Phil Windley's Technometria

« January 2004 | Main | March 2004 »

February 27, 2004

An Eclipse Plug-In Gives jBoss an IDE

I've used jBoss, the open source application server for several years now. jBoss supports security, clustering, load balancing, and transactions. Its CMP (container-managed persistence) works and while it can be a little trouble to configure, the price is right. One of the things jBoss has lacked however, that costlier alternatives from BEA and IBM had, was an IDE. That's changed now with the release of a jBoss plug-in for Eclipse. If you've never used Eclipse, its a very nice, open source IDE that has gotten a lot of plug-in support from open source projects and commercial vendors alike. For example, last May, I reviewed an Eclipse plug-in from Systinet for Web services development. If you're interested in using the jBoss plug-in for Eclipse, this tutorial from DevX.com will get you started.

2:08 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

CTO Breakfast

This morning was the first ever CTO Breakfast. I was originally calling it a CTO Forum, but there was already something run UITA with that name and, besides, it was just too formal for what we wanted to achieve. There are plenty of forums in Utah for entrepreneurs, people seeking funding, and so on, but no place where you can just get together and talk geek. That's what the CTO Breakfast is.

The folks at Canyon View Technology Park were kind enough to give me the use of one of the conference rooms just off the food court; we grab something to eat, sit around a table and talk about whatever comes to mind. Today there were about a dozen people there and we discussed topics from WiMAX to Virtualization to Service Oriented Architectures and Web Services. I was a little worried this morning that I'd invited a bunch of people to come and maybe no one would have anything to talk about, but that wasn't a problem. At 10am, there was still a group sitting around and talking.

We're going to continue to meet at 8am (come earlier if you can get out of bed--I was there at 7:30) on the fourth Friday of each month in the same place. I'd love to have you come. You don't have to be a CTO, just someone who likes to talk about technology. If you'd like a reminder, I've set up a low-volume mailing list that you can join and I'll send you a reminder and any other relevant news.

12:12 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 26, 2004

Why Keep Blogging?

Robert Scoble asks why anyone keeps blogging. He replies:

Because I have found no other way to meet as many geeks, see as much technology, have as many interesting conversations with interesting people, and make things happen for so many people, as my blog.

From Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger
Referenced Thu Feb 26 2004 10:46:47 GMT-0700

Amen.

10:48 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Object-Level Security Through Accountability

Doug Kaye reports from the RSA conference on a talk by Dan Geer on the disappearing perimeter. I wish I'd been there. Dan, who's now Chief Scientist of Verdasys, has written a paper on the topic (you'll have to squirt your identity information at them before they give up the goods). In the paper, Dan makes an interesting proposition: "Information security is what distinguishes information that has economic value from information that does not." He goes on:

Security is an economic issue just as quality and reliability are economic issues. While the means to accomplish any of them are technical, the goals are economic. This is rarely said about security, and almost never believed. So much the worse.

Almost any company has some bit of information that is both privately held and crucial, some bit of information that if prematurely revealed or revealed at all would cause irreversible harm. An equity pricing strategy, expansion plans not yet board-approved, the contents of a protein database, corporate succession plans and associated compensation, next generation chip masks, incomplete responses to subpoenas, patent filings in process, customer details acquired under the promise of safe handling, the negotiating position in merger talks, and so forth. For privately held companies, nearly everything about them is not ordinarily made available to just anyone. For publicly traded companies, premature disclosure can be nearly as bad as improper disclosure.

The point is this: We, all of us, already have information that in and of itself represents a corporate asset. The implication is just as clear: The loss of such information assets is a negative impact on the corporate balance sheet, whether we "realize" that loss on the balance sheet or not...

From The Shrinking Perimeter: Making the Case for Data-Level Risk Management
Referenced Thu Feb 26 2004 10:13:43 GMT-0700

Dan is famous for pointing out that accountability is cheaper, less intrusive, and scales better than access control. Put another way, accountability scales linearly while access control scales geometrically. The paper talks about object-level control, but Dan hasn't jumped off the accountability soap-box. The paper is essentially a call for better logging and tracking of actions that might result in information ending up where it shouldn't be. Note that this is in sharp contrast to the Microsoft DRM story that is entirely based on an access control model. Of course, Dan's never been shy about going head to head with Microsoft, even at personal cost.

The paper is well written and full of examples. I find Dan's argument compelling. Its not technical, if you agree with its premise, you could easily share it with the CEO (or even the CIO).

10:32 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 25, 2004

Using User Mode Linux

I've taught a course in large-scale distributed computing for five years now at BYU. The course requires that students, working in groups, manage their own Linux machine, including server installation and configuration. One of my goals in the lab portion of the class is to give students a feel for how much effort is required to get a server set up right and how fickle configuration can be. Along the way, they learn a little system administration and lose any fear they might have had about setting up Linux. Traditionally, the lab has consisted of a few rooms packed with old x86 boxes. That's going to change.

There are a couple of reasons for the move. First, the rooms are crowded and the students don't really like working there. The most important reason, is that the Department wants the rooms for something else. To accommodate the move, we're going to move the lab onto a rack of servers and let each group use one-third to one-fourth of the machine using User Mode Linux.

If you're not familiar with User Mode Linux, its a set of kernel patches that allow a Linux kernel to be compiled as an executable binary and then run on a Linux platform. After that, you can do just about anything on it that you can do on Linux running directly on the hardware. Our primary reason for using it is to create a virtual hosted environment for the lab where student groups can be root on a Linux installation without having to have a machine for each group.

Looking around the net a little, I found a couple of resources. First, UserModeLinux.org has a lot of information on how UML is being used, commercial hosting companies that offer UML based virtual hosts and the like. I also found an image for a Fedora Core 1 server that might be useful. With Redhat ceasing support for their free distributions, Fedora is taking up where they left off. Core 1 is the first release. There's supposedly a second release happening next month.

If you've used UML and your experience is useful in helping me understand how to best set this up for a class of 45 students (15 groups of 3 students each), I'd appreciate any pointers. I'm thinking right now that we'll use six rather beefy rack mounted servers. I'm not sure whether I should just use direct attached disks or some sort of shared file system (the latter, it seems would allow students to migrate from machine to machine easily rather than being pinned to particular machine). In any event, its a new adventure and I'm excited to play.

9:33 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Interplanetary Roadside Assistance

Last month, I wrote briefly about Spirit's file management problems. A recent article in EE Times gives the details. The Spirit rover runs a hardened R6000 CPU from Lockheed Martin and has 120Mb of RAM and 256 Mb of flash. The OS is Wind River System's Vx-Works version 5.3.1, with its flash file system extension. After the problem was fixed, JPL engineers found a detailed log file which gave them a detailed look at the problem and that's the basis for the sequence of events in the article.

3:13 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 24, 2004

Crucial Committee Meeting on SB66 Tomorrow!

The House Public Utilities and Technology Committee ( Committee Schedule) will be holding a hearing on SB66, the UTOPIA killer, Wednesday at 4pm in Room 225. If you've never attended a legislative committee meeting before, you'll enjoy this little exposure to sausage making. Its vital that the committee see a room full of UTOPIA supporters, not a room full of Qwest employees and US West retirees. Please go and support UTOPIA. If this bill passes, UTOPIA will be dead and so will Utah's chance to be a broadband leader instead of the broadband backwater that Qwest and Comcast are offering us. If you can't make the meeting, please write to you Representative and express your opinion. Calls count for more than emails. Faxes are a good compromise. Here is a list of the members of the committee. You can get their email address from the House roster.

• Rep. Stephen H. Urquhart, Chair
• Rep. Glenn A. Donnelson, Vice Chair
• Rep. Sheryl L. Allen
• Rep. Ralph Becker
• Rep. Chad E. Bennion
• Rep. Greg J. Curtis
• Rep. Brent H. Goodfellow
• Rep. Ty McCartney
• Rep. Michael E. Noel
• Rep. Gordon E. Snow
• Rep. Michael R. Styler
• Rep. David Ure

4:00 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Large Scale SOA Deployment Dramtically Increases Complexity

Independent applications before SOA is put in place

Service oriented architectures (SOAs) are about reuse. The goal of a service-oriented architecture is to build applications using modules that (1) look like network services, (2) are potentially very far away and (3) perhaps owned by someone else. There are some significant benefits to be had including reduced hardware expenses, fewer systems to operate and maintain, and better software reuse. All of these benefits come at the expense of significantly increased complexity. Let's see why.

The two figures to the right show schematically what can happen to add this complexity. The first figure shows five applications with their modules all operating independently. Changes to the yellow application have little impact on the operation and behavior of the other applications.

Interdependencies between applications after SOA is put in place

The second figure shows a similar set of applications that are interdependent because of module sharing. This is more of a problem than simply sharing beans in an EJB application where the application will be built, tested, and maintained separately. Here, because we're sharing services, rather than just code, the operation of many modules affect the overall operation of many applications. For example, the failure of the purple module in this scenario can cause all five applications to fail.

