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November 30, 2007
PayPal Really Makes Me Mad!
I got an email from PayPal today:
We have reason to believe that your account was accessed by a third party. We have limited access to sensitive PayPal account features in case your account has been accessed by an unauthorized third party. We understand that having limited access can be an inconvenience, but protecting your account is our primary concern.
Well, it wasn't a third person, it was me. I used PayPal to collect registration fees for IIW (happening next week). All the money we have to pay vendors, etc. is in that account and I can't get to it now. Of course, PayPal has already taken their cut, so what do they care?
To get the account back online I have to do four things:
- Submit a bank statement for the account I'm transfering to.
- Change my password
- Change my security questions
- Confirm my location
I was good on the first three. The last one required that I tied a credit card to the account and then they wanted to call me and have me enter a security code. They called the number I had listed long ago that isn't one I have access to on the weekend. They gave me no notice that they were going to call the number--they just did it. Since I didn't answer the phone they said this:
We mailed a letter with your Location Confirmation code to the following address. When you receive the letter, please follow the instructions on how to enter the code on the PayPal website. Please allow 7 to 9 days for your letter to arrive in the mail.
Huh???? Seven to nine days!?! Meanwhile I've got bills to pay and I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
I appreciate that PayPal is taking security seriously, but this is way overboard, as far as I can tell. They've made thousands of dollars from the money I collect there. The least they could do is provide a human for me to talk to and work this out. I'm willing to pay PayPal's high fees for the convenience, but this is very inconvenient.. I think I'll look somewhere else for the next IIW. I need to know that when the event rolls around I collected money for, I'll be able to get it.
Update: This morning (Dec 3) I logged into my PayPal account hoping I could download new attendees and got a message that my account at been restored. I don't know if it was my attempted intervention or whether some of the steps I completed (like sending a copy of my bank statement) was sufficient. In any event, it looks like IIW will be able to pay it's bills on time. Yeah!
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November 29, 2007
Pakistan is Iran 30 Years Ago
Here's a very informative--and scary--analysis from David Ignatius about how our experience in Iran 30 years ago ought to inform our interactions with Pakistan today.
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The Nerd Handbook
If you're a nerd, or live with one, Michael Lopp, writing as Rands, has a very funny piece you should read. The start:
A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That's the nerd working on his project in his head.
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Using CardSpace in Low-Value, Low-Overhead Situations
Kim Cameron has a nice post, including a screencast on how to use CardSpace in low-value, low-overhead installations like blogs. (By "low-value" I mean that the cost of a bad authorization decision isn't high, e.g. a spam comment).
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Scoble on Tech at Fast Company
Scoble is doing a video column at Fast Company called Scoble on Tech. Interesting format: Scoble and Ed Sussman from Fast Company are chatting on video. There's pretty high production value--it's edited down so that you see each person when they talk and there are out takes to sites they talk about and graphics.
I just heard about it from Brad Baldwin while we were meeting about Podcamp SLC (Jan 26--more later). I watched the show on Open Social and learned some things. There's definitely meat here.
Still, I'm not convinced that lots of people are going to take the time to regularly watch video. Do you watch much video online (besides the funny YouTube videos people send you in email, I mean)? Really? Doing something like Scoble on Tech is considerably more expensive than an audio podcast. I'm reticent to make that kind of time commitment without a compelling reason.
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The Gang is Back!
The Gillmor Gang is back and still the same. If you loved if before, you'll still love it. I laughed out loud twice in the first 15 minutes of show II.
It's only on Facebook, so you'll have to join if you're not already a member. If you do, feel free to add me as a friend.
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CTO Breakfast Report
As we did introductions today, a surprising number of people were remodeling their basement (time of the year, I guess). Consequently we ended up talking about home theaters set ups for the first part of the meeting. Interesting tidbit: maximum run length for HDMI is 50 feet.
We talked about Facebook Beacon for a while. There was much more discussion of social networks in general than of Beacon for a while, but then we dove into the meat of the power of recommendations and the vast value in coloring the social graph with meta data--including trust data.
Kids see Myspace as being about who they are and Facebook as being about what their friends are doing. Some people want to see what happening in all aspects of their life on the Facebook page. That leads to problems with business applications on Facebook.
I'd brought Super Crunchers with me, intending to talk about it a little and the conversation went that direction without me even having to bring it up. The discussion of what companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google are doing with our data led to a discussion of methods.
