfoAdvisor, what kind of difference it's made for your approach to managing information, and so on.

You can email me at seamonkey@absono.us if you have the time and inclination for an email or phone discussion, and many thanks in any case (either in advance for your insights, or for reading this at all).

Technorati Tagging: techdirt infoadvisor favor

A Different Kind of RIAA Scare Tactic

2006-04-25T10:49:00.000-04:00

RIAA suing people who don't own a computer. Blah, blah, blah. First off, it turns out that these folks did own a computer at point point. Second and more important, after the RIAA's "we sue dead people" incident a year or so ago, I just don't think that there's a suit they could file that would shock me, anyway.

The RIAA does appear to be going for a public humiliation approach on this one, though: maybe future RIAA suits will offer the accused the option of keeping the list of songs they're accused of downloading private if they settle immediately...

"However, the RIAA’s lawsuit maintains that Carma Walls, through the use of a file-sharing program, has infringed on the copyrights for the following songs: Who Will Save Your Soul, Jewel; Far Behind, Candlebox; Still the Same, Bob Seger; I Won’t Forget You, Poison; Open Arms, Journey; Unpretty, TLC; No Scrubs, TLC; and Saving All My Love for You, Whitney Houston."

More like Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla

2006-04-24T18:53:00.000-04:00

And an update on Gmail/AOL fun, also via IP:

From: Carl Hutzler [XXX@aol.com]
Sent: Tue 4/25/2006 7:02 AM
To: ip@v2.listbox.com; David Farber
Subject: Update [Re: [IP] AOL blocking Gmail]

As promised, an update.

Late last night around 11pm, we added into our whitelist a number of 
Gmail IP addresses for their outbound systems. Evidently gmail had sent 
us an email asking for more servers to be added to our whitelist for 
protection but had done so at 4:45pm yesterday. The request had not yet 
been processed. I esclaated internally and they got it done. So all is 
well now.

So now we will have to see if gmail's outbound spam problem is high on 
their list to fix or whether they are more interested in adding capacity 
to accommodate the increase in outbound spam,  umm mail ;-)

Oh, and one other thing, all their spam is domainkeys signed. This 
emergency whitelisting combined with the fact that all their spam is 
signed is a little ironic if you have been following the dearaol.com 
debate. ;-)

-Carl

This just came through Dave Farber's IP list:

Date: April 24, 2006 5:05:08 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: AOL blocking Gmail

Dave, just had a lively and interesting conversation with an AOL
postmaster phone number.  When they get reports from their users of
spam from a given host, they start rate-limiting mail from that
source.  When a given source is huge, it's inevitable that there will
be spam-marked mail from within that space, and even if it's just
amateur users who mark as spam mail that comes to them that they don't
want to see, whether it's spam or not:  with two larger user bases, it
can easily add up to a number of complaints that triggers aol's
mechanism.

So, net result, if you have a gmail account and try to write to
aol.com addresses now, you will probably not get through immediately.
You will probably get a message from google telling you that your
message has been delayed and giving an aol postmaster address,
http://postmaster.info.aol.com/errors/421rlynw.html, that tells you
that your site (i.e., Gmail) is being rate-limited and delayed inbound
to aol.

AOL's response to a complaint is to tell the Gmail user to tell Google
that there's a problem.  Clash of the titans?

Technorati Tagging: aol google email

Friday afternoon amusements: hi there, USPTO!

2006-04-21T14:56:00.000-04:00

Happy Friday, all. Got back to my desk and there was a message waiting for me, indicating that I'd had a very special visitor to this post on the USPTO's little patent difficulties.

Date: 21 Apr 2006 14:45:03 -0400 (EDT)
From: Sea Monkey Watch 
To: seamonkey@absono.us
Subject: Visitor - U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

151.207.242.4 came by for a visit at 21/Apr/2006:14:33:02.

Thought you'd want to know, because...

OrgName:    U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

...looks like...

patent and trademark

Technorati Tagging: asspatents amusement ip

Newsgator back, probably all drunk by now...

2006-04-18T16:35:00.000-04:00

Greg Reinacker has the first cut post-mortem on today's Newsgator outage available, so you should head over there and read it if you want the real information.

From my perspective, the timeline ran something like this:

Monday 5:00pm MST
Some ugly stuff starts happening in a dark corner.

Monday 10:00pm MST
Newsgator folks experience that horrifying "hang on, things are supposed to be getting better, not worse...what the fuck?" moment.

Tuesday 2:00am MST
"Tired. So very tired."

Tuesday 2:30am MST
"Fuck. Yes, by definition none of our options are good, but doing nothing isn't all that appealing, either. Let's do it."

Tuesday 10:30am MST
Newsgator back up.

Tuesday 10:31am MST (estimated)
Newsgator tech support goes down the long, painful list of bloggers who have been bitching about the absence of NG (such as yours truly), giving updates to each and every one.

Tuesday 2:21pm MST (estimated)
Greg Reinacker finishes up his post-mortem blog post and once again starts going down the long, painful list of bloggers who have been bitching about the absence of NG, giving another update to each and every one.

So...did you notice how the timeline didn't end when NG came back online, but rather continued on with the communication (when drinking heavily and/or sleeping might have seemed like more attractive options)?

Sure, I'll agree that it would have been ideal for NG to push out more information out earlier on, but in return I'll ask that we all agree that they had a bunch of other kind of important stuff on their hands. As I've gotten two real-human pings from NG in the last eight hours, it's a little hard for me to accuse them of henious under-communication.

The situation sucked hard, Newsgator came though.

Technorati Tagging: newsgator rss welcomeback

RSS Withdrawal: Minute 49

2006-04-18T09:08:00.000-04:00

...or...
my thoughts are with you, Newsgator guys

NetNewsWire wasn't syncing when I got up this morning. "Eh, it's a beta, I'll dig around a little this evening and see if I can figure out what's going on." Got to the office. FeedDemon wasn't syncing. "Hmmm...this isn't good. This isn't good at all." So okay, the Web is my something-or-other, I shall not want: head over to http://www.newsgator.com...and get a "maintenance" page. No feeds for me. "Ouch."

Technorati confirmed the outage, and I just now received an email from Newsgator Enterprise Server support, estimating that NG will be back online mid/late morning.

So I guess I can live without my input for a few hours...whatever withdrawal I'm going through, it's far less painful that what the Newsgator folks are enjoying right now. Sorry, guys, and good luck.

Update: here.

Technorati Tagging: newsgator rss withdrawal

On Design: MS' Own Worst Enemy

2006-04-14T12:52:00.000-04:00

The "Microsoft redesigns the iPod packaging" video got a huge amount of well-deserved attention a little while ago, and I was extremely pleased to learn that the video actually originated inside MS. One very big point for Microsoft.

On the down side, however, this video exists because something in Microsoft's corporate culture breeds a whole lot of utterly godawful design decisions. Like, really bad. The self-awareness suggested by the existence of the iPod video is promising, but there's a lot of work to be done.

An Example
For reasons too boring to explain here, I ended up on the Microsoft Office Online site a little while ago. After spending some time scanning the main page -- trying to figure out which of the 110 visible links* might lead to the information that I was looking for -- I decided to just go with the link that exhorted me to Evolve to today's Microsoft Office. Get more done.

You really have to follow the "evolve" link above and click around yourself to understand, but I'll give you the basics here: it's a flash-based extravaganza in which you navigate around an office that is populated by people with dinosaur heads. As you mouse over people and objects, they increase or shrink in size, move around in an erratic and irritating fashion, or sometimes do nothing at all. When you click on certain of these objects, a little text layer appears in the middle of the screen, providing you with a couple of bullet points about some Microsoft Office product.

Happily, during some stage of the creative review/testing process, somebody noticed that it was virtually impossible to tell where you're supposed to click in order to get more information, so there are red (or sometimes orange, for some reason) dots on the objects that you're supposed to click. This also has the happy side effect of making it look like somebody in this office has just run amok with a paintball gun, which was enough to keep me entertained for most of my visit.

But there's more. The bottom part of the page is made up of little frames (changing based on which room of the office you're currently in), each of which is its own little mini-page linking out to another source of information. Take a look:

The screenshot above is from the "Managing Information" section of this site. Stop laughing. Yes, it appears that the only approach that the MS design committee could agree on for "managing the information" that they wanted to present on this topic was to have eight different iframes of information, each of which is only partially displayed. And I particularly like the cases where we've got iframes within iframes so that you end up with two nested sets of ugly scroll bars cluttering up the view of a single, small piece of information.

What's really sad about this is that it's intended to promote software like Outlook 2003, which is actually well designed, powerful, and pretty easy to use. Almost as sad is that I expect that I'd like the original proposal for this monstrosity, and possibly even like some very early iteration of it. Be that as it may, when you take a look at this site, it becomes clear how important it is -- essential, even -- that Microsoft takes the message of that MS iPod video seriously.

* Yes, I counted the links. It breaks out as:

4 in the header
42 in the left navigation
40 in the page center
16 in the right navigation
8 in the footer

Technorati Tagging: ms design nightmare

Lunchtime Musings: toread, perchance 2.0...

2006-04-12T13:35:00.000-04:00

"'toread' is an email-based free bookmark service."

It's a "beta?" Check.
Gentle colors, rounded corners, big fonts, drop shadows? Check.
Mmmmmm...javascript. Check.
Not entirely clear what problem it solves for me? Check.

Yep. Web 2.0 is alive and well in Japan, too.

Technorati Tagging: musings web2.0

Jigsaw: Even Opt Out Would be a Step Up

2006-04-11T09:57:00.000-04:00

I'm with Michael Arrington on this one. As much as I've railed against Jigsaw, I could deal with the existence of this company if they gave me even a token amount of respect...and oddly enough, granting that respect could make their business a lot better. Consider this radical idea:

Joe Salesperson uploads his contacts into Jigsaw. Each of those contacts then gets an email saying "Joe Salesperson would like to make your contact information available to others via Jigsaw. Click here to confirm that the contact information listed below is correct, and to make your information public." [If you like, you can also imagine that the information will automatically become public after X days, though I'd prefer not.]

Ideally there's also a link right there in the email that allows me to reject the request (and all other similar requests forever and ever, amen), but that's probably asking too much, isn't it?

In any case, think about what this does for Jigsaw and GIGO, which has to be a huge issue for them. If that email bounces, they immediately know that the information is garbage in, and that the source of the contact may be sketchy. Don't post the contact, and flag the provider for review. On the other hand, if all of Joe Salesperson's contacts actively confirm their information, then all that contact info can be listed as "confirmed," and Joe can get extra-special Jigsaw points for being a good citizen.

So Jigsaw gets to immediately and automagically reduce the garbage out of their system, as well as getting some useful metadata on which of their users are genuinely putting something useful into the system. I also get a couple of things out of this: I become a participant in the process, rather than a piece of meat. I know who wants to put my information into this system, and I have the ability to remove myself from that system if I so choose.

Putting all of these things together, you end up with a Jigsaw that contains contact information that is accurate and represents people who will likely be more receptive to sales calls, because those people already know that they're listed in Jigsaw.

Not that I think that'll happen, or anything.

Lunchtime Musings: Smart Guy Deathmatch

2006-04-10T13:56:00.000-04:00

Disney/ABC decides to offer some popular programming online, for free.

Techdirt's Carlo says good first step, in that they're finally doing something. Umair "Bubblegeneration" Haque says bad, bad idea, in that this first step is strategically the wrong place to start.

With two of my key sources for stealing good ideas disagreeing with one another, I'm pretty much screwed for coming up with my own opinion. My suggestion is that you all read both posts and the associated links, and give it some thought.

I'll be doing that this evening...mostly as an exercise to clear my head of the image of Carlo and Umair fighting it out like Captain Kirk and Spock on that old episode of Star Trek. [Admit it, you know the one I'm talking about -- the one with the excellent fight music.]

Technorati Tagging: media webfocus deathmatch

The New York Times Redesign: Keep Watching

2006-04-03T09:22:00.000-04:00

Khoi Vinh says that the redesign of The New York Times site isn't (for the most part) his doing, and as much as I respect his work I can believe it. Hiring an excellent acchitect/designer was a key step for the NYT, but it feels like that was just one step in a much larger online plan.

If you take a look at the hiring that the NYT has been working on recently for their online arm, rather than "Code Monkey, Grade II" and "Reporter who Knows Some HTML," you see titles like "Creative Technologist" and "Futurist."

While funky job titles are one of the things that I don't miss much about Boom 1.0, in this case the titles point to some interesting thinking happening at the Grey Lady. The NYT seems to have made the leap to thinking about what they can do if they consider themselves as a company that uses technology (including printing presses, of course) to accumulate and distribute information, rather than as a newspaper that needs to have a Web site on Teh Internet.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

Update: Even faster than Microsoft...the NYT seems to be keeping an eye on what people have to say about their redesign. This post went live at 09:21 AM, and the NYT came by for a looksee at 10:14 AM.


Date: 3 Apr 2006 10:15:02 -0400 (EDT)
From: Sea Monkey Watch 
To: seamonkey@absono.us
Subject: Visitor - The New York Times

199.181.174.146 came by for a visit at 03/Apr/2006:10:14:11.

Thought you'd want to know, because...

OrgName:    The New York Times

...looks like...

new york times

I know where I want to go...are we there yet?

2006-03-31T13:51:00.000-05:00

On the Creation of a Microsoft Clock

The Ballmer brainwashing quote has already gotten a bunch of attention, but I'm interested in the interview for a different reason than most folks:

[Ballmer] It's going to take an innovative proposition. In five years are people really going to carry two devices? One device that is their communication device, one device that is music? There's going to be a lot of opportunities to get back in that game. We want to be in that game. Expect to see announcements from us in that area in the next 12 months.

Yet another "just you wait, we're going to totally change the rules of the game in n months" quote coming out of Microsoft. This one is just promising "announcements," at least, but it's part of a freakish, masochistic cycle that MS just can't seem to escape. They're pushing out a lot of good software and ideas these days, but there's something in the Redmond water coolers that compels management to make big predictions about how soon things will happen, and how earth-shattering the impact of those things will be. In print. Repeatedly.

So in recognition Microsoft's continuing commitment to trounce its competitors in any and all arenas, approximately 12 months from any given intervew date -- in the face of a history of apparently insurmountable odds, no less -- idle curiousity dictates that I start tracking this phenomenon.

