Phil Windley's Technometria

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June 30, 2006

The Conversation Keeps Evolving

Doug Kaye's announced a new, hybrid business model (PDF) for the Conversations Network. Doug's vision has been that the Conversations Network would be non-profit, but that has proven to place limitations on the network that limit its ability to scale, build tools, and grow channels like IT Conversations.

As a result, Doug is moving to a hybrid business model. The Conversations Network will continue as a non-profit. It will own audio and preserve it, have a license to the tools that make it work, and serve as a home for many new channels.

Doug and Michael Geoghehan have formed a new company called GigaVox that will be for-profit, own software, pay employees, and run some channels. GigaVox will license software to the Conversations Network. Nothing in the Conversations Network (including money and assets) will flow back to GigaVox.

You can listen to Doug explain all this. I'm excited to see Doug evolving this model to find out what works.

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June 29, 2006

Abandoning SCode CAPTCHAs

The CAPTCHA experiment was a failure. I didn't get any blog spam, but I heard from a few people who tried to post comments and failed (other's succeeded). In the end, I didn't feel like debugging it, or worse driving people away, so I determined to abandon it.

Still, I need a way to combat comment spam, so I went to a simpler, text-based CAPTCHA. This isn't as flexible as I'd like, but it's likely to do the trick. The main problem with it is having to edit code. When I update MT, I'll have to reinstall it. Of course, that's not the first time I've done that.

If you use this solution with MT 3 or above, you'll find that Six Apart changed how comment fields are generated in the system templates, making it impossible to add the spam text field. To fix this, use this replacement for <MTCommentFields>. This has the added benefit of putting the new spam text input field in just one place so that you can edit it more easily if needed.

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Crying Out for a RESTful Service Interface Description Language

Dave Rosenberg is frustrated with Web 2.0 apps that don't play well together:

If you haven't seen any of the 37 Signals stuff, it's great. Easy to use, well-designed etc. But even they don't offer a completely integrated suite of all of their own apps. I need Basecamp integrated with MyYahoo and Salesforce.com to really be productive. I want all my stuff on one page at one URL, in sync across multiple computers and visible on my handheld. This was the promise of portals but it remains unfulfilled. ... To me the big opportunity of Web 2.0 development is the ability to create a better user experience based on features etc. Instead we are ending up with a morass of social-networking, photo-sharing redundancy. And while much of this stuff is cool and potentially usable, it's not enough.

From Frustrated by Web 2.0's lack of multi-site integration
Referenced Thu Jun 29 2006 11:39:02 GMT-0600 (MDT)

Adam Fields picks up the thread with an observation that UNIX command line programs have a similar problem and solve it with a pipe and flags that changes the modality of the application to make it more suitable for a specific use. He makes mention of the fact that it's more complicated due to dynamic interfaces. I had another riff on the same theme...

Web services (with SOAP) introduced a wonderful style of application integration because the standards associated with them encourage intermediation. Web services intermediaries offer all kinds of services that makes managing and integrating multiple services easier.

RESTians are fond of making fun of the myriad standards associated with Web services. I'm sympathetic. Sometimes it seems like it's gotten way out of hand. But these standards have an aim of creating context that is sufficiently well-defined that intermediation and orchestration are not just possible, but easy.

Intermediation and orchestration are possible with HTTP, but not really easy because that well-defined context is missing. In UNIX, stdin, stdout, environmental variables, and so on are the all the context that necessary. Integrating Web 2.0 apps is more complicated.

A good first step would be a well-accepted service description language for HTTP-based Web APIs. WSDL doesn't work in RESTian services and there's no RESTful alternative. Moreover, most people don't even see the need. Well, read Dave and Adam's posts--there's the need staring you in the face. The only way that we'll get to a place where Web 2.0 apps are more easily integrated is when we have a service interface description language and other metadata standards for RESTful services.

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June 28, 2006

Will Vonage Die?

This analysis from Art Reisman says that Vonage is going to die. Art's claim is that once the incumbent players decide that VoIP is a real challenge there's nothing to keep them from offering the service more efficiently at the same price-points.

I don't disagree with this view to a degree. I've looked at VoIP as a business in some depth on some prior business deals I was considering and there's nothing about what Vonage is doing from a technology or business standpoint that offers significant competitive advantage. What's more, this is a business where margins are thin and so size and operational excellence are critical to success. The incumbents already have both of those in spades.

Where Vonage has any advantage at all, it's in their ability to take advantage of their green field position to do things that are more complicated in a business with lots of legacy issues. One example that springs to mind is Vonage's online provisioning system and it's link to their after-sale, self-service account management system (see Customer Starts With Custom). I moved all my phones to Vonage earlier this year and I love the ability Vonage gives me to manage features in my account whenever I like.

In the end, however, the gist of the article is spot-on: all services from all players will eventually be value-adds running over IP. Will Vonage die? Maybe, but I think they have an opportunity to emphasize the advantages they get from being new and small to out-maneuver the competition. Either way, the consumer will win and Vonage is part of making that happen.

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Using Web Analytics Tools

Paul Allen says that this article on using Web analytics well is one of the best he's seen. I use analytics everyday on my own blog to see what keywords people are using to find things I've written, which stories are capturing people's attention, and where readers are coming from.