We got talking about how screwed up TSA and airport security is. I brought up Steve Yegge's allegory of TSA and interface design. That's as close as I can come to making the discussion have something to do with IT. :-)
There was a great article in Wired on an amature terrorist hunter that made the point that the FBI can't do what matures can do because their
In fact, it's distinctly possible that Rossmiller, alone at her computer, has a better track record than the Justice Department. A Washington Post analysis in 2005 of the 400-plus people charged with terrorism-related crimes by the federal government found that only 14 of those convicted actually had any ties at all to al Qaeda or its network. Rossmiller's cases have come with solid backup, while the feeble evidence in the other high-profile Justice Department cases makes many prosecutors roll their eyes. Consider the seven Miami men arrested in the summer of 2006 and hyped as desiring to wage a "ground war" against the US and intending to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. They turned out to be a bunch of trash-talking blowhards whose plans were formulated while smoking pot in an empty warehouse. In contrast, the man Rossmiller most recently implicated --- Michael Reynolds --- had prepared meticulous plans to blow up pipelines and was shopping online for used gas trucks to implement his plot. The Pennsylvania resident was arrested after traveling 2,000 miles to southern Idaho, lured by Rossmiller into a supposed meeting with a financial backer.
"When I was in the White House and doing terrorism, the holy grail was 'actionable intelligence,' and she brings a form of actionable intelligence," says Roger Cressey, a White House counterterrorism official in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. (He learned of Rossmiller after he left the government.) The FBI, on the other hand, has failed in every attempt to modernize its technology since 2001, and it so restricts the software available to agents that they can't even begin to match what Rossmiller does. "The FBI is a dinosaur in many respects," says Cressey.
Rossmiller agrees. "I went to a meeting in Great Falls, and we got to talking, and someone had to look something up online," she says. "I asked, 'What do you use for Internet access?' and one agent said, 'We have to go to the public library down the street.'"
She also tells a story about another agent who had to get permission to open a Yahoo account because it violated office regs. "They weren't allowed," she says.
From Behind Enemy Lines With a Suburban Counterterrorist
Referenced Thu Nov 29 2007 09:52:17 GMT-0700 (MST)
We got into a discussion about social graphs and reputation in law enforcement Scott and I have an upcoming Technometria interview with Dan Lulich of IOvation on using reputation to detect fraud online.
This looks interesting: a way to read your car's diagnostic data and get it on your computer. The last word: WD 1 terabyte drive for $264.99. Nearly down to $0.25/Gig.
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November 28, 2007
Facebook Beacon Demo
If you've been curious about privacy concerns over Facebook Beacon, this demo shows how it works and why some are concerned. I think Moveon.org is totally the wrong organization to take this on, but whatever.
If you're a Firefox user (one more good reason to switch), these instructions show how to use the BlockSite plugin to kill Beacon. This will still allow you to use the rest of Facebook.
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HQ9+
Here is proof positive that the utility of a domain specific language depends on the domain.
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November 26, 2007
CTO Breakfast This Thursday
The last CTO Breakfast of the year will be held this Thursday at 8am in the Novell Cafeteria. Despite it's name, you don't have to be a CTO to attend--just interested in technology, where it's headed, and the problems of starting and building a high-tech business in Utah. If you're reading this, you're invited.
Be sure to subscribe to the Google calendar for future events. Here's the next several:
- Jan 24 (Thursday)
- Feb 28 (Thursday)
- Mar 27 (Thursday)
For directions, see the CTO Breakfast page.
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Stop Complaining and Starting Building
Doc, as usual, hits the nail on the head in explaining how to solve the privacy-problem-de-juer: Facebook's advertising platform. To wit:
If we want our reach to truly exceed Facebook's grasp, we can't just tell Facebook to stop grasping. We have do deals on our terms and not just theirs. We have to have real relationships and not just systems on the sell side built only to "manage" us, mostly by minimizing human contact.
Perhaps most of all, we need to come up with systems that help demand find supply, rather than just ones that help supply find (or "create") demand. That means we need alternatives to the outmoded and inefficient system of guesswork we call advertising.
That doesn't mean we make advertising go away. But it does mean that we find new paths between demand and supply. and it does mean that find ways to get unwanted advertising out of our face.
From Doc Searls Weblog · Making Rules, II
Referenced Mon Nov 26 2007 08:33:20 GMT-0700 (MST)
As I say in my piece at Between the Lines, I think there's more money and greater customer satisfaction in recommendations, but Facebook didn't go there.
Doc isn't, I'd guess, eschewing a commercial venture that would build these tools. Probably multiple commercial ventures. This doesn't have to be an open source project--although that's a possibility as well. People have made money--lots of it--connecting demand and supply for thousands of years. We don't have to imagine the alternative to demand generation as a revolution. Indeed, as Doc points out, it's a return to the long time order of things.
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November 22, 2007
Facebook Beacon: The Fine Line Between Advertising and Recommendations
I posted a piece at Between the Lines on the fine line between advertising and recommendations. The basic idea:
Facebook has missed out on a tremendous opportunity to use recommendation permissioning to annotate their social graph with trust information--that's an order of magnitude more valuable than the graph itself.
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November 20, 2007
Internet Safety Podcast
One of my colleagues at BYU, Chuck Knutson, has launched the Internet Safety podcast. If you're a parent wondering about tools and techniques for guiding your children's exploring, then check it out.
