Phil Windley's Technometria

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November 30, 2004

Blogs vs. Reporting

I mentioned KSL Radio's blog yesterday. This afternoon, there was a brawl during the trial of some white supremacists in Salt Lake. Read this blogs entry by the KSL reporter, Ben Winslow, and then read and listen to his story as filed. In the blog, Ben is an eyewitness, but in the radio report Ben is a reporter. The blog entry is much more personal and real. Which one captures your interest more?

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JotSpot First Impressions

Playing with JotSpot was once of the things I'd put off until the book was done. Tonight, I grabbed the intro email (almost 2 months old) and signed in.

One of the first things I wanted to do, naturally enough, was change the machine generated password to something I thought I could remember, so I went searching for the usual "preferences" link and sure enough found it. What happened next, however, surprised me. When I clicked on it, I got just another wiki page with an edit button. When I edited the wiki page, I got a form instead of the usual freeform wiki entry box. The preferences forms are completely built inside the JotSpot form system. I liked that right off.

I worked through some of the examples in their cook book to get some experience with their forms. They're pretty slick, using the page metaphor to store data and create applications. I'v been intrigued for a while with this idea of pages as the basis for applications and this gives me some food for thought.

Overall, the execution is professional and things worked pretty well for a beta. There were a few times that I suspected it didn't like Safari (my browser), but I was able to work through the issues. For example, the default editing mode is "WYSIWYG" which requires IE. Seems like that would be easy enough to default to something else when someone is not using IE. Changing my default preferences to "Script Markup" fixed the problem.

The tool panel on the right hand side is context sensitive and customizable. I couldn't find out how to install what JotSpot calls "applications." Applications seem to be pre-packaged sets of forms and pages for a given task (like recruiting). There was a way to browse the gallery, but no way to install them on my Wiki even though some of them looked very cool.

All in all, I spent a fun hour playing around and seeing what Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer have been doing with their free time. I'm curious how JotSpot will be perceived by the market with respect to other wikis like SocialText or Twiki. (Bonus link: Analysis of JotSpot by the Twiki team.)

I think that regardless of feature set, JotSpot has a leg up because they're hosted. It feels like going to a Web site and starting to play around--something people are conditioned to do. JotSpot can thus sell to a marketing or sales person with a corporate credit card without the CIO or IT manager ever being involved. That's a huge win because it removes some significant friction from the transaction. If JotSpot is smart (and Joe and Graham are plenty smart) that's where they'll focus their marketing. Position JotSpot as the no hassle way to get things done that the IT department never seems to get to. They're well on their way with their CookBooks and pre-built applications.

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Done Writing

Yesterday, I turned in the final chapters for my upcoming O'Reilly book on digital identity. There's still plenty of work left with editing and what not, but its good to have the writing done. The book has three sections. Part I is about digital identity concepts. Part II is about digital identity technology, and Part III is about building an identity management architecture, or IMA. An IMA is aimed at creating flexible, interoperable identity infrastructure in loosely coupled organizations. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

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Principle of Least Privilege

Yesterday and Orem, Utah man was arrested for stealing names, addresses, and account numbers off of the checks that he processed at his job as a clerk at a convinience store and then selling them to would-be identity thieves. This case is not about digital identity, but its a good example of why the principle of least privilege is important. In general, whether online of off, we're asked to give up more identifying information than is strictly necessary. This clerk had access to more information than he needed, strickly speaking, to do his job. This is true when you use your drivers license to prove your age as well. The clerk can see you address and phone number, but they're irrelvant to the transaction at hand. One more reason to not use checks.

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Rural Utah: Split Personalities

Utah's Office of Rural Development has launched a new website: rural.utah.gov. I think its great to see these kinds of sites come up. One thing that struck me, however, is that this is very much a single agency site (just DCED). I think it would be more powerful if the Dept. of Agriculture were involved as well. This ought to be a joint site between at least those two agencies, maybe others as well.

Getting a single online focus from multiple agencies is one of the hardest things for government to do. The primary reason this is hard is because of how budgeting happens. DCED and Agriculture get separate budgets and the budgets create the silos. Utah has a great Web presence, but they've got to solve this split personality problem to get to the next level. Utah's done it before with sites like business.utah.gov, which bring together mutliple services from many agencies. This is the way is should be since not many people care about which programs are in which agencies. They just want help and information. A site like rural.utah.gov is a great opportunity to give them that single face, if its done right.

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November 29, 2004

Using RSS for Service Announcements

Why don't Comcast and other ISPs use locality specific RSS feeds to notify customers of upcoming schedule maintenance windows, customer service alerts, and so on? For that matter, why can't I subscribe to an RSS feed for any product I buy that alerts me to upgrades, and so on? As far as I know not even "in the RSS groove" companies do this. Create product specific RSS feeds and display them prominently in the "About" box, the product page on your Web site, and anytime the software is downloaded.

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Blox for Your Blog

Laszlo's got a collection of blog boxes of "blox" that allow you to put pictures, sound, links, clocks, and the weather on your blog. I've done similar things on the right hand side of this blog, but they're all one-offs. Having a collection of standard blox will be nice.

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KSL Has a Blog

Last week, I wrote about KSL Radio's RSS feeds. Today I was surprised to see some referrals from KSL's blog. I didn't know they had one. The blog is reporters posting their thoughts about stories, context, and even information about their preparation for a story. Very interesting. Subscribed.

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November 26, 2004

What's an i-name? Why Do You Care?