There are basically three problems:

1. No one team understands or controls all the moving parts. Problems have much wider impact. As the second schematic shows, there is a big ripple effect for service failures, increased latency, security lapses, and so on.
2. Change management is more complex. Parts need to be added, upgraded, fixed, and replaced on the fly with no external impact. In an SOA, expected level of service can change after its put into production. For example, we may put a module into service and then increase its expected service level when it is incorporated into a new, mission critical application.
3. Separation of concerns is more difficult. Stake-holders (operations, engineering, security, lines of business) need to be able to do their jobs without having constant interaction. Traditionally, deployment is the time when all stake-holders come together. Moving to an SOA can't cause the entire business to be reorganized. For example, when a privacy policy is changed, does everyone need to get together or can just the privacy officer and operations make the change without involving development and the lines of business?

Web service intermediaries are attempting to solve some of these problems, but there is still little corporate experience with these issues on a large-scale basis and little "best practice" information is available to help companies plan for a move to an SOA.

10:58 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 23, 2004

Creating XHTML Blog Entries with Emacs and HTMLTidy

Jon Udell has been experimenting with XHTML content in his blog and RSS feeds for some time now and gotten some interesting results. This line of inquiry is interesting to me as well, but I haven't had time to play too much with the actual processing. What I have started doing, however, was ensuring, as much as possible, that the content of my posts is in proper XHTML form. Here's how I do that.

First, I write all my posts in Emacs before I post them using Radio. I'd given up on Radio's built-in browser-based editor long ago and have been using Emacs since the mid-80's, so I found it refreshing to have a real editor at my disposal. Its a little more overhead to fire up Emacs and then cut and paste it into Radio, but not much. The HTML Helper mode in Emacs aids with tags and so on, so that's a net increase in productivity. All in all, I think I'm better off in Emacs.

As I write, I try to write proper XHTML, but its easy to make mistakes, so I use a tool inside Emacs to help: HTMLTidy. HTMLTidy is a neat little program that will tidy-up your HTML and make it valid 3.2, XHTML, whatever. I have the following in my .emacs file:

(global-set-key "\C-xt" 'tidy-region)
(setq shell-command-default-error-buffer "tidy-errors") ; define error buffer
(defun tidy-region ()
  "Run Tidy HTML parser on current region."
  (interactive)
  (let ((start (mark))
        (end (point))
        (command "/usr/local/bin/tidy -config /Users/pjw/config/tidyconfig.txt -asxhtml"))
        (shell-command-on-region start end command t t
             shell-command-default-error-buffer)))

This isn't original with me. I found it with Google, but I can't remember where now. At any rate, all it does is process the region with HTMLTidy and replace it with the result from HTMLTidy. The contents of the tidyconfig.txt file are:

markup: true
tidy-mark: false
clean: false
show-body-only: true
gnu-emacs: true
output-xhtml: true

This isn't all I need to do, of course. I'd like to clean up my templates so that they use CSS instead of nested tables, but that's not been high on priority list yet--too many short deadline projects plus a book project will do that.

What I'd really like to do is to produce everything I write in XHTML, but that's not practical for a variety of reasons, including the need to change control and notification 'ala Word for group edited work. Still, I hate that I write a lot of content in Word that's format-locked. Maybe WorkML will help, but I'm not holding my breath.

11:58 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

The FTC ID Theft Clearinghouse

Growth in ID theft complaints to the FTC, 1999-2003

I came across a report from the FTC identity theft clearinghouse that shows ID theft growth over the last few years, or at least the growth in the complaints to the FTC. In 2000, there were 31,117 complaints to the FTC. In 2003, there were 210,000 (projected). The FTC site for identity theft has a lot of information. Unfortunately, much of it is in PDF, so its hard to link to or use other than just downloading and reading the document. The consumer side is pretty well fleshed out, but the section giving businesses information about ID theft is very weak. Just a few papers on Nigerian and Phishing scams.

7:59 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 20, 2004

SB66 Passes the Utah Senate

SB66, the UTOPIA killer bill, passed the Utah Senate yesterday. The bill would make the tax restrictions on the project so onerous that the project will never happen. This is too bad, since I believe UTOPIA to be a significant step forward for Utah. With UTOPIA, we're broadband leaders. Without UTOPIA, we're broadband also-rans.

Several Senators tried to substitute other bills, or amend the bill, so that it more of a compromise and didn't outright kill UTOPIA, but in the end, QWEST won this fight. I'm very disappointed, but the fight isn't over yet---there's still the house. I urge you to send an email to, or better yet call your Representative and urge them to vote "no" on SB66.

2:31 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Free Amazon Web Services Workshop

Jeff Barr, the Chief Evangelist for Amazon's Web Services (AWS) wrote to let me know about another Amazon Web Services day. They did the original at last year's ETCon in Santa Clara. This one's in San Francisco on March 17th, and like last time, its free. I blogged last year's event. If you want to understand more about how AWS works and see some great examples of it in use, then this is a great event to attend.

12:08 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 19, 2004

Digital Rights Management Slides

I gave a talk today to about 200 people on digital rights management. I asked for pointers last month and got some good advice. Here are my slides (PDF).

5:26 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Object-Based Storage Devices

When I first heard about Object-Based Storage devices, I thought this was an object-oriented database idea. I've had some bad experiences with OODBs, so I wasn't all that interested, but as it turns out, OSDs are not at all about OODBs.

The idea behind OSDs is pretty straightforward. A traditional file server consists of a file server, running a high level operating system, and one or more disks. Regardless of the speed of the disks, the file server ultimately limits the bandwidth between clients and the disks.

An OSD moves some of the processing power of the server onto the disk itself and provides a higher-level interface to the files. First, the disk knows the relationship between chunks of data on the disk (those are the objects) and the interface to the data is as an object. The disk manages the layout on disk. Second, the disk can store metadata about the objects and thus provide greater functionality. For example, the object could have access controls attached to it. Or the object might be set to have a life of 84 months, making it undeletable until that time has expired. Third the disk has an IP number and is thus a first-class network citizen in its own right.

In this scenario, the file server is actually not a server at all, its simply a manager. When you need access to particular files, the file manager tells you which disks to talk to to retrieve the files, but the disks themselves talk directly to the client. Thus the bandwidth is not limited by a file server, but by the bandwidth of the underlying network--on a switched network, this could be significant. The end result is a file system that is easier to build (since the disks already have most of the smarts built-in) and that scales linearly with the number of disks.

There is an iSCSI standard for object-based storage devices that has just been released and an open source project, Lustre.

5:15 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Sleepycat's DB XML

I just finished installing Sleepycat's XML database product on my TiBook. I had a few issues, but finally got it to where I can consistently build it. John Merrell's FAQ was helpful. I was having problems, so I made sure I was updated to GCC 3.3 (install the latest developer tools), fixed a problem with the location of jni.h in the latest Java distribution from Apple, wiped out all the directories, did a fresh install of all the sources (DB XML requires three other packages as prerequisites) and then ran the script John provides, changing only the version numbers where appropriate. Viola, it worked. Now to get the Perl API installed and explore a little.

Update: The Perl API is in the src/perl directory. There are a few things I had to do to get it to compile on OS X 10.3:

• The loader wants the value MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 defined, but unfortunately, the Makefile (in both the Db and DbXml directories) defines LD with this value early and then redefine it without the assignment later. I changed the last definition of LD in both files to be LD = MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 $(CC)
• The DbXml.c compile pukes because isnan is not defined. I tried uncommenting the #include <math.h> line, but that didn't work for some reason, so I ended up just cutting the definition of isnan out of /usr/include/architecture/ppc/math.h and pasting it into the DbXml.xs file directly. Its ugly, but I did get the code compiled and usable.

The first can probably easily be fixed by mucking around on the Makefile.PL file, but I'm not sure about the second. Ugh!

12:00 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 18, 2004

Bluetooth and CDMA

PhoneScoop has word of a new Motorola CDMA phone with bluetooth. Word is that Verizon would carry it. Maybe Sprint will as well? One can only hope.

5:52 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 17, 2004

Enjoy the Politics of Difference

John Gotze talked to Mr. Safe recently. The conversation is about whether to use RSS 2.0 or RSS 1.0 since they're both part of the Danish Government's Reference Profile (which I had a hand in creating). John's advice to Mr. Safe was to publish both formats. Here's the most important part of the conversation:

Mr Safe: When will things settle a bit more?

Me: When pigs fly. Enjoy the politics of difference.

From Gotzeblogged: Talking to Mr Safe
Referenced Tue Feb 17 2004 14:48:10 GMT-0700

In general that's good advice for anyone using any part of Web services. Just do something and stop waiting.