When I get a few spare hours I'll put together some code to track and display the data in some exciting, Web 2.0 fashion, but before that I'll have to ask for the assistance of my loyal readers: if you come across any quotes...or rather when you come across quotes where an MS exec notes that the company will do something, release something, and/or 0wnz0r some market in a specific number of months, pass them along to me. And let your friends know, while you're at it -- the more data there is, the more fun there is for everyone.

del.icio.us or technorati tagging the articles with "msclock" would be ideal, but if you're old school you can just email them to me.

Technorati Tagging: microsoft msclock predictions

Second 'verse, same as the first...

2006-03-30T13:46:00.000-05:00

Being Some Notes on Life

First Life
Genetics will out, it appears. My 15 month old daughter spent much of yesterday evening dancing in a goofy and uncoordinated fashion to the music of the Pixies and Johnny Cash, and then trying to grab the beer out of my hand between songs. I didn't think she'd get there until some point in high school, at least.

Second Life
After a significant amount of prodding I've finally gotten around to checking out Second Life. Initial thoughts:

It's nice to see that there were other geeks writing up notes and diagrams as they read Snow Crash, too.
My Second Life is eerily reminiscent of my First Life. To pick three items:
- No matter what I try, my hair looks way geeky.
- Having more and/or better memory would probably make Life run a lot more smoothly.
- My conversations with unfamiliar people tend to trail off into awkward silence.
I'm still trying to find enough hours to fit everything into my First Life.

Interesting, though. Fat bandwidth and improved graphics hardware/software are making [non-deterministic? open objective? experiential?] online environments more worthwhile -- i.e. less like text-based chatrooms filled with stiff, bizarrely placed "avatars" jerking from place to place. (Sorry Hive7, for the moment you still fall into this unfortunate category.)

With the technology to capture, describe, and render the more subtle elements of offline communication (both verbal and non-verbal) still looking some ways off, will a programmable gesture-based language start to fill that gap? Has it happened already?

Technorati Tagging: webfocus musings social language

Talk Amongst Yourselves...

2006-03-27T15:30:00.000-05:00

...after reading something from Don Marti and something from Tom Evslin. Just for the fun of it, you might also spend some time thinking about the similarities, differences, and overlap between power, influence, and authority.

Technorati Tagging: futuretech musings social

Agile Business: just to be clear...

2006-03-17T08:41:00.000-05:00

Since Scoble linked to it, this short post on an HP printer firmware development group getting a 3.4x productivity increase through Agile is likely to get some attention.

I'm in the process of writing about how even a Methodology skeptic can have lots of positive things to say about Agile...but even so, it worries me when I see stuff that appears to promise that Agile (or pretty much anything) will get rid of your gambling debts, quit smoking, be a friend, be a companion, and be the only product you will ever need.

I worry about seeing stuff like this because I have a (perhaps cynical) belief that some people will see these numbers and say something like: "Wow! We've got 45 projects that need to be done in the next 90 days, and right now we're on track to only complete 1/3 of them...if we implement Agile processes and get a 3.4x increase in productivity, we'll be able to get them all done plus some other shit, too! Alfred -- bring me the Bat-phone!" And 90 days later there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, because Agile processes did not magically add more hours to the day, nor reduce the scope of those 45 projects.

Looking at the few HP numbers provided, the biggest points made are that were made were that the cycle duration decreased from 9 months to 2 months and that the amount of work in progress descreased 5x. And that, to me, doesn't sound like Agile worked some magic -- it sounds like HP did the smart thing: the didn't try to work on everything at once, they figured out what the most important things for the company were right then, and they focused on getting those things done. Less work in progress at any given point in time -- about 1/5 what they used to have -- but the things that they are working on get done in...oddly enough, about 1/5 the time that it used to take.

And just to be clear: that's an incredibly good thing and a huge achievement...it's just not magic. It's an achievement that comes from the company as a whole being willing and able to make some really hard decisions about what's really important to their business.

Our regularly scheduled Agile series will resume shortly.

agile programming
rants

Lunchtime Musings: playsh

2006-03-15T12:17:00.000-05:00

playsh, which is described as "a narrative-driven "object navigation" client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys" is pretty retro-MUD-alicious, but it just doesn't measure up when compared to the classic: doom as a system administration tool.

Technorati experiment: retrotech programming collaboration

Micro Persuasion: Institutional Power Declining, Forrester Says

2006-03-14T12:05:00.000-05:00

Steve Rubel's post on a new Forrester Research report. Very interesting, but "institutional power declining" seems to me like a debateable take-away. Check the logos in The Many forms Of Social Computing and consider how many of them either are Institutions or have been acquired by Institutions within the last year or two.

I'd propose something like "institutions realizing that they need to change the way that they exercise their power." Hmmmm...maybe it'd actually be more accurate to suggest that a lot of people are sitting down, pulling out their dictionaries, and spending some time thinking about the simiarities, differences, and overlap between power, influence, and authority.

Technorati experiment: futuretech social metadata corporate

Agile Business: The One True List

2006-03-12T16:54:00.000-05:00

Being the first part of...oh, I don't know...probably two or three posts over the next couple of weeks on the topic of "Agile" being worthwhile even if it is a "Software Development Methodology," and also why it's not really a development Methodology so much as it's a business Methodology.

Matt has already posted a couple of times on Return Path's adoption of an agile methodology in a variety of areas, so it's probably time for me to weigh in. Here it is:

Overall, I've been happy with we've gotten out of using this methodology.

Now before people start rummaging through my basement in search of Whitney-sized cocoons, let me make a statement for the record: in many cases the phrase "did I tell you that we've adopted a new software development methodology?" still makes me as uncomfortable as phrases like "hey, did I tell you that I got syphilis last weekend?" and "no, no, it's totally not a cult -- why don't you come by the compound tonight so that the Leader can explain it all to you?"

Has everyone processed that statement and continued reading down to this sentence before sending me a "you can't be serious about buying into some bullshit capital-M Methodology" email? No, I didn't think so. Oh, well, don't worry about it. I expected those emails, you punks.

Anyway, why don't you all sit down, make yourselves comfortable, and read on. Here -- do you want a cup of this excellent Kool Aid? Let me tell you about this "one true list" deal...

The One True List of Things to Do
This is a big factor for me. Huge, actually. I'm sure that many of you, whether or not you work in technology, are familiar with the corporate ritual of "the splitting of the list." In the case of software development it usually works something like this:

After reviewing the list of projects that need to get done and the technical resources available to work on projects, a company finds that there's no possible way to get everything on that list done. So the project list is split into two sub-lists, with separate business people responsible for the tasks on each of the new lists. Those people, in turn, then split their lists in sub-lists, delegating responsibility for each resulting list to a different person; the process continues until you have approximately 2¹⁴ business people holding short but critical-to-them to-do lists -- and 98% of those people are justifiably pissed off because they can't understand why the fuck tech can't accomplish the two simple things that are on their to-do list in a timely fashion. Great.

Following an agile approach you can avoid a lot of this: you have one list of stuff that you're going to be working on for the next few weeks. I'll happily admit that doing this isn't as easy as saying it, and that we (Return Path) are still spending a reasonable chunk of time making sure that the list is and remains the one true list, but having a defined <shudder>methodology</shudder> actually helps here. You've got a process that everyone can understand. For lack of a better metaphor, you've set your rules of engagement, and everyone can either accept those rules or get gunned down like dogs in the street. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

This does mean that you've got a potentially difficult meeting every couple of weeks, where the people with juice need to agree on what's going to get done and what's not, but...well, at the end of that meeting you've come to some sort of agreement; as conflict-averse as I am, I'd much rather have a heated argument leading to (sometimes grudging) consensus about what needs to be done than have smiles, flowers, and puppy dogs leading to N different understandings of the priorities.

And now we come to the part of the post that I probably shouldn't write. I really want to be able to take at least partial credit for "Engineering productivity [being] way up," but there's a dirty little secret hidden in the agile approach.

You see, even if you're putting in a lot of time and effort to do the agile thing effectively, your Engineering folks probably aren't accomplishing much more than they would be otherwise. It may seem like more is getting done, but that's because a strange and wonderful thing has happened: your newfound agility hasn't added more people to your team, or more hours to the day, it's just helped you spend more time on the things that you as a company have decided are the big concerns for you right now. Interesting, huh?

More anon. And one of the issues to follow in a later post is addressing the issue of "we've been doing the agile thing, okay, and it sucks ass in cases where the scope of the project falls outside of an (iteration|release), so you can bite me, agile boy," so you just keep your pants on and don't send me email about that one, okay?

Eh. Who am I kidding? Go ahead and send those emails. Punks.

Lunchtime Musings: Broadband Wall Math

2006-03-10T12:44:00.000-05:00

Between a whole slew of recent posts on Techdirt (many linked from this one that appeared yesterday) and this Telephony Online article that I just came across yesterday, I've had broadband on the brain of late. [ You don't have to read all the linked posts, but at least check out the TO article. ]

Now anybody who's been keeping any eye on my del.icio.us bookmarks and recent posts will already know that I'm a little bitter regarding the amount of money that I have to pay for a pidding little 1.5Mbit/sec downstream "broadband" connection. Reading the TO article linked above, however, just about put me over the edge.

As you'll know from having already read through the article [you've read it now, right?], BellSouth’s Chief Architect Henry Kafka estimated that an average broadband user consumes about 2 gigbytes of data per month, which costs BellSouth about $1. At this point you might want to take a look at BellSouth's DSL pricing plans...the base price for 1.5Mbit downstream is $32.95/mo and for 3.0Mbit down it's $37.95.

So if we assume that our hypothetical, average 2GB-consuming user is likely signed up for something around this range, we can say that this guy is paying about $35/mo for something that costs BellSouth $1/mo. Now I'll happily accept that BellSouth has a lot of other costs to factor in there, but those are still pretty nice numbers to plug into your spreadsheet if you're BellSouth.

But we've opened up another interesting question here: if our average Joe is paying for, say, 1.5Mbit/sec downstream (or a "best effort" at that) and only downloading about 2GB/month, isn't he actually under-utilizing the bandwidth that he's getting from BellSouth? I'm glad you asked. Let's do some quick wall math:

So yes...Joe is using less than one half of one percent of the pipe that (in theory) BellSouth has allocated for him. Now I'll grant that 24/7 usage at full theoretical capacity would be a ridiculous thing to expect, but these numbers do seem to indicate that an "average" or even a "heavy" broadband user is consuming far, far less bandwidth than an all-you-can-eat contract allows them to.

Next Question: How did we get to this point? And that too is interesting...if you go back to that BellSouth pricing page, you'll notice that the packages offered are "fast," "faster," "even faster," and "fastest," rather than "some data," "lots of data," "a crapload of data," and "do you really need that much porn?"

It seems that many bandwidth providers, like consumers, have considered bandwidth almost exclusively as an issue of speed rather than volume. If you equate "internet access" to "viewing Web pages," then that works well enough: more bandwidth equals faster access to a bunch of relatively small files. Unfortunately for providers, however, that was only the first step; if you can download small things really fast, then downloading big things pretty fast becomes appealing, and downloading really big things becomes tolerable...the issue changes from "how fast" to "how much."

BellSouth and friends are just now really internalizing the fact that the phrase "you can access the internet at 3 megabits per second" can be accurately restated as "you can download 949 gigabytes of data per month."

Final Question: So what -- where do we go from here? And that one I can't answer. Maybe all-you-can-eat has to go away. Maybe the price of Internet access in the United States has to go even further up. Maybe we as a nation have to decide that our data infrastructure is critical to our development in coming years and make sure that the backbone companies are actually delivering the infrastructure improvements that we've already paid $200,000,000,000 for. Maybe this is why I avoid doing math...it pretty much always ends up upsetting me...

And it's more expensive than the SoundDock, too...

2006-02-28T18:02:00.000-05:00

Wow...weird. While it seems to be mostly yawns echoing across the Internet at today's apple announcement, I'm genuinely shocked. So okay, it's a sort of retro boombox deal for all the hip young things to buy -- in time for a spring/summer of hanging out on street corners and playing stickball or whatever it is they do -- and I have little need for such a thing, what with the not usually leaving my house and all. Fine. Not the target audience.

But to see Apple releasing a product that looks like it was designed by some guy that they just hired away from Coby? Seriously now, take a look at the two images below and tell me which product has that "I don't need that thing but it's so fucking slick looking that I'll probably end up buying it anyway" feel that Apple seems to have bottled in recent years:

Very strange.

Maybe it's the fever I've been running, but I don't get it...

2006-02-24T09:24:00.000-05:00

Dave Winer says that "none of the existing blogging tools can do little sentence or phrase-size blog posts." Ummmm...huh?

E(clipse|macs)

2006-02-20T10:43:00.000-05:00

I just neatly summed up a string of conversations that I've had in the last week or so with the sentence "Eclipse feels a lot like Emacs 2006." Now I'm sure that the Emacs faithful will point out that Emacs is Emacs 2006, but still...

The "sure, go ahead, extend it however you want" character of Eclipse is compelling and powerful, but also brings to mind my favorite snipe from the endless Vi/Emacs wars:

Vi Guy: Hey, I think Emacs is great, too. Actually, I heard something really interesting today: did you know that there's actually a text editor embedded somewhere in Emacs? I still haven't been able to find it, though.

Emacs Guy: Um, bite me.*

* Please note: as a Vi guy, it's possible that I'm slightly mis-representing the Emacs position in this discussion.

Yes, SeaMonkey 1.0 was released today...

2006-01-31T15:29:00.000-05:00

...and no, SeaMonkeyRodeo (or maybe it's "Sea Monkey Rodeo," I've never really gotten around to deciding which I prefer) has nothing to do with the SeaMonkey project -- other than my enthusiastic endorsement of any project that's run by a "SeaMonkey Council."

So please stop sending me email about it, okay?

Comments on Comments

2006-01-27T08:11:00.000-05:00

Del.icio.us brought me the Commentator yesterday -- a revolutionary tool that automatically comments your code for you as you write it. Ah, the wonders of technology.

