BookBlog

Movable Type Upgrade

If this entry posts correctly, I've upgraded Movable Type. The process isn't all done yet. The cms templates are somewhat messed up, I need to delete over 10,000 spam comments from the last several weeks, and need to install a new comment utility.

UPDATE: The cms template just needed a shift-refresh, and the spam comments are gone. Woo hoo! If you made a comment in the last six weeks ago, it got caught in a spring cleaning frenzy. Feel free to comment again.

Heading off to Women 2.0

It's cool to be somewhere where there are multiple events for women entrepreneurs. Will blog about the program when done.

One nice touch for networking -- the lunch is after the talks, the better for conversation-starting. It's more awkward to mill around with a group of strangers, and then, by the time you have more things to talk about, everybody leaves

Popularity can't ruin open source

I am glad to see that this this LinuxWorld articlecontains plenty of quotes countering Forrester Analyst Michael Goulde's report: "Vendors Refine Their Open Source Strategies/The Risk of Subverting Open Source Freedoms Mounts".

Goulde argues that "The traditional open source project with a large community and volunteer contributors is going to be diluted by extensive vendor participation," he told LinuxInsider in an interview."

What Goulde is missing is that fast that in the open source ecosystem, a very high percentage of projects fail. Most projects, whether initiated by individuals or vendors, don't get much contribution and die a quiet death. That's nothing new. If new vendors release open source projects that are not interesting to developers, then those projects won't get community participation. A tree fell in the forest and nobody heard.

His other argument makes even less sense. He writes in the report: "As major software suppliers adopt open source software as part of their strategies, the risk increases that the goals of the open source movement -- user freedom to use, modify, and distribute software -- will be undermined."

But the freedom to modify is in the license, not in the promise by the vendor. If a vendor open sources a product, it uses either GPL, or BSD, or some other style of license that grants permission to modify, and requires redistribution to be credited or to be also open source. Once the vendor releases the software, they can't take it back. Even if they offer new software under a different license, the community is now free to fork the code.

Wikiwyg -- the wysiwyg editor for wikis that was initially developed by Socialtext and released open source, is getting a increasing number of useful patches and bugfixes from the community. People find it useful, it's being adopted, and developers are contributing. The right to modify and redistribute is protected by LGPL.

If a vendor releases software that's useful, the community will pick it up. If it's less useful, it will get less traction. Projects might pick up interest as they mature, or lose interest if the software diverges from what the community wants. All of these patterns are common.

Rather than describing risks to open source, Gould might have described risks to vendors. If vendors hope that simply by opensourcing their code, they are guaranteed developer interest, they are sadly deluded. Just like any other product, an open source product needs to meet the needs of its customers -- in this case, open source developers -- in order to be successful.

Les Orchard on ajax portals

On the topic of portals reincarnated with ajax "I never wanted portals to be more dynamic, or even open to third-party-authored widgets - I wanted them to go away altogether."

Yes, Google Video is Evil

Google gives the content industries freedom to set their own prices, starting with Free. This will be popular with content providers, who hate Apple because Steve Jobs insists on setting his own prices for online music and video.

But Google does not allow video producers to set their own terms of use. Google Video has their very own, proprietary DRM that doesn't let users save the video to their PC or portable players. No time-shifting, space-shifting, excerpting, or other hallmarks of fair use. Fair use is forbidden according to Google's support documentation.

If Google wanted to be Not Evil, it would allow video producers the choice of providing content in DRM-encumbered or DRM-free formats. Video providers who wanted to allow users to download, time-shift, excerpt, and mash-up would be able to do so. Video producers who want to restrict content could do so too. If restricted content loses viewers to sources with more convenient terms, that would be neither here nor there to Google.

Many video producers who upload their content to Google Video are small non-commercial players, or obscure sources like this sushi documentary that have much more to gain from exposure than from restricting use.

Google gets a very small bye for beta -- maybe giving content providers their choice of format is a soon-to-come future feature. If not, Google Video really is evil.

Aggregated shopping

Donata.com writes about auto advertisers shifting budget from tv and print ads to the internet. He's predicting a new trend in online advertising, away from search context ads (Google) and an unstructured database (Craigslist), and toward structured, decentralized, XML-based ads. In this model, each dealer would post their list of available cars, with price and options. Now, there are already a plenty of centralized aggregator services. Froogle can find you deals on desk lamps and rain boots. If Froogle let users subscribe to a search by RSS, that would be a long way toward the vision.

Smart textile remote control

Maggie Orth's International Fashion Machines is marketing a fuzzy light switch. Touching the pompom completes the circuit and turns on/off the light.

A fuzzy switch is kind of nifty if you don't have little kids with sticky fingers. But it's not that different from a regular switch that you need to get up to flip.