While, I was at Doc's blog, I noticed that he has an article at Linux Journal on i-names. Very good explanation of what an i-name is and why you care. Read it.

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Put Your News Online!

Doc Searls quotes a formula from Jeff Jarvis where Jeff says in part:

Cut up your shows into stories and put them all online.

After you air a story, it's fishwrap. Nobody can see it. If they missed it, well, that's tough for them. Is that any way to treat your public? Well, you don't have to anymore.

You should put up every story you do -- and not just as a stream but as files that the people can distribute on their own.

You can still make money on this -- in fact, you'll make new money: Put ads on the video; track those ads; and tack on a Creative Commons license that says people can distribute the video but cannnot muck with it. And you'll find something magical will happen: Your audience will market your product for you and distribute it for you and it won't cost you anything more. It's free money, damn it. Tell that to your stockholders.

From BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis
Referenced Fri Nov 26 2004 15:31:56 GMT-0700

This echos something I said last week about KSL and their RSS feed. KSL is quite progressive. I'd love to see them take this step. They're so close!

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More Library Software: Delicious Library

Delicious Library screenshot in "woodgrained shelving" mode

After writing about Booxter, several people wrote to me to tell me about Delicious Library from Delicious Monster (no connection to Del.icio.us). When multiple people respond to a post about a product, its a good sign that they are passionate about it, so I downloaded Delicious Library and gave it a try.

First, like Booxter, Delicious Library can use an iSight camera to scan bar codes and looks up information online to fill in the blanks. Here are some differences I noted:

• Delicious has a nicely designed, iTunes-like GUI. The Booxter UI is fine, but I I liked the Delicious UI a better. I have to say, however, I didn't like the woodgrain shelving. Fortunately, you can just view books in a list, which for more than a few dozen is preferable anyway.
• The iSight scanning on Delicious seemed a little quicker. Maybe I'm just getting better at holding books up in front of the camera?
• Delicious understands DVDs and CDs. I tried this on Booxter yesterday and it didn't know what to do with a DVD. I probably loan out DVDs more often than I loan out books, so this was a disappointment to me yesterday when Booxter wouldn't do it.
• Delicious has so ties to Amazon it made me wonder if Delicious had their associates number embedded in the program. There's a one-click "sell this book on Amazon" that would be handy for anyone who sells books through Amazon. I didn't test this, so I can't comment on how well it works.
• Delicious will sync with your iPod. So will Booxter. I haven't figured out yet why I'd want to do that.
• Both let you keep track of multiple collections if you need to.
• Delicious will import Booxter files, butI couldn't find an import feature on Booxter.
• Right clicking on items didn't bring up any kind of contextual menu. You have to use the finder-like "gear wheel" to select an action. This can be awkward since you have to select the item and then move the mouse to select the action.
• Like Booxter, delicious keeps track of items in your collection you've loaned out. The borrowers section is integrated with the Os X Address application, which is nice. Dragging an item to a borrower checks it out and the UI does a good job of helping you keep track of which borrowers have what and the due date with a nicely designed "check-out card." Unfortunately, dragging the item to the borrower seems to be the only way to check an item out. Seems like a natural item to add to the "Item" menu.
• Like iTunes, you can select multiple items and update information about all of them (like location or owner) all at once.
• Booxter does a better job of turning free-form input into pull down menus for consistency of input.
• Booxter looks in lots of places for information on books, whereas Delicious appears to only look at Amazon.
• Finally, when I close the two products, Booxter asks if I want to save the changes whereas Delicious just saves them as you enter them. The latter behavior is what I was expecting. I I enter an item, add my own information and then move onto another item, I expect its saved. I was annoyed that Booxter kept asking me if I wanted to save the changes.

Either of these programs will do a nice job with a home collection. Neither would scale to a lending operation that goes beyond dozens of borrowers. The biggest downside of Delicious is the price: $40. Booxter was just $15. Turns out that after doing some research that Delicious does have their Amazon associates number embedded in Library! Its alittle gauling to pay $40 for a simple app that they're making money from other ways. Still, if you like a good UI or you need to keep track of DVDs of CDs, then Delicious is probably the right choice. The good news is that they both have demo versions that let you enter a few dozen items before you buy. This is plenty to see which you like, so try them both out and decide for yourself.

Update: Filip de Waard has a brief review of Delicious Library on his blog that you might find interesting.

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November 24, 2004

Blogs are the Selves in the Public Space We Call the Web

Zoe

I took our dog on a walk this afternoon. While I was out, I listened to Dave Weinberger's distinguished lecture at the Library of Congress on blogging and knowledge. Several thoughts occurred to me as I listened.

• First I wish the iPod had Bluetooth so that when my phone rang, it would automatically pause. I got called three times and each time I had to pull the iPod out the zippered pocket I had it in, pause it, and then answer the phone. Moreover, since the recording was MP3, it lost its place each time as well and I had to go searching for it.
• As Dave talks about encyclopedias, the Dewey Decimal system, and the quest to create a system of knowledge, I realize that knowledge (the classification and relationship of information) is not something external in the sense that Aristotle would have thought about it, but something that's internal. We each create our own system of knowledge over the course of a lifetime and that more than anything defines who we are. Knowledge is inherently experiential.
• Dave talks about the Internet as a parallel public space. I think this ideas is in his book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, as well. He refers to blogs as the way we populate that public space with selves that have a voice and are persistent. That's a good way to think about blogging, I think. Its how I establish an identity on the Web.

