Phil Windley's Technometria

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June 30, 2003

Impatient Web Searchers Measure Web sites' Appeal in Seconds

A recent study by Jim Jansen of Penn State finds that people typically only look at the first three results in a search result and one in five of them spend less than 60 seconds evaluating a web site to determine whether it meets their needs. By the time three minutes have elapsed, 40 percent of searchers will have moved on. Eight out of 10 times, the abstract that appears with the search results dissuades people from going to the site.

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You Can't Handle the Truth!

In "A Few Good Men," Keffe screams "I want the truth!" and Jessep fires back \"You can't handle the truth!\". A front page article in today's Salt Lake Tribune, is headlined "Some question value of state worker blogs," but a better title would be "You can't handle the truth!\" Rebecca Walsh writes:

Reading a Weblog is a lot like reading someone's journal. Someone's highly technical, mind numbingly boring journal. Most of the time. Then there are times when techies slather their innermost thoughts, their childish pranks online. And when the writer is a state employee, blogs can be fascinating reading -- and a source of embarrassment.

Gee thanks Rebecca! I like reading your stuff too!

The article is full of interesting little tidbits, like Rep. Ralph Becker, true to form, calling for more regulation: "We should have some protocol for how we use our increasing use of e-based communication..." and an unnamed state employee saying "The intent of the blogs is to provide information. But what kind of information are they really providing? Who do they think they are?" I think its interesting that Rebecca didn't provide links to the blogs she's questioning so that readers can go decide for themselves. So, I'll provide them: take a look at my blog, Dave Fletcher's, or Dave McNamee's and decide for yourself whether there's any real information there. I think the answer is obvious.

As she was preparing this story, Rebecca sent me an email and asked:

I'm working on a story about blogs. It's my understanding that the state purchased blog software to improve communication. I wondered what your thoughts are on the medium given what happened to you and other state employees who posted comments in their blogs. Do you regret posting your apology? Do you believe blogging helps IT employees?

I responded with the following:

I wrote shortly after I and others in the state started blogging that blogging [requires] a "culture of candor." (See http://www.windley.com/2002/09/06.html#a171). I believe that organizations work best when people are honest and willing to let others be honest. The culture at the state is one of suppressing unpleasant truths and its very defensive. I think that's regrettable and probably one of the reasons I didn't get along too well there. I can think of several instances where people got themselves in trouble with their blogs (like the recent one involving Dave McNamee [that] was in the paper). In another instance, an employee honestly admitted a mistake and his co-workers, who were also involved in the mistake, jumped all over him for airing dirty laundry. I think that to the extent people are willing to be tolerant of honest expressions or letting off steam, the whole organization gains because information flows more freely. This is clearly not the culture that exists at the State.
I'm not sorry I posted my apology. The timing and the fact that it came to light right then probably cost me a job I wanted very much. But the alternative was living with a secret the would have come to light eventually and constantly wondering when that would happen and what the fallout would be. I would have looked like I was trying to hide something, which I wasn't, and my intent would have been questioned. Overall, I'm confident that being honest and forthright about it was the best thing to do. You can tell I'm not much of a politician. :-) It saved me plenty of sleepless nights and led, ultimately, to the best outcome.
I'm more convinced than ever that narrating your work in a blog is a good way to communicate. But, some organizations aren't prepared for open, honest communication and that's a shame.
You might also find these posts helpful in understanding my thoughts on candor, transparency, and using blogs in organizations:
http://www.windley.com/2003/05/28.html#a641
http://www.windley.com/2002/10/18.html
http://www.windley.com/categories/enterpriseComputing/2002/06/20.html#a38

The heart of the article and Becker's comments seems to be the question: "how can we protect state workers from blogs so their feelings don't get hurt." I think if Ralph and others in the State want to solve a real problem, they ought to ask themselves why they have an organization that can't handle the truth.

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Me? A Postmodernist?

In a recent post, AKMA called me "an honorary postmodernist." There are some aspects about postmodernism that make me cringe, but to the extent AKMA meant "a thoughtful study of the limits of scientific inquiry, the origins and perpetuation of unreasonable prejudices, and the ambiguities of language," I'm flattered. I do think that AKMA is doing a great service by serving as the conscience, so to speak, of digital identity and the limits of the technology in solving societal problems.

In the post linked above, for example, AKMA alludes to identity being the sum total of all our experiences. I think that's a good way to think about it. That meshes nicely with my thinking on digital identity as well. My digital identity is a collection of bits that represent things I've done or collected online. The digital identity is a woefully inadequate representation of me, the person, because I have many more experiences and interactions offline than I do online.

The other issue with digital identities is that they're so much easier to fashion than real identities. This is good and bad. Its good because you are free to fashion an identity for yourself online that is different than your real identity---maybe one more closely aligned with your inner self than the public exterior you've presented in the offline world. its more problematic when we want to start using digital identities to control our bank accounts because now we need a link between our digital self and our meat self. Of course, Amazon doesn't care how many identities I have or anything about them as long as they all have a credit card with a positive balance.

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There Ought to be a Club for Former State CIOs

BIl Campbell, the recent former CIO from Wyoming has written an article in the latest CIO Magazine entitled "How to Survive in the Public Sector". He came to see me last November, just after I'd decided to resign, but before it was public, and spent a day with me. I remember telling him I was resigning and his discouraged reaction. I think even then he probably saw the impossibility of his situation. His comments in the article echo some of my own in my Public Service Tips.

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June 28, 2003

Safari Unstable?

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that Ver 1.0 of Safari is less stable than the last beta? It just dies on me from time to time.

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Phil Windley Speaks!

I've decided to be more overt about speaking, so I've put together a page with samples, recent engagements, rates, resources, and requirements. I enjoy speaking and I'd like to do more of it.

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June 27, 2003

DNS Turns Twenty

Paul Mockapetris invented DNS while working at the University of Southern California 20 years ago in 1983. It took a number of years to catch on. I still remember editing /etc/hosts by hand on every machine I managed in 1988. Most machines didn't have complete host tables. There were a few complete host tables on various machines spread around the net. This led to a process where sending mail to someone meant that you had to pick the route using UUCP-style ! routes in the email address. The trick was to get the message to a machine that knew about the host you were sending mail to. It was a game and we enjoyed being good at it. DNS spoiled the fun, but made the net much more useful. This ComputerWorld article talks about the history of DNS and its invention. In the article Paul says:

I had expected people to think a little about enhancing the infrastructure, but it's still working hard and I don't think there are any obvious stress points where it's going to fall down in the next couple of years.

It is amazing that it continues to work, but that's a testament, I think to the decentralized, albeit hierarchical, architecture of the the DNS system and the overriding simplicity of what it does. It just maps domain names to IP numbers. Contrast that with UDDI which shares a potentially decentralized architecture, but has a much more complicated goal to return services based on more nebulous criteria than a simple, hierarchical domain name.

The article seems to make the invention of domain names and DNS synonymous and I don't think that's right. I believe the notion of hierarchical domain names existed before the DNS mapping system was invented, but I could be wrong. This predates my Internet experience by 3 or 4 years.

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XACML: Extensible Access Control Mark-up Language

Yesterday, I wrote about SPML and a little about SAML. SAML is an XML-based language for exchanging assertions about identity. SPML is an XML-based language for interacting with identity provisioning systems. There's another important piece in the puzzle: a common format for access requests, policies, and responses. XACML provides just that.

XACML is the language of the Policy Decision Point, of PDP. The PDP is the chunk of code that recieves access requests, checks to see whether they should be granted, and returns an appropriate response. The PDP is not necessarily the same as the place where credentials are stored. It merely needs access to that service, ideally via SPML. The PDP could be a module running in the local system or a remote system accessed over the Internet.

There are a number of good resources you should look at on XACML:

Sun Developer has an excellent article on XACML. Be sure to look at the code samples in the sidebar (the ones in the mainbar are not indented and difficult to read).
The piece on sitepoint is one page of a long article on XML Security.
Sun has released an open source implementation of the XACML standard. This Source Forge site has a lot of great information.
I have to mention the official OASIS site on XACML since its got all the foundational information including the XACML standard in PDF.

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June 26, 2003

Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML)

The OASIS group will demonstrate the Service Provisioning Markup Language, or SPML at the Burton Group's Catalyst Conference in July. According to OASIS, ten OASIS members will show the stability of the specification and demonstrate interoperability between SPML-conformant products. You might rightly ask: What is SPML?

The Security Assertion Markup Language, or SAML has been around for a while. Its an XML-based markup language for exchanging assertions about authentication and authorization in a federated identity system. There's nothing in SAML about how security credentials get created, managed, or queried.

SPML is the other shoe. Its a markup language for provisioning credentials. Not surprisingly, its methods look just like those of any database: add, update, delete, query. When a SAML request is received from a partner in a federated identity network, the software receiving that request could use SPML to query the identity system for the correct tokens. These tokens would then be returned to the partner using SAML.

SPML is not designed, as far as I can see, for federated security provisioning, but rather easy interoperability between different vendor products. That doesn't mean it can't be used for that, but it would have to be tacked up by the players who would have to take the IT and business concerns into account. SPML will probably find the most use behind the firewall, at least initially.

Here are a few resources on SAML and SPML that you might find interesting.

CNET News article on SPML demonstration.
Slides by Gavenraj Sodhi (PDF) on SPML and SAML. There's a good example using a supply chain. Sodhi is the secretary of the OASIS TC on SPML.
OASIS TC Page on SPML. This is where the source documents live.
OpenSPML.org. A Web site on the promotion and distribution of an open source client code that supports the SPML. There is a source code toolkit on the site.
Sun has a good article on using SAML to provide SSO (single sign-on).