2:49 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Dornfest on RSS

Technology Review has an interview with Rael Dorfest. The primary topic of the interview is "alpha geeks," a term Tim O'Reilly coined to refer to the people shaping technology trends. At one point Rael talks about RSS as a Web services technology that's gaining traction.

TR: What makes RSS so important?

DORNFEST: It's one of the most widely deployed Web services around. It's easily decentralized. Blogging, because of RSS, has gone from a popularity contest--how many times has my site been pinged?--to discovery of information. The browse metaphor for search has gone by the wayside. I think that RSS and syndication and blogs broadened it out. There was a lot of hype about this a couple of years ago butÊit's only in the last year that things really startedÊbubbling. I use weblogs to find information more than I use Google. I follow trails. Google will find you obvious answers. Google will find you what you're looking for. Blogs, with RSS, will find you what you never expected to find.

From View from the Alpha Geek
Referenced Tue Feb 17 2004 13:15:07 GMT-0700

Other topics in the article center around topics from last weeks conference. Good perspective.

1:23 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 16, 2004

Its Joe Albertson's Supermarket, But the IT Department is Mine

Baseline has a feature on Albertson's this month. I have to admit that Albertson's is one of the companies I've always wanted to work for. There's a few reasons: (a) I grew up in Idaho and wouldn't mind a chance to have a challenging job in Boise and (b) I grew up in the grocery business--my Dad owned a grocery store for years and I spent a lot of my time there. The article talks about Albertson's technology challenges and its fight for market share with Wal-Mart.

Most retailers pull in sales data from their "point-of-sale system"--once known as cash registers--at the end of the day or twice a day. Wal-Mart pulls in sales from its electronic registers every 15 minutes. By 4 a.m. each morning, suppliers can see how their products sold the day before in every Wal-Mart store around the globe. According to Buzek, some suppliers are also allowed to see what other products were purchased by the consumer along with their own. The system is anchored by a Teradata warehouse that stores 200 trillion numbers and letters--the largest digital library of any company in the world. As a result, Wal-Mart has been able to continually lower prices in the grocery aisles while maintaining a consistent profit margin. It's a recipe that could spell disaster for Albertson's.

From Albertson's: A Shot at the Crown
Referenced Mon Feb 16 2004 21:56:33 GMT-0700

But Albertson's is taking a different tack, trying to get to know customers better (i.e. establish digital identities and tag purchases) in an effort to provide better service.

Albertson's has to get to know its individual customers better through its loyalty-card program and to offer products they might not be able to find on Wal-Mart's shelves. Wal-Mart does an outstanding job of marketing to the masses, McGarvie says, but it doesn't even attempt to get to know its customers on an individual basis.

From Albertson's: A Shot at the Crown
Referenced Mon Feb 16 2004 21:58:54 GMT-0700

But all that takes time and meanwhile Wal-Mart is chipping away at Albertson's market share.

Over the past year, Dunst says, the company installed a redundant high-speed network throughout its operations, using a combination of frame-relay and small-aperture satellite-communication technologies. As a result, sales data is ready for analysis "by the time the customer gets to their car in the parking lot," he says. Before the upgrade, sales information was processed in batches overnight. It could take up to 48 hours for managers in Boise to see if sales promotions were working.

From Albertson's: A Shot at the Crown
Referenced Mon Feb 16 2004 22:00:25 GMT-0700

But that's not far enough. Wal-Mart uses sales at the till to automatically place orders with suppliers. Albertson's not there yet. There's all sorts of "store of the future" ideas as well, including a private and proprietary system like the one Marc Smith talked about at ETCON.

In the end though, one wonders whether all the "gee-whiz" stuff will create an experience that will cause people to be willing to pay a bit more. I like shopping at Alberton's and I go there even when I know I'm probably paying more than I would down the street--I'm not particularly price conscious. However, the success of Wal-Mart proves that the same can't be said of many people.

10:16 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Commerce One Conductor Takes on Integration

Business processes typically cut across system boundaries and require the interoperability and choreography of multiple systems. Yet, most enterprise-level support systems focus instead on one task without thinking about working with other systems. Web services promise to solve the problems of integrating these enterprise systems and most vendors already support basic Web services protocols -- but the real problem is that tricky integration process. There are basically three choices to integrate systems with Web services: (1) write a custom application in Java or some other programming language that interfaces with enterprise systems and creates the integrated functionality; (2) buy message buses, integration brokers, business process modeling tools, and other middleware and configure them to provide the functionality; or (3) buy an all-in-one integration suite such as Conductor from Commerce One.

From InfoWorld: Commerce One Conductor takes on integration: February 13, 2004
Referenced Sat Feb 14 2004 17:42:38 GMT-0700

What business really wants from IT is automation of the processes that make the business go. For example in most businesses, the most important thing that happens is the transformation of an order into cash. Just how this is done in a given business is called the order-to-cash process. But in spite of its importance, the order-to-cash process and other crucial business processes get only spotty support from IT. Ironically, its the very ERP and CRM systems that CIO's installed in the 90's that require so much integration now. We often think of "legacy" systems as being ancient mainframe applications, but often its newer systems as well.

Be sure to check out the How I Tested sidebar on this one since there's actually some meat there about the extended example CommerceOne provides. In summary, it needs quite a bit of work.

One interesting conversation I had about this product occurred while it was in editing. In respect to this passage:

Also, an important caveat to keep in mind: Tools like Conductor are not simple to use. This is not a slam on Conductor -- it's simply a recognition that automating business processes by integrating multiple legacy systems is a complex process.

From InfoWorld: Commerce One Conductor takes on integration: February 13, 2004
Referenced Mon Feb 16 2004 11:17:29 GMT-0700

She asked: "If this is so complex, why would people want to use it?" That's a fair question for a word processing program, I suppose, but when it comes to enterprise-class software, its usually very complex stuff. The analogy I used was flying a plane. Flying a plane isn't easy but planes enable us to travel halfway around the globe in a day instead of weeks, so we put up with the complexity.

That said, enterprise-class software could be improved a great deal in its usability. We've sacrificed simplicity for interoperability and now we're going to have to fight our way back.

11:26 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 13, 2004

How to Own the Box

While I was at ETCon, I picked up a copy of Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box. A friend of mine, John Elsey, recommended the book to me at dinner last week and so I was looking for it. From the title, you'd think this is an instruction book, and it is in a way, but with a twist.

How to Own the Box is written as a series of vignettes into the activities of ten fictional white-hat and black-hat hackers. While the stories are fictional, the commands are real. The book contains detailed information on tricks, techniques, tools and even the right options to use. The book is so interesting and enjoyable, that I started reading it on the plane home and couldn't put it down.

If you're a CIO or IT Director I urge you to read this book. If you don't know much about security and hope the people on your team are handling it, then you must read this book. You'll at least come away scared. You probably also come away overwhelmed, but you'll also come away much more knowledgeable about the threat and that's a step in the right direction.

9:58 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 12, 2004

Speed Reading Eastern Standard Tribe

Danny Ayers pointed me at Trevor Smith's speed reader applet loaded with Cory's new book, Eastern Standard Tribe. I tried it out for 5 minutes and got through 3% of the book. Not bad. I've got the hardcover and this is actually something, I'd rather savor than rush through since Cory is thought provoking, so I'll read it the old fashion way, but I think the idea has promise.

The applet shows you the words one at a time and let you control how fast they come. You can move pretty fast. This would be ideal on a Palm for example. I can imagine some better control, so that I can pause easily and even adjust the font size. Like most things, eBooks probably won't catch on by trying to reproduce the physical experience in electronic media, they'll catch on by giving us a whole new way of doing the old thing in the new media. This speed reader idea is an example of how that might come to pass.

9:27 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 11, 2004

ETCon 2004: Danny O'Brien on Life Hacks

Danny O'Brien talks on Life Hacks

Danny O'Brien gave a great talk on how alpha geeks manage their life. I was enjoying the talk and didn't take notes, but Cory Doctorow did. Some highlights:

• Alpha geeks use shells
• Alpha geeks use text-editors like BBEdit, vi, and emacs
• Alpha geeks try every application, but usually end up back with editors and email. They don't trust complicated apps.
• Private, secret blogs and RSS are taking the place of todo.txt files and email alerts.
• Alpha geeks write scripts to take apart dull, repetitive tasks
• All alpha geeks back up. They've all learned the lesson.
• Alpha geeks make their ideas public, but hide their scripts.

This says what they do, but Danny also offered insights into why, which are somewhat surprising. Read the notes.

2:13 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

ETCon 2004: Eat Me and I'll Kill You

Marc Smith delivers Wednesday's keynote

Every product has a story to tell and some of them say "If you eat me, I'll kill you." So says Marc Smith, Microsoft's resident sociologists. Marc is describing a research project called AURA. Combine a PocketPC, a barcode reader, and Wi-Fi or mobile wireless and you've got the ability to find out lots of information about any product with a barcode. The project maps barcodes to names. Once that's done, all kinds of things are possible:

• Google the result for news, images, and other information.
• Annotate the product packaging
• Offer alternatives
• Show how and where it was manufactured
• Give alternative views of the nutritional data

Of course, all this can be personalized, so that I can see how this product fits in my diet, or whether it contains anything I'm allergic to, or even how it matches my environmental or political preferences.