As it happens, just a few days ago I was forwarded a copy of a comment-related document that I myself put together. While maintaining a fairly sizeable Web-based app, I finally camt to understood the degree to which comments give you a window into a developer's soul...though you may or may not want that insight, of course.

All comments below exactly as I found them in the wild, except that names have been changed to protect the guilty.

SomeCompany Comment Highlights

Some of the best comments that I've run across in my time at SomeCompany. The style indicates that they probably all came from Elmo, company founder and one of the greats of "Stream of Consciousness" programming.

First we have the informative comments. Pithy yet pungent, these casual asides have helped generations of developers navigate the twisted pathways of SomeCompany code:

;;; takes the shit out of textareas and turns them into nice little citizens

# gotta do all that bullshit with volume vs brokers discounts, all that crap.

Next, the incredulous; when you come across one of these, it's almost like you're sitting beside Elmo as he realizes just what he's gotten himself
into:

# fuck, we have to figure this out based on total_price sum in lstats vs original price?

# add this file to our masterpurge file. unfortunately we have to sort this fucker when we are done too. fuck.

;;; gotta get the fucking list_id in order to load the bitch. makes us do 2 fucking queries?

Then we have the ever-popular "oops" comments. These are particularly enjoyable, as they invariably exist independent of any more detailed examination of the issue (or any indication of whether it was resolved):

;;; what the fuck is this crap? looks like I left a sponge in the patient.

Then, finally, my all-time favorite. I love the way that it just trails off into nothing...

;;; oh shit, it tries to write oracle too...

Reply All. Rinse. Repeat.

2006-01-20T10:08:00.000-05:00

I've (unfortunately) seen this happen a number of times as a byproduct of dumbasses failing to grasp the fact that desktop email clients aren't great tools for email marketing, but never before seen it attached to out and out spam.

Rick Klau received a spam message yesterday. Not big news in and of itself, but here's the twist: the spammer had compromised a mail server, set up his (or her) spam list as subscribers to a mailing list, and then sent the spam as a message to that list...with the reply-to address being the newsletter address.

See where this is going? Every reply to the original spam message then went out to the entire spam list. And then the replies to that reply went out to the entire spam list. And so on, and so on...

Read Rick's original post for more amusement.

BellSouth Makes an Offer You Can't Refuse

2006-01-17T14:10:00.000-05:00

The Internet Daily reports that BellSouth has confirmed that it is "pursuing discussions with Internet content companies to levy charges to reliably and speedily deliver their content and services."

The article notes that "BellSouth has discussed its idea with MovieLink, a film-download service. [Bill Smith, BellSouth CTO] called MovieLink an example of the kind of company that wants customers to have a good experience and would view costs incurred in the strengthening of BellSouth's Internet capacity as worthwhile."

Am I the only one who gets an incredibly strong visual when reading that paragraph? Here's what I see:

A man wearing a snazzy pin striped suit and snap brim hat walks into MovieLink's offices. The diamond in his pinky ring catches the light as he taps the ash from his cigar onto the carpet of Jim Ramo's office.

"My name is, ah...Smith," he says, "and I represent a certain group of legitimate businessmen."

"You've got a nice little business here, Mr. Ramo, and it would be a shame -- a real shame, I gotta say -- if anything unfortunate were to happen to your business. If, like, it took your customers a week and a day to download your movies, let's say...I'd be real sorry to see something like that happen."

Smith stubs his cigar out on Ramo's desk, and looks off into the disance.

"You're worried about things like that, am I right? Of course you're worried about things like that. Your worries, they keep you up at night, right? Now my colleagues are prepared to help you out here. They can make you an offer that will make all those worries disappear -- poof -- and you'll be able to sleep like a baby again. Like a baby. You'd have to be crazy to not want to sleep like a baby, am I right?"

Or maybe I've just got a very visual mind. Well, whatever...I still fail to see how this is anything other than a protection money shakedown that ends up hurting both online content providers (and pretty much everybody is a content provider online) and BellSouth's broadband subscribers. Please explain...anyone? (And "yeah, but it totally benefits BellSouth so everbody else can go screw" isn't really the explanation that I'm looking for.)

Yahoo Acquires SearchFox Assets

2006-01-17T10:54:00.000-05:00

Zot! Missed this over the weekend: SearchFox (or some portion thereof) folds into Yahoo.

Patent Troubles for...um, the USPTO?

2006-01-13T14:01:00.000-05:00

Ah, the beauty of it all: Peter Zura's excellent Two-Seventy-One Patent blog reports that the USPTO's initiative to grant fewer asspatents, which is to include use of an automated "patent quality index," could be heading for some trouble due to...wait for it, now...a patent covering "a computer-automated methon for rating or ranking patents or other intangible assets [...]". Said patent being the property of a patent holding company, of course.

It is indeed reassuring to see how our current patent system helps to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries"...oh, wait...that wouldn't seem to be the case here at all. How odd.

Anonymity and Accountability

2006-01-12T09:18:00.000-05:00

Bruce Schneier has an article in Wired News on the important distinction between anonymity and accountability, which meshes well with some issues that I've been mulling over about online communities.

Through my wife, I recently learned about UrbanBaby, a child/family resource site focused on a few US metro areas. One of the features that they offer is discussion boards, or course, but those boards are implemented in a really interesting way: registration/login is required to participate, and the discussions are monitored and moderated, but the the individual posts are anonymous.

The result is a fascinatingly vibrant discussion. Because the site operators can see the identity of all posters, anyone who's abusive may quickly find themselves in a time out -- hours, days, or permanent -- and the operators have behavior histories at their disposal to see whether nastiness is a one-time thing for a poster or part of a pattern; on the user end of things, though, people seem comfortable asking questions and giving answers that they might be reluctant to post if their identity -- even just an online handle -- were tied to every post they made.

This combination of anonymity and accountability has, interestingly, made a community that feels much more friendly and personal than most that I've seen online: people post the way that they might make a comment into a room full of friends, just to see who responds, not worrying about whether they'll be judged, or whether their particular clique is there and paying attention.

Interesting model, and one that seems like it could have a lot to offer to some of the more struggling fixed-identity communities on the Web.

Opinions on FeedLounge (or other Web-based RSS readers)?

2006-01-11T20:04:00.000-05:00

So FeedBurner tells me that a number of you feed subscribers out there are using FeedLounge. With the sad demise of SearchFox I'm in the market for a new Web-based RSS reader.

Because I'm still a devotee of FeedDemon (the best RSS reader on the face of the earth), I'm going to take a look at NewsGator Online again for all the exciting synchonization goodness and whatnot, and perhaps see whether Bloglines has made any changes since last I looked; since I'm not at all familiar with FeedLounge, though, I'd be interested in hearing a bit about it from current users.

And as long as we're talking feed consumption, while I don't think that any other Web-based readers (or standalone apps, for that matter) currently facilitate the attention-focused "river of news" consumption style that I've come to love about SearchFox, it would be great to be proved wrong on that. Please let me know if you've got any recommentations.

Presentation Zen: Tip Zero

2006-01-10T18:34:00.000-05:00

With the Jobs having done another keynote today, you should expect to see the usual analyses of his presentation style. Credit where due, the man is definitely good.

Have spent the afternoon sitting through a series of non-Macworld Expo presentations, I have my own little recommendation to make to those who hope to improve their presentations:

Shut down your IM client before starting your presentation. Perhaps you should shut it down even before hooking up your laptop to the projector, hmmmmm?

Pushy P2P

2006-01-06T18:05:00.000-05:00

Push!Music
"Imagine that you have a mobile device that can store and play back music files, for example a mobile phone with an MP3 player. As you encounter various people, the devices you are carrying connect to each other wirelessly and media agents from the other nearby devices check the status of your media collection. Based on what you have been listening to in the past and which files you already own, new music might spontaneously and autonomously 'jump' from another device to yours (and vice versa). Later, when you listen to your songs, your Push!Music player also plays some newly obtained tunes that you had not heard before."

Huh. I'm old and out of touch with the cool kids of the day, but while this seems like it'd present a bunch of really fun technical problems to solve, the end result is of questionable value.

How do you deal with the issue of transferring a relatively large file (4-6MB for an mp3) over a relatively slow connection (732.2 kbits/sec if we're talking bluetooth), when you don't know how long the sender/receiver will be in range? Cool problems.

How do you make reliable judgements about what songs are likely to interest a user when the target device (an mp3-capable phone) can only store a relatively small number of files at any given time, the ID3 information is not necessarily reliable, and most of the user's listening likely happens on some other device? Cool problems.

I could see solving those problems being a lot of fun, but then in the end I've got (1) random mp3 files pushed onto my phone, eating up storage whether I like them or not, (2) I've got to go through a manual "do you approve this download" process every time some other user walks in range, or (3) I have to set up some sort of "approved uploaders" list in which case I could just ask my friends what they think I should listen to.

But, then, since I don't really get how the design and usability abomination that is MySpace managed to become hot stuff in the younger-than-me music world, maybe I'm just out of it.

Not dead, just busy...

2005-12-22T11:17:00.000-05:00

...and then with del.icio.us down for the start of the week I just got totally out of the mini-posting flow. Back into it tomorrow.

Microsoft: Paying (for) Attention

2005-12-09T15:48:00.000-05:00

InfoWorld reports that Microsoft is tossing around the idea of passing search advertising revenue down the food chain to end users. No details, of course...and I may just have attention/identity on the brain...but this nevertheless sounds a lot like MS doing some musing about a cash-for-attention play.

With AttentionTrust and root.net getting a reasonable amount of press, phrases like "attention economy" are starting to buzz around a bit, but as with cookies, there's a big question that these sorts of offerings have yet to answer for the potential users: what do we get out of it? If I don't get an improved experience (qualitatively different, I would hope, but I'd settle for quantitatively), with much more of what I want and much less of what I don't...well, then, what's the point of playing?

Microsoft's thinking, then, could be a way to sidestep this question for the time being: maybe you don't immediately get more interesting or appropriate advertising, but at least you get paid. And in order to actually get paid, Microsoft has to be able to track you -- know that you are you, and know what you're doing -- so that your "saw that ad" or "clicked that ad" account can be credited. And this, in turn, means that you're explicitly agreeing to give them full access to that attention data that all the kids are talking about these days.

I'd be pretty surprised if an actual large-scale "see/click ad, get paid" model came out of this, but it's interesting to see such an idea being discussed again in 2005. It's a very different view on the topic than much of what's out there, but it sure feels to me like another acknowledgement that attention is an issue that everybody doing business on the Web will have to deal with, sooner rather than later.

SAFELINK safe links? Really?

2005-12-06T13:58:00.000-05:00

There's been some discussion of Marketing Scoop's SAFELINK offering here at Return Path...most of it rather more charitable than my thoughts.

According to Marketing Scoop's site:
Businesses who subscribe to the program are provided with a SAFELINK icon to be displayed in emails sent to prospective customers. Those who receive the email know they are protected from computer viruses, scams, or unsolicited pornography. When clicking on the icon, consumers view a SAFELINK certificate, complete with information about the SAFELINK member company.

Sigh. Been there, done that.

This is an effort to bring sender reputation into email, which I totally support, but it's a really, really half-assed effort. Even putting aside from the fact that the design is fundamentally flawed, this approach puts the burden of validation on the user for each and every email message that they receive. For Truste-style Web site validation this is arguably acceptable, since it's a very occasional imposition on the user, but asking me to manually validate every stinking email? No, thanks...

8:00:03 AM "Wow! 481 emails in my inbox...guess I'd better get cracking."
8:00:08 AM "Excellent, message number one has the SAFELINK icon, so far, so good."
8:00:27 AM "Okay, not good. The SAFELINK icon linked to www.really-disturbing-porn-emporium.net, not the Marketing Scoop site."
8:03:32 AM "Holy shit. How do I make these popups stop? No, I don't want to allow ActiveX controls to run. Shitshitshit."
8:27:41 AM "Man, that sucked. Okay, on to message two. Yep, it's got the SAFELINK icon..."

MediaPost Makes Bold Suggestions for Email Marketing

2005-11-15T08:59:00.000-05:00

Pointer to a MediaPost column that discusses the "seductive attraction" of madness like the endless "best day to send email" discussions, and why one-size-fits-all approaches are generally weak.

Nice to see this point aired again, and yes, yes, yes: there is no "one true day" for email marketing...and while we're at it, one-size-fits-all sucks as an approach to targeting, too.

Network Diagrams for Compulsive Freaks

2005-11-11T12:51:00.000-05:00

Been spending time at our colocation facility this week, moving stuff around, cleaning out old junk, and the like, and this leads naturally into checking and updating network diagrams. Somehow I've managed to use Visio for years without ever noticing that the "Basic Network Shapes" template includes "keyboard" and "mouse"...are there people out there who actually put keyboards and mice on their network diagrams?

Ready for Winter

2005-11-11T08:42:00.000-05:00

And now a picture of Gwen, very pleased with her new coat:

Language Matters: RSS

2005-11-03T12:53:00.000-05:00

Back in July, when some folks were upset about various other folks' intention to employ RSS without actually calling it RSS, I started a post and then gave up on it -- while language seems like a big deal to me, I didn't think that many other people would care.

Apparently I was wrong. Nice to see that.

While I can understand why Dave Winer would be a little touchy on the issue, it seems to me like a non-starter question. RSS is a data syndication format, and in discussions of that format it is essential to use the correct, specific language. In cases where the discussion is of other tools or toys that might make use of RSS, however, dictating that the resulting RSS-fed product be called "RSS" seems unnecessary.

In the post linked above, Brad Feld used the SMTP/email example, but I prefer HTML. Which of the sentences below might you actually say during the course of a normal day?

A. Hey, you've got to check out this great HTML document that I just ran across!
B. Hey, you've got to take a look at this cool Web page that I found!

Be honest, now. You'd feel like a pedantic goober saying version A, wouldn't you? The fact that the stuff that you're looking at is marked up with HTML is totally irrelevant to a non-technical discussion. There is, however, a related language question that remains relevant: version B above is immediately comprehensible to pretty much anyone you might be talking to...they might never have heard of HTML, JavaScript, or Flash, but they know what a Web page is. What we need is a single, generally accepted, specific-but-not-too-limiting term for RSS thingies.

