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July 31, 2006
SocialText Open
With OSCON happening last week, there were some important open-source announcements. One I wanted to highlight was SocialText Open. SocialText is a very capable commercial wiki. Now, you can download the code at SourceForge.
SocialText Open isn't SocialText's first play in the open source space. They've been a big supporter of Kwiki, a wiki system written in Perl that is highly modular and customizable.
Ross Mayfield, SocialText's CEO commented on the change on his blog.
Socialtext Open changes everything. Including the way we are going to communicate, with nothing to hide and sharing our Public Roadmap. While Open is still in Beta and we don't know the full impact this release will have, my hope is it fulfills our goal of wikis everywhere and cultivates a broader developer community.From Ross Mayfield's Weblog
Referenced Fri Jul 28 2006 12:58:12 GMT+0200 (CEST)
Later, he said he wasn't sure how this changes his own job. But, of course, it will change.
This move has the potential to improve the SocialText product in significant ways. The problem for small development shops is having he bandwidth to get to all the things that need to be done. I've been in that situation numerous times and there's never enough time. Open sourcing the code base could add features with little or no cost to SocialText. Of course, there's always the chance no one will care enough to add code.
Ross reports that there were 500 downloads in the first 24 hours. SocialText is competing with some other very good open source wikis, including MediaWiki. SocialText will have the advantage of having commercial support, which will appeal to companies wanting to use the wiki in mission crucial situations.
I've known Ross for years now and wish him well. SocialText is one of the innovators in the social software space and I look forward to seeing what comes of this.
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July 28, 2006
OSCON 2006
OSCON's been happening this week. I'm sorry I haven't been able to be there--it's one of my favorite conferences of the year. I'm looking forward to hearing some of the talks on IT Conversations. In the meantime, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Flickr have links to conference goings-on.
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July 26, 2006
Open Source Business Models
I've got a student who's working on starting a company around a configuration management system he wrote while he was working for BYU and has licensed. I've seen the system in action and it's pretty good. Shops with over a dozen machines could use something besides a spreadsheet to keep track of all this.
He's been working on various parts of the business and decided he wanted to open source the software and build a business around the open source code base. I don't know much about that business model, so I hooked him up with Matt Asay. I'm sure Matt will be able to give him some pointers.
Just this week, I published Scott Mace's interview with John Roberts, the CEO and co-founder of SugarCRM, an open source CRM system. John and Scott spend a lot of time talking about open source business models and how they work. There's the traditional pay-for-support option that Redhat and jBoss have made famous and the hosted-services option that's becoming more popular with the growth of SaaS.
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July 25, 2006
The Customer Is In Charge
If you've had doubts about how the Web, and especially the blogosphere, has affected the relationship between companies and customers, look no further than David Berlind's recent exchange with a T-Mobile customer service rep that he recorded and put up on the 'Net.
The 13 minute call, which David recorded (and told the rep he was recording) shows a pompous, egotistical, and sometimes surly customer service rep berating David for not reading the terms and conditions of the service (does anyone read them?) and systematically refusing to listen to the real problem.
David posted a copy of the call at Between the Lines where it garnered hundreds of comments, many of which recounted similar tails of woe.
After all of this, and too late to avoid the black eye, T-Mobile issued an apology and refunded David's money.
Not every blogger has the reach of ZDNet, but many do and a good post can get noticed quickly, linked to by blogs with lots of readers, read by thousands, and cause a company real trouble.
The truth of the matter is that your customers are probably talking about your company right now. You can't control what they say. That's leaves two options: ignore what they're saying or join the conversations. The first option probably isn't good for business. How can you be part of the conversation?
The first step is to see what people are saying. Blog search tools like Technorati can help you find blogs that mention your company or products. For more sophisticated strategies, tools like KnowNow's ESS, which I reviewed for InfoWorld earlier this month.
On the pro-active side, many companies are starting blogs of their own. It's not very effective to just have the PR department start a blog and post company press releases there. This isn't joining a conversation, it's talking at people the same way companies have done for decades.
A better strategy is to encourage your employees to blog. A product team or an individual developer, blogging about their product, can be extremely effective in joining the conversations happening in the blogosphere and speaking with an authentic voice.
You might be worried about your employees blogging, but they're going to do it anyway. Why not take advantage of it? I think it's important that companies establish blogging policies early. Your policy will reflect your corporate culture, but you should err on the side of looser rather than stricter policies. Strict policies will stifle the activity you're trying to encourage.