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June 27, 2006

Identity Commons Sessions

Eugene Kim has posted a summary of Identity Commons sessions from last week's Berkman Identity Mashup. He says:

There are a number of grassroots community projects that involve multiple stakeholders and that are happening independently of any centralized direction.

These decentralized efforts could all benefit from some shared infrastructure, which could be as simple as a shared, neutral brand (i.e. "IdentityCommons") or as complicated as a set of rules that help ensure fair participation and governance among multiple parties.

Our strategy is to build an organization organically that addresses the needs of these different community projects.

From eekim.com: EEK Speaks
Referenced Tue Jun 27 2006 20:03:17 GMT-0600 (MDT)

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Blog CAPTCHA

The last week or so I've been getting slammed by "Nice site" blog comment spam that just wants a link to some dubious Web site. I'd turned on "approval for everyone" but that just means that it doesn't show up on the site--I still have to delete it and it got to be a pain.

In an effort to fight spam while keeping my site as open to feedback as possible, I've added a CAPTCHA to the comment page. The package I'm using is SCode (Movable Type). It's not too sophisticated, but it works and I imagine it will ward off the big offenders for now.

The hardest part of installing it was getting the GD Library built. It's got 4 or 5 dependencies and then I had a few other problems which were the result of stupidity on my part (using an older version of the library I had lying around). After that, it was as easy as installing and configuring most MT plugins.

As I was working on this, I began to think of a CAPTCHA as a very broad form of authentication--in this case letting people broadly identify themselves as "human." That's all I care about and so making people log in would be asking for too much specificity in their identity parameters.

Feel free to try it out.

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Prepare to Be Aggregated People!

Marc Cantor introduced the alpha of his PeopleAggregator. I spent a little time on it and built a profile, etc. The interesting part from an identity perspective is built-in support for SXIP 2.0, OpenID 1.0, and Flickr ID in the system, in addition to the native authentication service.

As Marc said in a note to me:

We'll be introducing the notion of using any or either or these ID systems within our system, so they'll be a lot of 'explaining' to do. But instead of hiding all that away (as I've been told I should) we're going to proudly wear our geeks hat high, and try and show people why tying into user-centric ID systems is a good thing.

Indeed. I think Marc is very good to embark on an user-centric identity experiment as he launches his baby. This will add to their headaches, but give the identity community a much-needed source of data, bug reports, and other fun stuff.

Congratulations Marc and thanks.

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June 26, 2006

ClaimID Launches

ClaimID has launched. ClaimID is a service that allows you to aggregate and contextualize URLs that are about you. So, if you've got a common name or there's material about you that's hard to find, you can make sure it's findable. If you've got a blog and are good about linking to things about yourself, it probably won't offer much benefit, but for people who don't blog, this could be a valuable service. There's a link to reputation here.

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June 22, 2006

Identity 2.0 Talk

My presentation on Identity 2.0 (PDF) went well this morning. I was first up (8:45), so the crowd was a little smaller than I'd have hoped for, but I got some good questions and lots of interesting discussion afterwards. Rod Boothby spent some time going over his talk from yesterday with me since there was some good agreement on key points.

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Freelance Courier

I'm not sure what to make of this: a freelance courier match-up service. There are so many problems on so many levels. First, things on the site don't work (try clicking the FAQ), but more importantly, reading the list of suggestions (warning it's a MS Word document) made me queasy. Am I just too much of a geek to think carrying packages on airplane for other people, having to meet them, develop some bond of trust, exchange driver's license data, and so on is too creepy to even contemplate? Maybe a "people person" would think this sounds fun. Do you?

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Yahoo! Local Adopts Microformats

Dan Farber has some great coverage of Supernova at Between the Lines. We'll have talks from Supernova at IT Conversations later--I'm looking forward to it. This post on microformats talk about Yahoo! Local announcing that they are supporting microformats to give structure to their listings. Very good.

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June 21, 2006

Getting People to Use Collaborative Tools

The Web 2.0 session was postponed until tomorrow, so I went to a session called "Collaborative Workspaces: Making the Transition." The panel was moderated by Jessica Lipnack, CEO & Co-founder, NetAge Inc. Other panel members were Tor Eneroth, Culture Manager, Volvo IT; Mike Wing, VP, Strategic Communications, IBM; and David Wires, Partner, Wires Jolley LLP.

Tor Enerath led out talking about helping people change. He described the problem as being a disconnect between people's objective and subjective thinking. We spend 80% of our time focused on the objective side, but 80% of our problems are subjective. Before you see a behavioral change, you need to change attitudes and beliefs. Rather than throwing tools at people, you need to start with the people. Top management's behavior is the hardest to change because they have strong mental models of what's worked in the past.

Next up was Mike Weng. IBM has been making a shift over the years toward less centrally controlled environments. IBMers rate the internal intranet as a source of trusted information equal to managers and co-workers. This is unheard of in corporate communications. Even when it's painful, you have to make information available to employees.

Mike talked about when IBM was on the ropes and they started putting financial figures out to employees. There were many divisions that didn't like "their people" having access to that information. Intranets and other information sources can disintermediate managers and keep them from hoarding information or using it to their own advantage.