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VoIP in My House

I just signed up with a new phone company called Vonage. The service is delivered over my Internet connection and lets me use my regular phone. When I here "internet telephony" I picture weird software, boom mikes plugged into the back of my computer and complicated set-up. This was about as far from that as you can get.

I signed up at the Vonage site about a week ago. Today, a box arrived at my house with a Cisco ATA 186, an analog telephone adapter. I plugged the ATA into my network, plugged a regular phone into the back and after a few blinking lights, made a phone call---no other configuration needed. The calls sounds great and seems to maintain in the face of heavy network downloads. I'll let you know later what my long term experience is.

Vonage has two calling plans for homes one with 500 minutes of long distance for $25/month and one with unlimited long distance for $40/month. Business accounts are slightly higher because they can. These plans come with every phone feature you can imagine, including call waiting, voice mail (with an email interface), call forwarding, caller ID, caller ID blocking, repeat dialing, and call transfer. A second line for FAX is an additional $10/month. There's a 911 feature as well--this has been a struggle for IP telephones so its a significant offering.

My account has a dashboard on the web where I can manage my voicemail, view call activity and usage logs (wondering who your teenagers are calling?), see billing information, and other housekeeping chores like managing account information. Here are a few unique features:

Your choice of phone numbers from just about anywhere in the US - I chose a Utah number, but I could have gotten an New York number (or one from anywhere Vonage has service) and had it ring in Utah. You can have an existing number transfered or get a new number.
Virtual phone number - multiple numbers from multiple locations ring in a single place. Want an office in Miami and LA? Done for $5 each.
Disruption call forwarding - forward calls to a number in the event your Internet service is down.
Quality degradation for bandwidth savings - you can chose to degrade the voice quality and save bandwidth.

Vonage is using dynamicsoft's Route Engine Platform to provide service out of two data centers in New Jersey. A California data center installation is planned. Interestingly, dynamicsoft is the vendor behind the SIP Protocol which is the basis for the SIMPLE messaging protocol. SIMPLE has vying with XMPP (Jabber) for use as a universal messaging protocol. Microsoft, AOL, and IBM has voiced support for SIMPLE, but XMPP has broad grassroots support. I frankly think that they're different enough that there's room for both. XMPP is a simple XML based messaging and presence protocol whereas SIMPLE is a more complicated P2P protocol capable of carrying multimedia content.

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June 25, 2003

Redesigned utah.gov

The utah.gov web site is sporting a new design. The new design is cleaner and less cluttered. I like it. The downside of a clean look is that there's fewer things on the homepage which means the hierachy got deeper. One of the problems with government web sites is the shear number of things that people want to find. Enforcing the three click rule is hard. That's one of the reasons why personalization is so important.

The new site also features live help and a new business portal that been in the works for months. There's more to come there and I'm anxious to see it.

Of course the problem with a new design is that all of the agency sites are still using the old design. So, all the work people went through to get the entire collection of web sites looking consistent now has to be redone. There's technology that can help with that, of course. Its called content management. Unfortunately the hurdles that have to be cleared to get content management in place are many.

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How Do I Know Who You Are?

One of the biggest challenges in digital identity is authentication, the process of knowing that the person or system presenting credentials is who they say they are. A driver's license has an authentication system built-in: the picture. Humans are really good at looking at pictures and faces, making a comparison and reaching an accurate conclusion about whether there is a match. For digital ID, the problem is more difficult. At the low end, we use usernames and passwords. More sophisticated systems use retinal scanners and other biometric devices. In this interview with the New Scientist, James L. Wayman of San Jose State University, California, expresses his reservations about biometrics.

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Why IT Doesn't Matter Anymore: Living in the Red Zone

A recent Harvard Business School publication is entitled Why IT Doesn't Matter Anymore. The author, Nicholas G. Carr, argues that "the core functions of IT have become available and affordable to all" which reduces the strategic value of IT. He says:

What makes a resource truly strategic-what gives it the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage-is not ubiquity but scarcity. You only gain an edge over rivals by having or doing something that they can't have or do. By now, the core functions of IT-data storage, data processing, and data transport-have become available and affordable to all.

This is an important article for any IT manager and especially CIOs to read. There are some excellent points. For example, Carr makes the point that thinking strategically may be more fun than the hard work of operational excellence, but the latter is much more likely to be the cause of problems for a company. He also says that vendor needs, more than company needs frequently drive IT purchases. Still, I think the analysis is perhaps too simplistic to be of much help to CIOs trying to prioritize projects.

The problem is that he's only thinking about the problem in one dimension. The figure to the right shows two dimensions: expense of the IT project on the vertical axis and the resulting increase in competitive advantage along the horizontal axis. Take you projects, get a group of your best managers together and go through an exercise where you rank each project on these two dimensions and then plot them on the chart.

The first step of the analysis is easy. Do everything in the green. You probably don't want to do anything in the white until you've finished everything in the green. Now, you may be thinking: never do anything in the red. These are not likely to improve competitive advantage significantly and they're expensive. Well, unfortunately, its not that easy.

The second step in the analysis is to further classify the projects in the red quadrant into two types. To understand the distinction, let me give you an example. If you're in the hotel business and you classified your expenses on this chart, clean sheets would fall into the red zone. Its expensive to provide your guests with clean sheets and all your competitors do it too, so there's no competitive advantage. Still, you'd be a fool to decide that you ought to slash the laundry budget and let your guests sleep in dirty beds. There are a number of "clean sheets" projects in IT:

Reliability
Scalability
Availability
Security
Desktops
LANs

You can see why these things fall in the red zone: they're expensive and, in theory, anyone can do them. In practice many don't. Finding out best practices in these areas isn't difficult and skilled people who know how to run these kinds of operations are available. I think the problem is often that these issues are "red zone" issues and its easy to get distracted by the fun "strategic" projects and let the "red zone" project languish because they don't provide significant competitive advantage.

That's short sighted because even though red zone projects can be done by anyone in theory, they are rarely executed well and plenty of companies fail for lack of execution even with a strong competitive advantage in some other area. I find that many business school analyses start off with the assumption that everyone will execute well and then focus on competitive advantage. That's not the real world and IT has become one of the most important areas in which to execute well---even if you don't believe its strategic.

I don't agree with everthing Carr has written in this article, in fact I think its tone is likely to cause many to miss the entire point. Even so, CIOs and other IT managers would do well to look at their projects and vigorously pursue any that fall in the green zone, while never losing sight of "clean sheets."

The tough thing about living in the red zone is that its not sexy. Its hard to do and no one's going to come up to you and say "Hey, I noticed the computers didn't go down again! What to go!" Its thankless work and it difficult to convince people to spend much on it. The goal is achieve operational excellence and do it as efficiently (read cheaply) as possible. Focusing on it requires different priorities, a different culture and organizational changes. But "red zone" work is the foundation on which everything else is built and success in other areas of the business is unlikely to come if its ignored.

Note: Although not specifically an IT book, my thinking in this area has been influenced by Mike Johnson's book Improving Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Profit. Its application to IT is my own invention. I took a class from Mike at the Univ. of Michigan Business School several years ago and was impressed with his formulamatic approach to customer satisfaction. I think there's much to be done in this area for IT as well---particularly when it comes to satisfying customers.

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June 24, 2003

What Shared Authentication Means to You

Glenbrook Partners has released a report entitled Rethinking Authentication on the impact of single sign-on and the shared authentication infrastructures like the Liberty Alliance. This is not the full report, you have to pay $1000 for that, but the abstract and table of contents are worth looking at in any event and they're free. Carol Benson, the reports author, says:

Like Moliere's character who discovered he had been speaking prose all along, some authenticators will discover they have always been "identity providers"; they just didn't know it.

She cites financial institutions and ISPs/Telcos as the serendipitous winners and sees a possible role for State governments if they choose to play. I've been spending quite a bit of time on Liberty and SSO over the last week. This report caught my eye as being about what shared authentication will mean instead of how it works.

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June 23, 2003

Trust and Identity Management

InfoWorld has a special feature this week on the relationship between identity management and privacy. Large organizations have a lot of relationships with customers, trading partners, and employees. Furthermore, in a service economy, digital identity matters and those relationships take the form of a collection of records in databases. This makes tools for identity management more important than ever. The problem is, that doing it right isn't easy.

This article, entitled Trusting ID management technology talks to some of the privacy issues. Some of the first computers in existence were used by banks and this drive to automate hasn't abated, putting financial institutions at the forefront of this problem. Large numbers of transactions and a natural fit on the web have caused banks to create huge repositories of information about their customers. Unfortunately, this has made the issue of privacy all the more important:

"We see the [privacy] problem getting worse. We see the entire financial industry in the U.S. putting their heads between their knees right now hoping the problem is going to go away," says Jim Hurley, vice president and managing director of information security at Boston-based Aberdeen Group. "These guys better get their heads out of the sand, or they're going to be in trouble."

Another industry in a similar situation and just as much in denial is the health care industry. HIPPA mandates a lot of privacy protection, but there's still a lot of people unsure how to proceed and hoping that it will go away. Good identity management can solve many of the issues HIPPA raises.