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November 19, 2007
Leopard and Mail
I was forced to upgrade to Leopard last week by a Tiger update gone bad. I'm not convinced I can blame Apple--I've updated my machine hundreds of times before with nary a fault and I was, without thinking about what was going on, installing a monitor and plugging and unplugging USB devices while the update was underway. I might have messed something up.
In any event, I had a problem that I couldn't find enough information to fix (something to do with a file locking problem in the IPv6 code, but I couldn't figure out the file name). Reinstalling the update didn't work. I could only boot into single user mode. So, since I wanted to upgrade to Leopard anyway and 10.5.1, the first Leopard update, had just been released, I decided to just upgrade to Leopard.
Normally I'd have done a fresh install, using a back up image as the machine to restore apps and users, but because I had a machine that wouldn't boot and my image was a few days out of date, I decided to just upgrade. Seemed to work fine--I've been using Leopard now for 4 or 5 days without noticing anything untoward. Things are speedy and stable.
Mail.app, Apple's mail application was significantly upgraded and so several add-on bundles I've come to rely on broke. MiniMail had an update that worked fine.
MailTags has a beta that kept hanging Mail.app, so I've uninstalled that for now. I'm hoping a working version is out soon since tags are my security blanket for finding email in the one-big-pile-of-old-email scheme I use for filing archived messages.
Letterbox was the mail bundle I've used the longest. It displays a three-pane mail view of mail with the selected message to the right of the message list rather than under it. I had no idea how much I'd come to like it. A Letterbox still isn't available and I was really hating email with the standard over-under configuration. Fortunately, I found a replacement: Widemail. I've only been using it for a few days, but so far, so good.
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Virtualization Security Threats
Laurianne McLaughlin has an excellent article in CIO magazine about security threats in virtual machines and what you can do now to mitigate them. One that caught my eye was No. 4, "Understand the Value of an Embedded Hypervisor". The reason I was tuned into that was a conversation I had with Gregory Ness on a Technometria podcast where he went into some detail about the role of a hypervisor in VM security.
As an aside, am I the only one who finds the interstitial page ads that IDG is placing in this online magazines completely annoying? I wouldn't mind so much if it wasn't the same ad, over and over again. I don't mind them having ads--after all, I write for InfoWorld, another IDG publication. Maybe its because I do write for them that they bother me so much. I suspect that 90% of the people will never tunnel through the interstitial to the second page.
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November 17, 2007
Free Ringtones on iPhone
The 1.1.2 update to the iPhone quietly added the ability to add free custom ringtones to the iPhone. The ringtones can be made from any (non-DRM'd) ACC file on your computer. I discovered this accidentally while downloading SoundSource from Rogue Amoeba. They had a new freebie called MakeiPhoneRingtone. Just drop an ACC sound file under 40 seconds onto the app and it puts it in iTunes, ready to be downloaded to the iPhone the next time you sync. Works like a charm.
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November 16, 2007
I'm on YDN Theater
While I was at Defrag, I sat down with Jeremy Zawodny for an interview on the Yahoo! Developer Network Theater. You can watch it here:
Alternately, you can download it. We talked about a variety of topics, including the idea behind my new startup, Kynetx.
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November 14, 2007
The State of FOSS in Utah
Clint Savage was the speaker at tonight's PLUG meeting. Clint is the founder of the Utah Open Source Foundation. UTOSF was the power behind the recent Utah Open Source Conference.
Clint ran down a long list of activities that UTOSF is sponsoring to promote open source in Utah. Some of the most promising, IMO, were promoting open source at local colleges and universities and open source family day. BYU's UUG sponsors Linux install fests, but I'm generally disappointed by the lack of interest in open source among CS students.
They mentioned the Home Runs in IT Conference that will be held at the Open Source Technology Center at Novell on Dec 6th. I'm flying home from San Jose the morning of the 6th from IIW to speak at noon. Sounds like it will be a good event.
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Kinetic Energy, Flywheels, and Friction
I read this essay on Kinetic Energy, Flywheels, and Friction at A List Apart when it first came out last year. I just reread it. Here's the basic idea:
The reason you have a Web site is to get visitors to take some action. In order to induce them to do so, you have to give them enough momentum to get them through the process--with all its attendant friction.
There's real power in this. Retail Web sites, for example, are full of friction and rely on their customer's determination to get the product to overcome that friction. Too often they have more friction than is necessary. For example, when I go on the Web to buy a Utah Jazz jersey, why don't sites guess that's what I want based on the fact that I'm from Utah? Most treat you the same regardless of situation. That's excess friction.
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November 13, 2007
Exploiting Online Games
I had a fascinating discussion with Gary McGraw last week about his latest book Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems. For the next two days I was telling everyone about it. The issues surrounding online game security are representative of the kinds of security issues that plague any large-scale distributed system. I heartily recommend the interview and the book to anyone who plays games or is just interested in the larger security picture.