David Wires is a practicing trial lawyer. When he started his clients, witnesses, and other interactions were all within a few miles. Now, they are around the entire world. Lawyers are reluctantly transitioning from quill pens. They consider email to be on the "cutting edge." Collaborative technologies have to work the first time and be invisible.

Wires is speaking of case information sites specifically, but the advise is good for anyone building sites they want people to come back to: Don't will your Web site with junk. Archive old information. Put current information on it. Update it daily. Otherwise, people won't come.

Wires says the when you shift the information flows, you're also changing the power and authority structures. That will create a lot of pushback from people who are losing in the power shift. This goes back to Wing's comments on disintermediating middle management.

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More Less Is More

If you think Jason Fried was just some geek who doesn't know what he's talking about when he says Less is More, be sure to listen to Moira Gunn's interview with Cheskin CEO Darrel Rhea where he specifically talks about how compulsively adding features to products doesn't lead to customer satisfaction. You may not be able to please everyone--get over it.

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Collaboration Technologies and Timezones

I've switched venues to the Collaborative Technologies Conference, also in Boston this week. I'll be giving a talk in Identity 2.0 tomorrow morning at 8:45. The conference is at the Seaport, a very nice hotel near the Boston World Trade Center. I was able to take the T from MIT, where we were this morning, right to the WTC for $1.25. What a bargain. The silver line, is this weird underground bus thingie; first time I've ever seen that.

CTC is about collaboration and the tracks look quite interesting. I'm hoping to take in a session on the Web 2.0 enabled enterprise this afternoon and then some others tomorrow before I have to bug out. The conference scheduler is run by Trumba and let's you select events from the agenda and then add them to any number of Web-based calendars or download them in iCalendar format.

I was disappointed to see that it suffered from the time zone problem common to most calendars. When I travel, I leave my calendar set to Mountain time since I want it to be relative to where I'm at. When I schedule an appointment for next week, I don't want to have to do the math to make sure it ends up at the right time. The problem is that calendars aren't made relative to the individual using them, so all the events came in two hours early and I had to manually reset them.

Amazing that we still have so much trouble with time zones. Not that I'm claiming that dealing with them is easy. I hate trying to schedule meetings where you're dealing with more than two time zones--someone invariably misses do to a math error. Maybe we really will have to move to timezone tribes to keep it all straight.

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Unifying Internet Identity Systems

I put a post about today's OSIS announcement, a project to unify addressable identifier systems (LID, OpenID, XRI) and token based identifier systems (Higgins, CardSpace, SXIP), at Between the Lines. This is a historic development.

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Principles of Reputation

Building the open space agenda for day three (click to enlarge)

Today was an open space day. The more I participate in open space, the more I'm convinced that it's the right way to do workshops. I wish we'd had two days of open space because the agenda for today was so packed with things I wanted to hear about. The first session I attended was labeled "The Laws of Reputation." I also wanted to go to Marty Schleiff's meeting on XRI, but I felt like I had to do the reputation thing.

I don't know that we got to "laws" as such, but we did get some ideas out that might be useful as principles:

• Reputation is one of the factors upon which trust is based
• Reputation is someone else's story about me - this means that I can't control what you say about me although I may be able to affect the factors you based your story on. Also, every person should be able to have their own story about me.
• Reputation exists in the context of community - this is different than saying "communities have a reputation about someone."
• Reputation is based on identity - reputation, as someone else's story, isn't part of your identity, but is based on an identity or set of identities.
• Reputation is a currency - while you can't change it, reputation can be used as a resource. Paul Resnick has a paper showing the value of a positive eBay reputation.
• Reputation is narrative - you have to apply metaphor to interpret, reputation is dynamic becase the factors that affect it are always changing, reputation may require weaving together of plot lines.
• Reputation is based on claims (verified or not), transactions, ratings, and endorsements. - this brings up the issue of evidence, recourse for slander or mistakes, etc.
• Reputation is muti-level - a reputation isn't just based on facts, but is also based on other's beliefs about the target of that reputation. This requires some way of signaling beliefs to others.
• Mutiple people holding the same opinion increases the weight o that opinion - repeat behavior is also another way of weighting reputation.

The participants in this session were: Daniel Lulich, Daniel Perry, Martin Rosvall, Mari Kuraishi, Eric Harris-Braun, Matthew Hochhauser, Daniel Hausermann, Phil Windley, David Evan, Casper Biering, and Niegel Jacob.

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IT Conversations is the Site of the Week

06212006 (click to enlarge)

David Fuhrer was kind enough to forward a report (with pictures) from Bangkok Thailand that IT Conversations was the "Site of the Week" in the Bangkok Post. That was a surprise from an unexpected quarter. David was kind enough to send along a picture of the page as well. Here's a shoutout to listeners in Thailand!

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June 20, 2006

ID Mashup Photos

John Clippinger (click to enlarge)

I've got photos from the Berkman ID Mashup on my gallery. There are also photos at Flickr, including this prize from David Berlind. At some point, I may need to start using Flickr instead of my own system. I really with that Flickr could see and use my photos in a decentralized manner so I didn't have to choose.

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Towards and Open Identity Layer

The first afternoon session was on Towards and Open Identity Layer and Trusted Exchange: What Might it Look Like? The panelists were Paul Trevithick, Parity Communications; Dale Olds, Novell; Tony Nadalin, IBM; Kim Cameron, Microsoft; and Marc Rotenberg, EPIC. John Clippinger, Berkman Center was the moderator.