This point about the Web being a place, brings to mind this post by Doc Searls where he contrasts the way the entertainment industry sees the Web and the way others see the Web. I'm convinced this differing world-view is what causes much of the strong feelings on both sides. Do you think Orrin Hatch sees the Web as a place or a plumbing system? I'd bet more the latter.

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Booxter Keeps Track of Your Library

I just ran across a cool little program called Booxter. Booxter is an OS X program for keeping track of books. Of course, there have been book databases for almost as long as there have been recipe programs (the killer app for computers in the home, if you believed the 1980's hype). There are several things that made this program stand out for me:

• Most impressive is its use of an iSight or other camera for scanning ISBN bar codes from books. I scanned half a dozen books in under a minute.
• Once it has the ISBN, it fills in most of the rest of the information you'd want to store from online sources including Amazon, Books Online, and the Library of Congress.
• There is a handy section for keeping track of who you've lent a book to and where it is. I have over 1000 books and I sometimes forget which books are home and which are at work, leading to some wasted time or trips.

The camera scan worked pretty well just holding the book up in front of my iSight camera, but it would be faster to have the camera mounted so that its looking down on the desk and just slide books under it for scanning in volume. It also can be finicky when its not in focus or square to the lens.

If you're a book lover and collector, like me, you'll like the idea of just having a record of your collection. I've resisted up until now because I was not willing to type all the relevant information into the computer. Now, I don't have to type anything. Works for me.

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Vintela Scores Microsoft Investment

Lindon Utah (yeah, that's where I live) based Vintela scored an investment from Microsoft yesterday rumored to be around $10 million. Vintela makes a product that allows Linux hosts to use Microsoft's Active Directory for authentication tasks. This is a product was found on the dustbin of SCO a year or so ago. When SCO started their rantings against Linux, they couldn't be working on a Linux product, so this got put aside. Some enterprising folks picked it up at fire sale prices and started a company with it. I know a few of the folks over at Vintela; they're good people. They've done well.

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Paul Allen, Blogger

Paul Allen, one of Utah's entrepreneurial lights and a friend, has a blog that's one year old yesterday. He takes the opportunity to talk about the power of blogging and makes a great reference to Benjamin Franklin. Ben signed his name B. Franklin, Printer, in spite of all his other accomplishments. Paul says:

I think I know why.

Words are powerful. According to scripture, they are more powerful than the sword.

Through the power of the press, Benjamin Franklin helped rally a nation to fight for independence from the British crown. He had helped Thomas Paine emigrate from England in October 1774.ÊWith some assistance fromÊFranklin, Thomas Paine went on to publish theÊpamphletÊCommon Sense, which more than any other tract rallied Americans (including George Washington) to fight for independence. It is reported that more than 500,000 copies of Common Sense were printed in a nation of just a few million people.

A great nation was formed by the power of words and the freedom of the press which gave expression to those words.

From Paul Allen: Internet Entrepreneur
Referenced Wed Nov 24 2004 08:58:00 GMT-0700

Paul goes one to talk about the things blogging has brought to him and signs off P. Allen, Blogger. Very good.

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November 23, 2004

Using ListGarden for Podcasts

As I contemplated creating some audio posts for my class next semester, I realized that I'd like to have an independent tool to create and manage the RSS feeds. Dan Bricklin's ListGarden seemed like the perfect solution but for one problem: When I looked, I realized it didn't do enclosures.

I actually finished the first draft of my last chapter (for my Digital Identity book) yesterday and so, as a reward before I started editing, I decided that a little recreational hacking would be fun. I grabbed the latest source for ListGarden (1.02) and modified it to use enclosures. I think I've been pretty true to Dan's coding style and usage. Here's the patch file for ListGarden.pm in version 1.02.

After I was done, I used the patched tool to produce this little test feed. I didn't have any MP3s that I'd produced, so I borrowed Adam Curry's introduction to iPodder. I hope he doesn't mind. I was able to add the feed to iPodder and have it download the enclosure and stick it in iTunes.

The tool uses an HTTP HEAD request to get the content type and length for any valid URL you enter as an enclosure to make it easy to use. If you put in your own type and length, they're left just as you specify them for situations where the server doesn't return the right information. As a result, you also need the LWP::UserAgent and HTTP::Request libraries installed in addition to those that Dan uses.

I'll send the changes to Dan. Maybe he'll incorporate them into the next version of ListGarden, but until then enjoy the patch. If you run into problems, feel free to contact me. I don't promise to fix any problems, but I might. :-)

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Axioms and Laws of Identity

Kim Cameron and Scott Lemon are thinking about identity in terms of laws and axioms. Kim's first law is "The Owner Decides. There are some follow-ups to that thought as well. Scott's First Axiom of Identity is that "Humans do not have any inherent identity." He makes some interesting arguments. These are good discussions to have.

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November 22, 2004

ACM Uses DOI

Friday I mentioned that academic articles need permanent URLs and that DOI might be the answer. Today, while looking at a column at the ACM portal, I noticed that they assign a DOI number to articles. Cool. IEEE is apparently also using them (as this link would seem to indicate), but they're not as up front about it, so its hard to tell.

The next step would be to promote the use of those in articles that the ACM publishes. Rather than a PDF, I'd rather have an HTML document with the references linked (via their DOI) directly to reference instead of a dead link to the bibliography.