Some say that its the large collections of data that are the problem, but I think that's one of those statements that looks right on the surface but is fatally flawed in practice. The fact is that secure, private identity management isn't a problem that can be solved a million times. If every department of a larger corporation is in charge of making their own small collection of data secure and private, none of it will be. What's more, it ignores one of the prime drivers of large collections: customer demand. Customers increasingly want to be treated "in total" by the organizations they deal with. When I call up and request DSL service from Qwest I want the DSL division to know I'm a phone customer, all the relevant data about me, and that I pay my bills on time. Of course, at the same time I expect them to not get any information they don't need---like my waist size.

There's an interesting relationship between identity, privacy, trust, risk, and security. I don't need much trust in you to supply you with my zip code so you can personalize your online service to my location. I don't expect much privacy and if someone steals your cookie database with my zip code in it, I'm not out much, if anything--low risk. On the other hand, when it comes to my bank, they hold a lot of sensitive information about me. For example, they not only know my bank balance, they also hold the bits that represent that balance--high risk. I expect a much greater degree of privacy from them and they have to work harder to gain my trust. That trust is based, in part, on the wholly unsubstantiated belief on my part that they run a secure operation. Because of my history with them, I believe them secure until proven otherwise. That will only work for the banks until they start having problems.

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Bizarre: Now I'm Headless Nick

The Deseret News is running a piece in anticipation of today's release of the follow-up legislative audit which was ordered last November. As usual, its full of half truths, mis-statements, innuendo, and bizarre rumors. The funniest is this one:

"Nobody is going to believe that Windley's influence in state government is not being carried out through his friend, Steve Fulling," one IT employee said. "The guy has been gone for seven months, but his ghost is still there. Everyone is still freaked out about Windley."

This kind of rumor isn't new. I think its funny that these people's world view is so narrow that they actually believe I've got nothing better to do than to continue to run IT in Utah after the State stops paying my salary. Of course, the people feeding these rumors don't really believe I'm still trying to run IT. This is really an attack on Fulling. The more closely Fulling's policies and programs can be tied to me, the more easily they can be discounted without examining their merits. The legislature and the press just play right along.

I do have an interest, as a citizen of the State, in how its run and a special perspective since I see some things as they really are because of my past position. IT in Utah is screwed up and what's screwed up about it is the way a small group of employees manipulate the system to protect their parochial interests. This summer's issues are nothing more than their continued efforts to ensure that they protect their turf and can ride out the rest of their time at the State with their feet up on their desks instead of doing something productive.

Its pathetic that the administration puts up with it, but these guys have been around for 25-35 years and they know the system. The administration is powerless to stop them so everyone just cringes and hopes they won't be the next target. This group knows how to use anonymous letters to the press and the legislature. They know how to stir the employees up with rumors, even ridiculous ones. They smile in your face and tell you they're with you and then go to a meeting with their peers and stab you in the back. They have some powerful allies. All of this protects an IT organization that is about as dysfunctional as any you could find. This is the borg at its finest.

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June 20, 2003

Zope User's Group Meeting

I'm at the Zope User's Group meetingin Las Vegas today. I flew my plane down this morning and planning on flying home this afternoon---its about 2 hours. The flight was a nice (early morning flights always are) and Las Vegas is its usual hectic self. There are about 8 people here including Rob Page, CEO of Zope. There's an information discussion of the newspaper business while we're waiting to get started. The Zope meeting is being held on the heels of the Newspapers Publisher's Expo, so there's a few newspaper people here. Here's a rundown of what the speakers said:

Rob opens up with a discussion of where Zope is going. He makes the point that since Zope has been open source, they've exchanged control of the product for additional developers working on it at little cost to them. Rob doesn't believe that a professional services and support model is sufficient to keep a company going in connection with an Open Source product. Zope's model includes products that can be offered to Zope users. These are not shrink wrapped packages, but rather pieces of intellectual property that Zope uses to add revenue to its professional services work.

Now, Zope hasn't given up compete control of the Zope engine. They are clearly the leader of the Zope open source project. One of the issues they worry about (and deal with via a contributer agreement) is making sure contributed code is clean from an intellectual property standpoint.

Chris Muldrow is the Editor of Fredricksburg.com. He's describing the use of MySQL with Zope and the set up of a Zope cluster. Zope has an internal database, so MySQL is not strictly required. The primary benefit is that data is now in a standard DB and accessible by other programs. Chris recommends a few tools to make this easier:

MySQL Front is a tool for manipulating the databases in MySQL. Development on this product appears to have been discontinued, but it can still be downloaded here.
The second tool he recommends is ZNolk, a Zope product for connecting to MySQL databases from within Zope. As I understand it, Chris uses ZNolk to create web-based administration tools in Zope for the MySQL tables.
ZSearch Interface is a built in tool for building search interfaces on outside database searches.
Chart Director is a Python module (apparently not just Python) for building charts.

The application that drove Fredricksburg.com to an external database is their real estate section. They grab data from the local MLS (multiple listing service) every two hours. Getting the data and manipulating it is better done with an external program in Python and MySQL rather than dragging down Zope performance.

From a business perspective, the way that they charge for the service is they sell agents ecards, business cards that show up with listings. An agent's ecard shows up on all their listings and routes email inquiries to them. If they don't buy the ecard, then some other agents ecard shows up in a rotation. There's also a hot properties listing that agents can buy as an upgrade to the basic listing. These are rotated on the home page. The interesting thing is that there are non-technical sales people selling these and entering them in the application using an admin tool that is built in Zope.

I've corresponded with on various issues from time to time with Michael Bernstein, author of the Zope Bible. Its nice to finally meet him. He's speaking next. His talk is a case study on a visual asset repository (digital asset management) system. Images in the system are similar between various customers, but the meta data from client to client varies greatly. Michael created an application that let's the client create multiple, private labeled versions of the asset repository each with its own metadata with no coding.

Sean Upton is from SignOnSanDiego.com, the website for the San Diego Union Tribune. He's talking about using AP (associated press) Digital content in Zope. AP Digital is a division of AP that sells AP content to Internet properties. Standard AP wire stories can't be used raw for various reasons. AP Digital is one solution to that problem. The way AP Digital delivers AP Online data to sites is through NNTP. The data is formatted in an XML-based format called NITF. Sean uses Zope to grab that data out of NNTP, parse the NITF, and present it on their site. The idea is not simply to push the contant online, but let writers and editors work on it and produce localized content.

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June 19, 2003

Digital ID World Conference

This year's Digital ID World conference will be held in Denver, October 15-17. Last year's event (1, 2) was very well attended and full of useful and interesting talks. The thing that made it work was that it wasn't just about one facet of identity, but brought together players from many different arenas and points of view. It was one of my favorite conferences and I'm looking forward to attending this year as well.

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RSS and eGovernment

News releases are perhaps the most obvious example of how RSS can be applied to eGovernment. Government has a peculiar relationship with the news media and, consequently, issues lots of news releases. Utah's Governor's office has officially started to issue news releases in RSS. It looks like RSS 1.0.

Kudos to the Governor's office for doing this and setting an example for the rest of the State. Its surprising how long it takes to get something even this simple happening. I talked to Natalie Gochnour, the Governor's Press Deputy, about RSS over a year ago and Utah Interactive was "very excited" to work on it and it still took a year. I know Dave Fletcher's been pushing this as well.

A few comments:

The title ought to identify it as Utah Governor's News, not just Governor's News. Some people may subscribe to news feeds from multiple governor's offices. I know if I were a short features editor at Governing magazine, this is something I'd love.
Most of the descriptions are blank right now. It would be nice if they contained the first paragraph of the story so you can read enough to know whether to click out of not.
I, for one, would love to hear how they selected the RSS version and why. That would be a good data point and help others with those kinds of decisions. Maybe Dave could blog it.

Now, I'm not sure how this is implemented, but regardless, its a great example of Web services in eGovernment. Some may not think of an RSS feed as Web services, but making data available in a self describing format is one of the key first steps. When I talk to people about Web services, and particularly those working on eGovernment, my message is always the same: "get started." RSS is a great way to get started because its easy and immediately useful.

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June 18, 2003

What is Orrin Smoking?

A story in today's Deseret News says Utah's Orrin Hatch would like to develop technology that would destroy the computers of people who download copyrighted material over the Internet. I say as long as we're going to allow companies to destroy personal property to enforce their rights without any due process, we might as well go all the way. So while we're at it, let's also develop technology that will incinerate the occupants of cars that have aftermarket parts installed. HP should be allowed to burn down your house if you install a non-HP ink cartridge in your printer. Feel free to leave a comment with your own suggestions. Somebody ought to hand Orrin a clue, because its clear he needs one. If you like, send the Senator and email and let him know how you feel on this issue.

Update: Amish Tech Support reports a possible copyright violation on Sen. Hatch's official web site.

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Small Scale and High Tech

I had a great conversation with Mark Jones of Future 2 this morning. We got to talking about infrastructure costs. He quoted the number of subscribers he needs to break ever. I thought he'd left off a zero, so I asked him to repeat it. He gave a number in the hundreds, not the thousands. Now he's got a pretty large coverage area, relative to the break even number. This is a huge win for wireless. Of course, all kinds of things can affect this: what level of support do you provide, how strong is the signal in the marginal areas, etc. This explains why there are so many WISPs (Wireless ISPs): the barriers to entry are low.

This reminds me of the another hot technology that's got people talking right now: blogging. There are people making money with small scale, low cost blogging (or near blogging) operations. Here are a few examples:

The last one isn't exactly a blog, but its a great example of a low-overhead media site. This time reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Ross Jardine and I start iMALL in 1994 with nothing but a $10K lease on an HPUX machine. You don't even need that much anymore. We used public domain and open source technology and I wrote most of the code. We were in the black from day one. Of course, we didn't grow very fast, but we had fun and built something that had real value.