There are all sorts of opportunities for "resolution services" that meet particular needs or demands.

9:33 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

RSS Use at Disney

I had to choose between Robert Kaye's file sharing talk and the talk on Disney use of RSS, but Ross Mayfield went to that one and did a nice write-up.

6:52 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 10, 2004

ETCon 2004 and DDTI Photos

I've posted some photos from the Digital Democracy Teach-In and the Emerging Technology Conference to my photo gallery. This was the first time I used Zach Wily's iPhoto2Gallery plug-in for iPhoto and my first real use of iPhoto 4.0. The plug-in worked great and made uploading pictures a breeze. iPhoto 4.0 is much faster and didn't hang at all as I used it. All in all, a much improved experience.

5:57 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Kill Apps for Your Cell Phone

Rael Dornfest and others are talking mobile hacks. There was lots of fun things, but here's a few killer cell phone apps I didn't want to lose track of:

• Opera - a real browser for your phone.
• Agile Messenger - a better IM client for your phone.
• miniGPS - location-based alerts and messeging for your phone.

For more info, you might try MobileWhack or Howard Forums.

5:23 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

ETCon 2004: Robert Kaye on Social Networking-Based File Sharing Networks

Robert Key advocates Bluetooth this year

Robert Kaye (slides) is describing social network file sharing systems. The primary purpose of the social group is to share, discover, and protect network. He proposes a hierarchy or tribes, chiefdoms, and states with leaders at each level and "tribal elders" who set the policies about who gets in. This sets the trust network.

Strict policies limit search horizons, large search horizons limit security. Social networks can grow quickly. The trick is to balance growth and security. Weak ties from social networks are stronger that random P2P connections. The networks lets you explore your strong and weak ties who are more likely to share your tastes and interests that strangers. Social network-based file sharing systems trade off quantity for quality.

Discovery includes ratings and recommendations from people in your social network to help guide and strengthen search results.

Robert likes a two-part system with a central server architecture. Algorithms for authentication are difficult to do in a decentralized system. The central server offers a Web service interface that allows user to build any kind of social network application. The server has no knowledge of what clients are doing and thus clients are protected. The central server also solves the P2P bootstrapping problem of how to get clients linked-in.

For the client, you can start with an open source client like Gnutella, although the standard routing query protocol is problematic, so something like the canonical identifiers from Bitzi, MusicBrainz, and IMDB's distributed hash table-based content searching system. Include the BitTorrent swarming P2P system for file transfer.

Using the network requires and invitation, port changing, and make sure everything goes over an ssh tunnel. Although, if you're going over ssh, you don't need an ssh tunnel since no one can tell what's going on anyway (except maybe through traffic analysis).

When the network is compromised, the attacker can see the same thing that a single network can see. So the damage, depends on how powerful individual nodes are. That goes back to the policies set by the "tribal elders." The idea is that this a toolset for building social networks, not the network itself and the elders use the toolset to create a network that follows their policies. When two tribes trust each other, they can connect and interact, expanding the search horizon.

Robert recommends "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond, "Smart Mobs" by Howard Rheingold, and "Urban Tribes" by Ethan Walters.

2:38 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

ETCon 2004: Fluid Time: Scheduling Washing Macines

I went to a talk on the Fluid Time Project by Molly Steenson and Michael Keislinger (slides [PDF]) . Some interesting social findings on how time works in groups, but the most interesting part to me was the discussion of instrumenting washing machines in a student housing project and then providing scheduling for them. The system negotiates schedule changes, sends alerts when the laundry's done that depend on how busy the machines are and how prompt the person usually is, and lets users check the status of the machine using their phone. A long time ago, out of frustration, I wanted to build a similar system for scheduling car repairs and doctor's appointments. This is that system.

12:40 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

ETCon 2004: Dave Sifry on Technorati

Dave Sifry talks up Technorati

I'm at the session being done by Dave Sifry, creator of Technorati.com

• Over 1.6 million sources tracked
• 11,000 new weblogs created everyday, up from 4-5K per day in March 2003.
• About 35% of weblogs are abandoned (no posts in 3 months)
• Over 100,000 updates per day.
• Median time from weblog post to live index (on Technorati) is 7 minutes. This makes the engine usable for tracking weblog conversations.

The nice thing about Technorati is that it tracks deep links. Almost no one links to www.amazon.com. They link to some specific page on Amazon (which, BTW, Amazon has enabled by having a RESTful architecture).

Dave points to a things he hacked together last night to point to products. Dave asks for an experiment. He asks the audience to link to the product page and then periodically check the cosmos for the page to see when they links appear on Technorati.

Dave talks about the Power Law of Blogging and shows his data. The data shows that when you have fair access to media, there will be a relatively small number of things that are linked to by a lot of people. When there were only three networks, they were all even distributed. When there are hundreds, you get a power law graph.

Technorati as Platform Dave's commitment:

• XML API for all functionality based on a RESTful architecture that is free for non-commercial use.
• Today: Link Cosmos, keyword search, top 100, breaking news, and current events.
• Perl, Python, Radio, C#, and ASP interfaces (see developers.technorati.com)

There are IM/SMS notification, movable type plugins, threading on weblog readers, and a high priority indexer (using the high priority indexer). Some application directions: open reviews (RVW format), keyword and Cosmos filters, discovery and filtering of subscriptions lists, vote links (differentiating between links as endorsements and links to non-endorsements), and geographic search and indexing.

11:16 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

ETCon 2004: Tim O'Reilly Keynote

What's on Tim's Radar:

The net is the platform. The new killer apps of the Internet, eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, PayPal, Mapquest, and others are on the O'Reilly best seller list, but moreover, are running on a new platform called the Internet. The software lives somewhere other than your local machine. These apps run on open source, but themselves are not open source.

Tim compares Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Amazon has harnessed the user community, but B&N has not. Amazon outsells B&N. Mapquest has not offered any social services. GeoURL and GeoAnnotation are some interesting projects in this area. Microsoft's Mappoint has an API, but they have no clue about end user participation. Tim believes that the first mapping site to bring social aspects to their site will come out on top.

Wordspy is a web site that creates dictionary style entries of words as they are coined. The site provides insight to culture as it evolves and words in action.

iPOD is a combination of hardware and backend system. However, wireless is missing. Also, there's no architecture of participation. GarageBand let's you create music, but there's not way in iTunes to share it. iChat knows about buddies, but iTunes and iPhoto doesn't. Orkut let's you organize friends into groups. More sites need to use this kind of information.

Managing relationships. Identity is about more than who I am and who you are, its about how we relate. Where is my address book? Is it on my phone, on my PC, on PayPal, on Okrut?

Why can't we have P2P identity sharing? Why can't I manage my friends on a local level and tie that into this other applications? (This is the DigitalMe idea in some ways.)

On the issue of mining the net for data, Tim talks about Technorati. He also mentions OrgNet.com's analysis of book purchase patterns. The study revealed a divided populace. Only two books connect the liberal and conservative book buyers. Interesting.

Here's Tim's summary:

• Hacking in all its forms
• Second generation network effects
  • social software
  • network enabled market research and data visibility
• Architectures of participation
• Getting beyond single device
• Robotics an hardware hacking

9:33 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 9, 2004

DDTI: Emergent Democracy Worldwide

Joi Ito and Ethan Zuckerman are doing a session on Emergent Democracy Worldwide.

Joi mentions that much of what we're talking about today is America and white and not generalizable to the rest of the world.

Ethan says he's the token African today to show how much we're fighting for diversity. How does this play once we get out of the highly wired, rich United States? While blogs have done a good job of giving alternative views of alternative stories, we haven't done a good job of covering news.

In response to a plea for Japanese to have more influence on US politics because it affects Japan so much, someone wrote: "when things are going well, we have time for you, but when we're in crisis, we don't care and you don't matter."

Joi: Analytically I realize that Africa matters, but how does that translate into my life?

Ethan: Its not just whether things get reported, its whether anyone is paying attention. Blogs are fair, in a mathematical sense, but for someone in Africa who doesn't speak English, doesn't have an Internet connection, or even a computer, blogs don't provide much.

Joi mentions Witness.org, an organization that gives video cameras to people to document people who are being oppressed. This gives a huge amount of raw material and a method for people to speak to the greater world with their own voice.

For some discussion, including links to sites, see this entry on Joi's blog and this entry by Ethan. Here is the link sheet

6:48 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

DDTI: Advocacy as Application

Jon Lebkowsky leads the Advocacy as Application panel

Jon Lebkowsky is moderating a panel on Advocacy as an Application. The other panelists are Bill Greene, from RightMarch.com, Adina Levin, from EFF-Austin, Jonah Seiger, from the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, and Cory Doctorow, from EFF.