One of the topics that was discussed was security. Kim Cameron made the point that CardSpace doesn't build all the walls that might need to be built, but it changes the paradigm so that the walls can be built.

Marc Rotenberg brought up the issue of electronic voting systems. He says that there are two very important and conflicting interests in making voting systems work: auditing and secrecy of ballots. Decoupling the identity of the voter from the audit trail is difficult. Kim said that voting, like sex, is better left in the physical world.

Caller ID was an interesting service when it rolled out because it confronted people with the notion of identity in an electronic world. There are two lessons: identity is highly dynamic (depending on context) for the same person and people want to be able to affirmatively assert their identity rather than having the default set against them.

Opt-in scales. In a "do not call list" scheme, there's nothing that prevents a company that you have a relationship with from contacting you. More people have signed up for the government's "do not call" list than voted in the last presidential election.

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Long Tail Markets, Social Commerce and Open Business Models

I'm attending the session on Longtail Markets, Social Commerce, and Open Business Models. The panelists are Philip Evans, Boston Consulting Group (moderator) Greg Steltenphol, adina, Glenn Fogel, Priceline.com, Mark Greene, IBM, Karim Lakhani, MIT Sloan School of Management, and Jean-Francois St. Arnaud, My Virtual Model, Inc.

The discussion quickly moved to whether users will be interested in open identity or not. Glenn Fogel says that his customers just want to get tickets and reservations and move on. Priceline has 17 million customers. They've collected data on these, but most of them didn't volunteer it by filling in preference forms. They gave up this data as part of a transaction. Bingo!

Is this a question o friction? Might not the right infrastructure make people more willing to share information? I have given Amazon all kinds of information about myself over the years. I've done it both voluntarily and indirectly. I do it because I want a relationship with Amazon. As a customer, I enjoy the benefits of having Amazon know things about me, so I willing give them data. (I just bought a book last week from my recommendations list, for example.)

I a longtail world, who has the information about the consumer? Does it go to the user? Is there anyone who scales to that level? Greg Steltenphol talks about correlating levels of participation with access to data within systems.

There was a discussion of whether we should trust for-profits or non-profits more with our identity information. Someone made the comment that for-proifts have an incentive to maintain data, while non-profits do not. As a consequence, the data might deteriorate.

Jean-Francois St. Arnaud showed off a retail model system that shows people how clothes will look on them. Clearly, to build such a model, they have to get a lot of personal data about people. Interestingly as I looked around on their site, I noticed that I had to sign into a particular retailer to create a model. I'd rather have a model that I can send to retailers so I don't have to create it over and over. Apparently this happens because the account you create at one of these retailers is universal and can be used at another.

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What Signals Are You Sending Out?

David Berlind's write-up of Judith Donath's presentation yesterday at the ID Mashup on signaling is well worth reading. Signalling is important for reputation. We don't have the infrastructure, at present, to easily pick up on signals and use them. Should I trust some one with an "edu" TLD in their email address more than a Hotmail account? Probably. Universities, as a rule, vet the people they give email addresses to. Hotmail, obviously, doesn't.

Part of the problem is that the signals that are there aren't easy to see. For example, why doesn't my email client (Mail.app) show the URL that a link inside an email message contains?

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Interoperability, Open Identity and Identity Brokers

These are some notes from my session. I didn't capture it all and may have mischaracterized things. I didn't try to record who said what. If I've missed something or misstated something, feel free to leave a comment.

There's a problem with interop, namely the huge anthropological problem around identity that wasn't there with internetworking. There are too many deep, philosophical discussions that can happen when you start talking about identity. We need language and social interop--conceptual interop--to get technical interop.

Identity brokers provide the role of interchange between protocols.

Common user experience is important in identity because people are involved, so it's more than protocols and interop.

How to Higgins, CardSpace (what has been known as InfoCard), and XDI relate to each other? Are they competitors, complimentary services, etc.?

Higgins is a framework that supports multiple identity protocols. CardSpace should function in Higgins out of the box. The goal is functional equivalence. CardSpace is architected to accept different identity technologies without changing the code.

In an interaction between a relying party and an identity provider, what's the role of the identity broker?

Card-based identity is different than universal address identity (i-names, OpenID, LID, etc.). Physical cards typically have addresses on them. That's one of the claims. Addressable identity elevates that claim to the identity itself. Addressable identity requires that users have a service provider. The broker is that service provider.

Identity brokers can also help users store and manage identities. Drummond gives the example of dropping your wallet in the lake and the trouble you go through to recover those credentials. If your machine goes down you may be in the same situation with respect to your card-based identities. Identity brokers can help solve that problem.

What are some of the new businesses that might spring up because of interoperability in the identity space?

There are several kinds of new businesses. An identity provider (or issuer) is one, and the identity broker is another. Also there will be people creating businesses around verifying claims and even making assertions about identities.

Opinity is an example of a reputation business that is working now. Their business is making assertions about people based on publicly available information.

Will companies embrace this model or will their proclivities toward hoarding customer data keep user-centric identity from launching?