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Weird Referrals on Warchalking

I've been getting some weird referrals the last week or so. About a month after I started this blog, I wrote a little post about warchalking and how we might want to use the symbols to tell people how to connect to Wi-Fi in conference rooms and other hot-spots that Utah was putting up. Because of that article, my blog got a link in a Guardian story on warchalking. Over the last week, I've had almost 1000 referrals from an article that's over two years old. Why? Is there a renewed interest in warchalking? Some robot stuck? I don't know.

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KnowNow's Agile LiveServer

My review of KnowNow's LiveServer is online at InfoWorld this week.

KnowNow 3 Enterprise Edition will be a breath of fresh air to IT shops stuck in large, monolithic integration projects. The simplicity and ease with which small integrations can be started and subsequently grown to encompass more and more of the back office should put KnowNow on every CIO's list of products to evaluate.

From InfoWorld: KnowNow shows off integration agility: November 19, 2004: By Phillip J. Windley
Referenced Mon Nov 22 2004 08:09:23 GMT-0700

The article is pretty tough on KnowNow for their enterprise pricing. I don't really mean to pick on them since they're certainly not alone. This one frustrated me a great deal, however, since I was very taken with the product's potential and wanted to tell a number of people I know to start using it since I could see how it would solve many of the integration problems they face. At the same time, however, I knew that these small companies would never spring the kind of money it would take to license an enterprise product.

I understand why companies price enterprise products like they do. Its not just about grabbing the most money. Its also about supporting an enterprise sales effort designed to appeal to CIOs and IT managers. That requires executive briefings, long sales cycles, user conferences in Las Vegas or Orlando, and so on. All of that requires money. There's also a respect angle. Products that cost $2000 don't get reviewed by senior management and aren't likely to be seen as solutions by the people "solving the big problems."

LiveServer is easy to install and use, so it was a lot of fun to review. It was a lot like a Web server in the sense that once you had it running, you thought of little projects to throw onto it at every turn. This is a very versatile tool. But that's really the issue.

Imagine, if NCSA had never done an open source Web server and Apache had never been born. What if installing and running a Web server cost $100,000? The Web would have never happened. What good ideas are hidden in products that will never see their true potential because they're priced out of range for innovative, small companies?

LiveServer shows Rohit Khare's influence even though he's no longer CTO. Lots of RESTful ideas that show HTTP to be a much more versatile and useful tool than most make it out to be.

One problem I had with the name: its hard for me to type "LiveServer" without slipping and accidentally typing "LiverServer." I had to check the copy carefully to make sure I got them all.

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November 19, 2004

Trackbacks and Identity

This morning's CTO Breakfast seemed to keep coming back to the same idea expressed in different ways. We started off talking about pornography filters and the possibility of using something like real-time blacklisting for SPAM to identify URLs and IP numbers that publish pornography to make it easier for filters to pick it out. At another point we talked about using information from logfilter to create blacklists for portscanning script kiddies and their zombies. Yet another conversation dealt with a Microsoft project for attaching comments to products based on their barcode.

What do all these conversations have in common? The use of an identifier to enable tracking some activity back to a source document or location. For example, another thing we talked about was using Del.icio.us for annotating Web pages. Imagine a Firefox plug-in that puts a pane on the side of the browser. Whenever you browse to a page, the pane shows all of the people who've bookmarked that page and what they put in their comments on Del.icio.us. Again, the URL provides a unique identifier for the page so that you can find every reference to it on Del.icio.us. Of course, Technorati and even Google are doing the same kind of thing.

As I was playing with Google's new academic search tool yesterday, I realized that one of the problems that academic papers have in the online world is the lack of a canonical identifier. Because journals do not routinely assign a URL to a paper, its difficult to refer to it in a way that always works.

Digital Object Identifiers are a possible solution to this problem. Here's an overview of how it works. Of course, DOIs are not just for academic papers, but anything represented digitally. This means that you can create a canonical name for lots of things that might not otherwise have them and then use those canonical names to do mundane things like track the digital object, or more exciting things, like creating trackback systems that find out who's referencing it, using it, commenting on it, and so on.

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November 18, 2004

GigaDial: Build Custom Feeds from Podcasts

Andrew Grumet and Martijn Venrooy have put together a very cool server-based application called GigaDial that let's you create your own custom Podcast feed from other feeds. Here's one I did that has a podcast from Adam Curry and one from the Gillmor Gang. As I find other things that are interesting to me, I can add them. I could create a custom feed for students to listen to or for my employees. I think there will be lots of applications for this.

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CTO Breakfast Reminder

We'll hold November's CTO breakfast tomorrow morning. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood.

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Starting a Business With No Money

Joel Spolsky points to several articles on starting a business without involving VCs.

• Peter Ireland on 10 reasons to shy away from venture capital
• Seth Godin's manifesto starting a business with no money.
• Joel's own VCs do not have goals that are aligned with the goals of the company founders

I would add on piece of unsolicited advice: never, ever use a reverse merger to raise money. Reverse mergers are the crack cocaine of the money raising arena and they set your company up for failure from the very start. The problem is that you're public long before your ready. What's more, many of your shareholders are not in it for the long haul or believers in your story. I've been meaning to write an essay on this. Maybe someday.

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KSL Radio has RSS

I've been trying to get news outlets in Utah to put up RSS feeds for a while. Russ Hill, News Director for KSL Radio wrote today to tell me that KSL Radio has an RSS feed. That's cool. They ought to put an "Add to MyYahoo!" button on the page as well for people who won't know what the XML button means. This is a good development.