Tony Perkins thinks this is the cheapest time to start an Internet company. I think he right.

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June 17, 2003

PIP Data on Home Broadband Growth

PEW has released a memo on home broadband usage (PDF) from its Internet and American Life project. The results might surprise some people since the common perception that home broadband growth is slow at best. I frequently talk to people who believe that every statistic they ever heard about Internet growth has now reversed. Most people reading this will know that's not true. According to the study:

As of the end of March 2003, 31% of home Internet users had a high-speed connection at home. This is up from 24% in October 2002 and 21% in March 2002. Today, approximately 30 million people ? or 16% of all Americans ? log on at home with a broadband connection. That is double the number who had a high-speed connection at home at the end of 2001 and, as noted, a 50% increase in the past year. In not quite three years, the United States has witnessed a five-fold increase in the number of people who go online with a fast connection at home.

The report contains numbers on what types of users have made the jump, what they use it for, etc.

This is, of course, little thanks to the Qwests and Comcasts of the world who continue to make little or no capital investment in passing new homes. They were big players in the first wave but are now mostly harvesting the potential subscribers in the areas they already serve. In the last year, the percentage of DSL subscribers has declined and the number of cable modem subscribers has risen modestly. Wireless, while small, in overall numbers has doubled. This clearly doesn't herald a huge win for wireless, but its a good data point.

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Thanks and Redhat Install

I've enjoyed the class this semester. Thanks for participating and asking lots of questions. That makes it more enjoyable for me. I hope you got something out of it. Please make sure you complete the online evaluation if you haven't done so already.

I'm looking for someone to install Redhat Linux on 6 machines for me in the 462 lab. I'll pay $100 for the job. If you're an experienced Linux installer and would like to do this, let me know.

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Virtual Databases

One of a CIO's holy grails is integration. The primary driver is business agility. This is related to aligning IT with the business, but there's a speed component. The marketing and manufacturing departments don't need you to be aligned with them next year, they need you aligned today and tomorrow when they change their focus and direction for what seems like the fifth time this year. Integration is one strategy for building an information infrastructure that can handle whatever is thrown at it.

This desire for an integrated infrastructure is behind much of the interest in Web Services and other, more Herculean tasks like Enterprise Application Integration, or EAI. Web Services, can be looked on as the poor man's answer to EAI or, alternately, as an iterative approach to application integration. I like to think of it as the latter. Why try to boil the ocean, when you can connect a few applications together more easily and harvest the low hanging fruit.

But what if you find that just connecting up the applications through their interfaces isn't enough? A middle ground between a lightweight Web services project and a Hoover dam-sized EAI project is something called Enterprise Information Integration, or a virtual database.

A virtual database, or federated database, provides a single, virtual interface to a collection of data sources. These data sources may live in multiple databases from multiple vendors and even be in multiple formats (relational vs hierarchical for example). To make this work, the organization deploying the virtual database creates a data model that contains the needed elements of each of the data sources being integrated and then creates a map from the existing data sources to the new data model. Using this model and map, the virtual database management system processes queries, updates, insertions, and deletions of the integrated data.

I think that data integration is the key to the integration puzzle, whether you're going to use Web services, EII, or EAI. I think we've actually never realized the chief benefit of databases. A database is commonly thought of my lay people as vast collections of valuable data. But we know better. For the most part, we use it as just a persistent portion of the program's variables. I asked these question a few months ago:

How many databases under your control were started as the data foundation to a single application.
How many of those ever get called on by some other application.

I'd bet the answer to these questions is "all" and "a few" in that order. This isn't surprising---most IT is done incrementally, reactively, in response to the problems of the day. Someone starts an Access database to keep track of a few things at work and in a few years the database is mission critical, living on direct attached disks, under someone's desk.

I argue in my Enabling Web Services whitepaper, there's a lot you can do to make data integratable, for very little cost, as you build web applications that use that data. This is not a full scale integration, but it cuts the ties between the database and the single application that uses it and allows other applications to start using that data as well.

The biggest hurdle in an EII project is creating the universal data model. There are two problems:

You have to get everyone to agree to share their data and participate in the modeling. Its more work to share than to keep your data to yourself. Its also a source of power. Sometimes, what's in the data is embarrassing.
You have to pay for it. As Felix Rausch, in a panel at the CIO Summit this May said: "no one's going to get money to do data architectures so it has to be dressed up in programs."

Two of the players in this field are MetaMatrix and IBM's DataJoiner. I've not used or evaluated either of these products. Other related products include offerings from places like Whamtech which create indexes of data in various data sources.

Further reading:

This short Baseline Magazine article is a nice primer on virtual databases. The associated quiz is informative.
This ComputerWorld article discusses some recent product news from IBM on EII.
This issue of the IBM Systems Journal is devoted to Enterprise Information Integration.

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June 16, 2003

Steve Gillmor on RSS

Steve Gillmor has three articles on his blog that give some ideas about where he thinks RSS is going. Whether you agree with Steve or not on the specifics, I'm glad to see the speculation because its expands my thinking. I'm also happy to see more and more people recognizing the power of RSS. When I started blogging, RSS was the thing that got me excited.

Steve claims that email is a subset of the RSS space. That's an interesting thought. Many people might have turned that around. I'd like to hear more from Steve on why he thinks this. I see email and RSS being related in the same sense that email and IM are related. There's a relationship, but I don't see it as a subset relationship. RSS is different than both email and USENET news in a significant way: its self describing. This allows it to be treated as a data stream and filtered, sorted, and merged in ways that we can only dream about with email. If you read Steve's third piece, he hints at this.

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Connect Magazine Column: Singularity Hints

I've recently started writing a monthly column for Connect Magazine. Connect is brand-new. Their "About" page says "connect offers an inside look at the regional economic landscape and the people driving its development. connect profiles high-tech, life science, or other innovative companies with ties to the west so you are aware of the major players in the region." I've known some of the guys involved in this venture for a while. They used to be with Digital IQ. They're bright and they've got a lot of pluck. They need it---this is a tough business. I'm impressed with what they've managed to put together in the last 4 months out of sheer willpower.

My June column is entitled Singularity Hints after a previous blog entry of that same name. In it, I talk about some trends in high-tech that I think are exciting. These trends are described by the following set of keywords:

Personalized
Peer-based
Decentralized
Collaborative
Connected
Converged
Presence-enabled

My plan is to use these words as guides as a write future columns. July's column is about Loosely Coupled Conversations and August's column, which I turned in today, is about Conversational Synchrony.

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Active Noise Reduction (ANR) Headphones: You Get What You Pay For

In May, I wrote briefly about active noise reduction, ANR headphones. I've used an expensive ($500) aircraft quality ANR headset in my private plane for many years and love them. I've owned a pair of inexpensive Aiwa headphones for several years but found them to be uncomfortable on long commercial flights. So, over the past few weeks, I've conducted a "good, better, best" test of noise reduction headphones to find a pair that I can use on commercial flights in comfort.

Active noise reduction is a technology that employes small microphones and digital signal processing (DSP) technology to cancel out ambient noise. The microphone samples the ambient noise and the DSP chip creates a a sound wave 180 degrees out of phase from the outside sounds. When this sound is played through the headphones it cancels out sounds in low frequency ranges. Noise reduction doesn't cancel out all noises, just low droning ones. So don't buy these thinking you'll be able to work while the kids run around outside your office screaming. You'll still hear them just fine.

Nevertheless, these headsets are perfect for flying. I find that I can play my music or the airpline movie dialogue at a level sufficiently low that I can't hear it when I turn off the active noise reduction. Flying with noise reduction headphones creates a quieter environment that makes flying less stressful.

A short disclaimer: The only time I use headphones is on airplanes. Consequently, noise reduction and comfort are my two big criteria. If you want great sound quality and use your headphones in environments where noise reduction won't make much difference, you can probably find great sounding, even better sounding, headphones for a cheaper price. What you're paying for with these headphones is the noise reduction.

The three headphones I reviewed are shown in the following table:

Manufacturer	Model No.	Street Price	Style	Rating
Aiwa	HP-CN6	$59	open air	Good
Sony	MDR-NC20	$179	closed air	Better
Bose	QuietComfort 2	$279	closed air	Best

I used each of these headphones in real-life conditions: each was used exclusively on the outbound and inbound legs of flights between Salt Lake City and cities on the East Coast (about 4.5 hours each way).

Aiwa HP-CN6

As I mentioned, I've owned the Aiwa headphones for several years and have used them on many flights, short and long. The active noise reduction feature of the Aiwa headphones works very well. Turning them on brings an amazing cessation of the low drone of the plane. These headphones are "open air" style, meaning that the headphone piece sits on the ear rather than surrounding it. They come with a carrying bag and an adapter for two-prong airline headphone jacks. These headphones fold for stowing. I have found that the Aiwa headphones are uncomfortable on trips longer than about an hour (which is almost every trip out of Salt Lake). The headphones press against your ears and the headband is unpadded and uncomfortable on the top of the head after a time.

Sony MDR-NC20

I used the Sony headphones on a trip from Salt Lake City to Savannah, GA and back. The Sony headphones are closed air construction (over the ear). The noise reduction feature worked as well as the Aiwa and the sound response was better due to larger, more expensive speakers. Even so, I found the Sony headphones to be uncomfortable after just a few hours. The ear pockets are not deep enough to let your ears remain in their natural position and the headband is not padded. Consequently after a few hours, my ears felt pinched and the top of my head hurt. The Sony headphones fold for stowing and come with a carrying bag and two-pronged airline headphone adapter.