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30 Inch Dell Monitors Are a Steal
I've got two Apple 30: displays--one at home and one in my office at BYU. They're lovely. I can't imagine programming without one. All that real estate makes a huge difference in productivity.
Last week I picked up three Dell 3007WFP 30 inch monitors. They're a steal; Dell has them priced less than $1200 (compare that to the Apple educational price of $1600). A c|net head to head review puts them neck and neck. I'm sure the esthetics won't be the same, but I can live with that.
Why the price drop? Dell's got a new 30 inch display on the way. The chief benefit is better connectivity which isn't something I've cared about--I'm not going to use these for TVs.
If you've always wanted a huge display, this may be your chance.
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November 12, 2007
ParenScript: A Lispy JavaScript Generator
Feedback on my interview with Bruce Johnson on the Google Web Toolkit led to ParenScript, a little language for Lisp that generates JavaScript. From the intro:
ParenScript is a small Lispy language that can be compiled to JavaScript. It also comes with client-side HTML and CSS generation libraries. This approach simplifies the development of web applications by enabling all components of the application to be written in Lisp, so that HTML, CSS and JavaScript code can all be generated with the full power of Lisp and its macros.
At the same time, ParenScript strives to produce maximally readable JavaScript with the absolute minimum overhead for advanced Lisp features, which sets it apart from other JavaScript generation tools. This enables straightforward, surprise-free debugging in tools like Firebug, and painless integration with JavaScript libraries such as Prototype.
From ParenScript
Referenced Mon Nov 12 2007 09:11:03 GMT-0700 (MST)
One neat feature: ParenScript comes with it's own macro definition form defpsmacro for creating ParenScript macros. A big step forward in user extensibility. Another is it's SEXP to JSON translation.
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November 9, 2007
Barbie Key Signings
What's hot for Christmas 2007? Barbie key signings.
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November PLUG on the State of FOSS in Utah
The Provo Linux User's Group meeting for November will be on the 14th at 7:30pm. Omniture is hosting, so head on over to Canyon Park Technology Center. I'm going to try to make it. Here's the announcement:
This is an exciting month for PLUG. We have a new meeting location: Omniture. Never before has the local FOSS community been stronger. The reach of groups like PLUG is growing beyond just a few computer hobbyists. Linux is now becoming the premiere solution for countless business tasks, rather than just an alternative one. If there was any doubt, it was dispelled with the recent runaway success of the first ever Utah Open Source Conference.
In line with the new growth trends in FOSS we have invited Clint Savage, president of the Utah Open Source Foundation to offer the first "State of Utah FOSS" presentation. This exciting new foundation is helping all of the Utah FOSS groups (like PLUG) take their groups to new heights. Come participate, grab a drink, shoot some pool, and meet the new players in the Utah open source industry!
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Starting a High Tech Business: Commitment
I'm starting a new business called Kynetx (nothing to see there yet). As I go through some of the things I do, I'm planning to blog them. The whole series will be here. This is the fourth installment. You may find my efforts instructive. Or you may know a better way--if so, please let me know!
Tuesday night, after Defrag was over, I was at dinner with Andre Durand, the CEO of Ping ID. At one point we were talking about startups, something Andre has a lot of experience in, and he spoke about commitment in a way that really rang true for me.
When you tell people you're starting a business, everyone, from your spouse to VCs, has one basic question in the back of their mind: "Is this guy committed? Is he serious?" Once they have that question answered to their satisfaction, they're with you.
The reason this rang true was because of other recent experiences I'd had. The usual reaction people give you when you say you're starting a business is mild curiosity, usually expressed in a question like "what's the idea?" You can explain it--doesn't matter how well--and they'll say "that's nice" and the conversation turns to other things.
But if somehow you can express the level of your commitment along the way, you'll get a totally different reaction. Something along the lines of "wow, you're serious, aren't you?" And then they want to know more.
This is why an entrepreneur who's willing to put their own money into the business is so compelling while one trying to get a company going without getting too much skin in the game is ignored. If you've rented space or hired employees, for example, you've shown commitment in a way that's tangible.
 Piper Turbo Arrow I'm Selling (click for more) |
In my case, I'm selling my plane. There are other ways to fund Kynetx, but this has some particular advantages--not the least of which is that it tells everyone how committed I am. (As an aside, this is a great plane, if you're in the market.)
Whether you just put money on your second mortgage or find some other more creative way to fund your business, do it in a way that tells the people who most need your assurance--family, friends, and funders--that you're committed. You'll see a huge change in attitude from them. More importantly, your momentum will increase with a public act of commitment.
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November 8, 2007
Spending Loyalty
Radiohead is earning customer loyalty while Apple spends it.
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November 7, 2007
New Conferences on IT Conversations
This week, I published shows on IT Conversations from two new series: the Singularity Summit and RailsConf. Here are the show descriptions.