Of course, having a radio station with an RSS feed immediately makes me think they ought to be using enclosures to send along the audio of the story. One feed with audio and one without. The audio of most of their stories are streamable from the Web page, so they already generate the content.

KSL Radio even has the opportunity to put ads in the enclosures. Place an ad at the beginning or end of the audio file and I'll likely listen to it. Do something like "this clip sponsored by Foobar Jeans..." In audio, you can attach the ad to the content more easily since its all sequential.

With this one discovery, KSL Radio has become my premiere news source for Utah news simply because I'll now see the latest stories from them several times a day without linking out to their site.

Think about seeing ten to twenty stories in your feedreader, clicking the ones you like and self-assembling a news program that you take on your iPod while you jog or drive into work. That is entirely possible using the technology we've already got.

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Google's Acadmic Search Tool

Google launched a search service aimed at academic literature. The services allows "you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web." The ranking is apparently by citation with is pretty cool since that's how most people would measure a paper's influence. Clicking on the "cited by" link gives you back the citing papers. Now, it they just had a link to the bibtex for the reference...

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November 17, 2004

Wal-Mart Suppliers Do the Slap and Ship

Last year Wal-Mart asked their suppliers to start using RFID tags on pallets and other large containers. Wal-Mart set a date of Jan 1, 2005 to get it working. Now, it looks like Wal-Mart's suppliers won't make the deadline. There are apparently technical hurdles, and the cost of the RFID devices is always an issue, but more daunting are the business case hurdles that many companies can't get over. Rather than going for an expensive integration of RFID technology into their entire operation, about 70% of the suppliers are doing what's called "slap and ship."

Essentially, what these suppliers will be doing on Jan. 1 is sticking an RFID tag on only a certain percentage of cases and pallets in warehouses that are closest to Wal-Mart's Texas distribution centers. Slap and ship involves minimal data integration and leaves the retail supply chain still blind to product movement. And it will apply to only a small percentage of the products shipped to Texas.

Not surprisingly, slap and ship is not a method endorsed by Wal-Mart. "It's something we sort of cringe at," says Simon Langford, Wal-Mart's manager of RFID strategy.

Langford won't say as much, but come Jan. 1, Wal-Mart could use some positive publicity about its RFID program. The reputation of the world's biggest retailer has been tarnished of late with allegations of unfair wage practices, hiring illegal immigrants and discriminating against female employees. And now some industry experts are predicting that suppliers' failure to meet the RFID mandate could be more bad press for the retail chain. Wal-Mart's biggest mistake, they say, was imposing a top-down mandate on its suppliers before the technology and business needs matured to where RFID-tagged inventory made good economic sense for suppliers, customers and Wal-Mart

From RFID - Tag ,You're Late - Why Wal-Mart's suppliers think RFID technology is not ready for prime time - CIO Magazine Nov 15,2004
Referenced Wed Nov 17 2004 17:51:39 GMT-0700

Wal-Mart's suppliers can't afford to make them mad, so they'll do just enough to stay in Wal-Mart's good graces. Some complain that the technology just isn't mature enough yet. Of course, Wal-Mart was hoping that they could hasten the development of RFID by providing a big push. They probably have and this might all still work out. I think too much will likely be made of this missed deadline. Wal-Mart is being bold and that's something companies in their position ought to do once in a while.

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November 16, 2004

How to Podcast

Here's my del.icio.us page of information on how to podcast. I'm thinking about creating audio files of commentary on papers I'm using in my grad class next semester. Hence the interest.

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Its All About Integration

Provo River near Bridal Veil Falls from the bike path (click to enlarge)

I spent 90 minutes this afternoon speaking to a vendor of VoIP solutions. I won't give the name to protect the guilty. :-) They had an excellent solution for what I was looking for and a number of features that were really innovative. There was just one problem--a fatal problem if it can't be fixed. I was looking for way to closely integrate a multi-party chat tool with their product. "Oh, we've got a chat agent!" was the reply. Unfortunately, it was woefully inadequate for the application. What's more, chat isn't their core competency. They're never going to resource chat (and a dozen other things) to the point where they can complete across the board. What's the solution? World class integration points.

Companies like the one I was talking to need to pay attention to just two things (at least on the technology side): (a) their core competency and (b) great integration points that are based on standards and easy to use. Otherwise, rather than selling your product's features, you'll constantly find yourself justifying its deficiencies. Much better to say "we integrate with XYZ's chat tool, but I'm sure we can integrate ABC's in a few days" than to try to prove your chat tool (or whatever) can make do to a group of techies who aren't buying your story, or your product.

To their credit, the company I was talking to didn't try to talk us into their chat tool, but rather offered to see what it would take to integrate an outside solution that works. That, however, is an equally difficult position to be in. It joins engineering and sales at the hip and before you know it, all your resources are tied up on small customization projects. I've been there and its not a fun place for a CTO to be. Building integration into the architecture of the product is the only way out.

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Network Bandwidth Cost by State

Anyone know where I can find a map that shows the cost of network bandwidth by state or region? Contact me if you do.

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Kim Cameron is Blogging

Kim Cameron, one of the architects of Microsoft's digital identity ideas, has started a blog. Subscribed.

Among the interesting posts was a scenario from Eric Nolin involving Bluetooth, a Polycom phone, federated MP3 player, and a conferencing service that all combine together to play your favorite music to you while you're on hold.