Bose QuietComfort 2

The Bose headphones were the most expensive of the lot, but also the most comfortable and the best sounding headphones. The headphones are constructed to repress noise even when the active noise reduction circuitry is not turned on. They have deep ear pockets and a padded headband. I used them on a 4.5 hour flight to and from Boston and was able to wear them in comfort the entire trip. The sound response from the speakers was excellent. Even though these headphones have the largest earpieces of any in the test, they folded to be the most compact for stowing. The Bose headphones, unlike the other two, do not work as headphones in passive mode (i.e. with the noise reduction turned off), so they're worthless without a battery. They come with a nice zippered carrying case, a two-pronged airline adapter, and a quarter inch headphone adapter for use with a home stereo.

Conclusions

The results of this review aren't too surprising. The Bose headphones cost $220 more than the Aiwa and $100 more than the Sony but have clearly superior performance in comfort and sound quality. All of these headphones deliver good noise reduction, so I think the real loser here are Sony headphones. Their comfort and performance are not sufficiently superior to the Aiwa's to justify a cost differential of $110. My suggestion: buy the Aiwa's and try them. If they aren't too uncomfortable for you, they're an excellent value and you'll get noise reduction at a bargain price. If you can afford it, treat yourself to the Bose headphones. Bose has a reputation for delivering high quality and these headphones are no exception. I plan on keeping my pair.

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June 14, 2003

Zope User's Group Meeting in Las Vegas

Michael Bernstein let me know about a Zope User's Group meeting in Las Vegas this next Friday. I going to try to fly down if the weather's nice. I've been interested in Zope for a while and recently started programming in Python, so this looks like a great opportunity to combine two of my favorite things: flying and computers.

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June 13, 2003

RSS in Ads Revisited

Jenny disagrees with my comments on Ads in RSS. She says:

[I]f you are providing me with the full text of the article in my aggregator, then I'm willing� to trade you my eyeballs for an ad. However, if you're just sending me the headline with a one- or two-sentence description, then that's the ad. Your intent is to get me to go to your site to read the full article, at which point I will see the ad (probably lots of ads), and the transaction is complete - I clicked onto your page and became a number you can sell to your advertisers and in exchange you let me view the content.

I agree with Jenny in this distinction. Syndication implies you're giving me the thing, not just a link to it. What actually happening with most RSS feeds is we're pulling down a "teaser" and we'll go read the article on site if its interesting. In that case, the ads can exist on the site and when I read the article, I'll see them. Frankly I mostly only want to see summaries in RSS anyway.

Even so, if InfoWorld or the NY Times, or someone else wants to put ads in my RSS feed, I'll survive. If they're too obnoxious, I'll unsubscribe. I'm just not going to be able to get too worked up about this.

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Investigation Concludes

After my moment of stupidity last month, the state decided to have the Dept. of Public Safety conduct an investigation. They turned their results over to the AG's office which concluded that there was no "evidence that would merit criminal prosecution." There are some times when you're really glad to have someone else agree with you and this is one of them. The article in today's SL Tribune is pretty fair and factual.

The article states that I've agreed to pay restitution and that's something I'm happy to do. I think one could quibble with the amount. There's a claim that they spent 48 hours cleaning up after this and I'm very curious how all those hours were spent. Anyone who'd been on the other side of this knows that these numbers are always shaky at best. At any rate, its nice to have it concluded.

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June 12, 2003

InfoWorld Ads in RSS

As noted by Dave and Sam, InfoWorld announced today that they will introduce ads in their RSS feed. Before I comment, I should disclose that I write for InfoWorld and am on the masthead as a contributing editor. Believe it or not, I thought about this before I knew InfoWorld was going to do it and my thoughts haven't changed.

I view this pragmatically: I'd rather see ads in RSS than not see the RSS at all. I'd rather have InfoWorld and other news sources, including the NY Times show up in my aggregator than have to go to each and every site and search for what interests me. These guys aren't going to just give this content away and as RSS gets more and more popular they might choose not to play. That would be a shame, both for me personally and for RSS as a technology.

One of the words frequently associated with RSS is "syndication." Syndication means that you redistribute content that was created for one venue to others. In the case of most blogs, that is done without restriction or fee. Grab my RSS and go to town. In most other media, syndication comes for a price. If you want to syndicate InfoWorld's content, the price is to look at their ads. Some sites, like Slashdot.org will let you see their site ad free for a fee. Maybe their RSS feed is next?

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Intermountain eXchange: What's New in Networking

A month or so ago, Pete Kruckenberg, Jim Sorenson and I had lunch and discussed the idea of creating a regionally based conference on next generation networks. There's a national conference called Next Generation Networks but we saw a need to sharing between regional players since much of what can and should be done is regionally flavored. From that lunch grew an effort to create and host a conference called Intermountain eXchange or IX. Today was the first meeting of the program committee

The Intermountain region can be loosely defined as the states bordering Utah plus Montana. These states all have common problems in deploying networks. Chief among them is sparse population. Its not hard to imagine broadband networks being built in Denver, Boise, and Salt Lake. But those places are easy. There are things working in rural areas as well.

IX₁ will be held in the Fall of 2003 on the University of Utah Campus for 1.5 days. The format would be single-track and a combination of panel discussions, presentations and keynote addresses. The goal is to help attendees exchange information about things that are working on a regional basis. For example:

UEN is GigE connectivity for wide area networking fro Salt Lake to the Uinta Basin. Many others probably don't know that possible or that carriers will provide it.
The Utah Valley Community Network is connecting municipal networks in Utah County. Their experience is relevant.
UTOPIA is creating a 500,000 subscriber government backed wholesale FTTH project in Utah.

These are just Utah examples, but I've heard of other interesting things in Idaho (like Syringa and IdaCom), Colorado, and elsewhere. We'd like those projects and people to be participants as well. The objectives for the conference are:

Discuss why broadband matters in the Intermountain Region
Educate about regional developments in broadband and wide are networking.
Share success stories, case studies, and ideas
Develop a common vision and understanding of what is possible.
As an outcome, define a path for future regional efforts

We're looking for both attendees and people who'd like to present on interesting networking projects in the Intermountain region.

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OSCON 2003

I'm going to be at OSCON, the OReilly Open Source Convention in July. I'll probably arrive on the 8th and leave Friday afternoon, although I haven't made my flight plans yet. This is a big conference with multiple tracks. Its held concurrently, if that's the right word, with the PERL, Python, and PHP conferences and also covers Apache,�Applications, Emerging Topics,�Java,�MySQL,�PostgreSQL,�Ruby, and�XML. Last year I have a great time and I'm really looking forward to this one.

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Network World Compendium on Weblog Panel

Network World did a nice job of covering Rock and Paul's comments from my panel at the Weblog Business Strategy conference. Rock and Paul are pioneers in using blogs in large organizations. They're both facing challenges and using blogs to help solve the problems. Their work will be worth following over the next while.

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June 11, 2003

Sonic ESB: Programmable integration

The pressure to integrate disparate systems across the enterprise is steadily increasing, but establishing connections between systems, even those designed for integration, remains a daunting task.

Traditionally, enterprises connected systems using point-to-point links and custom code. More recently, integration brokers--proprietary software for creating connections among multiple systems--emerged as another solution. However, point-to-point connections are expensive to maintain, and integration brokers have been expensive to buy.�

Sonic ESB is one of a new set of products billed as enterprise service buses (ESBs), lightweight integration brokers based on standards such as XML and SOAP designed to work in a distributed environment. [Full story at InfoWorld...]

One of the things that really struck me while I was working on this story is that as these systems become increasingly flexible, configuration stops feeling like configuration and starts feeling like programming--in a really bad language. As I point out in the article, this isn't really Sonic Software's fault. Other tools suffer from the same fate. If any of them came out with a proprietary language at their core, they'd be criticized for not being "standards based." Consequently, you end up writing your "program" in snippets of 2 or 3 languages and stitching it all together with a bunch of GUI-based configuration. Some people think things like XLANG and WSFL are the answer to this problem, but I think they're syntactic arsenic. While I would welcome a standards-based work flow language, I don't believe it has to have angle brackets.

What can make this all work in spite of the difficult configuration is an integration architecture. To make use of these tools, you need to understand the tool and its concepts, but you also need a well thought-out plan for what is being integrated and precisely how that's going to work. You probably don't have an integration architect sitting around, so you're going to have to find the person in your organization who can take on this role and create the plan.

All this shouldn't scare you away, however. I encourage people to dig in and start working with these tools. Begin a small pilot project to find out what you need to do to create the integration architecture. For an organization with disconnected legacy systems trying to move toward being a real-time enterprise, the rewards are sufficient to merit the struggle up the learning curve.

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June 10, 2003

Weblog Business Strategy Conference Wrap-Up

My panel is over. I felt like it went pretty well. We talked about start-up experiences, tools, culture, knowledge management, and alternate uses of blogs. The panelists were all well spoken. One issue that came up that I hadn't written about before is the hierarchy issue surrounding what a CIO, for example, might take as a casual response might have a much larger perceived effect. I'd like to do another one of these with a slightly different feel. Ask each panelist for take five minutes to present a case study (with a standard format, perhaps) ands the have the panel comment on each and let the audience ask questions.