In the case of RSS, one could make the argument that "RSS" is a perfectly good designator that should be propagated, rather than splintering off into "Web clips," "Web feeds," and whatever else various marketing departments come up with, but I don't really buy it: something like a simple "feeds" is much more compelling to me. It's not tied to a specific technology, so that you eliminate discussions like "do you mean RSS RSS or Atom RSS?" It's a meaningful word rather than an abbreviation, which is always a good thing, and -- since I'm starting from Brad Feld's post this seems an appropriate note -- it's an analog analog.

The idea of a feed or feeding something into is one that's familiar from the outside world, and one that points users in the right direction when trying to understand what "feeds" might be online. "Channels" should have been a good candidate for this word, and it's strange to me that it never really caught on as a term for RSS thingies.

Outside of FeedDemon (you subscribe to channels rather than feeds in FD), I never hear about RSS channels any more; given that "channel" is the key element in all versions of the RSS spec, and a totally familiar offline term to boot, it's just weird. I guess that the people have spoken.

Attention, Aggregation, Customization

2005-11-01T18:46:00.000-05:00

In his post The Looming Attention Crisis Fred Wilson notes that he's already past his saturation point for RSS feeds, among other things. [And I haven't said this in a while, but you should really go read the original post now.] Quite a few other people have been talking about this as well, but since he's effectively my boss at a couple of removes, I pick his post. Go figure.

Anyway, the RSS saturation question is one I've been thinking about quite a bit recently. My little experiment with the Searchfox RSS reader crystallized a couple of things for me, but the real reason this started getting mindspace was that I've noticed that I consume feeds very differently than I did a year or two ago, and that the change happened via slow evolution rather than a clear decision on my part.

Back in the day...I subscribed to a bunch of feeds. I maintained a folder structure to keep those feeds in logical, topical groupings: Tech, Work Stuff, Funny, New York Stuff, Writing Related...probably a round dozen categories in all. The system worked, for the most part; the biggest difficulty was that I'm a compulsive taxonomist, and the question whether a given feed had the characteristics of, say, a "Tech" feed rather than a "Work Stuff" feed was one that could eat up a lot of time. Every time I saw that little bold number indicating that I had unread items, I went and read those items, frequently saying to myself "this is so cool! I'd never have time to check all of these sites for updates! Woo-hoo!"

In this brave new world...I have something like 300 feed subscriptions, and just three folders: Daily, NewSubs, and Keepers. The feeds in daily (about 40) are the ones that I normally read individually...I'll at least look at every item in a feed. Some of these are pre-aggregated already (my del.icio.us inbox, tech.memeorandum, and so on). NewSubs tends to be 15-20 feeds, and is the first stop for any new feeds that I add. After a little while I either delete the feed (very common), add it to daily (much less common), or drop it into keepers (also pretty common).

Keepers is where it gets interesting: it's bulk input for the multitude of keyword watches that I have set up in FeedDemon (best RSS reader ever, etc., etc.), and a place to scan though periodically; I don't read everything and don't worry about it. These feeds have stuff that's interesting to me, but I just trust that the good stuff will bubble up to me.

This is also where Searchfox got interesting (and, I believe, where FeedDemon is going). For those who've missed it, Searchfox scores and sorts feed items based upon your reading/clicking behavior: things that are "like" items you show interest in get scored higher and therefore appear at the top of your list of unread items. While there's work to do on the intelligence of the scoring, it's pretty solid already -- and this approach works perfectly for my keepers folder. 250+ feeds get torn into their component elements and ranked based on what I'm likely to find interesting. Perfect. (Though as a side note I do have concerns about the feedback loop created by this sort of personalization if it's based entirely off of my own behavior and doesn't mix in some data from others who seem to be "like" me, as well, but that's a whole different story.)

So what's the point here? Well, that over time my approach to consuming feeds has shifted to treating them as raw material, rather than finished products. I don't feel obligated to give each feed the attention it deserves, nor do I worry about what gems I might be overlooking. While I do still read my daily feed group in a high-friction way, much as I go through my email inbox, the rest of it (the overwhelming majority) gets a low friction approach. ["Low friction" as a concept that applies to process and interface design is also something that's been much on my mind recently, more on that anon.]

If I set things up right (and have the right tools to work with), then increasing the size of the input set doesn't necessarily mean a corresponding increase in demands on my attention: I'm consuming the aggregate product, not the individual feeds.

Comparing Two Things: Still Patented After All These Years

2005-10-24T18:37:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I pointed out a little blast from the past: the origins of the term "asspatent," in this September 2004 post. While you should, of course, read that post in its amusing entirety, the business end was an imagined dialogue between Lawyer and Boss at Commtouch: a "vendor of email technology, messaging applications, and comprehensive messaging platforms to enterprises, portals, large ISP and Telco organizations since 1991", and also the company that purchased US Patent 6,330,590 towards the end of 2004. To wit:

Lawyer: Hey, boss? We may have a problem -- apparently some guy has a patent on comparing two email messages to see whether they're the same.

Boss: Yeah, right. Pull the other one, why don't you? It's got bells on it.

Lawyer: No, seriously. You know how the U.S. Patent Office is. I actually patented my ass the other day, just for fun. It was approved. I'm thinking about patenting respiration next week.

Boss: It's been a long week and I don't need to deal with this crap. We just got $3.9 million thrown at us, let's buy the damn patent. There are too many companies in the anti-spam software space anyway, maybe we can pick up some extra revenue by suing people.

So yesterday's post inspired me to check on what Commtouch has been doing since September '04...after all, I'll happily admit to being rather cynical on the patent front, and it would be unfair of me to assume that Commtouch was going the patent shakedown route without any supporting evidence, wouldn't it?

I mean, in the absence of, say, a Q4 2004 summary press release noting that "[Commtouch] believes that its patent strategy is moving in the right direction, and that in 2005, it will be able to initiate a patent licensing program for the registered patent it purchased during 2004," it would be unreasonable to opine that the imagined Lawyer/Boss discussion above seems eerily accurate, right?

Lacking something like a May 2005 press release in which Commtouch CEO Gideon Mantel gleefully states that "Coming on the heels of [Commtouch's] agreement to market DCC commercially, the license to PineApp marks one of the first steps in implementing our global DCC licensing strategy," and that "[Commtouch plans] to decisively enforce our licensing program and patent strategy in a comprehensive manner," it would be just plain wrong to suggest that Commtouch plans to continue demanding licensing fees for an idea that it didn't create, from companies that independently developed similar ideas, on the basis of a patent that should never have been granted at all...right?

Right?

Calling an Asspatent an Asspatent

2005-10-22T06:59:00.000-04:00

It was nice when Colin O'Malley noted the importance of the term "asspatent." I was pleased to see that someone else understood how important (and fun) it was to be able to simply call an asspatent an asspatent, rather than having to go with a duller term like "patent of questionable validity." I've been waiting, though, for an indication that the term was working its way into people's everyday vocabulary -- a sign that usage was not limited to gentleman scholars such as Colin.

I wait no longer. George Scriban yesterday referred to restaurant chain Ceriality's patents covering serving cereal to their customers as asspatents. I'm so proud.

And for those of you who came to this party a little late, I'll flatter myself by assuming that the term asspatent is pretty much self-explanatory, but it has its roots in this post that I wrote a year or so ago, if you're curious.

Thoughts on California

2005-10-15T11:32:00.000-04:00

Been bouncing around California this week, hence the light (nonexistent) posting. A few days in Carmel (Mona's grandparents), a few days in a cabin in the redwoods (peace and quiet), and now a couple in San Francisco (quick check-in with some friends).

1. Holy crap, every time we're there I'm struck by how beautiful Carmel is...I'm jealous of Mona's grandparents, though: sounds like it was a really incredible place to live in 1955.

2. Gwen thinks that the Pacific Ocean is the most incredible thing ever.

3. It's a little weird that a wood stove-heated cabin four miles from the nearest town (population under 1,000) down a one-lane, twisty road has broadband internet access. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

4. It's even weirder that we managed to find what must be the only hotel in the San Francisco bay area that doesn't have any in-room internet access of any sort. Beautiful view from our room, though, so again I don't complain.

Back to the real world tomorrow with thoughts on family vacations, software development mindsets and methodologies, online identity, and my involvement with all of these things.

TechCrunch Blogs Attention Trust Recorder. Attention Trust Doesn't?

2005-10-05T15:06:00.000-04:00

Seems a little odd to me that I'm hearing about the Attention Trust Recorder via techcrunch, rather than the AttentionTrust blog.

Given who's involved with AttentionTrust, I would've expected more active communication from the organization. On the other hand, reading down that Board of Directors you see a lot of names have have had a lot of other stuff going on recently.

Attention and identity, attention and identity. Really need to free up some time to sit and think...

Explicitly Social Software: ning.com gets some attention

2005-10-04T08:30:00.000-04:00

People seem to be paying a little bit of attention to 24 Hour Laundry's release of ning.com.

Hmmm...identity is one of the big questions for Explicitly Social Software: having discrete identities and data sets associated with different ESS is a pain, and I haven't yet seen any really effective ways to address the issue. Perhaps providing a framework that allows people to quickly and easily develop their ESS under a single bigass umbrella is a reasonable way to sidestep the issue?

Users don't currently support a centralized "ning.com profile," but I'd be surprised if there weren't ongoing discussions of the possibility of either creating one or supporting some sort of "shared profile" structure available to ning.com application developers as an option.

Our Secret Masters: McDonald's vs. Starbucks

2005-10-02T21:41:00.000-04:00

Mona, Gwen, and I drove up to Amherst, MA this weekend for a visit with Mona's mom. With this comes our road trip tradition: mmmmmmm, mmmmm fast food. I grew up in New York City in the 70s, and neither cars nor fast food made much of an impact on my life, so now I try to make up for lost time when road trip opportunities present themselves.

After a meal of McDonald's finest on Friday night, we spent a painfully long time in line at the Starbucks booth, waiting for people to place their seventeen syllable, multi-lingual coffee beverage orders; this led into a discussion of what people mean when they "buy a cup of coffee" these days. Putting aside the cost of anything other than drip coffee at Starbucks, Mona and I placed bets on the McDonald's nutiritional equivalent of Starbucks drinks, and upon returning home to a high-speed internet connection we checked our guesses...

You can get the details here and here, but I'll give you the big winner. A Grande Whole Milk Caffe Mocha with Whip Cream is an almost perfect nutritional analogue to tossing a McDonald's Double Cheeseburger into a blender and drinking it down.

McDonald's has gotten all the attention recently what with Super Size Me and all, but my vote for Super Secret Corporate Master has to go to Starbucks: the same calories, fat, cholesterol, and sugar delivered via a stealth mechanism that lets people think they're "just buying a cup of coffee," plus they charge the victim two or three times what the McDonald's nutritional analogue costs. Genius...

User Agent Spam?

2005-09-29T13:56:00.000-04:00

Okay, this is kind of weird. Electronic me just mailed me some stats on blog visitors, and electronic me had barfed while parsing user agent strings from my access logs. Now maybe it's common and I just don't spend enough time perusing access logs these days, but I have never before seen user agent spam:

XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX - - [29/Sep/2005:10:00:42 -0400] "GET /~whitney/images/rss_full.gif HTTP/1.1" 200 1025 "-" "At [a known comment spammer's site] you will get an interest free line of credit of upto 100,000,000.00 just for signing up and you can pay back what you owe whenever you want. (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; At [a known comment spammer's site] you will get an interest free line of credit of upto 100,000,000.00 just for signing up and you can pay back what you owe whenever you want.)"

This is just weird as shit. Given that the audience you're targeting by putting spam into a user agent string is one that's pretty likely to get pissed off by finding spam in a user agent string, it also seems a tad unwise as a marketing tactic.

A True Geek Definition of Web 2.0?

2005-09-29T09:45:00.000-04:00

There's a post entitled Web 2.0 Elevator Pitch over on Read/Write Web, which collects a variety of different people's working definitions for "Web 2.0". (In case you've been living under a rock for the last few days, the topic has heated up again following Tim O'Reilly's recent posting of a Web 2.0 meme map. And yes, that would be an image posted to Flickr, very 2.0.)

The R/WW post is interesting enough in itself, but it's too bad that Dave Winer's Web 2.0 musings yesterday weren't included:

"What if Web 2.0 is actually about sex? What if you could choose -- a bubble in which some VCs get rich, or a bubble in which we all get laid? Come on, seriously now. Given a choice would you rather hang around a party listening to some idiot talk about target markets and business models or have wild sex with the partner(s) of your dreams?"

Seems as good a theory to start from as any...I know a fair number of geeks working on "Web 2.0" stuff that would be pretty happy if it all turned out to be about sex rather than stock options this time around.

Searchfox Beta Report: Day 1.5

2005-09-21T09:06:00.000-04:00

It's a bit of an overstatement to say that I've had an actual half day to play with Searchfox since the last update, but there is one item that I wanted to get down here.

Dave Winer's River of News approach appeals to me, even though it's not the way that I currently consume. Searchfox seems like a nice step in that direction, as the personalization seems to provide some pretty decent shape to the flow...in general stuff that is interesting to me does tend to move towards the top of the list.

With the good, however, comes the bad: the items that I've read or clicked through within a given day generally get very high scores for a little while, which means that as the day progresses more and more of the top items are things that I've already checked out:

So while I'm liking the personalization so far, seems like there are a variety of productive tweaking opportunities. Having an "unread items only" view would take care of the concern above pretty easily. The other intriguing direction is giving me some direct control over the personalization factors: I'm guessing that it's some sort of bayesian magic happening in the background, so why not give me the option of manually entering and ranking terms that I haven't yet come across in posts but would like to see?

More anon.

Searchfox Beta Report: Day 1

2005-09-19T13:15:00.000-04:00

So the first big change for day one's report is that I'm giving up on the whole scoring thing. You see, the whole login failure issue discussed in day zero came down to my not realizing that the Searchfox RSS reader login page is at http://rss.searchfox.com, and it's the Searchfox favorites login page is at http://www.searchfox.com. I've been thinking about trying to shunt some of the blame off to Searchfox, but that's a little tough to do; while one could make the argument that the layout at www.searchfox.com suggests that the username/password fields there apply to Searchfox RSS...well, it's a stretch.