Jonah leads out talking about how tools can facilitate advocacy. These are evolutions of things that started long ago. The essence of MeetUp is online organizing for offline action. The business world is about making something bigger than what you started with. Applications are useless without users. The tools are only half of the solution. Message matters. You have to have clarity. You have to motivate people to participate. MoveOn works because their message resonates with their constituency.

Cory says "architecture is politics." We want the Internet to be something that is inherently resistant to regulation. That is not true. We all live somewhere where we are subject to those regulations. If you want the Internet to survive, you have to be involved. Early on in the Internet, the FCC was considering taxing modems. Kevin Werbach, working at the FCC, put in a electronic comments box and in 24 hours 300,000 letters came in (against naturally). We can fix bad laws. Defeatism is not an option and not necessary. We can make a difference.

Bill Greene talks about outsourcing. RightMarch.com outsources most of its backend services. CapitolAdvantage, for example, syncs with Congressional contact forms and RightMarch.com just uses CapitolAdvantage to create "email your congressman" on their site.

6:13 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

DDTI: eVoting Panel

The eVoting panel went well (at least I thought so). While I couldn't blog it, several other people did. Here is Ross Mayfield's entry.

I think the summary of the panel would be:

1. The current systems and process leave a lot to be desired.
2. But, they're not going away.
3. So techies need to be involved to solve the problem.

Here's some ideas about how to get involved:

• Start with your county clerk and find out what election system your county uses and how it is certified. What issues do they face? Is there a way you can help them?
• Meet with someone in the state election's office. Ask them the same questions. What is the certification process is your State?
• Engage your legislators. Send them an email and ask to meet with them. Help them understand the issues surrounding eVoting so that they're educated.

5:26 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

DDTI: Wes Boyd on MoveOn.org

Wes Boyd, of MoveOn is talking about "Bringing Ordinary People Back into Politics." Broadcast is about story telling and story telling is about conflict. Attack and defend leads to cynicism. Everyone backs away and watches on TV.

MoveOn started as online petition during the Clinton impeachment. In four days, 23,276 people signed the petition. They realized that these were people who were looking to be heard and they could be reached cheaply.

In 2001 MoveOn asked people what they cared about. The answers were Campaign Finance Reform, Energy, and the Environment. MoveOn has been effective in raising money around specific issues, including financing ads about the Iraq war. MoveOn's membership doubled at this time.

The Virtual March on Washington let people schedule calls to their congressperson so that there were be a continue roll of calls against the war in Iraq. The was an easy way for people who called to post the responses to their questions in real time.

Rated discussion groups allow people to participate and for the good posts to rise to the top. (Although this seems to reinforce the echo-chamber effect.)

5:03 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

DDTI: Traditional Media and Digital Democracy

Dan Gillmor, San Jose Mercury News, Jeff Jarvis, Advance.net, and Jay Rosen, NYU Journalism Professor are doing a panel called "Gatekeepers No More? The Grassroots Challenges the Journalist Priesthood."

Jay asks the question: what makes the moment different? Public opinion grew up hundreds of years ago as a balance to the power of the crown. The idea applied to a small percentage of the people, but the organization was egalitarian. Overtime, the small group grew to include almost everyone, that is, we consider "the public" to be everyone. As it grew large, however, the ability participate declined. People have perennially hoped that new technology would change this, starting with the telegraph. The original promise of the public in not just readers but also speakers. The Internet has given voters a mouth.

Jeff says he's been in journalism his whole life, but he's never seen a time as exciting as this. Everyone now has access to a printing press. There have been some big changes: the reader has a voice. Reporters need to stop looking so closely at the stump and pay more attention to the green. Political reporting is not so much "reporting" as it is "repeating." They repeat the same story and message over and over. (I've seen this many times in my own experience.) Jeff's manifesto:

1. Every meeting webcast
2. Every politician has a weblog or equivalent
3. Federal agencies have Web sites that are easy to use and citizen friendly.
4. We should expect elected officials to have a dialog with is
5. We should expect journalists should report and not just repeat.

Jay: the media doesn't go away, but what has changes is what I call the "terms of transaction." We don't, as a society, want to discredit the press. But the nature and foundation of their authority is changing. Journalists think we need to give people more information so they can participate. Its more likely that if they participate, they will seek more information. Journalists don't care whether people are engaged, only if they are informed. Tools like blogs let people engage and encourage them to be informed.

There ensues a general discussion of how some people don't read or write effectively, but audio and video can let them participate. This leads to a discussion of P2P and DMCA.

3:12 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

DDTI: Effective Political Blogging

Effective Political Blogging panel

Doc Searls, Halley Suitt, Mitch Radcliffe, Cameron Barrett, and Dave Weinberger are doing a panel on effective political blogging.

Cam is talking about his efforts to help the Clark campaign. Clark's blog has the ability to support group forming around specific events and issues.

Dave talks about how unexpected and emergent what has been happening in the blogosphere surrounding politics is. There a surprising attachment between supporters and bloggers.

Halley talks about how blogging and reading political blogs got her interested in politics. She quotes ten trends of political blogging from her blog:

1. Political blogs are simply political. Regular-people-telling-the-truth-about-their-lives blogs are subversive and radical.
2. The blog swarm giveth, the blog swarm taketh away. (What bloggers write about -- jump all over -- swarm all over -- put at the top of the charts -- these issues can define the discussion, not because they are necessarily more correct, more fascinating or more important -- but because they are so FAST AND FRESH.)
3. FDR: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." Bush: "We have nothing so profitable as fear and fear itself."
4. Cheney is not, and never has been the Vice President.
5. "It's the credit card economy, stupid."
6. There are no more Democrats. There are no more Republicans.
7. We should kiss Europe's ass for reminding us who we are as a nation and who we must be and who we can not be.
8. Remember the video of the LA Riots -- dads smashing store fronts, moms carrying away jumbo pack diapers.
9. The Diebold Riots will not be pretty.
10. Blogs opened our hearts, our minds, our lives. Dean opened our hopes. Meetup opened our homes. Can you spell C-O-M-M-U-N-I-T-Y? There is no going back.

I'm not exactly sure what 3, 4, and 6 have to do with political blogging. They out of character with the rest of the list. I guess you've got to get your licks in somewhere.

Mitch says we're making a fundamental error by treating the campaign as a horse race. This reinforces the position of the mass media in the election. We strengthen them by talking about them so much. We give CBA, ABC, and CNN power by naming them. We'll move past the Dean campaign.

Dave says that political blogs are social, not informational. The goal is to connect with each other, not to influence. Deanblog comments discourage flaming. This style gives people a sense of connectedness without letting them fight. Halley mentions that these people call what they're doing "blogging" even though most bloggers would laugh at the notion of comment posting as "blogging."

Is there something unique you want in a political blog? Cam: No, blogs are blogs and very generic. Halley: As a consumer of political blogs, I'd like to have a hefty "about" statement to understand who they are. Dave: Wouldn't blogs being fielded by a campaign want to have more social networking stuff built in? Cam: yes, for example, we'd like to have a way for people to enter their zip code and get a map to their polling place.

What is effective political blogging as opposed to popular political blogging? Cam: Comments add a community aspect of political blogs.

Blogging is the first step of many steps. How does it lead to action? I've long advocated techies being more involved in the legislative process.

1:09 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

DDTI: The Influentials

Jonas Seiger, Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at GWU is presenting some interesting statistics on the nature of people accessing political web sites. The survey was done using pop-ups and telephone surveys. The people had to have visited a political web site and done two of a large list of other activities that would indicate political activity. About 7% of the US qualifies as an "online political citizen" (OPC).

In general they are male (62%), well-educated (59% college degrees), have good incomes (42% over $75,000), and 36% are between 18 and 30. Mic of old and new--44% are new. 49% are Democrats, while only 29$ are Republicans. This is due to the opportunities Democrats have had in this election cycle. 46% of OPC make campaign contributions, while only 10% of the general population does.

Keller and Berry say that 10% of Americans influence what the other 90% think, through their networks. They are activists and trendsetters. Using some qualifiers to find out who were influentials, the study found that 70% of OPC were influentials compared to 10% of the general population and 13% of the online community as a whole. This means that reaching OPCs has great leverage because the exert a disproportionate amount of influence on their friends and family.

59% of Iowans used the Internet to get information about the candidates. Dean did better among top users, but Kerry beat Dean in people who sometimes used the Internet to find out about candidates.

The lesson: message matters. Dean failed to close the deal. Just as Dean's success cascaded through the network he created, so did his failures. Polls show that Dean got people energized and they came out to vote, but voted for Kerry.