Companies are almost universally bad at managing customer data. They talk about it being a competitive advantage, but few of them put the money into it to make it really work. There's opportunity for other companies to put together good data, in a user-centric way, and then service other companies by providing good data.

We are all identity providers (Drummond holds up a business card). When ever we create usernames and passwords at various sites, we are providing identity information. Relying parties who want to accept user generated identities in a interoperable way, can do so now with OpenID, LID, i-names, and so on.

What are the incentives to getting companies (both identity providers and relying parties) to adopt this?

This is disruptive technology. It won't likely be the big players (like Amazon) that adopt it first. It will be the smaller bookseller looking to compete.

How does all this affect enterprise identity and single sign-on?

Enterprises frequently manage identities across multiple systems. They are not as concerned with identity tokens as they are with identity attributes and being able to use them interoperably.

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Reputation and Wi-Fi

I'm sitting in the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School right now waiting for day two of the Berkman identity Mashup to begin. I missed yesterday because I wasn't willing to fly out on Father's Day. My panel in identity brokers will be at 9am.

As I got here and opened up my laptop, I signed into the Harvard wi-fi network. They allow temporary guest logins; you have to provide an email and telephone number. I don't know what keeps people from just giving them dummy data. Probably nothing. I was thinking, however, that you could use a reputation system to determine whether you wanted to give someone access. Reputation systems could have already verified email addresses and even phone numbers.

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June 17, 2006

MeshForum Presents Manual Lima

This week IT Conversations published the first show from the MeshForum conference held in May. The show was Manuel Lima of VisualComplexity.com speaking on Mapping Complex Networks. In this keynote address Lima identifies key characteristics of a good network map and highlights some of his favorite projects. The whole line-up of shows from MeshForum looks outstanding and I look forward to listening to them.

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June 16, 2006

Identity Brokers and Business Models

Next week, I'm moderating a discussion at the Berkman Identity Mashup in Boston. Our panel is at 9am on Tuesday if you're coming. The title of the panel is "Interoperability, Open Identity, and Identity Brokers." Here's the description:

Very likely there will be a new industry of identity brokers, identity providers, and relying parties using those digital identities. Will it become subject to power laws and vendor concentration? What forces will play a role in shaping this new industry? The Higgins open source software framework is one emerging implementation for identity systems that allows for interoperability and integration, utilizing open identity protocols. What might its role be in help enable this new industry? What role with other systems play? How might new identity systems be used or abused by governments, corporations and large organizations through National Identity card and GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers)?

A few ground rules that I've laid out for the panel is that we'll not use PowerPoint. Each member of the panel will get a few minutes for a non-commercial introduction and then we'll jump into questions. I like to get questions from the audience, but I'll also have some to start. Here's a few I've thought of.

• What is an identity broker?
• What are the roles of identity providers (IPs) and relying parties (RPs)?
• What are the industry forces that are likely to emerge and why?
• What are the business models?
• Where are the pain points now that new business might be built around?
• People are starting to understand CardSpace (formerly InfoCard) as a metasystem for IPs and RPs to talk to each other. How does Higgins fit in?

If you've got other suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.

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June 15, 2006

Yelling at Moira

Dr. Moira Gunn is the host of TechNation, a popular show on public radio and one of IT Conversation's most popular series. This morning I was yelling at her in my car. Of course, she wasn't there and didn't hear my rant.

I was yelling because her interview with Dr. Katrina Firlik had just ended and way too soon from my perspective. Dr. Firlik is a neurosurgeon and author of the book Another Day in the Frontal Lobe : A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. The interview was great and the stories fascinating. I could have listened for another hour at least. I hope Moira will forgive me for wanting more. I guess I'll just have to buy the book.

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Parallels and Virtualization

I just posted a review of my experiences with Parallels on Between the Lines. Parallels is the virtualization technology that runs on OS X. It's been in beta, but today it's available as a final release.

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You Don't Need Your Government Today

Speaking of Utah.gov, it's offline and returning a 503 (Service Temporarily Unavailable) error. Anyone know what's up? In the meantime, you don't need your government today--go away and come back tomorrow.

And as long as we're talking about eGovernment, Google launched a specialized search engine for US Government information. The page can be personalized, if you log in. The personalization includes feeds from various government and non-government news sources as well as the ability to add random RSS feeds.

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June 14, 2006

Testing as an SOA Management Strategy

"Testing isn't an event" says John Michelsen, the Chief Architect and a co-founder of iTKO, Inc. I was the moderator on an InfoWorld Webcast this afternoon where John presented. SOA brings new challenges to testing. Testing individual services is similar to code-level testing in any other development effort, but testing integration points, especially when there are dozens of hundreds of them is more difficult.

One issue is that business analysts and QA folks need to be involved in the testing process. To make that more difficult, SOA testing is something that needs to happen continuously.

If the business side, QA, production operators, and support people aren't involved in your iterative development process, you're not really doing agile development, you're still doing waterfall. Even though you're iterating in development, you're not involving the rest of the organization. On the other hand, involving these other groups in the iterative process can lower the cost per test as well as giving faster discovery and resolution of problems.

John spent some time going over iTKO's LISA test product and showing how it supported complete, collaborative, and continuous testing. LISA allows you to define actions and then assert the desired results. This gives a declarative testing model so you don't write code. LISA uses WSDL to show the valid operators in a Web service; you build tests against that list.