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July 24, 2006
My Audio Setup
Some people have asked me what I use to record various audio for IT Conversations. The set-up I'm using right now is the result of a lot of experimentation and a lot of help from people like Doug Kaye and Paul Figgiani. Paul's Podcast Rigs Web site is a real help to anyone getting into podcasting.
 Audio recording setup (click to enlarge) |
My current setup consists of the following:
- Apple MacBook Pro with 2Gb of RAM. Obviously, you could substitute some other computer. I also use a Apple 30" Cinema Display, which is clearly optional, but very nice.
- Mark of the Unicorn UltraLite FireWire audio interface for connecting mics and other things to the computer. I have a MOTU Traveler interface at my BYU office that serves the same purpose. The great thing about an interface like this is that you get all the channels (8 for the UltraLite and 16 for the Traveler) as digital signals in the computer where they are recorded separately.
- Heil PR40 mic on a Heil PL2T Boom with a Spider shock mount. I've tried a lot of mics and like the Heil best. If you're new to audio (and I was) it might surprise you how much difference a mic makes in how you sound. For a demonstration, read this test and then listen to the results.
- JK Audio THAT-2 telephone handset audio tap for recording phone interviews. I'm going to upgrade that to a Telos One sometime soon since that's what Doug and Paul both recommend.
- Sony Pro MDR-7506 headphones. These are closed air (meaning they cover your ears) and are very comfortable. You can wear them for hours without a problem.
- I use AudioDesk for recording and what minor editing I do. AudioDesk comes free with the MOTU products. Make sure you spend some time getting familiar with it and customizing it for your needs. It's very capable.
You can certainly get by with less expensive gear (see Paul's PodCast Rigs site for suggestions), but this is what I've gravitated to over time. No doubt I'll change things out as I go along, but I'm pretty happy with this setup. One thing about podcasting--it's given me a whole new category of things to learn about and a bunch of new gear to play with.
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July 19, 2006
Supporting Utah Dinosaur Curation
You may or may not know it, but Utah has a huge collection of dinosaur fossils. Of course, Utah is where Dinosaur National Park is located. Unfortunately, the facilities for supporting this important collection are in serious disrepair.
The National Park Service is requesting comments on the development of a regional paleontological repository facility in Vernal, Utah in a partnership with the Vernal Field House of Natural History (Utah State Parks). The facility is to be constructed adjoining the newly opened Vernal Field House of Natural History in Vernal and jointly managed.
The Utah State Paleontologist, Jim Kirkland, is requesting that people read the plan and strongly support the facilities development.
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July 18, 2006
Reputation and eCommerce Site Ratings Survey
The other day Devlin Daley pointed out RightCart to me. RightCart is a SaaS shopping cart implemented in Rails. The reason RightCart caught our attention, besides the fact that it's pretty slick, is that it uses RapLeaf's rating system as a way to rate merchants.
Coincidentally, the next day, Scott Allen pointed to some survey results he had about Rapleaf and "transactional trust." The survey showed that ratings are the number one way that buyers choose merchants.
Ratings are one way that people establish a reputation for a merchant (or a buyer when two-way trust is necessary). One of the problems with ratings is that they're not usually transferable from site to site. For products that's not such a big deal. I can read customer feedback and look at ratings for a Nikon lens on a number of sites and feel fairly confident that they're talking about the same things.
ClaimID is one way people can start to aggregate information about them. In a post on the ClaimID blog, they talk about the Allen survey and how ClaimID could help. The problem with that is that it's strictly voluntary. Nothing makes me "claim" bad ratings.
I think that Internet-wide, cross-site reputation systems need what RapLeaf has, what ClaimID has, along with some other features as well, including the ability to automatically query Web-based sources of data. The reputation system we're building is meant to be a testbed for exploring these ideas.
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July 17, 2006
IT Conversations in a Podcasting Supergroup
An article in Podcasting News calls Gigavox Media, the new home of IT Conversations, the "first podcasting supergroup."
A new company promises to be the first podcasting supergroup, bringing together two influential pioneers of podcasting, Doug Kaye (IT Conversations, The Conversations Network) and Michael Geoghegan, right, (Reel Reviews, Grape Radio, and the DisneyLand Podcast).
During the Gnomedex 6.0 conference last weekend, Kaye announced the launch of GigaVox Media, Inc., a for-profit partner company of the non-profit The Conversations Network. Kaye describes the relationship between GigaVox and its non-profit sister as a "hybrid business model" where the two sides work in parallel: "together with complementary objectives."
Kaye will remain at the helm of The Conversations Network as founder and CEO, and will now serve as CTO at GigaVox Media. Michael Geoghegan will be the CEO of GigaVox Media.