In the end, that whole experience meant that I had to assign myself something like -5,000 points for being a dumbass, and +5,000 to Esteban Kozak of Searchfox for not sending me a final email along the lines of "thanks, dumbass -- that's two hours of my life that I'm never going to get back." At that point the scoring process just gets a little demoralizing for me, so out it goes.

On to the actual day one:

Getting Data In There
Exported OPML file from FeedDemon (the best RSS reader in existence). Started import into Searchfox. Waited...but not nearly as long as I'd expected, inasmuch as I'm subscribed to something like 350 feeds. Searchfox also gave me a nice message thereafter, listing the feeds that it couldn't locate or validate; since I didn't even recognize any of them, I shrugged and moved on. Very smooth.

It may just be due to the beta status, but it's worth noting that this is clearly aimed at people who have already drunk the kool aid: the subscribe/import section of the interface assumes that you've already got a stock of feeds you want to import, or that you'll add feeds manually -- none of this "here are some feeds to get you started" stuff here. There's a placeholder in the navigation for "suggested feeds," but not yet live.

The Interface
(Screenshot below)
Nice and clean, but a few personal gripes: first, while I'm not a big fan of frames, there are cases where they (or similar magic) just make sense. For me, a Web-based RSS aggregator is one of those cases. Since I have my 350 feeds roughly grouped into four folders, I only have about 100 feeds listed at any given time...but that's still a lot of scrolling up and down if I'm checking out items from feeds at the bottom of the list: scroll down, click on Scobelizer, pop back to the top of the page, read items, scroll down again to Techdirt, pop pack to top of the page, read items...you get the idea. While there's stuff I don't like about Bloglines, they're implemented so that my list of feeds and my list of items from the active feed scroll independently, which is a godsend.

Second gripe: feed items end up looking like headline-only summaries, and I hate headline only summaries. Clicking the little twistie next to the headline opens the item content, but I'd be much, much happier if I got something like 25 words of the post displayed by default. Headlines don't necessarily tell me whether I want to read an item. This seems like a potentially big issue for Searchfox, since it's deciding how to score feed items based on my interaction with those items. Just clicking the twistie and leaving the item text open seems to bump up its affility score pretty significantly...haven't yet tested how/whether I can train Searchfox to ignore or downgrade items that I read but don't particularly care about (short of using the delete function, which I'd like to avoid).

So far, so good: generally like Searchfox, and feeling like the personalization has really interesting potential. Some irritations, but still trying to figure out how much is just due to "that's not how I do things right now." More in a couple of days.

Gedankenexperiment #37: Bad Judgment Theater

2005-09-16T15:46:00.000-04:00

Okay, let's say that you were a "technology marketing and product launch specialist experienced in the management of integrated marketing programs ranging from brand identity development, product management, customer acquisition campaigns and Web application development," and you lived in California.

Do you think that it would be a good idea to submit your resume and a stock cover letter -- containing no mention of any software development skills or experience -- for a job opening as a Java developer in New York City?

Take your time. Put as much thought into it as you need.

No, of course you don't think it would be a good idea. Because if you did such a thing you'd be a dumbass, and you would be the reason that "the marketing guys" are on the receiving end of so much mockery and derision in many technical organizations.

Holy shit, this kind of crap just drains me. If you're a good Java developer with some Perl and PHP, and live in NYC (or if you know such a person), drop me a note. Please.

Searchfox Beta Report: Day 0.5

2005-09-15T17:59:00.000-04:00

I knew that I liked FeedDemon, the best RSS reader in existence, but I didn't fully realize how much it would throw me to try to use another reader as my primary. So far I've found a number of things that I like about Searchfox, but I still keep wanting it to be FeedDemon...just because.

Anyway, I've been taking notes but not yet had the time to write up anything coherent; just so you all have something to mull over, though, I've come up with this little item...

One of the key elements of Searchfox is personalization, scoring feed items based on your behavior and using that data in a variety of ways. One of those ways is a little display box of "topics I like," pretty clearly gathered by some sort of word frequency counts on highly-ranked items. This is still beta, folks, so there's some tuning to do there: while the list is a little eccentric, the list of words does make for some excellent found poetry.

Topics I Like
By Whitney McNamara and Searchfox
Voice, path, partner:
return it! Skype me!
Time...
patent things, rss,
sell gene law tracking.
You think we be building?

Searchfox Beta Report: Day 0

2005-09-14T09:52:00.000-04:00

After reading a fair amount about the new Searchfox Web-based RSS reader, I submitted a request to participate in the beta. Shortly after submitting my request I received a login and password; I poked around for a few minutes, found it intriguing, and decided to put together a few posts on the process of getting to know Searchfox.

And so it begins...

Day Zero
Return to the www.searchfox.com, type in username and password.

Hmmm...login failed. Must have used a different password.

Try another of my commonly used passwords. And another. No joy.

Okay, maybe I didn't remember to change the autogenerated password?

Find email, copy and paste password.

D'oh. Must have gotten all security-minded and used a different password. Bad Whitney. D'oh, d'oh, d'oh. Okay, where's the "I'm an idot, send me my password" function hidden?

Poke around the site. "Help" page totally unhelpful. Still no "I'm an idiot" button anywhere. Bad Searchfox. Send email to support, imagine recipient giving a deep sigh and muttering "what is this guy, an idiot or something?" under his breath as he reads the email.

Day 0 Score
Whitney: -1 for stupidity
Searchfox: -1 for not anticipating Whitney's stupidity

Cumulative Score
Whitney: -1
Searchfox: -1

Roberts Confirmation Hearings

2005-09-12T08:33:00.000-04:00

Just a little reminder: the first Supreme Court appointment in 11 years is imminent. Roberts' confirmation hearings will be broadcast live on WNYC (radio or online), and I'm sure a variety of other outlets.

These are lifetime appointments, kids, might be worth a listen...

Nooked Blog: Nooked - Influencer survey

2005-08-28T21:02:00.000-04:00

An "Influencer" survey conducted either for or on behalf of Nooked (an RSS markedting company) found that these influencers were very aware of RSS and used it a great deal.

Fair and true enough, but does this feel to anyone else like a marketing department's ham-fisted response to the Nielsen "RSS...um, wha?" survey that we started hearing about last week?

Ex-MS CTO dismisses patent problems

2005-08-26T10:57:00.000-04:00

In an article entitled Ex-MS CTO dismisses patent problems, Builder UK quotes Nathan Myhrvold: "Patent litigation represents only 3 percent of federal lawsuits and there has been a steady decline in the number of lawsuits filed per patent, Myhrvold said. "

Which I'm sure is true, but is only one take on the numbers. Another way to look at those numbers would be to say that between 1991 and 2000 the number of US patents issued annually increased by 64%, and that over the same period the number of patent infringement lawsuits increased 111%. (Peruse the other numbers on the linked page, as well.)

As I've mentioned before, a decrease in the number of suits filed per patent doesn't necessarily indicate a healthy environment when the number of patents issued is increasing so dramatically. The raw number of patent infringement lawsuits is still increasing, and the money that goes towards supporting those lawsuits -- rather than, say, research and development budgets -- is increasing right along with it.

Basecamp: Now Automatically Coding Your Projects?

2005-08-25T14:06:00.000-04:00

Based on a quote from the CNET.com article Pearl Jam to offer 'bootleg' downloads, it appears that 37 signals' Basecamp -- a really excellent project management tool -- may have achieved what project manages have been asking for since time began: you put in your project plan, and then Basecamp automatically develops it for you...

"The idea to embark on such an endeavor has been floating around the Pearl Jam camp for several years. 'The thing we were looking for was a really good way to manage the thing,' Tim Bierman, manager of Pearl Jam's Ten Club fan organization, told Billboard.com. 'That's where Basecamp came in. They developed a killer application I'm really confident the fans are going to love.'"

...or, I suppose, Tim Bierman may have just gotten the company and their flagship product confused. Though that's a somewhat less entertaining possibility.

Urge to post on asspatents rising...fading...rising...

2005-08-24T09:17:00.000-04:00

Following (and posting on) the vagaries of the US patent system gets a little wearing after a while...outrage sags into scornful disbelief, which in turn fades into a fatalistic apathy. But then you get one of the particularly egregious perversions of the original intent of the system and the whole cycle starts over again...

While there are any number of articles on the topic to choose from, this article summary really cuts to the heart of the matter: "Wired News reports that the US Patent & Trademark Office rejected a request that Apple filed in October 2002 to patent technologies that support the iPod's rotational wheel interface. The reason for the rejection: Microsoft had apparently outraced Apple to the patent office with a similar request by five months."

Hmmm...so the the two requests were filed five months apart? Perhaps the method of using hierarchical menus covered by the patent wasn't exactly "non-obvious to the skilled practitioner," eh? I've linked to it before, but let's take another quick look at the relevant portion of the US Constitution: among other things, it states that the Congress shall have the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to the respective Writings and Discoveries; [...]"

The authors of the constitution recognized that it benefitted society at large to offer inventors a guaranteed, legally protected monopoly on use of their inventions for a limited period of time, in return for making the details of that invention public and available to all after the expiration of that monopoly. Note, however, that this deal only works to "promote progress" if the invention is one that is difficult or impossible for some other clever person to develop on their own.

To put it another way, Section 8 of the US Constitution doesn't say anything at all about "providing corporations with the opportunity to generate additional revenue in licensing fees by completing their patent application before any of the other individuals and organizations who are filing overlapping or identical patent applications."

RSS Version 3: Because There Aren't Enough Competing Standards

2005-08-19T12:08:00.000-04:00

I'm sure everyone has already seen the RSS Version 3 Homepage, whether via Slashdot or one of the other million sources that have pointed to it. From the homepage:

Welcome to the RSS Version 3 Homepage. This site strives to create expanded and complete standards for syndication of online content - more specifically, it aims to recompose the RSS Version 2.0 standard due to underdocumentation and lack of concern towards modern necessities. Our goals are to provide at least one complete standard for common use under the Attribution/Share Alike Common License.

Hmmmm...so RSS 2.0 is underdocumented, and the solution to that is to create a competing standard? Interesting. Classic case of the dark side of OSS: "I don't want to figure out how X works, or contribute to the boring parts of the project, so I'll start my own very slightly different project."

People, Cookies (Me and My Data)

2005-08-18T13:31:00.000-04:00

Fred Wilson has clearly spent some time thinking about cookies, and consistently comes down in the cookies' usefulness to users outweighs their drawbacks camp. I don't disagree, exactly, but nor can I say that I wholeheartedly agree. Couple of things:

1. Browser cookies are the best commonly available approach to handling certain issues of persistent identity on the web, but that doesn't mean they're a great approach. Everybody (including Fred, if I'm reading correctly) acknowledges that cookies aren't an answer by themselves: just to pick the easy example, cookies can be considered broken when your model includes either multiple individuals using a single computer/browser or a single individual using multiple computer/browsers. That doesn't make cookies bad or useless, but just illustrates that there are limitations on the technology that you must remember if you're thinking about building out on top of it.

2. Too many of the people trying to rehabilitate cookies' reputation are idiots. Take, for example, a snip from this NY Times article:

It isn't necessarily just corporate America that is threatened by the anticookie fervor, Ms. Ross said - the deleters stand to suffer, too. For example, cookies help a computer limit how many times a user sees annoying ads like a floating, animated message. Such "frequency caps," to use industry parlance, are common among publishers. "So cookies are a really good thing for managing the user's experience," she said.

Huh? I, the user, am supposed to feel warm and fuzzy about that? Got some bad news for Ms. Ross...if your ads irritate me you don't get the opportunity to "manage my experience" by playing with display frequency -- Firefox, Adblock, and Flashblock allow me to set my own personal frequency cap to zero, but thanks so much for your concern. As Fred points out, cookies can and do provide some real benefits to users, but "cookies allow ad servers to annoy you just a little less" doesn't make that list.

3. The really important one: what's in it for me, damn it? The weakness that I see in Fred's line of thought -- as it applies to the existing implementation of cookies, at least -- is that in all but the most specific cases we're talking about largely hypothetical benefits to the user, when the (real and imagined) drawbacks are already burned into the public mind. If we're going to get past cookiephobia, we need to see some tangible benefits coming from keeping cookies: the mantra of "stuff will be more personalized" just won't cut it.

Cookies mean that I don't have to manually log in every time I post something to del.icio.us? Clear, immediate benefit for me. Good del.icio.us -- have a cookie. Fifteen separate advertising.com cookies get me...ummm...what, again? My own intermittent and unscientific testing has proven to my satisfaction that deleting ad network cookies doesn't have even the slightest negative impact on my Web browsing experience, nor keeping those cookies any positive effect...so why should I allow these cookies in the first place? Those cookies are another example of me giving data to a service, and if I'm going to give someone that data I'd damn well better get something in return.

The Asspatent Series: United States Patent Application 0050177789

2005-08-12T16:52:00.000-04:00

United States Patent Application: 0050177789 is Microsoft's filing for " Method and apparatus for visually emphasizing numerical data contained within an electronic document"...which would be "highlighting the numbers, whether in their alpha or numeric forms, in a word processing document."

Asspatent.

Asspatent, asspatent, asspatent.

Though it does point to an interesting omission (as far as I've seen, at least) in word processing and presentation software: the damn things do spelling and grammar checks, why not basic math checks? I can think of several occasions in recent months where I've seen Word docs or Powerpoint presentations that had arithmetical typos (misplaced decimal points and the like).

I suppose that this is a sort of half step in that direction, highlighting the numbers so that you can check them, but why not go all the way and have the computing device try to identify and validate your computations?

Blogfodder: Sick, Work, Vacation

2005-08-11T17:16:00.000-04:00

I dropped off the face of the earth for about four days due to a 101 degree fever that I then thoughtfully passed along to my seven month old daughter; both of us doing rather better now.

The past two days I've been trying to catch up on work and possibly even get ahead a little...which leads into the final part of the title: heading out Friday night for five days on the Maryland shore, hanging out with family, kayaks, food, and drink. Largely offline until next Thursday.

Just so you all don't miss me too much, I'll dump out some of the recent blogfodder highlights...