You can take the same workflows that you build for a functional test and then stage them in a load mode and find performance bottlenecks. You can build baselines and then compare changes as services are maintained in various stages of the lifecycle.

SOA is marked by constant change at the component and app level. This requires that we move beyond the kinds of traditional operational systems (disk, server load, etc.) Web services management system provide some of this, but it's really monitoring and recovery. I can see how a comprehensive and continuous testing system could happily live along side the traditional operations platforms and the newer Web services management systems to augment those with continuous functional and performance coverage.

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No Hablo Espanol

Earlier this month Utah launched, with little fanfare, www.espanol.utah.gov, a Spanish-language companion to the state's Web site at www.utah.gov. The site contained 10 pages of information about taxes, health care, and so on in Spanish. A few days ago they took it down in the face of complaints that it violates Utah's "English as the official language" law. I think I'm going to be sick.

Don't get me wrong. I think that we'll all be better off if immigrants are assimilated into mainstream culture, including language, rather than forming a separate sub-culture. But I'm also a realist and realize that that change happens over generations and the best place to make that happen is in the schools.

The level of xenophobia and insecurity required to say that government shouldn't make useful information available in a variety of formats and languages is just stunning. This is really about erecting barriers, not assimilation. I'm embarrased.

I wonder if putting a link to Babelfish on each page at Utah.gov that said "see this page in Spanish" would violate "official language" laws? From my reading of the law, I don't think so.

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CIO Blogging

Last week, Michael Fitzgerald published a column in CIO Magazine giving CIOs advice on blogging. We had talked a long time ago--I'd forgotten--and he mentions my blog and experience getting started when I was Utah's CIO. He makes some great points that someone new to blogging, especially someone steeped in the usual rules of business communication, needs to know.

• Write in first person
• Refer to other Websites by linking to them
• Use links as a form of shorthand to avoid stopping to explain things that can be found in the link
• Blogs are just a tool for communication--don't overthink them
• Sound like yourself or no one will take you seriously
• Don't feel like you have to be "more candid" than the next guy
• Keep it short and to the point
• Grow a thick skin
• Remember that blogs are forever
• Check your grammar and spelling

He also gives some reasons to blog:

• Blog to establish and argue your position
• Blog to improve communication with your staff
• Blog to establish yourself as a guru or your company as a leader
• Blog because you like to write
• Blog to demystify your department
• Blog to avoid the clutter of email

There's some good advice in the article and anyone thinking of mixing blogging and business ought to read through it and take it to heart. There are some other things I'd add that are covered in my essay on starting a blog, including advice on domain names and hosting.

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June 13, 2006

Blogger Conference Report

Phil Burn's sets up the banner (click to enlarge)

The Utah Blogger Conference started out a lot like a blog: informal, slow, and a little disorganized, but once it got going, there was a lot of energy. I noticed a lot of informal conversations happening as the conference organizers were setting up and those are likely to prove as useful as anything else.

The conference was organized by Phil Burns and Ryan Money with a lot of help fro their friends. There are about 160-180 people here, so the turnout is great.

The main event was a panel with Cydni Tetro, Phil Burns, myself, Tim Stay, and Pete Ashdown. The questions covered a lot of topics in the general category of how to start a blog.

After the panel, the time was given over to networking and there were lots of people chatting in small groups. One of the people I met was Kaylyn Denny, who writes a food blog. She promised me she'd comment on the food at the conference (Godfather's pizza).

All in all, this was a great start. Phil and Ryan did a good job--afterall, the food and t-shirt were free. What more could you ask for? I'm anxious to see what happens next.

Some other coverage:

• Gary Thornock has some notes from the panel.
• Charley Foster has pictures and commentary.
• Dee Taylor has picts as well.
• Scott Lemon has notes.
• And Kaylyn did blog about the food!
• Move coverage from Janet (newspapergrl)
• Tim Stay takes on the issue of local communities--something that came up on the panel.
• Jospeh Hall also has some comments on the conference and the food.

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Practical Common Lisp

I just published an interview with Peter Seibel at IT Conversations. I did this interview as part of my Technometria podcast. I saw Peter's book, Practical Common Lisp, in the bookstore a while back and picked it up. Now, I'm a Lisp fan, so he didn't have to sell me on the language. Even so, as someone who sees a lot of programming language books, I was impressed with this one and read it cover to cover.

Peter and I talk about his background, how he came to Lisp, some of Lisp's most powerful features (like macros, CLOS, and multi-paradigm programming), linguistic abstraction as a development strategy, and using Lisp in a production environment. I really enjoyed getting to know Peter and getting his perspective on things. Needless to say, I recommend the book and the interview as something you'll enjoy.

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Novell's Bandit

Novell announced the Bandit project yesterday. Bandit open-sources key identity management technologies and creates projects for extending them. From the press release:

The Bandit project is focused on delivering a single, consistent experience of digital identity and includes several common identity services such as authentication, roles, policy and compliance:

• The Common Authentication Services Adapter (CASA) provides interoperable authentication that enables application and enterprise single sign-on with a secure vault for user and system credentials.
• The Common Identity service is an implementation of the Higgins framework for representing digital identity.
• The Role Engine service can be integrated into any application to consistently calculate role information and unify authorization across systems.
• The Audit Record Framework service provides an open auditing and compliance API and receives audit records from Bandit's open identity services and other applications to provide common identity and event information to verify security and compliance.