Scott Hefferman, CEO of MeetUp.com, shows some pictures from MeetUp's around the country, including the Heritage Foundation, which is the fastest growing MeetUp application lately. Hefferman was influenced by Putman's " Bowling Alone." His girlfriend drug him to a Lord of the Rings meeting that was poorly organized and he thought that the world needed a site to allow people to meet up. The big bet was that if you give people a tool to find each other, they'll self-organize and the answer, apparently, is yes.

MeetUp is alike Hallmark, they create holidays. MeetUp let's people create "Mini Cooper day" or "pug day." Politics is the same thing. Over 50% of people going to political meet-ups have never been to a political meeting before. People go to meet-ups to learn. They go because their co-workers, or neighbors take them. Being at a meet-up doesn't imply strong support. People go to meet-ups who don't know that it was organized on the Internet. The Internet is enabling non-connected people to meet as well.

1800s to 1950's was the era of joiners and organizers. 1950 to 2004 was the era of broadcast. No need for members, chapters, organizations, or meetings. 2004 shows the trend to grassroots meetings again. He quote De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" on the liberty of associate and the power of meeting.

12:15 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

DDTI: Trippi Keynote

Trippi delivers his keynote address to several standing ovations

Its a mistake for anyone to buy into the spin that's coming out the broadcast media. They didn't understand what was happening before, why should they understand now? Broadcast democracy has failed us. DMCA and Patriot Act aren't being discussed by the mainstream media--they're being discussed on the net. The current system is rotten and broken.

If took 5-6 years to understand that the Kennedy-Nixon debate was a defining point in history. No one understood that it would come down to buying one-way media messages using $2 million contributions.

The Dean campaign was about overthrowing that system. That you couldn't get there in 13 months isn't surprising. There is only one tool that will allow the American people to take their government back and that's the Internet. Its not going to happen on CNN or in the LA Times.

The Howard Dean campaign is an Internet miracle Dean started with 432 known supporters nation-wide and and $150,000. He raised $45 million, a record and raised his stature to hundreds of thousands of supporters. The American people now have the beginning of tools and a platform to act. No one is going to do it for them.

The fact that the campaign had a clue that MeetUp.com could be used came from a relatively obscure blog. Joe read the blog and the campaign decided to embrace it. Now 200,000 people are signed up for Howard Dean at MeetUp.com. This was the Internet to get people to do something offline. Its not just the online tools, its the tools online that help people fulfill that energy offline in their communities and their neighborhoods. The Dean campaign didn't happen on TV, it happened over the watercooler and the Internet.

MoveOn was instrumental in teaching the Dean campaign about online tools and techniques. The political press has no clue what the Internet is or how it works. They have no way to write about it, they put it in their old context. The Internet community doesn't understand the political context.

The Dean campaign worked because all the people around the country gave him the standing to be an opposition candidate. Dean led the rest of the Democrats in this and could do so because the grassroots gave Howard Dean the power and voice to make that argument.

Broadcast politics is on the wane. Broadcast media has jumped the shark on the war and on the Dean campaign. Our democracy is seriously threatened now in ways the American people hasn't grasped yet. The Republicans raise more money under $100, $1000, $10000, $100000, $1000000. The Democratic party only leads in contributions over $1000000. The Dean campaign and Internet turned that on its head. Dean raised more money on $75/head contributions than any other candidate. Politics is about the money.

We're in the beta stage of Revolution 2.0. Its about the American people having the tools to say enough. The people in this room can give them the tools. This is not over. We need to reach deep enough to make the change. The day isn't that far off when 2 million people wake up, donate $100 each, and change America. Howard Dean is 670,000 people.

People are now comfortable enough and the technology is mature enough where Emergent Democracy can take place. The Internet took a party with no message and gave it a message. It took a party that raised only big money and turned it into a party that can raise money from small donations.

The current primary system was set up to ensure an insurgent candidate like Jimmy Carter never happened again. The cycle has been moved up to happen very fast and favors established candidates. The only way to win was to win Iowa and New Hampshire. Without the party institutions being for you, it was impossible to do this. The Dean campaign showed that there are new and different ways to get there.

The Dean campaign ran into broadcast media. When Al Gore endorsed Dean, alarms bells went off in every newsroom and every other campaign in the country. The alarm said "kill him now." "If we don't kill this son of a b, he'll be the nominee." The press corps determined to hammer him because they think that's they're responsibility. Gephardt wrecked the Dean campaign and the committed suicide. The Internet couldn't stop that.

Why does the establishment want it to fail? What's so scary about the American people getting evolved in their democracy. Its too easy to say that Dean is a dot.com crash. Dean gave them the ammo and the broadcast media used it to hammer him.

The system has taught Americans that their $25 contribution doesn't count. That their four hours as a volunteer is a waste of time. The system is so rotted, so corroded, that people believe they can't make a difference. The Internet has taught people that they can turn a race upside down. The Internet shows that people working together for the common good are powerful.

Ed Cone questions Joe Trippi during the O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In

A woman at Penn State sold her bike for $79 and sent the check to Howard Dean. She sent an email saying "I sold my bike for democracy." Now all kinds of people do that. That's the power of connections on the Internet.

We didn't have the luxery to say "I think John Edwards is a great candidate." But given what we were up against and what we were trying to do, there has to be some way to build unity and not be in camps. No knight on a white horse, shining armor is going to ride into Washing ton and change it. It has to be us and the Internet is the platform that gives us the power to take the country back. (Standing ovation.)

Questions (led by Ed Cone):

• What work? What got people to the polls? Tools that let people take action offline. Meetup.com. Tools that let people put in their zipcode and find out what was happening in their area. Deanlink allowed people to get their friends involved in the campaign. There was a very broad spectrum of people who were using the tools (14 year old kid from Alaska, 72 year old retiree). Eighty-nine year old man bought a PC and became a MeetUp host and team lead in his area. How do we build tools that let people take this straight into their community. The other problem is that its so transparent. Every other campaign can get the info. Kerry campaign came the Dean site, got the names of undecided voters and sent their own letters. There are authentication issues. There are significant suceptibilities to dirty tricks.
• You make an analogy to eCommerce where bricks and mortar are often incorporated into the business. How well were you able to mesh Dean's organization with unions and other offline groups? Delegate selection is Byzantine. Dean's campaign thought MeetUp leaders ought to be delegates while the local Democratic chairs fought that. The establishment was reistent because the Dean campaign didn't do anything the way it had been done before. There's a large group, including broadcast media, who do not want to give up power. The media never turns the camera back on themselves.
• There have been stories about your pay. The Internet should make things cost-effective. Talk to us about Joe Trippi getting rich on the campaign. The Kerry campaign will put on a dinner where you spend $350,000 on a ballroom, steak, entertainment, and fill the place with $2000/plate folks. The dinner is a huge success because you make $650,000 on it. Dean bought a $100,000 ad in Austin to take Bush on in his home state and used it to raise $1,000,000. The implication isn't just that I'm a thief, but that I'm a really bad thief. I made $165,000 on the Dean campaign. That's a lot of money, but its not millions. This is just broadcast media disintermediating me from the people who gave $75 to the campaign. I didn't have authority for budget and spending. We raised $45 million. My firm would have been Dean's media advisor whether I was the campaign manager or not. I would have made $165,000 either way. My partner has done the media buys for Dean for 12 years. This is about knocking down what happened. If people come to believe that this was a get rich scheme, then it will stop the movement, not just me or Dean.
• How well was the campaign able to incorporate ideas from the grassroots? How important is that? The biggest problem was that there were so many ideas and keeping up on top of them. It's hard to be sure you're seeing it. It was an idea from the blog about the Governor eating a turkey sandwich while the VP was eating a $2000/plate dinner. MeetUp came from the blog. The idea of Dean bloggin on the Lessig blog came from Lessig and was, as Dave Weinberger said, one of the most authentic moments. The campaign stopped growing in the fall when they stopped putting energy into the growth and changed the focus to organizing on a state by state basis.
• Is there a disconnect between what Dean was proported to be and what he was and how did that affect the campaign? Most people don't get a chance to meet the guy and talk one-on-one and so people put their own belief system on him. For example, many people voting for Kerry believe that he voted against the war.
• What are the online missteps? After November, we couldn't figure out how to communicate with people. When Dean was ahead and looked invincible, many people didn't understand the urgency of what was happening and how vulnerable the campaign was to the outside forces. The blog comments to pleas were incredulous. The campaign could get messages to people, but they were public messages and they couldn't say what they needed to say. Transparency hurt honest communication with the support base. How do you maintain the openness and directness of the campaign and still not give away your strategy?
• What will it take from people in this room to get a different kind of journalism that has some power and authority? I think its happening already. The Trent Lott affair was dropped by mainstream media and the blogospehere kept it going. The mainstream media didn't write about the Dean campaign or anything that was happening until Dean raised money. "Its the money stupid." IN the end, its the special interest money vs. us. The only way to get attention is to raise money.