While disagreeing with Bruce Schneier on security topics is generally a good way to be wrong, I can't share his (kinda) positive take on the recent, successful "MD5 is broken" defense. As Schneier says (and Ed, our head of development reminds me at every opportunity), MD5 is broken, but it's not broken in any way that appears to be relevant to the case. Where Schneier takes the positive message of "[i]f there's any lesson here, it's that theoretical security is important in legal proceedings," it seems to me like more of an effort to muddy the waters surrounding security issues for personal gain. I don't believe that this case is actually a model for any productive thinking on the importance of security -- theoretical or otherwise.

Many others have pointed to the Copyright Office's possible Internet Exporer only issue. Come on, now -- when Microsoft makes a point of being cross-browser compatible, "but testing is hard" seems a pretty lame argument.

Nelson's blog is well worth reading in general. In particular, I loved his post on the One True Email Quoting Style. While it's true that the OTEQS is also the basis for usenet-clogging "death by a thousand line-by-line rebuttals" debates, I still love it. Oh, and by the way -- Nelson is the inventor on Google's recent RSS advertising patent filing. Still think it should be rejected, but really excellent for Nelson.

AOL acquires XDrive. Yeah, whatever. This is really just an excuse for me to complain again about the fact that no one offers a decent, cheap home storage appliance. All I want is no stupid OS limitations on client machines, minimum of three hot-swappable drives, RAID5, and a nice small form factor. In a world of Nano-ITX motherboards and sub-$1/MB hard drives, is this really so much to ask?

Brainspace

2005-07-28T23:16:00.000-04:00

I was reminded today that my memory sucks.

I asked Andy Sautins -- raconteur and gentleman about town -- about a project that he's beeen working on for some time, and he pointed out that a few months ago we'd had a fairly long conversation on the very topic about which I was asking. In my defense...I guess...we were both drinking during that initial conversation, but it was nevertheless a little embarassing.

Over the past year or two I've been trying to better manage my tendancy towards absent-mindedness, with some success. I've figured out some of what I need to do to keep more of the importanct active things, both personal and professional, available in my head, and am better about finding tools that I'll actually use to help manage whatever doesn't fit into my head (backpack, anyone?).

Even so, it's irritating to me that I seem to have relatively little available brainspace when I can sit here and -- without having to dig at all -- type out the voiceover from the TV show Renegade:

He was a cop, and good at his job...but he committed the ultimate sin and testified against other cops gone bad -- cops that tried to kill him, but got the woman he loved instead. Now, framed for murder, he prowls the badlands: an outlaw, hunting outlaws...a bounty hunter...a renegade.

That's, like, 250 bytes of storage that I'm apparently never going to be able to reclaim for any other purpose.

Miscellaneous RSS

2005-07-27T00:25:00.000-04:00

Three links:

Yahoo opens 360 to outside content
"Is it fair to say that the 'walled garden' concept is finally and officially dead?" Probably not, but we're still seeing pretty astonishingly fast acknowledgement that people's online stuff (and selves) are widely distributed these days, and that people seem to like it that way; that interests me.

Why Yahoo buying Konfabulator is more than just about widgets
I'm a sucker for endlessly amusing resource hog that is dashboard, and am kicking myself that the idea of a "meta-widget" didn't occur to me before reading this.

Google adds RSS reader
See note one.

For those who haven't been following along at home...

2005-07-27T00:19:00.000-04:00

When White House spokesman Scott McClellan recently said "The president believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others"...and..."We look at it from a standpoint of stopping lawsuit abuse," he was referring to legal protections for companies that manufacture firearms, not any other cases that have been in the news recently.

MarketingVOX: An Odd Take on Ajax

2005-07-21T09:01:00.000-04:00

MarketingVOX is running a little article entitled "Ajax May Undermine Web Advertising, Analytics Models." Read it, it's...odd.

The focus is a claim that Ajax (referred to in the article as "hodgepodge of JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, and XML") may cause the impressions-based Web advertising sky to fall, by screwing with the metrics used: "Traffic metrics are also affected by the technology, because most sites measure traffic in terms of visitors and pageviews. Though visitor counts are unaffected, [Adaptive Path's Lane] Becker says 'this blows away the page-view metaphor. Click paths have to be measured differently.'"

Weird. Point A, if use of Ajax makes for better user experience, "oh, but if we use it we'll have to re-think how we make money" doesn't seem like an argument with a lot of legs. Point B, it sure seems like the complaint isn't that the tracking of page views will be incorrect in any way, but rather that use of Ajax means that where a site's visitors once had to suffer through three or four page reloads to accomplish a single task they will now have a single page load -- which reduces artificially high pageview "inventory" numbers.

Technology happens, and businesses have to adapt to that technology -- whether the implications are exciting and heavy with low-hanging hundred dollar bills or lose-your-shirt scary.*

* Okay, unless you're the MPAA or RIAA. Then you just pretend that the technology has absolutely no implications whatsoever for your business model, and ask congress to make that fantasy the law of the land.

Online Indentity Management: AlwaysOn

2005-07-18T13:52:00.000-04:00

AlwaysOn is apparently planning on launching an online identity sort of service, pulling profile data from other services into the AlwaysOn portal. SiliconBeat notes that the idea has never taken off, despite a number of offerings in the area. The linked post doesn't have much by way of details, but it's worth tossing into the hopper for consideration.

So here's a question: other than the computational overhead, key management complications including fun like designating authoritative servers, complexity for end-users, and some valid concerns about whether it really fits the need all that well, why is it that we don't hear more about people using either public key crypto or its basic architecture as the basis for an online identity management system? While it might not be the right approach, it's not any worse than some of the ideas I've seen tossed out there.

There are already a few different examples of people using public key crypto to create private content on the Web, with client side decryption, and signing data (to authenticate that it came from a particular source) is a reasonable leap to make from there...while it seems like a bit of a stretch to make it all work, so does every other option that I can think of.

And just as a slightly related side note, check out the stealthsurfer drive...while it's focused on anonymity online, one could (or rather "I do") view that as just another perspective on "controlling one's online identity." Going to pick one up to play with...

Blog Bites Woman

2005-07-18T12:47:00.000-04:00

Like about 1.7 million other people, I read The New Nanny Diaries Are Online in the NY Times this weekend. Today, I read the response from the nanny in question, posted to the blog in question, and wow -- there's a little bit of a disconnect between the two realities.

Read, and judge for yourselves. It'll be interesting to see what sort of attention (if any) this story gets in the offline world.

Podcasting, Podcatching, Whatever

2005-07-11T16:42:00.000-04:00

Mike at Techdirt today posted BBC Takes A Step Towards Broadcatching? Apparently the BBC is taking the step of debuting a new sitcom online, and Mike writes:

The show will go online a week before it actually airs on TV, and then be available to download until a week after the series ends. What's not clear from the announcement, though, is whether they'll offer up any kind of RSS feed or enclosures for this. Also, it's unlikely they'll be using any kind of BitTorrent-like P2P tools to ease their bandwidth needs. However, just the idea of offering up a new television show for download at the same time as it's playing on TV is an intriguing idea.

So the BBC isn't yet "podcasting" -- or whatever we want to call it when it's non-audio content -- but Mike's mention of RSS enclosures and BitTorrent as relevant to this sort of distributrion reminded me of a link that was passed to me a few weeks ago: the Azureus BitTorrent client has long had an "RSS Import" plugin. Point the plugin at one of the RSS feeds that lists new torrents, provide it with a regular expression that defines the shows you want to capture and away you go -- new episodes of the shows that you choose are automagically downloaded as soon as they're available.

Excellent.

Oh, and the trend-conscious should note that this is so buzzword-compliant as to be a little frightening...RSS, BitTorrent, and search all at once. Mmmmm.

FeedDemon Subscription Model: Not So Much With the User Joy

2005-07-08T17:45:00.000-04:00

Since George Scriban asked, and Nick Bradbury answered, I'll just connect the dots.

In the case of FeedDemon, users apparently still make a pretty clear distinction between the software itself and the services associated with it, and while they're open to a subscription for services, a subscription to keep the software itself working...not so much.

Yahoo RSS Search...and Creative Commons?

2005-07-08T13:38:00.000-04:00

Steve Rubel caught a quick glimpse of an apparent Yahoo blog/RSS-focused search offerings. Kinda interesting. Even more interesting? The text from the screenshot that he took:

This Yahoo! Search service finds lorem ipsum doler itum foo bar blah blah blah mktng spiel. While most stuff you find on the web has a full copyright, this search helps you find content published by authors who want you to share or reuse it, under certain conditions [Emphasis mine.]

Sounds to me like they might be checking for feeds that are Creative Commons licensed? Neat.

Microsoft and Claria

2005-07-01T15:43:00.000-04:00

Fred Wilson posted today on the Microsoft/Claria reports that have been floating around. It is (as I seem to say about everything) an interesting post that you should go read, and also (as I seem to say about almost everything) one that raises some questions for me.

The first is very minor...Fred writes:

First of all, its a match made in heaven. Two of the most hated companies in the technology world getting together. Sounds right to me.

I don't think it really matters, but that statement started me wondering whether Microsoft is really still one of the top "most hated" companies in tech. I would without question give them the title of "most mistrusted," but that's a pretty different thing from hate. Personally, the last time I'd say that I actually hated Microsoft was when I was rebooting my Windows 98 machine two or three times a day. Anyway, that was just an odd little bell that went off in my head -- the real question is coming up.

Fred also writes:

But Microsoft can take the good stuff that Claria has; its behavioral targeting technology, its relationships with advertisers who understand that behavior is the best targeting technique for many applications, and possibly Claria's data.

The question here is whether Claria's behavioral targeting is really all that good. I'll preface by saying that I have no firsthand knowledge of their technology...the reason for my skepticism here is really based on textual analysis more than anything else. Some of you may want to stop reading now.

A few months ago, a Claria-sponsored article on behavioral targeting appeared on ClickZ. [Read it, please.] The first postulate for my analysis is that Claria would not have had their name linked to an article with which they substantially disagreed.

The article contends that behavioral targeting on the Web should be "reactive" rather than "predictive." I consider this statement to be absurd. Behavioral targeting systems are necessarily both reactive and predictive: by analyzing a data set (i.e. "reacting" to past behavior), the system determines what content can most appropriately be displayed for the individual being analyzed (i.e. "predicting" what that individual will respond well to).

The only way that I can see this distinction making any amount of sense is if one is trying to promote the idea that old-fashioned statistical techniques don't apply to the Web. That is to say: one is promoting the idea that behavioral targeting on the Web should be focused on responding quickly to apparent trends that appear in relatively small amounts of recent clickstream data, rather than modelling, profiling, or any of the other approaches that focus on how an individual's behavior conforms or departs from that of larger groups.

Why would one want to promote that idea? Well, if "behavioral targeting" was quickly becoming one of the buzzwords of the Web, and my technology were geared towards short-term clickstream analysis, I'd sure be pushing the idea that it was time for some new thinking about how behavioral targeting should work.

It makes sense, I think. Back when Claria was Gator, they were all about quick response: replace ad X with ad Y when the user loads a particular site or ad, pop up ad Z when the user visits a certain type of site, and so on. When Benjamin Edelman (Berkman Ctr. for Internet and Society) analyzed the targeting of Gator ads back in 2003, he noted that:

"Testing to date has shown no signs of profile-based targeting of this sort, and tests with different or invalid user IDs and machine IDs yield the same results as tests with the original IDs as set by Gator's installation software. Nonetheless, Gator's marketing materials prominently offer a targeting capability ('... based on past behavior'). This 'past behavior' targeting may reflect profile-based targeting not yet detected by the author. Alternatively, it may refer only to display of an ad as a user leaves a targeted web site (or some number of minutes or clicks after a user leaves that site). Future research may attempt to more fully flesh out Gator's profiling systems by comparing the ads shown to users with divergent browsing histories."

I'm sure that Gator (sorry, "Claria") has been working on profile-based targeting in the last couple of years, but I doubt that it's been their primary focus -- it's difficult and requires a huge amount of time and data, and until recently I don't think that Claria would have had enough clients asking for sophisticated targeting to make the investment worthwhile.

Claria's relationships are definitely valuable, as is their data (to a company that's not afraid to get a little mud on its reputation, at least), but I'm really not sure about the technology. I have a lot more research to do on the folks working in this area, but if it's high-end behavioral targeting technology and knowledge that Microsoft is looking for, I think they'd be well served to explore some other options.

Patents for Standardization?

2005-06-30T11:04:00.000-04:00

Quote from Scripting News: 6/30/2005:
"I've been having a back-channel conversation with Larry Lessig about software patents, and why they may be worth the trouble (my position, not his). Here's another reason. If we had a patent on podcasting, one of the terms of the license would be using the same export format we did."

Wow. Really, really can't agree.

My first concern is simply about this sort of use of the patent system: patents, software or otherwise, are not tools to enforce standardization of ideas or technologies. If we want to get old-school about it, patents are tools intended "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to the respective Writings and Discoveries; [...]"

The second is simply practical: what would a "patent on podcasting" be? What exactly would it cover, and how broad would it have to be to encompass "podcasting" as a whole? Would you file suit against any companies that were doing something that looked like podcasting but didn't follow your standards, and cash drain them out of existence? What if their approach were actually interesting and useful?

This sort of issue is why standards bodies exist, not why the USPTO exists.

Ugh.

Nick Bradbury on Microsoft, RSS and Attention

2005-06-28T09:56:00.000-04:00

Nick "creator of FeedDemon, the best RSS Reader ever"* Bradbury wrote an excellent post entitled Microsoft, RSS and Attention yesterday.

It actually meshes really nicely with my post yesterday, but Nick's focus is specifically on "attention" data, that being a subset of user generated data that service providers are really, really interested in having. Says Nick:

Your attention data is very valuable to the services that collect it, so there's not a lot of incentive for them to give it back to you. But even though you're paying those services by giving them your attention data, that shouldn't mean that they own it. It's your data, and you should be able to share it with other services so that they can use it to make recommendations for you.

Read Nick's entire post, please, and follow the links he's got in there. These issues surrounding ownership of network-defined identity are only now gelling into something that we can understand and start to work with, and so now is the time that we should start working with them.

* Note that I'm thinking of changing the nickname to "author of FeedDemon, the best RSS reader ever, which should totally be ported to OSX because I'm currently torn between my love of FeedDemon and my love of everything else about my powerbook", but that seems a little unwieldy.