Rodney
Brooks - The Singularity: A Period Not An Event - In the keynote
presentation from the 2007 Singularity Summit, Rodney Brooks,
Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT, explores many possible
singularity futures based on decades of experience researching,
inventing, and commercializing robots. During this presentation
Dr. Brooks examines why we need robotics and AI as well as how the
singularity will not be like it is portrayed by Hollywood.
David
Heinemeier Hansson - Rails 2007 Keynote - The next evolution of
Rails isn't going to be a unicorn, according to David Heinemeier
Hansson. In this keynote address at the 2007 RailsConf, Hansson talks
about what the Rails community has and where it's going, and the
gradual improvements Rails will see in the coming years.
There are many other new conferences, including Supernova and Defrag that will be coming along in the next few weeks and months. Watch for them--they're sure to give you something to listen to on those long winter nights.
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November 6, 2007
The New Federated Identity
I've been asked to put together a feature for InfoWorld on user-centric identity. The feature will include written text, a couple of podcasts, and some flash animations. I'm a little excited about the opportunity to use these different media to communicate the idea of this important topic to business.
The podcasts will be 15-20 minutes each on the following topics:
- Podcast on user control and laws of identity
- Podcast on state of identity in enterprise
I've already got these scheduled with guests, so please don't ask to be on the podcast.
The initial outline for the written part is:
- Intro to User Centric Identity -- statement of problem (300-400 words)
- Technology: OpenID & CardSpace (700 words)
- User-Centric Identity in the Enterprise - how can I use it now? (touch on security, privacy, federation, customers, limitations, etc) (800-1000 words)
- Futures - where is this going? (500 words)
If you have ideas on any of these areas, please let me know or leave a comment. I'm particularly interested in where you think this will go in the near term.
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Defrag Closing: Relevance and Information Overload
 Paul Kedrosky, moderator of the closing panel at
Defrag. (click to enlarge) |
"Everytime I try to get more personalized information, I end up with more celebrity obituaries in my newsfeed. Why is that?" asks Paul Kedrosky, moderator of the closing panel at Defrag.
At issue: is information overload real, or is it something that people at Defrag (and other's like us) invent so we can have a problem to solve? Is this a problem a relatively few people care about because only a few people are really all that connected or involved?
People are fundamentally lazy. Most people aren't going to tag things, rate them, review them, or anything else. Are the rest of us just information sherpas for the rest of the population? Maybe, but that's not all bad. Tagging is just the editorial process of our day. Editorial efforts are always a few creating meaning for the many.
Pulling structure out of the implicit will make this task easier. There is an interplay between implicit and explicit. Implicit provides a set up and then explicit drives the point home.
 Closing panel at Defrag (click to enlarge) |
Paul asks the panel: "What are people using now to solve this problem that didn't exist ten years ago?"
- The emergence of faceting - the navigation of a site like Home Depot. Going through information on lots of products by price, by brand, etc.
- Search tools and feed filtering
- Digg - what everyone else thinks is interesting
- StumbleUpon - a big time-waster or an alternative to search?
What's interesting about several of these tools is that they lead to discovery, something that's been missing from the Web since the rise of the search engine in 1996. People used to "browse" the Web. Digg, StumbleUpon, and even Twitter lead to serendipitous finds.
Information overload and the stress associated with it is a choice. We choose to focus or not. We choose to pay attention to things.
Still, there's an issue of too much data on things we need to pay attention to. Because the data is available, we feel like we shouldn't miss it and indeed, missing relevant data can be costly. This is no where true than in the capital markets. People make money from having the right information, on time. There's money to be made here.
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Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for October 2007
Here are the top ten shows on IT Conversations (by download) for October 2007:
- Bruce Johnson - Technometria: Google Web Toolkit (Rating: 4.20)
Recently, Google released from beta its Google Web Toolkit. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language. Phil and Scott talk to Bruce Johnson, one if its co-creators. In addition to discussing its development, Bruce gives a number of examples of projects that took advantage of GWT.
- Robert Trivers - What Do We Know (Rating: 4.25)
People lie. We lie to each other, we lie to ourselves, and these deceptions cause no end of problems for human society. In this talk from Pop!Tech 2005, biologist Robert Trivers discusses the biological basis for deception in humans and other species. He shares the evolutionary imperatives that created the skills necessary to deceive others and also explains why self-deception has a biological basis.
- Maryanne Wolf - Tech Nation (No rating yet)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with author Maryanne Wolf about how human brains have adapted since we invented writing and along with it reading.
- Guy Kawasaki - The Art of Innovation (Rating: 4.77)
Guy Kawasaki has a long history working in technology, both in established companies and as an entrepreneur. He worked for Apple at the time of the development of the Macintosh and later returned as an Apple Fellow. In this keynote speech, he gives what he believes are the important stages towards successful innovation. He presents the steps in both a humorous and intelligent way, showing what companies must do to be successful.