10:27 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

O'Reilly Digital Democracy Teach-In

The Digital Democracy Teach-In is about to start and Joe Trippi will be the keynote speaker. If you're interested in following along, I'll be blogging the event, but you can also listen in live courtesy of IT Conversations who wil be streaming the audio of the event live.

9:22 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 8, 2004

Call to Action: Senate Bill 66, the UTOPIA Killer

Friday, the Legislature passed Senate BIll 66 (SB66) out of committee, bringing it one step closer to reality. If you're not aware, SB66 would gut UTOPIA, making it impossible for the project to go forward. Eighteen city councils have voted on the project and decided to move forward after years of study. Six of those, so far, have even voted to guarantee the project---that's how strongly they feel about it. And yet, the legislature, believes that they are smarter and more enlightened than all these city councils. They essentially are going to take away the autonomy of cities in this matter--in the name of Qwest. If you support UTOPIA, I urge you to contact your Senator and Representative today and urge them to defeat SB66.

8:54 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 6, 2004

Additional Questions for eVoting Panel

The Digital Democracy Teach-In is Monday and I think its going to be great. There's over 170 people registered and that's not counting speakers. Here are a few additional questions for my eVoting panel.

• Jim Flowers, who has been involved in Georgia state government in a number of posts says "For Georgia going back [to paper ballots or voting machines] is simply not an option. The panel needs to understand that the paper ballot systems Georgia used, and the old mechanical machines (from the 1930's),which did not have a paper trail, yielded a higher undercount than Florida in 2000. Plus, there is the matter of some $52 million spent replacing the old machines."
• Is eVoting here to stay? Is there a significant difference between existing eVoting machines and their mechanical cousins? If we've lived with mechanical voting machines for 100 years, why are we so worried about electronic voting machines?
• David Sklar asks the following question: "If I want to make and sell a slot machine, the Nevada Gaming Commission audits my code. If I write software that controls an airplane, the FAA reviews my code and development practices. Shouldn't our standards for machines that protect democracy be at least as strict as our standards for machines that protect our ability to gamble fairly and fly around safely?"
• Scott Ritchie, a California college student has proposed bringing open source eVoting software from Australia and modifying it to meet the demands of the California Secretary of State. Is this really a viable option?
• ATMs seem to be able to give us a reliable paper trail of our finances, what makes this so hard in voting?

5:35 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Answering the Build or Buy Question

One of the questions that CIOs frequently face is termed "build or buy." Should we build this system or function ourselves, or should we just buy something even though it may not meet our needs exactly? For example, often the business side will argue for building something because the systems that can be bought don't quite align with how the business runs. Other times, the techies will want to build something and the reason comes down to having fun. So, what criteria should you use to decide whether to build or by your next system?

I think there's one simple measure that can be applied to answer the build vs. buy question: Does the system or function add competitive advantage? If so, then build it. If not, buy it. A few examples:

Company IT departments don't build general ledger packages anymore for a good reason: your accounting software won't add to your competitive advantage. We do, however, see organizations trying to significantly modify ERP systems to change how paydays are handled, etc. In Utah for example, we modified SAP's payroll system to handle a special way the Highway Patrol had of paying troopers because they couldn't be convinced to follow a standard business convention. The end result will be a system that's more prone to problems now and more expensive to upgrade later.

Of course, Utah isn't a business, but if it were, they'd be deriving no special competitive advantage from the way troopers receive their paycheck. These kinds of system should be bought and business processes should be changed to ensure that the system requires as few modifications as possible.

On the other end of the spectrum, I'd cite my experience at iMALL. We built a subscription-based eCommerce system. It wasn't one of a kind--at several points we could have bought something that did something similar. In the end, however, we believed we could build a better system and that was the basis of our competitive position. Worked too. We sold the company for $450 million (in 1999 dollars) based largely upon the business model and the technology. We eventually had over 50,000 merchants using the system and did partnerships with companies like First Data Corp. that we would have never been able to pull off without our own system.

The cloud in that silver lining is this: we built too much of the system. For example, we should have bought a transaction monitor (application servers were too new) early on instead of trying to handle them ourselves. We spent a lot of precious capital building components that we should have bought. The rule works here too: many of the components offered no special competitive advantage and we had no business building them.

3:10 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

At Last, Someone to Talk To!

AOL has released AIM 5.5 which includes iChat compatible streaming video. At last there will be someone to talk to. I've used iChat's video feature several times and it really works. Jon Udell and I had a real conversation a few weeks ago that was much more than an IM exchange or even a phone conversation because of the presence of video. Now, if Apple would reciprocate and incorporate digital certificates in iChat, I'd be happy (for a few minutes at least).

10:35 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Wayne Perry: The Future of Wireless Communications

Wayne Perry, CEO of EDGE Wireless and a member of the board of ATT Wireless (not to mention part owner of the Seattle Mariners and private pilot), is giving the keynote address at eBusiness Day at the Rollins eBusiness Center at BYU.

The cellular concept was invented in 1948 by Bell Labs. Cells allow reuse of the frequency. Previously, there could only be 500 mobile phone uses per frequency. In New York City there was a 25 year waiting list for a mobile phone. The FCC didn't allocate spectrum until 1982. Another major development was the DSP chip. ATT expected up to 1 million cellular subscribers by the year 2000.

By 2000, there were 97 million subscribers, almost a factor of 100 greater than predictions. Today 157 million people (55% of the US population) have cellular phones. That's more than wireline telephone users in 1994. In 2001, for the first time since the Depression, the number of wireline phones decreased. In 2005, the number of wireless phones will surpass the number of wireline phones. On average we use the phone about 600 minutes a month. Worldwide, this amounted to 100 million years of talking.

On top of this, the US is behind the rest of the world. In Taiwan, there are cellular users 110% of the population. China has 250 million subscribers and China MobileCom is expected to add 35 million subscribers next year. Verizon has 35 million subscribers total.

While voice lines are down, 22% of US households have a high speed data connection. US broadband penetration is higher than most of the rest of the world. The exceptions are Korea (80% penetration) and Japan.

Mark Twain said he loved to talk about the future because no one can call you a liar. Not surprisingly, Wayne is very bullish on wireless carriers, not 802.11 carriers, but cellular providers. What's really telling, I think is that he turns to things that are currently happening in other countries to point to what will happen in the US. The question that is left unanswered is, who's fault is it that the US is so far behind? I have to point to the wireless carriers. They all want to keep you inside their walled gardens and give you just the services they think you want now.

Wayne speaks to the privacy issues of location-aware phones. Parents will buy a service that alerts them when their daughter goes to her boyfriends apartment. Of course the daughter will buy an alibi service that says she's at the library. Wireless providers are like arms merchants---they win either way.

Wi-Fi is popular because its perceived to be free. The total CAPEX to install Wi-Fi at the United Airlines terminal in Denver is less than $50,000. That kind of CAPEX won't support charging for Wi-Fi in general (because someone else will offer it for free). Wi-Fi will drive down the cost of other wireless options.

DoCoMo predicts 500% penetration. How do you get there? Lots of wireless devices. In five years, no child will leave the house without a location-aware wireless device. No one will be allowed in the national forest without one. He tells the story of a dairy farmer who installed a pager on his lead cow. Instead of going out to get the cows, he trained the lead cow so that when he paged it, it would come in and bring the herd. The moral of the story: don't assume you know how people will use wireless. To which I would add, don't install barriers to people doing interesting things.

Why would VodaFone (largest wireless provider in the world) by ATT WS? VodaPhone wanted to be in the US. They own a 40% ownership in Verizon, but their phones didn't work with Verizons system so Verizon wasn't cutting it. The world is moving toward consolidation of wireless systems and standards. CDMA is probably better, but better doesn't cut it. GSM is going to win.

9:50 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 4, 2004

Friendster is Just the Beginning, Friends

Privacy is over-rated, at least as a topic that concerns most people. Sure, if you ask people "do you care about your privacy?" almost everyone will say they do. But, if you offer them $0.25 off a 6-pack of Coke at Albertson's if they give up details about their purchasing patterns, they'll stand in line to give you the information (literally).

When it comes to government held databases, its even worse. If I ask "should we combine government databases to make them more effective?" there will be a number of people who will cry foul. However, if I ask "would you like to be notified of any money the government owes you when you apply for a fishing license?" then then response is quite different.

The recent controversy over MATRIX is an excellent case in point. Most people are repelled by the idea of MATRIX on the face of it, but the same people will sit in front of their television sets and complain about government ineffectiveness when police let a man who's wanted in Utah for sex offenses go on a routine traffic stop in Nevada and he later rapes a woman.

You can't have it both ways and as a society, we have to decide what's most important to us. I'm happy to see the current debate happening, because that's how we decide these kinds of issues in a democracy. Its noisy, its dirty and its sometimes acrimonious, but its served us well for over 200 years.