Novell already incorporates some of Bandit's open identity services within its SUSE Linux distribution and plans to include Bandit's identity services in future releases of other products.

From Novell Enables Rapid Adoption of Identity Management by Open Sourcing Key Technologies: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
Referenced Tue Jun 13 2006 10:37:21 GMT-0600 (MDT)

The press release also contains key quotes from Paul Trevithick, technology lead for the Higgins project at the Eclipse Foundation, George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance management board, Bob Lord, Red Hat senior director engineering, Dick Hardt, Sxip Identity founder and CEO, and Kim Cameron, architect of Identity and Access for Microsoft. These quotes were important to demonstrate that there's an identity community trying to solve these problems in concert and avoid the vendor-sports circus that surrounded the Higgins announcement.

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Utah Blogger Conference

The Utah Blogger Conference is tonight at 6:30pm at the Larry H. Miller Innovation Center in Sandy. The conference is free and there's no need to pre-register. Just show up. I'll be there speaking on a panel. See you there.

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Hill AFB Air Show 2006

Oracle stunt plane getting ready for the show (click to enlarge)

Saturday I took my two youngest boys to the air show at Hill Air Force Base. The weather was perfect--about 75 degrees and sunny. The planes were very fun to see, both up close and in the air. There were some stunt planes, including the Oracle stunt team and close formation flying. The highlight of the show, of course, was the Thunderbirds. While the stunt flyers do stunts and the others do formations, the Thunderbirds do stunts in formation. That's cool. I took over 100 shots, and uploaded a few of the best.

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June 12, 2006

SOA Testing Webcast

I'm moderating a webcast for InfoWorld on Wed. The topic is testing in an SOA environment. iTKO is the sponsor and, hence, the presenter. I'm looking forward to it--SOA testing isn't a topic that get's much play, but's its important. The Webcast is free, so if you've got time in Wed (Jun 14) at 11AMPST, tune in.

An interesting sidenote: while we were doing the dress rehersal, I dsicovered that the ON24 control console doesn't support anything but IE. Argh! (This isn't true, of the audience app--it works fine cross platform.) But I just updated to my new MacBook Pro, so I'll be able to test out Parallels.

Update: I was able to use Parallels to log onto the On24 moderator system from my Mac desktop. Works very well.

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June 8, 2006

What I Expect from Online Retailers

Last week, I wrote about the joys of being on the bleeding edge with the new MacBook Pro. The disk issue is giving me fits. The problem is that in anticipation of putting a 160Mb disk in the machine (before I realized that fast 160Gb SATA drives are impossible to find), the machine was ordered with a 100Gb drive in the interest of being economical.

I can't work in 100Gb--at least I'd rather not. My laptop is my only machine and I want everything on it. So, at the moment, that requires a 120Gb drive at the minimum. No problem, I think--I'll just order a 120Gb drive. 120Gb, 5200RPM SATA drives are available (Seagate Momentus 5400.2), although almost everyone who's selling them has them back ordered. The process, however, has opened my eyes to why I love Amazon and while I will always order from them if they have what I want.

About 10 days ago, I ordered a drive from NowDirect and paid for next-day air shipment. A few days later, I hadn't received it, or an email that said it had shipped. They had no online way for me to check my order, so I called them up. The drive was in stock, but they needed to verify credit card before they could ship. Of course they hadn't bothered to tell me that--I guess they just wait for people to call in. And, yes, I even checked my spam box to make sure it hadn't gotten accidentally thrown out.

So, I give them the info they need, verify that the order will ship that day and hang up. A few days later, no email, no disk. I call again. Now the disk isn't in stock and it will be another 10 days before it ships. Argh!

I go back online and find another (maybe the only other) place that claims to have them in stock: PCNation. I place the order. At least they have an online account system. Two days later, however, it still reporting that my order is "to be shipped." I called them this morning and was promised that it will ship today.

The fact is that Amazon has set the bar very high and most online retailers struggle to reach it. What does Amazon do that others often don't? Here's a partial list:

• Confirmation emails are clear and contain links to tracking pages where you can get more information about your order.
• Orders almost always ship the day the order is placed and when they're not, Amazon notifies you promptly.
• Orders that are delayed beyond the promised date also result in notifications.

These are just a few things that I've come to expect from online retailers. The interesting thing is that they're not really very hard to do either.

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June 7, 2006

IEEE Spectrum Radio

IEEE Spectrum has a podcast that is produced from material in the magazine. The latest show, for example, is about the Spectrum article on UTOPIA, that I commented on last week. I don't like the flash player since it makes it hard to link directly to the specific show I'm interested in, but the content is pretty good and professionally produced. This would be a great addition to IT Conversations.

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Social Innovations Conversations Launch

The Conversations Network launched a new channel this week: Social Innovations Conversations. Doug has been working hard to redo the IT Conversations code to support multiple channels. This is the first channel to launch under the new system.