- Scott Lemon, Ben Galbraith - Technometria: Technology Travels (No rating yet)
How do young people view the online experience? What are the implications of how life will be for people who have spent their entire lives online? Phil, Scott, and Ben discuss this and other topics related to recent conferences attended. Besides the whole issue of Millennials, they also assess the status of flash-based applications versus Ajax, as well as other methods available to make desktop based online applications.
- Leonard Maltin - Tech Nation (No rating yet)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with movie critic Leonard Maltin, who explains how movies have changed over the years, and how they're changing today, all thanks to technology.
- Ned Gulley - Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators (No rating yet)
Ned Gulley is a software designer at The Mathworks and the architect of the company's semi-annual MATLAB programming contest. Since 1999 he's watched contestants exhibit a unique blend of competition and cooperation. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Gulley why winning solutions are woven from the contributions of ten or more players.
- David Bankston - Issues with Software as Service for Social Networking (No rating yet)
Social networking can transform communication and build powerful connections, but getting it right in the enterprise takes a special touch. David Bankston shares his experience as a technologist and entrepreneur in this lively discussion of ways in which software-as-service and social media can help businesses manage customer feedback and build brands and communities on line.
- Dmitri Williams & Jake Vickers - Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators (No rating yet)
Dmitri Williams is an academic at USC Annenberg School for Communication, who studies the social dynamics of online games. On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell speaks with Williams and George Vickers, who reflect on the ways in which leadership and organizational skills can be developed in an online multiplayer game.
- David Link - Technometria: Technology Appliances (No rating yet)
If you ask the average person for an example of an appliance, he or she would mention a toaster. However, David Link, CEO of ScienceLogic, would give you a completely different example. He joins Phil and Ben to discuss technology appliances. In addition to defining them, he talks about how they are developed and why enterprises find them particularly useful. The group also assess how appliances can be used in a virtual environment, as well as the importance of technology monitoring.
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Andrew McAfee on the Exploitation of Ties
 Andrew McAfee of
Harvard Business School (click to enlarge) |
I'm listening to Andrew McAfee's keynote at Defrag. He's talking about how social software can be used inside the enterprise. One of the key tasks facing proponents of social software is to articulate the value.
Any worker has relationships of various strengths with co-workers. They might have strong ties to a core group who they work with all the time and weaker ties to others. There are still others who have the potential to provide value through relationship whom the worker doesn't know yet.
The prototypical tool for strongly tied teams is the wiki. He stresses that too many teams are still emailing things around to each other when tools like wikis would be a better way to manage team interaction. Less disruptive and easier to manage. At the strongly tied core, the use of social software leads to artifact creation. That is, what emerges is a document that represents the team's work product.
Organizations spend a lot of time strengthening strong ties--making them even stronger. Nothing wrong with that. But the people to whom you're strongly tied are not likely to be the source o non-redundant information. You usually know what they know.
Andrew believes that sociologist Mark Granovetter's theory of the strength of weak ties provides an important theory for understanding social software and weakly tied teams.
Social networking software, like Facebook provide a way for people to keep up with what weakly tied networks are up to, what they're thinking. What's more, they're starting to have tools for exploiting that weak network. Social networking software brings in non-redundant information and gives you bridges to other groups. Novel information is the emergent artifact for this group.
Potential colleagues have been traditionally brought into contact with each other through what some research calls "brokers." These are the people who know everyone. Andrew sees the blogosphere as the prototypical tool for brining people together inside the organization. If people are doing what Jon Udell calls "narrating your work," then others in the company can discover that activity and form ties.
Andrew says that most managers don't see the value of blogs, thinking of them as marginally time-wasting. Turn it around and think of it as workers broadcasting to others what they're doing. The benefits are innovation, serendipity, and bridging. Teams emerge from this activity.
The final group is those co-workers with whom we have nothing in common and have nothing to say to each other. This group actually has value to each other. Using prediction markets, the knowledge of a large group of people can be used to create answers create collective intelligence. The emergent artifact is "an answer" to a question about something of value to the company.
He mentions the Hollywood Stock Exchange as a remarkably predictive tool for determining the earning potential of a Hollywood movie. Companies don't use prediction markets enough to harness their employees' knowledge to create answers for the company.
Here's a table that summarizes Andrew's talk:
|
Tie Strength |
Potential Benefits |
Technology Example |
What is Emergent? |
|
Strong |
Collaboration, Productivity, Agility |
Wiki |
Document |
|
Weak |
Innovation, Non-redundant information, Network bridging |
Social Networking Software |
Information |
|
Potential |
Efficient search, Tie formation |
Blogosphere |
Team |
|
None |
Collective Intelligence |
Prediction Market |
Answer |
The concept of ties provides a foundation for conceptualizing value and selecting the right technology. The result is not that these technologies will make all ties equal. There will still be strong, weak, potential, and non-existent ties in an organization. These technologies can be differentiators that increase rather than decrease the differences. The tools allow these differences to be exploited and value to be created from them.