Song Number Two Is a Fuck You Song

2005-06-27T13:56:00.000-04:00

Update: I'm really impressed -- as of late yesterday, Nike has issued an apology and is attempting to dispose of all of the flyers.

Original Post:
Okay, I don't normally think of myself as anti-commercial, but this is just a little too fucking raw for my taste.

Not content with naming their east coast skateboarding tour the "Major Threat" tour, Nike has appropriated imagery from the band Minor Threat to promote that tour. Compare and contrast:

Minor Threat's Album Cover	Nike's Tour Poster

According to Pitchfork Media, Nike never mentioned this lookalike ad campaign to Dischord (the label that released the 1984 album):

"No, they stole it and we’re not happy about it. Nike is a giant corporation which is attempting to manipulate the alternative skate culture to create an even wider demand for their already ubiquitous brand. Nike represents just about the antithesis of what Dischord stands for and it makes me sick to my stomach to think they are using this explicit imagery to fool kids into thinking that the general ethos of this label, and Minor Threat in particular, can somehow be linked to Nike’s mission. It’s disgusting."

It's actually hard to pick what's most disgusting about this. Is it Nike's curious about face regarding appropriation of imagery? Maybe -- the company did, after all, sue Sega back in 2002, when Sega started running a commercial that copied the "look and feel" of a successful 1996 Nike tv ad.

Is it the ongoing appropriation of consciously anti-commercial imagery for commercial purposes? That's a good possibility, too. Perhaps the feeling that I have right now is what others felt when they heard Janis Joplin singing over a Mercedes ad. Incredibly, the most appropriate word I can come up with for this is disrespectful, though in straight edge terms that's a pretty powerful condemnation, so I guess it fits.

Did Nike not realize that people who wrote the lyrics...

When we have nothing left to give
There will be no reason for us to live
But when we have nothing left to lose
You'll have nothing left to use

We owe you nothing so
You have no control

Merchandise keeps us in line
Common sense says it's by design
What could the business men ever want more
Than to have us sucking in their stores?

We owe you nothing
You have no control

You are not what you own

...might not want their history stripmined in an effort to build an edgy brand image and thereby sell more sneakers? And yes, I know that's Fugazi rather than Minor Threat. It was also Fugazi that wrote "Song Number One" (which was not a fuck you song). I'm not a big fan of after-the-fact band reunions, but right now I'd totally support a Fugazi reunion that lasted long enough to write Song Number Two, which should absolutely be a big old fuck you song.

As Dischord notes, anyone who is so inclined can email Nike here. And just a side note: if I can keep myself from using the word "fuckers" in my email to Nike, then so can you.

Explicitly Social Software: We Have Met the Network and It Is Us

2005-06-27T09:31:00.000-04:00

The Infectious Greed post Data Should be the Intel Outside has been getting a bit of play in the last few days. In it, Paul Kedrosky proposes that the spectre of proprietary data is hovering over the green fields of Web2.0. [Go read the post now if you haven't already.] And, for a number of reasons, I agree with him.

Seems to me that we're now seeing some real movement towards the age of Explicitly Social Software; when people say that "the network is the computer" these days, they're not talking about Sun, nor even about the power that comes from using that network to share and develop open technologies. Rather, people are talking about how their data -- their data, I emphasize -- lives on the network now, not a single computer. That network is made up of data of the people, by the people, and for the people, if you will.

That's a complicated thing, though. If you're providing one of those services out on the network and need to make enough money to keep the lights on, it's a scary thing to remove "data lock in" from your day-to-day toolkit. If you're using those services, how much information do you actually want shared? How do you manage all of that data now that the network is your computer, and then damn thing never shuts down?

At this point I doubt that we'll ever hit the point where all data is open, and believe that there's going to be a fair amount of resistance and bizarre "sorta shared" experiments before we even get to "most data is open." But this is something that matters to us -- the people who make up the network -- and will matter a lot more five years from now; as Paul says, the time to start working on this is now. And unfortunately, we are the network, so there really isn't anybody else to do it for us...

More on Moreover

2005-06-24T10:55:00.000-04:00

Every time that I think that Moreover couldn't suck any more, they come up with a way to surprise me. I keep saying that I'm going to kill off my remaining Moreover feeds, but they're such a great source of examples of the wrong way to do pretty much everything related to RSS that I just can't give them up. This week's installment? Further examples of high-quality Moreover ad placement in a technology-focused feed...

The Long Tail: What the Long Tail isn't

2005-06-19T12:34:00.000-04:00

A couple of months ago I was part of a discussion where I ended up feeling like some sort of luddite, mouth-breathing heretic for proposing the idea that the term "the long tail" was suffering from overexposure, and that there were -- perhaps -- cases where it might be inappropriate or irrelevant to apply it. As with "bayesian" in the months following "A Plan for Spam," the fact that many of us were suddenly introduced to a term and concept with broad implications and a dangerously good pop-science accessibility score meant that we all wanted to find a way to use it. A lot.

Happily, though, the correction has started to set in...you should go read Chris Anderson's What the Long Tail isn't post in its entirely, but I'll give you a couple of quotes that made me smile, just to whet your appetite:

"It's time to draw the line. Long Tails are found everywhere, but not, you know, actually everywhere."

"The fact that something isn't popular doesn't mean that it's just a matter of time before it will benefit from all sorts of powerful demand-creation Long Tail effects. More likely, it's just not good enough to be commercially interesting, and probably never will be."

It's All About the Singing Bass

2005-06-18T15:47:00.000-04:00

Moving is frequently a difficult and stressful process; you're in between, having made an irrevokable step out of your familiar and comfortable space, but not yet really settled in to your new space. There are boxes everywhere you look, you can't find anything when you need it, the environment is still anonymous white walls...it's unsettling, in every sense.

In my experience, moving a business is kind of like that, but with a measure of naked terror tossed in to the mix. The last time I was involved with moving a company it was (thankfully) as a monkey: rack the switch, patch everything in, connect the monitor to the PC, insert tab A into slot B...that kind of thing. During that move I had the joy of sitting around at midnight, listening to arguments about who was supposed to have printed out the new network architecture docs, whether it was the network guy or the server guy who should deal with a machine that no one could ping, and who should open up and rummage through the twenty unlabled boxes to find the switches that we needed. I was paid by the hour. That was pretty cool.

So anyway, not to have too subtle a transition, but we -- Return Path -- moved one of our offices yesterday. At 2PM we shut down the old office network, at 4:30 everything was loaded on to a truck, and at 5:30 our stuff started coming up the freight elevator at the new space.

At 7:00 the arguments started.

We argued about whether we should redo the patch cables so that they were color-coded by user function rather than port number. We argued about who should go out on a beer run. We argued about whose fault it was that the godawful singing bass from the old office had accidentally gotten moved to the new office. Important technological questions, all.

Now, there will probably be some small fires to fight Monday morning, and there are still a couple of items on the "it should really be done this way rather than how we did it" list, but...well, it's the same thing that I write every time that anything big happens with the company: I work with really good people.

I'll also take a moment to emphasize my own critically important role as "guy who worries about things and ends up going on the beer and/or coffee runs," since I know that people who are responsible for my continued employment read this. This is a blog, after all -- when push comes to shove, it's all about me.

Thank you, and good night.

Nothing to hide? Nothing to fear.

2005-06-17T08:05:00.000-04:00

So remember a couple of months ago when I poked at the question "do you know what the data retention and disclosure policies for your ISP are?"

Well, it appears that our friends at the Justice Department have been pondering that very same question, and have come to the conclusion that they'd be much happier if your ISP was required to retain logs of Web, email, and IM traffic, and required to provide those logs to law enforcement upon request.

The Justice Department would prefer that ISPs do this voluntarily, of course, where voluntary means "bending over for us so that we don't have to go through the hassle of actually getting this requirement written into law," but with the grusome twosome of child porn and terrorism as justification, it seems likely that an attempt at legislation will come if ISPs don't fall into line pretty quick.

Oh, and by the way: remember that you'd better not be encrypting any of that data that you're sending and receiving over that internet connection, either...unless you're a child pornographer or terrorist, of course. And you aren't a child pornographer or terrorist...are you?

Microsoft and Anthropology

2005-06-13T18:10:00.000-04:00

Bless the "river of news" -- it brought me these two little snippets one after another.

First, Scoble points to a Fortune.com on Microsoft's "anthropological" study of small business users. Next, Drew McLellan writes about trying to install SQL Server on a Win2003 Web Server Edition box.

Quick tip for the MS anthropologists: having a "Web Server Edition" that makes it quick and easy to get a Web server up and running with none of the unnessary crap -- ahem, services, sorry -- is a nice idea. Makes things simpler for the user. Making it impossible for that user to then install Microsoft database software on that server? Stupid idea. Really, really stupid idea.

Let's say I'm running a small business. I've had my own Web server running for a little while, and now I want to set up a more complex site where my Widget buyers can log in and get custom information. If I'm running Web Server Edition, I've got two choices: buy (and license) another machine to run SQL server, or shut down my current Web site and rebuild the box. Great. Thanks, Microsoft.

This is one of the places that MS has always seemed weakest to me: I believe that Microsoft is legitimately trying to make it easy for users to accomplish their tasks, but the company has an irritating habit of doing so by dictating what tasks the user can accomplish and how those tasks can be performed. As long as your needs and goals are in line with those that MS planned for, you're in good shape...start moving off of those storyboards, however, and MS becomes a lot less interested in where you'd like to go today.

AOL: Hotbed of Innovation

2005-06-13T17:05:00.000-04:00

"'Imagine 27 channels that were never available before on the Web, plus email for everyone,' AOL Executive Vice President, Media Networks Kevin Conroy told the Daily News."

I'm sorry -- in the context of the internet, what the fuck does "27 channels" even mean? And "email for everyone?" Great idea there, guys; watch out for copycats, though -- I've got a feeling that this "free email" idea could take off pretty quick. If companies like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google get wind of this and come up with their own "email for everyone" offerings, you might end up having to fight pretty hard to get new users.

This weekend my mother actually asked to help her "find an internet connection that's less crappy than AOL" (yes, my parents did shape my approach to the English language, and yes, I've been bugging her about getting off of AOL for years). Will 27 channels of choppy video clips pull in enough traffic and ad revenue to offset the steady stream of defectors? Gee, let me think...

The full NY Daily News story on this impending flop is available here, if anyone actually cares.

Playing Chicken

2005-06-09T19:11:00.000-04:00

Be careful what you wish for.

Last night, when I was on the phone with the company that had missed (another) "confirmed" appointment to install one of the data lines coming into our new office space, I thought I had a plan.

"Yes, I understand that all of your field crews have already had their schedules set for tomorrow," I said, "but since you were supposed to show up here today, don't you think it makes sense to satisfy the commitments that you have outstanding before you begin work on any others? I don't want someone here to do the work Friday or Monday, I would very much like to have someone here to do the work tomorrow. I can see how scheduling could be difficult, but I'm totally confident that you can find a way to make this work."

As God is my witness, I was just trying to get them to confirm an install date of Friday, rather than pushing it out to next Monday. After the brain-eating clusterfuck that we've enjoyed while trying to get Verizon, Con Ed, and an assortment of other telco ducks in a row for this space, it really never crossed my mind that they would actually agree that getting the line installed today -- whatever was required, however it had to be fit into the schedule -- was something that needed to happen.

So here I sit, in the half-finished machine room of an empty office space, waiting. I played chicken, and...well, I think that I won...

MacRumors.com : WWDC 2005 Keynote Coverage

2005-06-06T13:54:00.000-04:00

Ajax-powered WWDC 2005 Keynote Coverage, indended to make manageable the server load created by thousands of obsessive geeks frantically reloading for updates? Sweet!

Appears to be hosed, though. Haven't gotten an update in at least twenty minutes.

Ah...just got an update by manually refreshing. The update confirms that macrumorslive's real-time coverage is, in fact, hosed. Come on, PubSub, give me something to work with here...

Update
So here we go. The theories of Intel making PPC workalikes, or long-term coexistence of the architectures go out the window. The word from on high is that it's Intel all the way by 2007.

Scoble on Casual Software Piracy

2005-06-06T11:35:00.000-04:00

Scoble's post last week on Microsoft's rencent marketing campaign is interesting, but I got stuck on one throwaway sentence right at the beginning.

In the list of reasons that people give him for running Windows, number three is: "[m]y friends have Windows and I know I can get support and software from them."

Interesting...I kinda doubt that it's homebrew software or pointers to interesting and useful shareware that these people are talking about. I hadn't thought about it in quite this way before, but there's an interesting theory to spin out here...does software piracy actually support Windows' dominance in an odd way? How many people do have stuck with Windows because their friends could provide a copy of Office, the graphics packages that they want, or a supply of "free" commercial games?

Definitely a B-list issue when compared to something like raw price or OS fear, but an interesting possibility. If this is a factor, then how does the online license activation requirement in more recent MS software affect this cycle?

...still sixteen kinds of busy today, but trying to clear my head (and the blogfodder folder) a little this morning...enjoy...

RSS Ripoff Merchants, Creative Commons, FeedBurner

2005-06-06T11:08:00.000-04:00

Read/Write Web's Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, 30 May - 5 June 2005 points to a discussion that I was following last week on what MacManus was calling "RSS Ripoff Merchants" -- companies that offer software or services that exist to ahem find and repackage content pulled from various sources around the Web.

Since I've been seventeen different kinds of busy for the last few weeks, I didn't get around to posing on it (or on any of the other posts that I've been meaning to get to).

The thread did resonate in an interesting way with one thing that's been in my head recently, though, so I wanted to get it out: while copyright is secured automatically as a function of creating something, copyright for...oh, say, blogs, for example...is a slightly odd case. Many people take a "common sense" approach, implicitly allowing significant amounts of re-use and assuming that others will use blog content "appropriately" -- quoting posts, or republishing them with attribution -- because that's the way blogging has worked thus far.

Now, common sense has as its basis community, and what is common sense to the community of bloggers may not be common sense to the larger world. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a mechanism that allowed us to make explicit the terms under which the content that we create may be used?

Yes. Yes, it would. While adding a creative commons license to your Web site or feed doesn't prevent others from using the content that you create in inappropriate ways, it does, at least, make it clear to others how you will allow your content to be used...you're communicating your standards and preventing the honest misunderstandings if not the outright abuse.