Peter Durand, who is the series editor for the GlobeShakers series on the the new channel, has a post on the launch. His article talks about some of the shows that have appeared on the new channel. If you subscribe to the IT Conversations RSS feed, you got a sneak peak of some of these shows on your iPod due to a serendipitous bug in the software that creates the RSS feeds.

Social Innovations Conversations (SIC) is a product of the Stanford Center for Social Innovation and the Pittsburgh Social Enterprise Accelerator. Previously, material in this category would have appeared on IT Conversations since it's was the only channel we had. Now, shows that touch on social issues will be mainly showing up in SIC. Tune in and give it a spot on your iPod.

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June 6, 2006

v|100 Luncheon

I went to the VSpring Capital v|100 luncheon today. VSpring does a great job with this program and the luncheon is one of my favorite networking events of the year. I see all kinds of people there that I need to catch up with. Dennis Wood, who makes it happen, and the VSpring partners deserve kudos for a job well done.

Ellen Levy was the speaker today and she gave an awesome talk. She's the Director of Industry Collaboration & Research for Stanford University's Media X and has a broad background in high-tech and venture funding. She talked about games and how they're transcending entertainment. She also talked about time. During 1999, she kept a detailed journal of everything she did each day and everyone she interacted with. She says it changed how she spends her time.

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June 5, 2006

Evolving Software

Jon Udell's latest column at InfoWorld is a scary story that's all too common: fork-lift upgrades of Web-based software that leaves users worse-off than before.

I've been consulting with a company that's developing a Web-based product for the last five or six months. The back-end is, realistically, quite complex and involves a fair amount of ontological work. I've suggested a release strategy that gets a timely and useful piece of the product out soon and then adds functionality little-by-little, every week or so, over the coming months.

You'd be surprise by the amount of resistance that sort of idea attracts. Not by management either--they seem all too ready to take an incremental approach. Interestingly, most of the resistance comes from programmers in the trenches. I'm not sure why.

Still, as Jon suggests, the steady accretion of small, incremental changes combined with continuous evaluation of the effects of those changes is the key to systems that evolve and is the strategy most likely to win.

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RedHat's JBoss Acquisition is a Done Deal

Marc Fleury sent out a note to the JBoss newsletter mailing list today announcing that the RedHat acquisition of JBoss, announced in April, has closed. From my own experience in being acquired, this is the point where the dreaming stops and the work starts.

The period in between the deal and when it closes is kind of like being engaged. There are lots of things you'd like to do and plans you're making, but until the ceremony, it difficult to move forward with many of them. Once the deal closes, however, everything can move forward.

I've been a JBoss user for a long time now and seen it mature and grow over the years. I wish them well and hope the RedHat acquisition yields more of the same.

Scott Mace interviewed Marc Fleury about JBoss and the the role of open source in changing the face of EJB at JavaOne in 2004. You can find that show at IT Conversations.

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Less is More

Jason Fried is the CEO of 37 Signals, a company that's garnered attention for delivering great Web-based tools like Basecamp and Writeboard. I've used these in my lab at BYU to great effect. At IT Conversations, however, we found that they just weren't right for the project management tasks we had. Obviously, these tools aren't right for everyone and that's the story.

In one of the IT Conversation shows I really liked last week, Jason delivers a short (12 min) talk from Web 2.0 called "Less is More." In the talk, Jason talks about how to win by "under-doing" your competition. A contrarian notion, to say the least.

A development effort I've been involved in lately has been using some of these ideas. We've been very pleased. You won't be surprised to find out that David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails is a partner in 37 Signals. Many of the ideas that Jason espouses about managing the development of software are reflected in the design of Rails.

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June 2, 2006

Spectrum Talks Up UTOPIA

An IEEE Spectrum article discusses Utah's muni-broadband project, UTOPIA. There's a map of UTOPIA cities, but the legend seems to be missing. There's also a page of photos. The piece also contrasts the UTOPIA architecture with Verizon's FiOS service.

The peaceful coexistence of multiple service providers is another thing that distinguishes Utopia. Because Utopia sends TV programming as Internet packets, indistinguishable from e-mail, Web pages, and everything else, it puts a huge reservoir of bandwidth at the disposal of its providers. By contrast, Verizon's FiOS, a sort of DSL on steroids, reserves most of an optical fiber's capacity for television, which means that FiOS customers who go to the open Internet, instead of to Verizon, for television programs have to cut into their Internet broadband, which is capped at 15 Mb/s.

From IEEE Spectrum: A Broadband Utopia
Referenced Fri Jun 02 2006 12:53:01 GMT-0600 (MDT)

UTOPIA is like an airport, a municipal utility that private companies use to service customers. If the first few airlines had all built their own airports, air travel in the US would be a very different beast than it is today. Buying gates as a Class B airport isn't cheap, but it's a whole lot less expensive than building the airport itself. There is infrastructure that properly can and should be shared to create a good environment for innovation. That's what UTOPIA does.

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Mike Leavitt, Technology Champion

Mike Leavitt (click to enlarge)

Mike Leavitt, my old boss, has been named NASCIO's National Technology Champion.

The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) named Michael Leavitt, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as the association's 2006 National Technology Champion Award recipient in recognition of his outstanding contributions in the field of information technology (IT) public policy and practice.

"Secretary Leavitt's pas