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RSS Edges Into the Bureaucracy

Wired has an article on RSS in government that features Utah's very own Ray Matthews and his RSS in Government weblog. Ray is quoted several times in the article. He's clearly one of the driving forces behind the use of RSS in government inside and outside of the state. He organized last week's Utah Syndication Summit that I blogged.

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November 15, 2004

Web Services and International Travel

Writing in CIO Magazine, Merritt Maxim makes a useful analogy between Web services and international travel. Immigration and Customs are about authentication, authorization, and content control. These problems only show themselves at scale.

In simple point-to-point Web service models, scale is manageable because the tight coupling between partners restricts the number of authorized identities to a very small number. However, as companies expose more Web services and allow more users access, bulk identities are not sufficient. Companies will require better visibility into who is accessing exposed Web services. Compounding the problem is that these new identities are not all in the perimeter device, meaning that the Web service now has to look for the identity credential. Just like the 747 analogy, having a sudden surge in demand for Web services from a diverse user population will choke Web service performance.

It is for these reasons the press and industry pundits are starting to talk about the importance of identity management in Web services deployments. People often dismiss the connection between the two since they tend to visualize Web services as application to application, where identity is straightforward. But as the point to point model expands, identities become more fine-grained and harder to manage. Plus, Web services are inherently unpredictable. Just as Immigration Control's staffing issues get complicated by delayed or canceled flights, Web service usage can fluctuate wildly based on business partner usage.

From Web Services: Who Goes There? - Oct 31, 2004 - CIO Opinion - CIO
Referenced Mon Nov 15 2004 11:13:56 GMT-0700

This is why identity management is a crucial part of Web services. Most organization will have trouble getting their hands around the identity management issue to the degree required by wide-spread Web services deployment.

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On eVoting and Stolen Elections

Kathy Dopp has made a splash with her analysis of voting in Florida. Kathy's analysis has led to a number of conspiracy theories about stolen elections. Kathy, who has an MS in Statistics, has been very involved in Utah's eVoting activities and told me before the election that she planned on doing a statistical analysis of the voting results. Wow! Did she ever.

I don't believe that the election was stolen. What I do believe, however is that election officials in Utah and elsewhere had better wake up and see that electronic voting is fueling a lack of trust in our voting system. There's no reason this has to be. In my experience, however, elections officials pay lip service to voting system integrity, but don't always make decisions that support it. They'll frequently just throw it in a pool of requirements like "cost" and then let them all battle it out. Often integrity ends up the loser when it ought to be paramount.

Utah hasn't made a decision yet and I hope that they will use the election as a learning opportunity. I think it will be tempting to say "see nothing terrible happened, eVoting works fine." That would be the wrong message since lack of evidence of a problem is not the same as not having any and it certainly doesn't show that problems won't happen in the future. Kathy's analysis and the subsequent discussion at least have helped move us past that.

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November 13, 2004

Case Study in the Problems Caused by Academic Paywalls

I've recently been thinking a lot about innovation in IT and specifically how innovation in academic computing research is exchanged (or isn't) with other communities of innovators. Today, while reading Steve Holden's blog, I ran across a perfect example of the problems academic innovators face. Steve says:

If you listened to Tech Rag Tear Out Podcast #9 and thought the part about Internet user motivations was interesting,Ê I got email back from one of the authors - Thomas Stafford - that additional reports have been written by himself/colleagues:

• Stafford, Thomas F. (2003), "Differentiating between Innovators and Laggards in the Uses and Gratifications for Internet Services."Ê IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 50(4), 427- 435.
• Stafford, Thomas F., Marla Royne Stafford, and Lawrence L. SchkadeÊ (2004), "Determining Uses and Gratifications for the Internet," Decision Sciences, 35(2), 259-288.

Like most "academic" computer science publications it is very hard to find "free" reference URLs, so my best recommendation is to go to a major university's computer science library and do a photocopy of these there.Ê Sometimes they can be ordered online for $5-10 each.

From Steve Holden's Weblog
Referenced Sat Nov 13 2004 10:38:53 GMT-0700

So, if I read this right, here's essentially what happened, Steve finds something from Stafford that is interesting and mentions it, but can't provide links to it because its not available online, at least not without going through a paywall.

Anyone who might be interested in Stafford's ideas is going to have to go to a LOT of work to get to the publications (relative to the work they have to go to to get to other things on the net). Consequently, not many will ever really see the details of what Stafford thinks. Stafford loses relative to innovators who don't publish in academic journals and simply make their work available online. We lose because Stafford may have some good ideas, but most will never know because the potential benefit is exceeded by the short term cost of getting to the ideas.

The net has changed how information is exchanged and the power of linking cannot be ignored. Ideas that flow freely are more competitive than those that are restricted in some way. Ironically, academics has always prided itself on the free flow of information, but the net has turned that on its head to the point that now academic researchers are the ones who find themselves in the most restricted space of any innovators in the IT space.

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November 12, 2004

Utah RSS in Government Publisher's Meeting

One of the reasons I went to Salt Lake today was to attend the Utah Government RSS Publisher's meeting. This group meet at irregular intervals to talk about how governments can use RSS. Ray Mtthews is the leader of the group and put a splendid program together for today: Jordan Frank from Traction Software and Bill French from Myst Technology Partners.

Jordan Frank from Traction Software who makes the TeamPage product. (See Jon Udell review at InfoWorld.) TeamPage uses WebDAV for document management, has pluggalbe LDAP authentication, and has support for mobile devices. Its used by the DOD (CIO's office), Justice (Western States Information Network), Homeland Security (AZ Customs and Border Security) and State of Connecticut (Network Security definition and tracking). The State of Utah, by the way, uses Movable Type for some of these same purposes.