9:16 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This
November 5, 2007
Free Markets: Your Choice of Silo
Doc is giving his riff on VRM. It's new and different every time. No one does this sort of thing as well as Doc. With respect to VRM, he quotes Whitman:
And I know I am solid and sound;
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow;
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
I know I am deathless;
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter's compass;
I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt
stick at night.
I know I am august;
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood;
I see that the elementary laws never apologize;
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by,
after all.)
I exist as I am---that is enough;
If no other in the world be aware, I sit content;
And if each and all be aware, I sit content.
One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself;
And whether I come to my own to-day, or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can
wait.
It seems relevant. He said a lot more than this, but his gestalt is so hard to capture in a blog post.
4:21 PM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This
Dick Hardt on Trust
Dick Hardt is giving a new talk at Defrag. He's talking about trust; his thesis is that trust defrags identity. Much of what's he's saying is right in line with the reputation work (PDF) my students and I have been working on. He makes a critical link to identity: identifiers bind personas together to increase trust.
Intuition doesn't work well online because of the absence of clues and the ability to create false context. Institutions haven't done much better. He brings up another key concept this is largely about accountability.
Key point: binding behavior from multiple sites together leads to better accountability. This doesn't mean that we can't have multiple personas just that we ought to be able to link them if we feel the reward is worth the loss of privacy.
3:35 PM | Comments (1) | Recommend This | Print This
Defrag: Making Interactions Explicit
Eric Nolin is being very explicit about sponsor talks at Defrag. No harm there--in fact, I like it. The sponsor talk is clearly labeled as such and right before lunch. Today, it's Shane Pearson, from BEA. I interviewed him for Technometria (as part of our coverage of Defrag) a few weeks ago.
Shane said a couple of things that piqued my interest. One was referring to a McKinsey study on interactions on the workplace. He put of a graph about the evolution of managed assets showing that capital was the earliest and easiest asset to manage. Information was second and interactions are the latest asset that businesses want to manage. The money quote from the study:
Almost 85% of people have jobs that are largely or wholly about interacting with other people (rather than transforming raw materials, running machinery, etc.).
IT has always had a function that included managing people interactions, but we've largely relegated it to the bottom-line "saving money" side of things: zero-day start, make sure the phones work, run the email system efficiently, etc. We've not been about top-line, "making money" activities.
Shane asked "what if wanted to know what articles and blogs my co-workers were reading?" He the put up a slide that showed what Facebook might look like if it provided enterprise-friendly functionality.
This got my attention. Maybe it's been obvious to others, but I've informally done similar things with co-workers--shared what we're reading--but this could make it more automatic. I'd welcome the opportunity to see more of what my co-workers think is interesting in any given day. Ironically, universities are particularly bad at this.
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Defrag: Web 2.0 and Security
I just put a piece on Michael Barrett's (CISO, Paypal) presentation at Defrag. He started by saying that Web 2.0 scares the hell out of him.
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Forgetfulness as a Virtue
Joshua Schachter, the creator of del.icio.us, just mentioned that one of the key methods we have for dealing with too much information is forgetting. He said it in the context of talking about how every time he finds an interesting blog and adds it to his feed reader, he has one more thing to do. Not adding it right away and only adding it if he remembers and goes back saves that effort.
This is a critical survival function in the modern world, I think. We have to be willing to let things fall off our plates--and be more forgiving of others when our stuff falls off theirs. We all have too much to do.
I've started to be more selective about all kinds of things I do--from installing applications on my laptop to responding positively to lunch invitations--recognizing that everything I do today commits me to future action and commits my future attention in some way. So, forgive me if I don't respond sometimes.
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At Defrag
I'm in Denver at Defrag. Eric Nolan, Brad Feld, and Phil Becker have organized it to discuss "the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the "aha" moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, "social" networking, collaboration and business intelligence."
I missed Dave Weinberger's keynote. I didn't want to--he's an engaging speaker and this performance must have been great: I walked in as someone commented that she never expected to come to a tech confernce and cry in the first sessions. But to make it I would have had to fly out yesterday and as much as I love Dave, I love being with my family on Sunday evenings more. Sorry Dave.
Flying out this morning did allow me to see the Moon-Venus conjunction that Doc showed on his blog this morning. Very clear skies and a beautiful morning.
The good news is that IT Conversations will get the audio, so while I didn't hear it live, I'll hear it none-the-less. If you're not here, look for the audio in a few months. I'm sure it's going to be very interesting based on the speakers and topics.
Defrag has all the marks of an engaging, early-stage conference: a smaller-sized crowd that makes for more intimate, honest conversation, not too many vendors to drive the agenda, and lots of familiar faces who I know are interesting to listen to.