And one more side note: thanks, FeedBurner! It took a total of three clicks to add the appropriate CC license to my feed. With the sixteen kinds of busy that I still have to deal with for a few more weeks, I like it when people do work for me.

On Parenthood

2005-05-23T19:45:00.000-04:00

...and then, one finds oneself saying to a four-month-old: "okay, if we're not going to take a little nap, then why don't we go listen to the violent femmes?"

Weird.

Google Factory Tour in Stereo

2005-05-19T17:31:00.000-04:00

Just sat down to check my feeds, and it feels like half the posts are about today's Google Factory Tour. Amongst those posts I found this entertaining pair, that look like they were posted just a few minutes apart...

Om Malik:
Google executives are on stage talking about how they want to work with developers and help extend Google Maps. Instead of unofficial hacks, they want to make it more formal, so the developers can monetize their efforts. There seems to be a lot of effort behind Google Maps. This was in response to a question posed by someone in the audience. In case you were wondering, Jeff Jarvis has some interesting links.

Marc Hedlund:
I asked about Google Maps hacks, like this week's Chicago Crime site, at the Google Factory Tour. Particularly, I asked if their agreements with Navteq and Tele Atlas, who provide the underlying map data for the service, would require Google to shut down sites that used the map data without Google's permission. They responded that they had every intention to not shut them down as long as their licenses permit it, and one of the engineers insinuated that they might be working on a Google Maps API or a similar way to build on top of Maps (he actually said, "to make them not hacks," by which I think he meant not unauthorized). They also said they hoped that the data licensors would realize that increased traffic benefits them.

Scoble Ranks RSS Feeds

2005-05-18T17:27:00.000-04:00

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger says:

"Here, let's rank RSS feeds from worst (least useful for readers) to best.

Worst: headline only feeds with ads. [...]"

Yes, he's looking at you, Moreover...

IP on IP: Defining Patent Trolls

2005-05-16T13:33:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting little thread going on the IP list, started by a pointer to this article on proposed patent reforms.

Robert (Internet guy of long standing) Raisch's question, and Jason (Lawgeek/EFF Attorney) Schultz's response, are an interesting starting point for all of our musings...reproduced below:

Question:

From: Rob Raisch
Date: May 15, 2005 6:24:37 PM EDT
To:
Subject: Re: [IP] Patent reform in Congress

Ok, I'm slow about these kinds of things, so let me get this right...

1. I invent something useful,
2. I patent it (which gives me the right to exploit my invention
for a period of time), and
3. I then sell that right to someone else because for whatever
reason I am unable to commercialize it myself.

So, the new patent-holder finds an infringer and decides to protect their newly purchased property rights? And that's a "troll"? Sounds like the infringer has been amazingly lazy, not done the requisite IP homework, and has made money off of an idea they do not own and had no rights to exploit.

What am I missing?
/rr

Response:

From: Jason Schultz
Date: May 16, 2005 12:25:02 PM EDT
To:
Cc:
Subject: Re: [IP] Patent reform in Congress

Rob,

You've hit the nail right on the head. Defining patent "trolls" is not as simple as saying its any entity that didn't invent or doesn't commercialize a product, just like defining spam and spyware are difficult out-of-context. The key to defining trolls appropriately is within step #3 on your list -- the reason you did not commercialize it yourself. For some inventors in some industries, e.g., semiconductor manufacturing or biotech, it is nearly impossible for anyone without billions in capitalization to effectively commercialize inventions. However, in other industries, e.g. e-commerce or various forms of software engineering, it is much easier. The vast majority of troll complaints come from the latter and not the former. Thus, the key is context -- why did the inventor assign the patent to the alleged troll? Was it because they were understandably unable to commercialize it? Or was it because there was no commercial market for it but rather (because of broad claims and the cost of litigation) a market for leveraging large settlements out of companies, both large and small.

These distinction are important because patents are not supposed to be universally fungible commodities like a car or a house or even a piece of real estate, where any sale for profit is considered a good sale. Rather, patents are government grants that are meant to be given only when they serve the public interes, i.e. they are only supposed to subsist as a tool to help promote actual innovation and commercialization of technology. If a company buys a patent that never contributed to any such innovation or development, then it is against the public interest to allow that patent to be unfairly exploited via litigation. On the other hand, if the patent did make such a contribution, the inventor is owed some compensation. Drawing that fine line has proven to be a tricky task, but it is nonetheless an important distinction to bear in mind when determining who's a troll and who's a talented innovator.

Jason Schultz
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation

How Class Works - Graphical Representation of Data

2005-05-16T10:10:00.000-04:00

The New York Times has a nice little graphic up, entitled How Class Works, which nicely illustrates how households moved between economic bands in a ten year period (1988 - 1998).

This gets right at one of my little side obsessions: when you've got a lot of complex data, how can you represent it graphically to provide a visually comprehensible overview? One of my favorite approaches is a topo map inspired thing that I use for a number of reports.

The linked report snapshot has time as columns (one month per column), and the possible data slots as rows; the greater the percentage of data that falls into a given cell, the darker the color of the cell. So simple as to seem pretty stupid when I try to explain it to people, this approach nevertheless lets me get a very solid idea of how the data is falling out within a given month, and how it's trending over time, with just a glance at the report.

Fun With Server Logs

2005-05-05T15:01:00.000-04:00

Somebody at Microsoft is either really on the ball or has a whole lot of free time on their hands. About two hours after putting this post live, I got a ping from a log monitoring process that I have running (yes, I'm an obsessive freak who has a process running to look for interesting stuff in my server logs and tell me about it).

tide519.microsoft.com - - [05/May/2005:14:40:19 -0400] "GET /* SNIP */ want-to-license-piece-of-microsoft.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.40607)"
tide518.microsoft.com - - [05/May/2005:14:40:23 -0400] "GET /* SNIP */ more-about-ip-less-about-peoples-asses.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.40607)"

Want to License a Piece of Microsoft Research?

2005-05-05T12:09:00.000-04:00

Microsoft Watch has a little post up today entitled Want to License a Piece of Microsoft Research? Apparently Microsoft yesterday announced the creation of a new business unit called "IP Ventures," tasked with licensing Microsoft-Research-developed technology to VCs and startups.

Color me unsurprised. [You can skip down to the paragraph starting "Why are we here?" for the relevant portion of the post.]

NYT on Patent Farmers

2005-05-02T17:51:00.000-04:00

The New York Times today published an article entitled "A Payday for Patents 'R' Us," that uses the recent settlement [shakedown] in the long-running NTP/RIM patent infringement case as a jumping off point to address some of the issues and tactics often associated with "patent holding companies" [patent trolls].

I'm pointing this out largely as a followup to last week's Myhrvold's Insane Troll Logic...read the Times piece, paying particular attention to the graphic that illustrates the increase in the number of patent suits filed at the district level since 1990. (Copy of the image here, as well.) Note the rate of increase...think it looks at all familiar?

Myhrvold's Insane Troll Logic

2005-04-28T18:50:00.000-04:00

I should learn that sitting down to check my feeds just doesn't work as a strategy to get a few relaxing minutes away from a stressful and irritating day. Not when I have a feed that's searching the web for information on patents and the USPTO, anyway. From an interview with Nathan Myhrvold running on News.com:

What do you think of the complaints of how patent litigation is hurting companies? Some days it sounds like the trumped-up malpractice crisis of the '80s.
Myhrvold: Well, this is even stranger. We actually did a study on this. The overall number of lawsuits for patents is growing, but so is the overall number of patents. So explain that to me.

If I'm painfully obtuse, please, someone tell me, but I don't actually understand what Myhrvold's argument is supposed to be here. I see a pretty straightforward explanation. The number of patents granted each year has been increasing steadily since the early '80s, with a big, ugly spike in the late '90s:

[Chart actually intended for a different post that I'll have time to finish one day...]

As the number of patents granted increases...so too does the number of patent lawsuits.

And when you add in the shifts in what is considered patentable (check the two cases noted on the chart), the picture doesn't get any prettier. There are a lot more potential infringement targets for a patent on something like "one click buying on the internet" than for a patent on, say, a "Gate turn-off thyristor with anode rectifying contact to non-regenerative section." One might then reasonably expect that as the number of software and business model patents increases, they will tend to generate lawsuits at a per-patent rate rather higher than their old-fashioned cousins.

Okay, I feel better now. Thanks for listening.

What Color are Google's Helicopters?

2005-04-28T08:22:00.000-04:00

Being some additional space for me to vent on the topic of...

...a discussion related to Google's recently added "search history" that started on Dave Farber's IP list and eventually made its way over to Declan McCullagh's Politech list. (Note that some fair portion of the discussion happened off list, so you get only some highlights in the links above.)

It started with a message from Dave Farber, entitled "BAD IDEA OF THE WEEK -- Google Launches Personal History Feature," which was just a forward of an AP story on the feature. I initially read that as a suggestion that it was a bad business idea for Google, and responded: since A9, AskJeeves, and Yahoo all offer some form of search history these days, it seemed to me that Google really had to respond with a similar offering.

The followup from there was people laying out privacy concerns, both actual and hypothetical, that could arise from such a feature. Just to get this taken care of up front, I totally agree that there are privacy concerns inherent in Google's search history feature; where I seem to depart from most other people on these mailing lists, however, is that I see Google's search history as one example of a sort of privacy concern that is already ubiquitous on the Web these days, rather than a dramatic first step on to a slippery slope. Further, I'm much more frightened by the decay of offline privacy in the US than I am by anything happening online.

So a couple of things, largely taken from a rather snide email that I sent to Declan McCullagh (if you see this, Declan, sorry -- I should have gone to bed rather than replying to one last email):

If we're concerned about Google explicitly retaining search history, so too should we be concerned about the fact that A9 already does the same thing, and that A9's login is tied to the user's Amazon login. As noted above, other search engines already offer explicit search history retention, as well. Yes, Google is currently bigger and more popular than other search engines, but focusing attention exclusively on Google -- even getting them to eliminate the feature -- would not effectively address the larger privacy issue.

Note the word "explicit" in the paragraph above. Most of us only have a vague idea of what the data retention and disclosure policies are for our ISPs and the sites we visit: search, commerce, or otherwise. Remember that your ISP knows every site that you visit, for at least as long as it takes for logs to roll over. Unless you reject all cookies, have javascript completely disabled, and use an anonymizing proxy server, the sites that you visit may also know a great deal about you. Even if you clean out your cookies periodically, a static IP or an ISP-assigned DHCP address with a long lease (which is pretty common) means that sites can link together what you've been doing across multiple visits without having to store much of anything on your local machine.

Assuming that you aren't so paranoid that you're taking all of the privacy-enhancing steps above, you've got another big privacy issue: there are a whole lot of companies in the business of tracking you from site to site. Take a look at your cookies...atdmt.com, centrport.net, audiencematch.net, advertising.com...these organizations and others like them know as much or more about your browsing habits than sites like Google or Yahoo. That may or may not be a problem, but since many of those compaies have a reach that extends much further than any single content-based site, it's an issue that bears examination from a privacy perspective. Again, do you know what the data retention and distribution policies are for these companies?

And then for US citizens, of course, there's the offline world. Libraries, retailers, religious institutions, travel and communications companies...any and all records that these organizations have of your transactions must be provided to the government upon request, no warrant required, no notification to you required. Go, Patriot Act.

So yes, it's possible that there are a couple of mysterious black helicopters circling above your house, but I don't think that they belong to Google. Yet.

And yes, I still owe a followup on Fishtank and Habitrail. I'll get to it...

Ads via RSS: Weblogs, Inc./Google and Slashdot/Feedster

2005-04-27T17:55:00.000-04:00

I noticed earlier today that Slashdot has very tentatively started putting ads in its RSS feed, apparently powered by Feedster. Since the FeedsterMedia site wasn't as locked down as it probably should have been, I also learned that ads have been (or shortly will be) running in some of the Freshmeat and Sourceforge feeds, as well.

On the heels of that discovery, I was pointed to Jason Calacanis' post noting that Weblogs, Inc. has started running Google-powered ads in some of their feeds. Dave Winer is not amused.

Character Blogs are a Complete Waste of Time?

2005-04-20T07:08:00.000-04:00

An interesting little firefight broke out a few days ago over on Micro Persuasion, around Rubel's Character Blogs are a Complete Waste of Time post. [Go read the post and comments.]

Speaking as someone who created a pretty successful "character" corporation/Web site a number of years ago, I fall strongly into the "there's absolutely nothing wrong with character blogs" camp. Around the same time that I created Alien Abductions, Inc., I was also spending a lot of time writing and was fascinated by the public/private tension of a lot of writing on the Web; I created a couple of characters and had them write "online diaries," which looked a lot like blogs. Those were less successful (I'm not that good a writer), but that experience makes me strongly disagree with statements like this:

Rubel writes:
Character blogs are a waste of time because a character is not and never will be human - unless it's Pinocchio. Jason even noted that the Captain, who blogged about basketball, couldn't possibly play the sport. Ugh. A character blog is a giant missed opportunity to have real humans – whether they be employees, customers, or even distillers and bottlers - engaging in a real dialogue with consumers. I am all for using characters in TV commercials and even micro-sites, but having them blog is just a lame, lazy idea. In fact, it's an insult to blogging and bloggers everywhere.

I have a difficult time accepting that creative writing in a particular format (e.g. "character blogging") is an insult to anyone. I can agree that the Captain Morgan blog sucked, but that's because the writer or creative team doing it sucked...they didn't understand what they were doing. If a writer creates a compelling character and the character's blog is engaging -- revealing different aspects of the character over time -- then what's the problem? Why is that blog offensive when a "micro-site" by or about that character isn't?

Since I still owe a followup on Fishtank and Habitrail, in addition to my regular job and trying to squeeze in a few minutes with my family, I've decided to take an experimental approach in this post. There's a great deal more I could say, but instead I'll see if I can get someone else to take a look at the topic. Someone who has a keen interest in, and understanding of, both blogs and the role that "characters" play in our lives. Someone like Wil Wheaton. Actually it is Wil Wheaton.

Since my email to him will just be one of the many coming from somebody that he doesn't know, asking for something, I won't give good odds on his having time to respond, but I'll update if I hear anything. Consider the buck passed.