Geoghegan and Kaye met in early 2005 at a dinner hosted by Tim Bourquin of the Portable Media Expo.From Podcasting News: Gigavox: The First Podcasting Supergroup?
Referenced Mon Jul 17 2006 09:43:17 GMT-0600 (MDT)
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July 13, 2006
Goodbye Al Mansell
 Al Mansell |
Al Mansell is retiring from the Utah Senate. He was president of the Senate when I was CIO. My most memorable experience of Sen. Mansell is when I was moving all domains from state.ut.us to utah.gov. Al was very upset about the move, so I went to talk to him about it.
I asked why he didn't want to use utah.gov and he replied that .gov meant governor and he wanted to use utah.le for legislature. As techies we may laugh, but to someone outside the voodoo of DNS, that seems like a perfectly reasonable request. Why can't he use utah.le?
I explained that in fact .gov meant government and had been in use by the Feds for a few decades. I also mentioned that the legislature was free to do whatever they wanted with their domain names, within the technical restrictions of DNS, since the CIO had no authority over the legislature. I don't think it made him very happy even so.
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Unconferencing
Kaliya got a nice mention on unconferencing in an article in the San Jose Mercury News. This is the same technique we use at the Internet Identity Workshop that's garnered considerable praise for achieving real results. Kaliya is a master at this. She had to convince me to do it the first time, but after seeing what unconferencing could do, I became a believer.
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Podcast Demographics
A new report (click for PDF) from Nielsen/NetRatings gives some interesting demographics of podcast listeners. Broad generalizations aside, the report has some interesting results:
- 51.6% of people who listen to podcasts pay their bills online
- 24.6% have participated in online job searches
6.6% of adults have downloaded a podcast and the the 18-24 age range is twice as likely as the average adult to download podcasts. Apple users are more likely to download podcasts as Windows users.
Our own data at IT Conversations shows the following about our listeners:
- 90% male
- 80% age 30 or older
- 23% age 50 or older
- 40% have a Masters degree or higher
- 40% with household incomes of $100,000 or more
- 48% live outside of the U.S.
This differs in some significant ways from the Nielsen data; our audience is older, more educated, and more affluent that your standard podcast listener. The difference can likely be explained by the type of shows we produce.
We're always looking for new material to put on IT Conversations. If you've been to a great conference you think other IT Conversations listeners would enjoy or just know someone who would be a great guest on one of our series, please let me know.
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Our Nets Are Out Strengths
Tom Barnett, who I interviewed last year on IT Conversations, has a very rational view on what terrorism really means. We tend to give them too much credit for being strategic and smart when in fact their weak and without hope. He says, in response to the recent train bombings in India:
There is a profound reason why we're rich and powerful and connected and the enemy is none of those things. Terrorism is a strategy of the weak, and it earns them only what the powerful decide they no longer want.
As I opined in BFA, there are no lasting 4GW victories. Yes, sometimes conflicts are won, but what is really achieved? Look at Cuba or Nicaragua or Palestine--or best yet--Vietnam or China?
All these 4GW "victors" got was amazingly bloody disconnectedness, and--when they got smart--then they came back crawling to the system, the nets, the rules, the "decadence."
4GW is not some apogee. No Kaplanesque romanticism please. This is the dregs and nothing more.
Our nets are our strengths. They will attack and we will grow more resilient. Bush was right: Bring it on. Speed the killing. Flush the losers. Extend the nets. Be resilient.
Watch India. These attacks will accomplish nothing.From Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog: 4GW is not some advance, but the Gap's last gasps
Referenced Thu Jul 13 2006 09:39:10 GMT-0600 (MDT)
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July 12, 2006
Introduction to Microformats
Jack Herrington has put up a great introductory article on microformats at IBM's Developer Center. If you're wondered what microformats are and how they work, this is a good one to read.
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Building Tools for Personal Productivity
Peter Bowen wrote about system administration and procrastination. His particular problem was with Nagios, but we've all been there from time to time. When I became Executive Producer of IT Conversations I tried to spend the time necessary to build tools to help me automate the work wherever possible.
For example, the newsletter that goes out each week is mostly generated from RSS feeds using a MovableType template and then has the ratings integrated using a Perl script. Took me an hour or two to put together but it saves me precious minutes each week when I create the newsletter.
As programmers, we ought to be tool builders. Anytime you find yourself doing something more than once, build a tool. Doing so pays big dividends in increasing personal productivity.
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July 11, 2006
Naked Conversations
I've been asked to give a training session on blogging to employees of a mid-sized public company, so I'm looking for ideas and materials. One resource that was both informative and entertaining was this IT conversations presentation by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. Together they wrote a book on corporate blogging called Naked Conversations.