Traction positions teampage as a "time-ordered journal" as opposed to a "personal podium." This is really just marketing to position themselves "above" the blogging world as a "serious piece of enterprise IT software." The thing walks like a blog, talks like a blog and looks like a blog. At its core, it's a blog. In fact, if I showed you one of their pages, you'd have a tough time telling that it wasn't produced by Movable Type. The difference is not so much that TeamPage isn't a blog, but that its a system for using multiple blogs in concert.

Traction's RSS feed is dynamic, allowing custom RSS feeds by keyword, poster, and so on. Access control allows RSS feeds to protected for certain users.

There are some interesting ways that they system puts blogs together for enterprise use. For example, projects can contain multiple blogs and each project can have various ways of aggregating the content from these blogs including keyword and category. People have "homepages" on the system that shows projects and alerts that they're interested in.

I have to admit that I see some immediate benefit to these features. For example, I use blogs in my research lab, but there's no good way for me to take interesting entries from the blogs my research assistants write and promote them to the lab homepage. All the pieces are there to make this work in Movable Type, for example, but its not built out yet.

They use blog tools to create a forum where users leave comments as blog posts in certain blogs about certain topics. This also seems like a good way to integrate discussion forum and blogging tools. People can leave comments on a blog about a topic the author has posted, but there's not usually a way for them to start their own thread in a way controlled by the owner of the blog.

Many of the interesting features of TeamPage are enabled by support for more sophisticated access control. The ability to selectively control multiple actions on a project by project basis from a corporate directory enables the use of the software for things you might not use a standard blog package for.

Another addition that's more sophisticated that what you'd find on a standard blog is a searching tool that does more than just full text search. For example, it allows you to triangulate on specific pieces of information by selecting several articles and then finding other information like those articles.

Another interesting feature is what Traction calls the "collector." The collector is like a shopping cart for articles. You use the collector to collect references to posts in the system as you drive around and then you can do various things with the collection such as email them to someone, post them somewhere, create a portlet called a linkbox, publish them to PDF, and so on. This is handy for sending out a list of references to someone, promoting articles to the homepage, or creating a list of articles for other uses. This would be handy. I'd especially like to have it grab not only blog articles, but pictures, documents, and other content.

I'd like to see a Del.icio.us-like way of collaboratively linking articles on a multiple blog platform.

Bill French from MyST Technology Partners also spoke today. I've interacted with Bill several times online, but we'd never met in person, so I was anxious to listen to him speak.

Bill's talking about syndication as IT infrastructure. Syndication is about effective information interchange and that drives value creation. Bill asks "what will the world be like in 10 years when there's 500 billion XML documents on the Web?" This vast amount of data can be browsed, it will have to find its way to the people who want it.

MyST platform is a loosely coupled, framework of legos for solving IT problems. Presentation architecture is consistent, based on XSLT, and standard's based (RESTful). This makes it easy for Google and other search engines to find and catalog content.

Bill gives the following requirements for syndication

• Scalability and agility: e.g. how many formats do you support? Can you add new formats easily?
• integration: past and future
• Pervasive security and permission controls
• Localization and encoding e.g. translation of feeds to Spanish
• Quality assurance and testing e.g. are there certain keywords in a feed?
• Legal and compliance e.g. look for trademarks, copyrights, personal data, etc.
• Discoverability
• User satisfaction and performance
• Spelling and grammar
• Historical snapshots
• Valid XML, all links work
• Performance tracking e.g. how do you track click-thrus, hits, etc.
• Staging, testing, promotion, scheduling, etc. of feeds

Dividends from using syndication as an infrastructural component include

• Ability to meet shifting demands
• Rapid time-to-market
• Greater interoperability
• Improved application quality

Bill says that its time for organizations to creating the position of "newsmaster" which is analogous to "webmaster" about strictly about syndicated data in the enterprise.

Bill gives some examples of companies using their platform for infrastructure level syndication. Verisign has a syndication site called rss.verisign.com. Intel has one at rss.intel.com. Another example is a "learning blogosphere" that they created for a business class (BIT320). Students use any Weblog software they like and there's a public environment, but using syndication, MyST created a private area that incorporates all of these and can use it to comment on their work, see what's new, and so on.

Bill shows how one of these blogosphere can be used as an information space for product research and competitive intelligence. The platform harvests information from blogs on Oracle and other forums. The system interoperates with Office 2004's research pane using MOSTEL(?) so that you can search this system from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

Partner watch is a service that creates an RSS feed of alerts whenever certain Websites stop mentioning certain words. For example, if you're a PR person, you might want to know when certain magazines or sites stop mentioning your product or company and are mentioning your competitors.

Dedicated feedreaders (like MyST's Flash-based Kerry news reader) will be important. They represent packaged content that people can get all at once with one install and it can be presented in specific contexts.

Bill's parting comment: RSS is too important to ignore. Your company needs a syndication strategy. Bill's talk was excellent, by the way. Lots of innovative ideas that I'm sure caused everyone to rethink how they view syndication technologies. Just what I was looking for.

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MyYahoo! Tips for RSS Publishers

I had meetings in Salt Lake this morning, so I'm in the Salt Lake Public Library right now catching up on email and some reading. Its one of my favorite spots to hang out downtown. On the drive up, I listened to Scott Gatz's talk from Gnomedex on MyYahoo!. I learned a few things that I didn't know, so I thought I'd pass them on.