9:49 AM | Comments () | Recommend This | Print This
November 2, 2007
Domain Specific Languages
Recently, I've been designing a domain specific language for Kynetx, the start-up I'm working on. When you tell someone you're designing a language, the usual reaction is incredulity. "Why would you design your own language?!?!" they say. I'm here to tell you why.
First, let me say that I'm a big believer in notation. Using the right notation to describe and think about a problem is a powerful tool--one that we're too eager to give up it seems. People seem to believe that (a) all languages are pretty much the same and (b) the world has enough notations. While (a) is true in theory (they're all Turing complete, after all) the power of a notation isn't in what it can accomplish, but the ways in which it allows you to think. I'll deal with (b) in what follows.
There are basically three myths that lead people to avoid language design.
- It's too hard--the domain of experts
- GUIs are better and more approachable than notations
- A general purpose langauge (GPL) is a proper tool for solving domain specific problems
The first argument is simply not true. I teach dozens of undergraduates a year how to design and implement programming languages. Parsing is well understood and good parser tools exists for almost all modern programming languages. Building an interpreter for a parse tree is no harder than building any other program of comparable size. There is skill involved, to be sure, but anyone who is a competent programmer can build an interpreter for a small to medium sized programming language.
So, if building interpreters for programming languages is within the reach of most programmers, why don't more do it? There are basically two ways to tells a computer what to do: a GUI or a language. They both have their advantages. Drag and drop is great for moving one file from one directory to another. When I want to systematically rename hundreds of files, a language is the clear winner. Still, the GUI has become so much a part of everyday computing experience that we often assume that it's user-friendly nature trumps all other needs.
I'm in the middle of reading Walter Isaacson's new biography of Einstein. It's clear that notation played a major role in his ability to come up with the principle of general relativity. He demurred at first, believing that the math was for someone else to come along later and tidy up. But later in his life, after the experience of working on general relativity, became an ardent convert.
Similarly, there is power in notation for computing tasks. Not merely the advantage of parameterized execution, as I gave above in the file moving example, but in it's ability to allow us to think about problems, express them so that other's can clearly and unambiguously see our thoughts, and collaborate to create joint solutions. What's more, languages can be versioned. GUI configurations are hard to version. Programming languages have advantages even when they're not executed.
The DSL becomes the focal point for design activities. The other day, I was having a discussion with three friends about a particular feature. Pulling out pencil and paper and writing what the DSL would need to look like to support the feature helped all of us focus and come up with solutions. Without such a tool, I'm not sure how we would have communicated the issues or whether we'd have all had the same conception of them and the ultimate solution we reached.
Over and over in my career I've seen that when you give people a language instead of a GUI, they come up solutions that you didn't even know were possible. Language expands the range of solutions while GUIs usually limit it to the vision of the creator.
The final argument--that GPLs are capable of doing anything a domain specific language (DSL) can is true, but misses the point. For example, when I've explained to people--capable computer scientists--what I'm doing, the first reaction is "why don't you use X?" where X could be BEPL, Javascript, etc. There are several reasons:
- The abstractions aren't right and nothing has the right mix of abstractions. I need a rule language focused on Web pages with event triggers and data source integration taken for granted. BEPL isn't that, although it could be shoe-horned in. Notation designed to increase the power of thought can't be shoe-horned (and shouldn't have too many angle brackets).
- GPLs are, by definition, general. They are designed to solve a wide host of problems outside the domain I care about. As a result, expressing something I can put in a line of code in a DSL takes a dozen in most GPLs. I can build very tight and expressive abstractions for a single domain that would not be appropriate for a GPL.
To be fair, there are trade-offs. When you develop a DSL, you lose the ability to leverage the checkers, IDEs, and other tools that exist for GPLs. This is offset by the increase in expressive power and the relatively small size of most DSLs. You can get away with less--especially at first while you're using the language more for clarifying your thoughts.
Do I anticipate that wonks will write programs in my DSL? Wonks will have a GUI, or maybe a 2x2 matrix--the universal tool of the MBA. In fact, I view my DSL as an intermediate form--something that is generated by one part of the system for use by another. But in the meantime, I've found incredible freedom, design leverage, and expressiveness in designing and implementing my DSL.
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Why Can't My Car Tell the Speed Limit?
I got a ticket on my way to the Guy Kawasaki event yesterday--34 in a 25. I wasn't trying to speed--I simply wasn't paying attention. Here's my question: why can't my car tell the speed limit and warn me when I'm over? Seems simple enough to do in theory. You wouldn't need to annotate the roads physically, you could do it with GPS and maps. I'd pay for this service.
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Label that Brick!
Don Reisinger hates power bricks. More specifically, he hates that he can't tell which brick goes with which product. Years ago, I got frustrated not knowing what brick went with what device when I pulled them out of a box and hit on a simple strategy. Every time I open a new box of anything, the first thing I do is label the brick. It's saved me a ton of frustration.