What would be really nifty is a fabric household remote control. Touch bits of fuzz or parts of a colorful pattern to could turn on/off lights, heating/air conditioning, stereo, run the bath. The trigger could be a soft press, or a bounce for the playful. It could be a fuzzy desk toy, a mousepad like desk accessory, or a watch band.

It will be especially fun when these are available as kits, and 8-12 year old kids will be able to make them as crafts projects.

Telcos prevent customer satisfaction

Last week's WSJ reported that "Several large telephone and cable companies are starting to make it harder for consumers to use the Internet for phone calls or swapping video files." Surely, the best strategy that a business can take when faced with booming customer demand is to reduce what it offers to customers.

The incumbent telcos and content companies have the same problem -- they'd rather protect their obsolete business models than to see what customers want now and provide it.

This is so delightfully evil...

Clocky, an alarm clock that rolls off the sideboard and hides when you swat it.

Just won an well-deserved Ignobel Prize.

Someday when Apple merges with Disney

On that day, Disney will license all of its content with creative commons licenses, and offer Disney fans a set of creative tools to remix video, and retell stories, and create games, and resell the content they create using Disney raw materials....

Then Disney stories will return to the folk art roots from which they started, and fans young and old will multiply the time they spend with Disney stories and characters by a factor of several, and the market for creative tools and accessories will grow.

Today this is but a fairy tale. Second Life, the creative stepchild of the entertainment business, is enabling the creation fo a secondary market in player-created game content. The stepchild of the entertainment business is misunderstood and despised by its elder sisters, but it will be queen someday.

What's Google doing with that fiber?

Om Malik speculates that Google is building a nationwide fiber network, will use wifi at endpoints to reach users, and then use location-awareness to turbo-charge ads.

The dots to connect are:
* Google has been quietly buying up dark fiber around the country
* Google is working with a small startup in San Francisco that has software for location-based services at wifi hotspots
* Google just launched Google Talk, a text and voice messaging client.
* Google spends a lot of money on IP transit fees, and could avoid those fees by sharing traffic directly with ISPs.

If that's what Google is doing -- wow. Google is very good at building very big, low-cost computing systems. The network incumbents have an inflated cost structure and a business model based on lobbying for competitive advantage. Some smart capital investment could free vast potential energy in communication services. This could go kaboom.

von Hippel's "lead users" vs. Goeffrey Moore's Visionaries

Michael Osofsky picks up the thread comparing Eric Von Hippel's "lead users" to Geoffrey Moore's "visionaries," and prompts some more reflection on the similarities and differences between the categories of technologyearly adopters.

I suspect that von Hippel's Lead Users and Moore's Visionaries are mostly the same people viewed with different perspectives shaped by time and technology.

Moore saw visionaries as "early adopters" -- people who are eager consumers of brand new products. von Hippel studies early adopters as innovators -- people who not only consume but customize products.

Early adopters have always played a role in customizing products, but they have more opportunities to do so these days. There are more tools available to modify products, ranging from open source software to low-cost CAD and low-volume contract manufacturers.

When Moore first wrote Crossing the Chasm, it was most important to help technology companies to see how different mainstream buyers were from early adopters. A technology provider wishing to hit the big time needed to focus on packaging the product for more mainstream buyers, and to ignore the eccentric preferences of the visionaries.

These days, customer innovation has been democratized, changing the rules of business success. Successful tech companies (like Google, Amazon, Ebay) need to be good both at packaging a service for broad use, and at providing tools for lead user customization.

By moving away from Moore's understanding of users as eager but passive "consumers" and focusing on the active role played by lead customer innovation, von Hippel reaches several insights that Moore didn't a decade ago. Many lead user customizations are one-offs which allow a manufactured product access to an application the vendor couldn't supply cost-effectively. Many other lead user customizations are applicable to a larger class of customers, and vendors can use the signals of end-user customization to lead their next-generation product development efforts.

So, instead of abandoning lead users, von Hippel recommends serving them with customization tools, and adopting popular customer innovations into the manufactured product line.

Vint Cerf helps Google reduce evil

In an interview with CNET, the internet pioneer evangelized sensible ideas about public policy for the internet.

Cerf told CNET that he finds it ''"troublesome" that various states and localities have been proposing and implementing measures to outlaw municipally sponsored broadband networks. "Why on Earth would we inhibit people from making their own investments--deciding, for example, to float a bond?"'.

Cerf has also been out talking to Hollywood, encouraging them to 'view the Internet as an alternative distribution outlet. "Some are responding positively, but some legal departments are still having trouble swallowing the idea."'