Personally, I'm much more concerned about the capabilities that private companies have right now because they aren't subject to the same level of scrutiny or the checks and balances that government is. If you want to see something very scary, give me $2 million and 6 months and I'll show you a system that reveals secrets about people that they never thought could be brought to light. And it can be done with data sources available to the public right now, along with data that people will freely give up about themselves and their acquaintances in exchange for almost nothing. Friendster is just the beginning, friends. Scott McNealy was right.

3:52 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 3, 2004

New Enterprise Software Business Models

Bruce Daley is moderating a discussion on new enterprise software business models. The following is a summary of a lot of comments from many people.

Subscription software model has significant benefits for software vendors: they don't have to spend large amounts of money in maintaining old releases, ensuring backward compatibility, and so on. Another advantage is that ongoing revenues are easier to predict. In the traditional perpetual license model, customers wait for the last two weeks of the quarter and beat you up on price. You never know going into the last two weeks what your sales will be.

The downside of the annuity business is that you've got twelve closings per year instead of four. You can't catch up if you miss a month. You have to perform every month to keep customers and keep the revenue flowing. The other side of the coin for maintaining old releases is that its much more difficult to do revolutionary upgrades because everyone is coming along at the same time.

6:36 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

CRM and Social Software Discussion

The discussion that followed Ad's talk wasn't supposed to be about the link between CRM and social software, but that's how it turned out. Some good out-takes from the discussion:

Mark Sunday (CIO, Siebel): 95% of all the issues that a CIO faces are either governance or legacy. Companies are running at less than 30% efficiency and its largely an IT problem. Yet, because of governance and legacy issues, they can't solve those problems.

Ad Nededof (Chairman, Genesys): We present ourselves (in our marketing) as perfect and then customers call and we're not. There's a perception gap between how we think we're doing and how our customers think we're doing.

Ross Mayfield (CEO, SocialText): Process breakdowns require that people route around the failure in process and get things done. Informal networks are how companies get work done. Social software is about strengthening those informal networks. Social software gets the information out of email and attachments and brings it "above the fold" so that it can be used, linked, and indexed.

Ben Smith (CEO, Spoke): The majority of sales professionals prefer an introduction to a sale and social networks (like Spoke and LinkedIn) let people use their contacts to get introduction to people they need to meet.

Ad: Doing business is making friends. Helping people understand other cultures is important.

Mark: CRM systems try to put structure around unstructured data. There's real potential for using social software to create the next generation of CRM systems.

Chris Roon: eBay is a great example of social software applied to a particular purpose.

Me: CRM systems follow Sarnoff's law: the value of the system is linear with the number of contacts. We don't let people build communities within our CRM systems. Thus we never see Metcalf or Reed scale benefits.

Ben: these kinds of systems have to work bottom-up because people own their relationships.

9:43 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Ad Nederof on Customer Service

Ad Nederlof, Chairman of Genesys and author of Customer Obsession: Your Roadmap to Profitable CRM kicked off this morning talking about customer service. He spent considerable time on the results of a survey they did. The bottom line: good customer service is the surest step to customer loyalty and the surest way to differentiate yourself.

he talks about what customers want:

• No waiting. Why don't more companies let you enter your phone number and then call you back?
• First call resolution -- no transfers. Know who's calling and know their history with the product.
• Personalized service. Refer to past experience. Let customers know you know them. Only possible if you have all the relevant information.
• Finally, customers want to be satisfied.

There is very little middleware that links the ERP systems that customer service depends on (such as CRM systems) and the relatively unstructured world of faxes, telephone calls, and emails. The goal ought to be optimizing the communication with customers. VOiP is a significant enabler in this regard. Lots of companies are working on this but proprietary routing (of all communications) is a significant hurdle.

One of the thoughts I had while listening to Ad is what recent innovations in the social software space inform or affect customer service. That, of course segues right into some interesting Cluetrain links.

8:49 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Enterprise Software Summit

I'm at the Enterprise Software Summit today. I arrived last night in time for dinner and had some great conversation. Ross Mayfield is here as well and blogged yesterday's events.

8:30 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

Jim Flowers on eVoting

Jim Flowers has responded to my post about the eVoting panel with some good, from the trenches, perspectives. Jim has been involved in Georgia state government in a number of posts for some time. He says "For Georgia going back (a question proposed for the panel) is simply not an option."

s the new system perfect? No. Will printing ballots solve the problem - perceived or otherwise? No. Once your copy leaves the station - the integrity is broken. And, auditing a paper trail takes tremendous resources - a cost not yet counted in the writings I have seen. Audit processes similar to the financial sector and security sector can be implemented to check the integrity of the machines - and that is good enough. There are far more important issues threatening our democracy (like PATRIOT, lack of voter participation, etc) which make this issue just one of many to weigh in our policy analyses.

From Jim Flowers' Radio Weblog
Referenced Tue Feb 03 2004 08:06:04 GMT-0700

Jim's fundamental point, I think, is that getting real people with real problems (i.e. elections office staff) in the debate will add significantly to level of discussion and move us closer to real solutions.

8:08 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

February 2, 2004

eVoting Panel Format and Questions

At next Monday's Digital Democracy Teach-In, I'm moderating the panel on eVoting. The panel is at 2:15 in California Ballroom C. The participants are

• Gary Chapman, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas
• David R. Jefferson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Bill Stotesbury, Vice President of Marketing, Hart InterCivic

This is a good, balanced panel and I think the discussion will be good. Here's how I like to do panels:

• Each panelist gets five minutes to introduce themselves and their positions. I discourage powerpoint slides, but if they must be used, the panelist is limited to 2 slides max.
• I will set-up a situation and ask for reactions, ask questions of specific panelists, and try to keep the conversation from lagging.
• Audience interaction and questions are encouraged anytime after the opening intros by the panelists. Questions should generally be directed to specific panelists in the interest of time. Other panelists are welcome to follow-up if they have something to add.

Here is a list of potential questions that I've come up with. Feel free to propose your own questions either in the comments below or by emailing them to me.

• What's the current state of eVoting? Should eVoting machines be used in the 2004 election or should we scrap them all in favor of paper until we gain more trust in them?
• To most people living in the Internet age, eVoting seems somehow inevitable. Is it inevitable? Is it something we fix and then move on or are we destined to always use paper if we want to trust the system?
• What's the difference between eVoting and Internet voting? Should we discuss them separately or is the difference insignificant from your perspective?
• I was CIO of Utah for almost two years and worked in the same office with much of the Elections Office staff. They know a lot about elections, but not very much about technology. Yet, I don't recall ever getting a question from them about this subject. In general, how "tech-savvy" are state elections people?
• Dan Gillmor has said "Electronic voting machines, the touch-screen voting machines, are ... a really shocking scandal because the lack of interest in this until recently [by] the major media...[T]he fact that people in government have been just sort of fecklessly running along with this is outrageous." Is this really a scandal or "much ado about nothing?"
• One of the primary complaints against eVoting has been that there is no paper trail and no way to verify the vote. Can we fix eVoting by simply adding some sort of voter verifiable paper trail as the California Secretary of State recently called for? Why have most eVoting machine manufacturers been against this? Would the public accept ATMs that had no verification mechanism?
• Another big complaint against the machines is the lack of transparency in something that is fundamental to our democracy. Open source proponents have long claimed that open source software is more secure because its open. Can we make eVoting systems more secure by opening them up? Can we open them up and protect the intellectual property rights of businesses? Is this something that governments ought require be open and then be willing to pay the cost for that?
• Many will say that independent review boards are enough to solve the transparency issue and yet some voting machines (I'm thinking of the Diebold case here) have been subjected to that sort of scrutiny, but still found to be flawed when opened to a more general examination. Can we ever trust an independent review board working behind closed doors? Do we have to?
• Let's talk about the DOD's SERVE program. A recent report (which was authored in part by one of our panelists, David Jefferson) concluded: "Because the danger of successful, large-scale attacks is so great, we reluctantly recommend shutting down the development of SERVE immediately and not attempting anything like it in the future until both the Internet and the world's home computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear." What is SERVE and what are its biggest flaws? Can Internet voting ever work and if so, under what circumstances?
• Many people think that eVoting is about the touch-screen system that is inside the polling booth, but in fact, an eVoting system has as much to do with ballot preparation, a difficult process, as it does with ballot presentation and vote counting. What issues arise in the ballot preparation portions of eVoting systems that we should be concerned about?

11:49 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This

RSS Winterfest Transcripts

If you missed the RSS Winterfest, transcripts are available on the web (see the right hand side). The transcripts are a little rough, but useful. The format looks like a series of weblog posts and was a little confusing at first--just read up from the bottom of the page. You might be particularly interested in The Future of RSS discussion, the use of blogs by the DOJ, and applications of blogs and content syndication. fixed these links to sort entries in ascending so you can just read from the top down.

8:53 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This