Overall the conference has been good. There's been some good information, some insights, and a lot of seeing old friends and making new ones. Dan Bricklin has put pictures up from the conference. His are better than mine. He's got one of those Sonys with the big lens. I've been looking for a new camera and thinking about whether I should get a Canon Powershot A400 (small) or a Canon G5 (bigger lens). I've been leaning towards the A400 since I like to carry it around with me all the time. Maybe I should rethink that.

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Tony Perkins: The Open Source Media Movement

Tony Perkins, of Red Herring fame, is the last keynote of the conference. He now edits Always On, an online high-tech journal. There is an RSS feed. I've just gone and signed up---mostly because I'm curious about the format and what he's doing.

Tony believes that right now is the cheapest time to start an Internet company---its only going to get more expensive from here. Whatever we did in the past 5 years, we educated 700 million people to have a new behavior: using the Internet. That's an expensive proposition. Its done and we don't have to incur that anymore. There's plenty of people and lots of good tools right now. In the future, it will be more expensive to build a brand, high good people, and overtake the people who start now.

He gives some stats about the always-on generation: 74% of teens use IM every week. 94% surf the web for homework help. 41% use IM or email to talk to teachers. 30% have used IM to find new friends. 17% have used IM to break up with someone.

24 million US households now have broadband---up 2x from 2001. This is in contrast to what many people believe. The "broadband myth" still persists. 42 million TV's worldwide are Internet enabled.

Tony's rules for media start-ups:

Its better to boot-strap than to go to board of director meetings
Build a community that advertisers care about
Create multiple revenue streams
Build a virtual team
Trust your gut, but listen to your readers
Building a media brand is black magic

Tony talks about comments as viewer ownership. Third time this has come up for me. Maybe I should reconsider? Tony doesn't allow anonymous posting---he wants people to own their words. He considers member transparency to be an important invisible hand that guides posting.

AlwaysOn makes money from multiple sources: sponsorship and advertising, producing events, paid membership for premium services, pay-per-drink for AO generated archives, re-selling research and other info products, classified advertising, and AO Media Labs (new network development).

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The Law of the Blog

Mark E. Young, Communications Counsel, PARTNERS+simons is moderating a panel on \"The Law of the Blog.\" The panelists are

Arik Hesseldahl, Senior Editor, Forbes.com
Denise M. Howell, Counsel, Reed Smith Crosby Heafey LLP
John Palfrey, Executive Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
Catherine E. Reuben, Partner, Robinson & Cole LLP
Maurice J. Ringel, Esq., Founder & President, Ringel Law Group, PC

Denise makes the point that the root of litigation is interaction and blogs are all about interaction.

John recommends the Creative Commons license and to be sure your copy right statement is baked into your RSS feed. After a question from the audience, John says that you need to make sure you understand the license and what rights are being given away, whether you can legally give them away, etc.

Catherine talks about employee relations. She says not to automatically sign confidentiality agreements when you take a job. Exclude things that are overly broad. Your employer may own your blog.

Maurice says that to the extent a blog may be considered advertising, it may be subject to laws regulating ads.

Arik is giving some specific examples of where journalists have been shut down by their employers for writing a blog.

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Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms

David Shnaider, Former President ZDNet, Founder of Prodigy is moderating a panel called \"Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms.\" The panelists are:

Rafat Ali, Editor/Publisher, PaidContent.org
Vin Crosbie, Managing Partner, Digital Deliverance
Jeff Jarvis, President & Creative Director, Advance.net
Elizabeth Spiers, Editor, Gawker.com

Jeff says that posting in a forum is like saying something in the bar last night. No one remembers what was said or who said it. Writing it in a weblog is like crapping in your neighbors yard. You've put you're name on it and no one will forget. Their advantages is speed, variety, voices, tools, and interactivity. Weblog tools are the cheapest fastest publishing tools with the widest potential distribution ever. Digital cameras are cheap.

Elizabeth, who writes Gawker.com tells some anecdotes about how the big media pays attention to her blog and others. Gawker is a little bit of a special case because its mostly about the media. Media is big-time narcissistic, so the fact that they read things about themselves is no surprise. My recent experiences bear this out. The media is reading blogs and quoting from them.

Rafat Ali blogs for a living at PaidContent.org. He also runs an email newsletter that is essentially the same content. He says they're complimentary. This is something I've often wondered about. He poses a question: how many of you have read a print publication on wireless? Not many hands go up. He asks: how many of you have read a blog on wireless? Many hands go up. Of course this conference is biased that way. He says:

Blog + database + research reports = big business
Blog + nothing = hobby

Vin makes the point that keeping a journal isn't a fad. People have been doing it for thousands of years. Blogs are online journals. Think of Lewis and Clark, Charles Darwin, and so on. If the net existed when they were writing, they'd be bloggers. Vin believes the media, despite their claims to the contrary now, will start to use blogs, once they understand blogs. He notes that smart media have already begun blogging.

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Where Blogs Matter

Jason Shellen is the Associate Program manager at Blogger. He's keynoting on Where Blogs Matter. He makes the point that most blogs have an intended audience. What people write is meant to be read and blog writers get to know their audience. That's really true. I have a whole new group of people I know because I write a blog.

Jason talks about some of the things that create community and points to comments as one. I've never enabled comments on my site for a couple of reasons. First, that makes it seem less like my site where I say what I want and more like a bulletin board. Second, I'd rather people who want to comment take the time to write out their thoughts on their own site---I think it encourages more thoughtful response.

Jason says that Google is using a blog called "Google Love Notes" for support to publish notes that they get that the rest of the company should read or see. This is a cool idea. A blog makes this so easy and letting everyone else know the issues that support is seeing through real email messages is a good way to do it.

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Matthew Berk: Digital Self-Fashioning

Matthew Berk is a Jupiter Research analyst. he's talking about what he calls digital self-fashioning. He suggests some various approaches to this task:

Anthropomorphic approaches - these are metaphors for reconstituting the body in a virtual world.
Topological constructions - this treats the network as a virtual place with conversational interaction.

The political backdrop is about

Freedom of the self - boundary transcendence
Alienation of the self - a loss of presence

Self fashioning is how people constitute themselves on the net through collections of content. It is done through technologies of the self, which usually take the form of documents or writing. People explicitly act to fashion their identities and at the same time they are fashioned by their context.

Online people constitute themselves as assemblies of documents and other data designed for people to read and establish some relationship. The more structure in and between this content, the greater is its action potential. This structure and meta-data gives the content meaning. Content, like identity, is always plural, differential. These plural collections of content relate to different views of the identity.

Berk defines community as dynamically connected collections of content. Some examples include: Amazon user reviews, Classmates.com, eBay seller ratings, yahoo! groups, AOL profiles, online personals, and, of course, blogs.

Blogs represent a new "technology of the self." They are a pure expression of content management application that have few attached metaphors and are mark-up independent. Blogs represent a tool for self fashioning. The community is a network of interlinked content. Berk points out that other uses of the Internet have lots of metaphors (browsing, navigation, etc.) but blogs do not.

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Presentations

Remember that presentations are due tomorrow unless you're the betting sort. You can email me your presentations by noon or bring it on a CD. There's no need to run your Sieve code.

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June 9, 2003

Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms

David Shnaider, Former President ZDNet, Founder of Prodigy is moderating a panel called \"Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms.\" The panelists are:

Rafat Ali, Editor/Publisher, PaidContent.org
Vin Crosbie, Managing Partner, Digital Deliverance
Jeff Jarvis, President & Creative Director, Advance.net
Elizabeth Spiers, Editor, Gawker.com

Blog + database + research reports = big business
Blog + nothing = hobby

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Blogs as Content Management

Matthew Berk, Senior Analyst, Jupiter Research is moderating a panel on "Blogs as/and Content Management". The panelists are:

Mike Amundsen, President, EraServer.NET
Timothy Appnel, Independent Writer
Bill French, Co-Founder, MyST Technology Partners
John Robb, President and COO, Userland Software
William Stow, President, Tsunamin Corporation
Adam Weinroth, Founder, Easyjournal LLC

John Robb says "weblogs are content management systems for the rest of us" in the same way that WordPerfect was desktop publishing for the rest of us. They are being used in a wide variety of applications in places where content management systems would have been used in the past.

Bill French asks "what are the real requirements?" Traditionally these have been things like capture, publishing, deployment, management, etc. which are not the real issue. The issue is the ability to increase awareness. That's what people want. The velocity that's required for blogs brings that out. The more you call something a blog, or blogging software, the less likely you are to use it for something else.

Mike calls blogs a pattern of thinking about things and says that content mark-up (like RSS) is important. Bloggers are marking up content with meta data in ways that HTML writers don't. He talks about aggregators and that they are creating new ways of gathering information that is independent from the browser. What about content management for email.

Tim tries to distinguish between the technology and the product. People don't care about the web site produced and its features, not the tool. If you've got data that's right for a chronological treatment, weblog software works well. If you've concerned with workflow and editorial control, a traditional CMS system is better. Tim thinks blogging tools will disappear as a category and most apps will be able to perform things we associate with blogs. Rob, not surprisingly, disagrees. Blogs are a specific category of things and an application that is recognizable and distinguishable from other applications. I think I'd agree with Rob.

Bill started talking about being agile as "a chameleon in a bowl of Skittles." John points out that this can't apply to the GUI---users can't learn to use those kinds of tools. . William (not Bill) responds that the repurposing of information is critical to what CMS systems are about and this is the chameleon part. Blogs can play in this world. Tim says Geocities didn't work because it lacks structure and this can't be repurposed. Weblogs tools have nailed the ability to move information around and re-use it.