First, notice the "Add to MyYahoo!" button on the left hand column of this blog. Easy to do and easy for people to use. That's one big advantage that hosted feedreaders have: this is all just Web stuff. Here's the URL:

<a href="http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=[your RSS URL here]">
 <img border=0 src="http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/my/addtomyyahoo2.gif">
</a>

Also, when Yahoo! comes by to slurp your RSS feed, the agent is called YahooFeedSeeker and it leaves statistics about your RSS feed and MyYahoo in your logs. Here's a recent entry from my logs:

66.218.65.53 - - [12/Nov/2004:03:44:42 -0700] "GET /rss.xml HTTP/1.0" 304 0
"-" "YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; 
http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html; users 33; views 5314)"

Notice the users and views tags in the agent field. They give the number of MyYahoo! users who subscribe to that particular feed and how many views its had (not sure about what time period this is over--probably from the start).

There's also a FAQ for publishers, which I had a little trouble finding. The FAQ contains a few useful tidbits. For example, MyYahoo! has a ping API that allows Web sites to notify MyYahoo! when their content has been updated. There's an XML-RPC and a RESTful interface. This URL would notify MyYahoo! that this blog has been updated:

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=http://www.windley.com/rss.xml

I happen to think that MyYahoo! opening up to RSS in a big way was a milestone event. Most companies would not be as open about allowing other content onto their system. Its a gamble for Yahoo! and one I hope pays off for them. Their willingness to play big and not create walled gardens of content says loads about their understanding of network effects.

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November 11, 2004

Scale-Free Networks

Today Scoble writes about a conversation he had with Steven Levy about being on the A-List. Robert says he consciously combs through less read bloggers to find things not seen before. This of course, brings to mind Clay Shirky's piece on power laws. That, reminded me that I wanted to post something about Peter Denning's latest column in Communications of the ACM on Network Laws (PDF).

Denning, as usual, gives a wonderfully cogent tutorial on power laws and talks about scale-free networks. Scale-free networks are networks that have power-law connection statistics. Scale-free networks have two properties:

• Growth: new nodes appear at random times
• Preferential attachment: a new node connects to an existing node with probability proportional to the number of connections already at that node.

Note that I'm paraphrasing rather than quoting because the PDF won't let me grabs snippets conviniently.

The bottom line is that the power-law distribution is self-reinforcing in scale-free networks. Denning mentions that viruses spread quickly in scale-free networks. The same is true of ideas. Other important thoughts: failure of a random node in a scale-free network has negligible effect on connectivity, but failure of a hub does significant damage.

Large social networks are scale-free. To spread an innovative idea, bring the hubs (think Scoble, Doc, or Winer here) on board. To stop an innovative idea, convince the hubs its of no value. The business of spreading innovations is a skill that improves over time.

Denning also talks about the idea that many of the biggest innovations of our time like the Internet, Web, and Linux were built by consortia. Viewed from the perspective of the network a consortium is a consciously built hub in the scale-free social network.

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Messaging Architectures

Tim Bray talks about "store and forward" and "post and poll" messaging architectures. "People who are designing message interchange frameworks that might need to become Internet-scale should consider this, and be careful of architectures that donât fall into one of these two baskets, because nothing else has yet been shown to work."

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November 10, 2004

New Feature: Showing Delicious Activity

I've added a new feature on the right hand side column: a box showing the last 5 bookmarks I've made on del.icio.us. I ran across Jeff Veen's tutorial on putting Delicious on your blog. Since I already use Feedsplitter, this only took a few minutes to set up. What I'm doing isn't the most efficient way to do things since every homepage hit results in multiple calls to Feedsplitter (one for forum comments and one for Del.icio.us), but its more loosely coupled than generating a file and then including it. Loose coupling often requires a tradeoff of efficiency. The benefit is that later I don't have to remember as much about how all this hooks together when I change something--it will likely just keep working. I've experienced this kind of serendipidous flexibility before and its nice.

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VMWare ESX Review

Tom Yager reviewed VMWare ESX for InfoWorld this week. This was a review I wanted to do, but he beat me to it. :-) I think virtualization is a tool that not enough IT managers use yet. I've got ESX installed a couple of Dell 6650 4-way SMP boxes with 16Gb of memory connected to a SAN. This set-up is my virtualization testbed and serves as the platform for study we're doing in my lab. At some point in the not too distant future we hope to have some hard data on the performance trade-offs. Power is one big reason to go virtual that Tom doesn't mention in his article. Data centers are getting denser and hence the power/square foot ration is going up--way up. I believe virtualization on dense servers can reduce overall power requirements and we're trying to gather evidence to support the idea.

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Lurking Software

Chad Dickerson asks "is Wiki under your radar?" in his latest column at InfoWorld. Most of the column is about his exploration of Wikis and deciding which one to install at InfoWorld. The kicker, is that after all that, he finds that its already been installed months before. Some CIO's get nervous when that happens. I always say that "I love when good things happen and I didn't have to push it." Most IT people will scratch their itches and that's a good thing, in general. The trick is discovering these rogue projects and then finding ways to grow them into services that the rest of the organization can use.

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Using Del.icio.us

Jon is expounding the virtues of Del.icio.us:

What Roland Piquepaille is doing here, like what I'm doing here, begins with self-interested personal information management. We categorize our own items first and foremost for our own benefit, so that we can find things more ea