My own page on how to start a blog remains one of the most popular pieces on my blog. I'm shooting for a mix of advice and discussion on
- Blog culture
- Practical advice
- RSS and feed readers
- Podcasting
- Smart blogging
I think this will be one of the most enjoyable training sessions I've done in a while. I'm glad to see some companies getting out in front of this and establishing good policies and providing training to avoid problems.
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An Update to the Microid Plugin for MovableType
Tim Appnel was kind enough to apply his formidable MovableType expertise to my MicroID plugin and made some significant improvements:
- There is no longer a need for an explicit context argument to the tag. The code senses the right context using MovableType voodoo (looks at the stash).
- There is no longer a dependency on Digest::SHA1. Apparently MT 3.0 and above has SHA1 code built in (see MT::Util->perl_sha1_digest_hex();)
- Other things like a localized error message and making the tag work in a recent comments loop.
I've updated the documentation and you can download the new version there.
Thanks Tim!
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KnowNow ESS and Business RSS
My review of KnowNow's ESS has appeared in InfoWorld. ESS is an RSS management system. It filters, aggregates, slices, and dices. I was very impressed with it. I think enlightened corporate PR and marketing people will need tools like this to follow what companies are saying about them and to use RSS as a communications tool. From the review:
I found ESS to be an excellent system for managing syndicated feeds. The various pieces work together well, and the browser-based set-up and configuration make it easy to get going. The ability to capture, aggregate, and filter traditional RSS feeds as well as data from back-office systems makes ESS a must-have tool for businesses looking to exploit syndication.From KnowNow gives RSS a business-savvy shine | InfoWorld
Referenced Tue Jul 11 2006 10:46:54 GMT-0600 (MDT)
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Star Wars Over Telnet
 Darth Vader questions Princess Leah (click to enlarge) |
When I took my first computer class on Fortran in the Fall of 1976, I made calendars for my family with Snoopy printed in ASCII art. Of course, I just got the Snoopy card deck from someone and copied it, but I made the calendar myself--after all every gift needs a personal touch. I still have the card deck to show curious students who have never seen punch cards. A bit of ancient history.
Of course, there are all kinds of ASCII art, a real need before the day when people had graphical interfaces and broadband connections. Even so, I'm always amazed at what people come up with. Now you can watch the original Star Wars in an ASCII animation. Just telnet to towel.blinkenlights.nl and the show will begin. It's not done yet. It quits just after Luke rescues Princess Leah. Watching it in ASCII art with the dialogue flashing buy in text is actually kind of entertaining.
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July 10, 2006
A Reputation Framework
Today on the Diane Rehm show, Diane's guests were Jennifer Golbeck, research associate, Institute for Advanced computer Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, Md, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, professor of physics, University of Notre Dame and author of "Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else", and Kathleen Carley, professor, Computer Science, Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University. The topic was Social Networks and the Web
At one point Diane said something like "But you don't know who these people are who are contacting you. This is an identity issue!" Indeed. In fact there are two issues.
When Diane says "identity" in this context what she's talking about is a way to link an online persona with meat in the physical world. That is, some way to hold people accountable in the offline world for their acts in the online world. Criminal and civil accountability is a key factor in how we govern society. Courts of law are really just big authentication exercises, if you think about it.
The second issue is reputation, which short of criminal or civil accountability, is the primary way we hold people responsible for their actions. I've been thinking about reputation a lot lately. I believe that the emergence of identifiers which can be used out of context (like OpenID, LID, and i-names) will allow cross-context reputation systems to emerge as well.
Some of my students and I submitted a paper to DIM2006 last week on the reputation framework we're working on. The paper is called A Framework for Building Reputation Systems. Here's the abstract:
This paper introduces a set of principles for governing the design and operation of online reputation systems. We also introduce the design, architecture, and implementation of a flexible, general-purpose framework. called Pythia, for building reputation systems and show an example application of the framework.
If you're interested in reading the paper as a PDF, here's a copy. The paper was produced from the HTML source using Prince XML, so it's identical in content to the Web version.
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Prison Lawnmowers
While writing a piece for Between the Lines on paying for the participation revolution, I pointed to a piece from Jon Udell on fixing a reel lawnmower. Following links from Jon's story and cruising around a little eventually led me to a site that specializes in lawnmowers for sale to prisons. Who knew?
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July 8, 2006
Electronic Voting and Paper Ballots
This story from the Salt Lake Tribune talks about the policy confision and questions surrounding recounts for electronic voting machines in Utah after last month's primary election. While there is some chaos right now, I'm confident that it's going to all get worked out because the proper levers are in place.