Adam talks about the barriers to entry with CMS systems. Boy is that ever true. We tried to put a CMS system in place in Utah and I think its still not off the ground. Its difficult to get the use cases right, difficult to train people, and requires a lot of money (more than its worth, perhaps). About the same time, I started playing around with Radio because it was a personal CMS. We'd have been better off to just buy Manila for $1000 and get people used to the idea of content management. When you're in a big organization, there's a temptation to do things big, even if you ought to start small. That's a tough lesson to learn.

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David Weinberg: Why Blogging Matters

Blogging has excited the Internet community, the technical community, the business community, and others in a way we haven't seen since the early days of the WWW. People who talk about "the bubble" clearly have missed the importance of the web. The Internet and the web are still here. What's driving this? The fact that the Internet is a place for conversation, not just a place to find things.

What is a blog? We do need to get past this. Here are some characteristics:

Daily
A few paragraphs
Reverse chronological
Linked in (little acts of selflessness)
Voice
Not technology

Blogs are full of voice. They are rhetoric, a social phenomenon, and something more.

On rhetoric. The is some importance to writing badly. More to the point, that you're reading a first draft because its published frequently. Readers thus tend to me forgiving. Forgiveness is not a bad characteristic to be knitting the world together with.

As a social phenomenon: blogs have a place. We are constructing a social self. This is fundamentally different than USENET or email. My blog is a proxy for myself. When you meet people that you've read for a time you feel like you already know them.

So what about authenticity? The M&M's view of our selves. There is an authentic inner core and a public outer shell. Words like "authentic," "honest," and "sincere" describe the correlation between these two selves. You weblog as a "self" has just one voice, so is it more like the inner core or the outer shell?

The web favors good writers and pushes for self-exposure. It also favors the unemployed! (Big laugh.) The recession has been the best thing for weblogs. There's some real truth in that (like all good humor).

Rather than talking about blogging and Journalism, Dave talks about blogging and truth. The claim is that objectivity seems the world as it is. This brings us multiple stories or views, expert sifting, and a community baseline. The weakness is that journalists are humans, so journalism can't be fully objective. Subjectivity's claim is that it shows us out world as it is. The strengths are that it acknowledges the observer and their context. This might capture more of the experience. The weakness is its scattershot, raw, and individualistic.

Blogs, for the first time, give us "multi-subjectivity." You get multiple reports and multiple sifters. The blogosphere contains multiple points of view from multiple cultures, contexts, etc. The Internet allows us to see all of this. Previously we could not read multiple points of view.

Some groups don't like this.

Businesses have grown up in a culture where knowledge can be controlled. They are a fort that carefully controls what knowledge comes in and goes out. Weblogs punch holes in the wall. Companies are no longer the sole source of information about their product.

Knowledge gatekeepers like journalists have gotten used to being the one true source. This began as a quest for trying to figure out what's worth listening to to a quest for certainty. Knowledge became so anorexic that it has no contact to humans. The real world is not about certainty. I missed some things here.

One way to get information when you're shopping for appliances is to look at the Kenmore site. The information is there, but a long way down and not very useful. Another way is go to google and type "kenmore maytag information." The second way leads to sites with real information about drying sheets and that the buzzer is too loud. Furthermore, it believable because its not marketing material. Its not being pitched.

Alienation. Dave uses this word to describe the modern experience where were have weird ideas about reality totally disconnected from real human experience. He claims that blogs are popular because they are about human experience---they are the antithesis of the alienated experience.

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Are Weblogs a Threat or Opportunity?

Kathleen Goodwin, CEO of iMakeNews and chair of this conference is moderating a panel on \"Are Weblogs a Threat or Opportunity?\" Panelists are:

Rick E. Bruner, President, Executive Summary Consulting, Inc.
Michael O'Connor Clarke, Senior Vice President, Weber Shandwick (Canada)
Beth Goza, Community Lead, Windows Client Team, Microsoft Corporation
Jeff Mooney, Director, Content Product Management and Educational Services, MediaMap
Carin Warner, President, Warner Communications

Beth Goza, from Microsoft, says that the only marketing strategy that a company ought to have with regards to blogs is to have not strategy. By this she means that having employees have conversations about your products in their own voice isn't something you can plan and box in. Rick Bruner cautions that blogging doesn't have to be about ranting and big personality. Value can be created by layering in context and analyzing in a utilitarian style. Michael and Kathleen both disagree and say that personality is important. They say blogs need a compelling voice. Dan Bricklin (in the audience) says that expertise is also important. I think there's a continuum there. Some blogs are all expertise and not much personality. Other blogs are all personality and not much expertise. There's a balance there that we're not likely to agree on here.

Beth makes the point that blogs are the "anti-popup." Its pull, not push. You have to attract readership through value. Blogs are good for companies because they require the company (marketing and PR) to write compelling content rather than just shouter (via advertising dollars) than the others. Jeff brings up a related point: how do you measure success? Is it just readers? Is it hits? Is it sales? Carin says "you don't need to measure everything." I agree---you only need to measure those things you care about.

Someone in the audience makes the point that you get an ROI very quickly because the cost is low and it doesn't take much audience reach to justify it.

Kathleen asks how you keep a blog timely. Beth answers that to be a blogger means to be part of a community. That keep its timely. This points out the danger of trying to plan and think about this too much. If you're just trying to game the system, you won't be part of the community and you'll be talking about things and people won't be listen. Dan Bricklin says that blogs are a conversation which is a way to summarize Beth's comments. Carin suggests that corporations should offer a forum for their customers to "blog" about their experiences. I'm not sure how you do this and really make it a blog rather than just a email forum. Maybe something like Slash would work. Are companies ready to have their customers tell them what they think? The real danger is that the people most likely to participate are those with an ax to grind. Some things are unique, however: Kathleen suggests that Symantec has users who are experts in viruses. Could those people be harnessed?

A big battle erupts over the word "pitch." Carin about takes Michael's head off over a comment he makes about people (bloggers) not wanting to be "pitched." The audience comes to Michael's defense saying that in general "pitch" sounds like something you don't want to have happen to you. Users don't want to be educated they want to learn. Blogging is specifically not pitching. If you're passionate about something, write it in a blog and use the pull method that Beth talked about earlier.

Beth is a star. She is honest, open, and really fresh. I enjoyed listening to her and found her comments to be both well though-out and witty. Bill Gates should give her a raise. :-)

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Dave Winer: What is Blogging?

Dave is keynoting. He started by recounting some of the history of weblogs and points to a reverse chronological series of posts he put together for Wired magazine in 1996 and an event that helped him understand the power of this format.

He brings up a favorite topic: how are bloggers different than journalists? Dave's conclusion: they're not necessarily different (i.e. journalism can be done on a blog). That means that there are some things bloggers ought to do including tell the truth and disclose biases and conflicts of interest. Of course, this is a controversial topic and while he won't get much of an argument at this conference, he would and has gotten some pushback from others.

He tells the story of a Harvard student under fire from the RIAA who was punished by the Dean by being suspended from the Internet for a year. Bloggers at Harvard began to write about it and respectfully disagree. Of course, this isn't all that unusual on a college campus. The administration is used to nipping and gripping from the faculty. Would the executives at IBM be as forgiving? Dave wonders---so do I.

Someone in the audience says: real journalists have editors behind them. I disagree with that. If you're the owner, publisher, editor, and only reporter of a small town newspaper is that not journalism? If that owner goes out and hires a reporter and takes on the sole role of editor did this act magically make the journalists? Is the word "journalism" reserved for only sophisticated organizations with lots of money? I don't think so. On the other hand, I don't particularly care if anyone thinks what I do is journalism or not. The label is unimportant.

In the context of a larger conversation Dave says: "When people write about technology, they're just manipulating symbols to tell you about themselves so they ought to just cut out the middleman and talk about people." That's an interesting perspective and one I wouldn't disagree with. All writers, no matter what their subject are telling you about themselves in certain ways. Of course, I don' t think that means that we ought to just all write about ourselves. Product reviews and technical analysis are still useful.

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Weblog Business Strategies: Michael Gartenberg

The introductory speaker is Michael Gartenberg, VP and Research Director for Jupiter Research.

Michael asks: "Why Weblogs?"

Rapid communications
Rapid feedback
Getting the message across
Extend the brand to new audiences

He asked the question of Jupiter management and the debate was furious because Jupiter isn't used to giving away content. Still, in a short time, they've had quantifiable results: clients have said they renewed because of Jupiter weblogs. Microsoft Monitor is an example of a research line with a companion weblog

There's a gap between perception and reality. Michael says this is the perception:

Lack of Ethos
Lack of Value
Creates web noise (redirects Google)
Ego driven publishing

He claims that the reality is different:

First hand expertise You have a business forum in the speaker's own voice
Traditional publishing is ego driven as well
Opportunity for direct contact with audience
Customer centric communication
A "no-spin" zone

Michael, referring to the scene in the Graduate where Dustin Hoffman is told to go into plastics, asks are weblogs the new "plastics?"

There's lots of hype, but that's OK.
Easy way to get internal visibility
Easy way to get external visibility
Easy way to get fired

No one every got into trouble by keeping their mouth shut---weblogs are the antithesis to that maxim. With that, Michael offers up a few keys for corporate weblogs:

Keep it modest at first
Go internal before you go external
Ask permission, not forgiveness Adding a disclaimer isn't enough.
Who should blog? Everyone with something to say
Blog early and blog often
There are differences between corporate weblogs and personal weblogs
In general, keep the cheesecake recipes offline.

Perhaps the most important thing that I heard in this talk: Love is a better master than duty.

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June 7, 2003

Off to Boston

I'm off to Boston early in the morning for the Jupiter Media Business Blogging Conference. I know Dave is hosting a bloggers dinner on Tuesday but I'll be flying back to Utah then (have to be back to teach on Wednesday). If anyone's interested in dinner Monday night, I'm game---after all, you do need to eat both nights anyway.

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June 6, 2003

IT Conversations with Doug Kaye

Doug Kaye has begun something he calls IT Conversations. He's interviewing various IT folks and putting the resulting MP3 files on the net along with an associated discussion area.. He told me about this when were at ETCon and I thought it was a great idea. Perhaps because of my enthusiasm, I was one of the people he interviewed first. My interview is available now as is one my Tony Greenburg. I found Doug to be a good interviewer and it all went very smoothly. I think this is an interesting experiment in audio content. You can download the MP3, burn it to a CD or put it on your iPOD, and listen to it in the car or wherever. Although, you should be warned not to drive and listen to my interview at the same time---you might fall asleep.

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Using Correct Titles

I was going through Jon Udell's slides from his talk at OSCOM last week and his discussion of using the right titles on web pages caught my eye. It pointed to this column he wrote called The Google API is a Two Way Street. As I read through these, I realized that this was the answer to a problem that had nagging at me for some time: when I search the pages on my blog, the titles are all the same and, consequently, not very helpful.

Fortunately, Jon even supplied a script for Radio Userland that partially solves the problem. Partially, in the sense that Radio, unlike some other systems, doesn't give each post a fresh archive page, but collects all the posts from a single day onto a "day post." So you have to pick one title for the day. Jon picked the most recent post for that day and that's a reasonable solution. I'd rather Radio put each archived post on its own page. I use a Mac, so there were a few changed I had to make to Jon's script. The original script contains these lines:

scratchpad.archiveDate = year + "\\" + string.padWithZeros(month,2) + 
           "\\" + string.padWithZeros(day,2); 
scratchpad.archivePath = "c:\\radio\\www\\" + scratchpad.archiveDate + ".txt";

This is very Windows specific. To make the script more general, I changed them to this:

scratchpad.archiveDate = year + file.getpathchar() + 
      string.padWithZeros(month,2) + file.getpathchar() + string.padWithZeros(day,2);
local (basefolder = user.radio.prefs.wwwfolder)
scratchpad.archivePath = basefolder  + scratchpad.archiveDate + ".txt";

This should work on either platform. One word of warning: The code uses the scratchpad to store a lot of data. This is a nice way to be able to watch scripts run and great for debugging, but its a global namespace. If you get two instances of the script running at the same time, you'll get interesting results. I discovered this because I was debugging some things and so was hitting "Run" and then "Kill" to start and stop the script as I saw what needed to be changed. Unfortunately, "Kill" doesn't really stop the script. Once its off and going, you just need to let it go as far as I can tell. Fortunately, I was running it against a copy of my site, not the real thing because when it was done, the archive files were mincemeat.

At any rate, once Google catches up with my site, I expect the new titles will be much more helpful in finding things. I just reindexed my blog with Atomz and the results are much better.

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June 4, 2003

Blogs for Project Management

Jonathan Petersen wrote a well thought out piece on using weblogs as project management tools. He says, in part:

Were I a CIO I'd be talking about�blogs as a project/program management tool.� Most�IT organization have 3 project management tools:

email - used for workflow, document revision control, and messaging (well and for ass-covering�to be honest)
Microsoft Project - used for work breakdown and progress tracking
Microsoft Powerpoint - used for project status/rollup reporting to senior management.
While I'm sure there are companies that are running project dashboard systems that enable workflow, source control, polls and discussions, etc. but I'd be willing to bet that blogs + RSS + trackback pings + Google would be significantly more powerful than whatever is currently in use in 95% of IT organizations.�

He goes on to describe scenarios for answering the "why is this project off track?" question using standard tools and using blogs. I think he's right: blogs could provide a very nice way to keep track of projects. He points out a few problem like lack of workflow that would have to be addressed with some other tool.

I think you could incorporate blogs and RSS into a tool that does workflow like @Task. That way you could sugar coat it a little and make the "writing" task seem like part of the project management tool.

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June 3, 2003

Consolidated Management, not Computers

In a refresh of an idea that has been making the rounds since the first time-share computer, HP announced that they will start selling a blade PC system that keep disks and CPUs in a central facility and push only screens, keyboards, etc. to the user's desks. The idea is that if you have 10,000 employees but only 7,000 of them need to access computers at any one time, you save that same percentage of your hardware costs. Of course, the real savings would be in managing a cluster of blades instead of 10,000 PCs on desks. Anyone who's read this blog for any amount of time will know that I've long been an advocate of consolidated desktop management. My fervor doesn't extend to consolidating the PCs themselves, however because it flies in the face of something else I think is important: mobile devices.

I use a notebook computer exclusively. I want a single computing device with me wherever I am that not only has access to my data, but also is set up for how I use it, has the right applications, and a form factor I'm comfortable with. My computer is my work environment. Laptops are more expensive than desktop machines and not as powerful, but I think you have to focus on the entire value equation when considering what to deploy, not just the raw MIPS/$ ratio. I think many employees are more productive in an environment that is equipped for mobile computing.

I think that the end result of consolidated desktop management ought to more flexible not less. Business managers ought to have more options about how they equip their employees. The business manager, not the IT shop ought to be deciding whether an employee gets a laptop or a desktop. Mac or PC? That choice ought ot be there. I've argued before that enterprise desktop management can more easily support choice than a fragmented management approach can.

HP's product takes this kind of flexibility away for a limited savings. As the article says, 80% of the cost of putting desktops on employee desks is managing them, not buying them. So, even if HP's product can save 30%, which I would question, its only saving 30% of 20% or 6%. Giving up all your flexibility for 6% seems like a big price to pay. You can consolidate the management of PCs using software from great (Utah-based) companies like Altiris and LANDesk without consolidating the actual hardware and realize significant benefits.

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June 2, 2003

Language Assignments

Here are your groups and language assignments. Note that I have moved a few people around to even things out. Dig into this and let me know quickly if you can't find a workable implementation of your assigned language.

Group	Group Members	Language
1	Max W. Alex R.	Ruby
2	Brent A. David R.	PERL
3	Kenneth B. Melissa A.	Haskell
4	Kevin H. Megan F.	Squeak
5	Dan O. Adam Manwaring	ICON
6	Carl Y. Kats R.	SML/CAML
7	Jarom N. Maria P.	MDP or SR
8	Christopher H. Burdette P.	XSLT
9	David H.	Python
10	Rebol

Come prepared next Wednesday to make your presentation. I'll pick groups at random after we've taken all those who must go first.

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Changing and Building Culture

In response to my earlier posts about corportate blogging, Steven Vore pointed me to a post he'd made last year on changing corporate culture. I've read the 3-5 year timeframe before and it rings true. Its kind of depressing that it takes that long. I can serve as a witness that it doesn't take that long to build a great culture from the ground up. I've been part of such an organization and that is an exhilarating experience.

In the Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge says that once a person has been part of such an organization they'll do anything to do it again (I'm paraphrasing because I can't find my copy of the book). That's really true. I've talked to many of the people from the old iMALL team and a lot of them would jump at a chance to work with that team again. The work wasn't easy and we had a lot of rough spots, but there was an open, positive culture of competence and success that the entire team shared. Part of the pain of seeing it come to an end was that it was like watching a group of thugs rip apart a beautiful work of art that they had no context for understanding.

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June 30, 2003

Impatient Web Searchers Measure Web sites' Appeal in Seconds

You Can't Handle the Truth!

Me? A Postmodernist?

There Ought to be a Club for Former State CIOs

June 28, 2003

Safari Unstable?

Phil Windley Speaks!

June 27, 2003

DNS Turns Twenty

XACML: Extensible Access Control Mark-up Language

June 26, 2003

Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML)

VoIP in My House

June 25, 2003

Redesigned utah.gov

How Do I Know Who You Are?

Why IT Doesn't Matter Anymore: Living in the Red Zone

June 24, 2003

What Shared Authentication Means to You

June 23, 2003

Trust and Identity Management

Bizarre: Now I'm Headless Nick

June 20, 2003

Zope User's Group Meeting

June 19, 2003

Digital ID World Conference

RSS and eGovernment

June 18, 2003

What is Orrin Smoking?

Small Scale and High Tech

June 17, 2003

PIP Data on Home Broadband Growth

Thanks and Redhat Install

Virtual Databases

June 16, 2003

Steve Gillmor on RSS

Connect Magazine Column: Singularity Hints

Active Noise Reduction (ANR) Headphones: You Get What You Pay For

June 14, 2003

Zope User's Group Meeting in Las Vegas

June 13, 2003

RSS in Ads Revisited

Investigation Concludes

June 12, 2003

InfoWorld Ads in RSS

Intermountain eXchange: What's New in Networking

OSCON 2003

Network World Compendium on Weblog Panel

June 11, 2003

Sonic ESB: Programmable integration

June 10, 2003

Weblog Business Strategy Conference Wrap-Up

Tony Perkins: The Open Source Media Movement

The Law of the Blog

Weblogs: New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms

Where Blogs Matter

Matthew Berk: Digital Self-Fashioning