Utah's law requires a paper ballot and designates it the "official" ballot. Based on that law, there will be some court challenges and lawsuits and precedent will be established. That's how these sorts of things get worked out.
Some will decry this as messy and expensive, but that's the way democracy works most of the time.
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July 5, 2006
Inside Utah: Talking About UTOPIA
Jennifer Napier-Pearce interviewed me about UTOPIA, Utah municipal broadband project, for issue 50 of her Inside Utah podcast. Jennifer, who works in public radio, produces a good show with board interest for folks in Utah and high production values.
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Earth in the Balance on IT Conversations
Today is the first time IT Conversations has published content from one of its sister channels. In this case it's Al Gore speaking at Stanford Business School. If you get your daily dose of IT Conversations from the RSS channel, you'll hardly notice. If you come to the Web site, when you click through to the landing page, you'll find yourself on the Social Innovations site. Look around--there's some good stuff there.
Once Open Source Conversations gets fired up, I expect this sort of thing will happen more often. Remember that you can always create your own custom playlists of content from any Conversations Network affiliate using the personal program queue feature available to any Conversations Network member (and joining is free).
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Software Strategies for Flat World
I have to admit that when I read the copy for David DeWalt's (Pres. of EMC Software Group) presentation to Software 2006 (see Software Strategies in a Flat World), I was sure it was going to be a 30 minute advertisement for EMC. I was pleasantly surprised. While David does talk about EMC, he's using the company more as example of how the software business is changing in response to challenges like global outsourcing, multi-tenancy, and service appliances. I quite enjoyed it. If you're in the software business, it's worth listening to.
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Kaliya as MVP
And speaking of Kaliya, she was picked to lead the MVP discussion at Gnomedex last week. She spoke about the gap between group forming network that we call "civil society" and social tool builders.
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Identity Open Space in Vancouver
There's an Identity Open Space happening in Vancouver BC July 20-21. This is bring jointly produced by Liberty Alliance and Kaliya Hamlin, Doc Searls, and I (the IIW folks). The goal is to create another highly interactive event and move the conversations forward.
We're hoping that by having it close to the Liberty meeting we'll involve some people who haven't been part of the conversation before. Liberty Alliance has open their meeting, which is happening right before the IOS event, to non-members. If you're curious about Liberty and user-centric identity or just want to spend some great time in a great place at the perfect time of year, then this is one you won't want to miss.
Kaliya will be facilitating this event, so I'm sure it will be fun, interesting, and worth the time. Register online.
Note that this is not the second IIW event of the year which will happen in December. We're also planning a big identity open space day in conjunction with DIDW on Sept 11 in Santa Clara. More on that a little later.
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July 3, 2006
Open Access to Research
Last week I published a show at IT Conversations by Paula Le Dieu talking about Science Commons. Science Commons is a project of Creative Commons aimed at making more of scientific results and data available without copyright restrictions.
I personally believe that academic research has less impact because the primary journal publication organizations (whether for-profit or non-profit) lock up results behind copyright. Le Dieu goes through some very real scenarios where this could have negative impact. Mind you, we're not talking about private data generated by private companies, but results that you paid for in many cases with your tax dollars.
Last month, Wired Magazine had a feature on Harold Varmus, the Nobel Prize winning scientist and former director of NIH who's been on a crusade to establish online, peer-reviewed journals with real standing. So far, the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, has a family of first-rate, open access journals, all in the biosciences.
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July 1, 2006
Changing Linux Screen Resolution In Parallels
I've had parallels running now for some time on my MacBook Pro and it's really nice to be able to fire up Windows or Linux when needed. I have a feeling this is going to come in real handy this fall when I'm teaching CS462 and have 40 students using Linux to do their assignment. I can keep a fresh image that's identical to the one their using and just fire it up when I need to try something out.
One thing that's bothered me, however, is that Fedora didn't want to create screens bigger and 800x600. I knew I'd blown over this on the install, but figured I'd come back and figure it out later. Maybe I was Googling the wrong terms, but I couldn't find much specific to setting up screen resolutions on Linux running under Parallels.
Tonight I spent a few minutes figuring it out because John Dougall was having the same problem. As an aside, don't you wish your state representative ran Linux? Here's what I did.
First, I ran system-config-display and selected "Generic LCD Panel 1280x1024" under the "Hardware" tab. Then I edited (by hand) /etc/X11/xorg.conf to change the Modes line in the Section "Screen" declaration to read:
Modes "1280x1024"
This did it. Logging out and logging back in started up the larger screen. I couldn't change the hardware from "Generic" but that didn't seem to matter.