Hopefully Cerf's well-respected presense and active evangelism will help Google throw its weight behind good tech policy and counteract the force of the telecom and content oligopolies. The tech business strategy mantra is "commoditize your complements." Google benefits when there are fatter pipes available to more people, and more content available for indexing and related ads. The world will get better when the innovative business that see the fortunes to gain pry off the stranglehold of stagnant businesses who only see what they have to lose.

Asterisk needs marketing

Socialtext is considering the use of Asterisk as a telephony server. We use a mishmash of skype, vonage, POTS, and freeconference.com to support our distributed team. It's amazing that it can be done at all, but the string and baling wire is getting tiresome. "Can you hear me" isn't amusing any more, and wastes plenty of valuable time.

The open source telephony server toolkit has tremendous potential to provide low-cost telecom services for small-to-mid-sized businesses But somebody needs to step up and market the heck out of it.

I was browsing through the Asterisk site itself, and the sites for some Asterisk VARs. The sites all focused on a long, long, long list of features. The laundry list is probably helpful for a telecom geek who knows exactly what she is looking for, and is in search of the specific set of protocols, hardware devices, and functions.

The "feature list" approach is next to useless for a small business person who wants to know how their telecom needs can be met effectively. A good marketing person would talk to small business people and understand what sets of capabilities they're looking for in a phone server. Then they would explain, step by step, what Asterisk can do, and what the packages contain. The laundry list of features would show up on the site as a third level of detail, when the customer, now with a better understanding of what they are looking for, can see the details and compare to alternatives.

What's needed isn't marketing fluff -- airy promises about enhanced productivity solutions yada yada. It's for basic, clear, education so customers can learn what to buy and how to buy it.

Boycott Windows Vista

Personal computers were overwhelmingly successful in because they supported a wide variety of software and peripherals. PCs put digital control of words and data into the hands of end-users, routed around central IT bottlenecks, and a multi-billion dollar market was born.

Special-purpose word processing computers bit the dust. IBM's monolithic model -- where you bought the computer, storage, peripherals and software from the same vendor -- lost market share. Microsoft played a huge role in making the PC explosion happen in the 80s and 90s.

Now, Microsoft is breaking this model that made it successful with its upcoming Windows Vista operating system. Audio and video are the latest media to move from the exclusive control of central distribution into the hands of end-users. And Microsoft has written Vista to keep that control out of end-users' hands.

This News.com story explains how Vista is designed to restrict audio and video capabilities:

For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer's connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren't in place.

The News.com article goes into more detail on how Vista reduces opportunites for software developers, hardware devices, and end-users.

This is a fine reason not to upgrade to Windows Vista when it comes out. A software upgrade ought to provide customers a better product, not a worse product.

This is also an opportunity for entrepreneurs building on Linux and web-based services. People who can package easy-to-use, open personal creativity systems have a vast market to gain that's being left behind by Microsoft.

Cingular Wireless sucks

The superb What Geeks experience contrasts with the dismal customer service black hole which is Cingular Wireless.

My account has fallen victim to the merger between Cingular and AT&T Wireless. I sent Cingular a payment, but continued to get dunning phone calls. It turned out that while I had changed the address from Cingular to AT&T, I had failed to update my account number to the new Cingular account. They couldn't find my payment. So I double-paid using my credit card to keep them from turning off the account.

The next step is to fax bank and bill-pay records of the transaction to their research department. The support person had a helpful demeanor, but was unable to confirm the fax number of the research department, or any way to check on the problem once the records had been faxed in. I'm scheduled to get a call back on Wednesday.

In the meantime, Cingular has a visible amount of my money earning interest somewhere. If one has bad memories of MCI billing "glitches" that turned out to be genuine, one might start to be suspicious at this point. There's plenty of money to be made by double-billing people who have problems with the AT&T conversion. Hanlon's Razoroffers some mild comfort to the paranoid: "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."

p.s. Here's Chris Shipley of Network World and the Demo conferences telling her story about getting stuck in the AT&T/Cingular transition.

Kudos to What Geeks

I dreaded an endless cross-vendor finger-pointing maze when when the Microsoft documentation for securing a wireless network contradicted the Linksys documentation, and the Microsoft rep tried to send me to Fujitsu.

At that point, I gave up on the vendors and called Whatgeeks a rental help desk service that promised assistance at $.99 per minute. The Whatgeeks tech support person was superb. He helped me through configuring security for a network with several versions of Windows and different speeds of network cards. Then he helped with another network misconfiguration. The tech was polite, informative, knowledgeable and efficient. What great customer service. Highly recommended.

Web platforms are as dangerous as desktop platforms, until...

Google maps, Flickr, Ebay, and other web services with APIs are pulling the relevant platform away from the desktop and toward the web.

Still, the network effect of powerful, privately owned web APIs is potentially as dangerous as the network effect of Microsoft's desktop APIs. On any given day, Google or Ebay have the right to change their APIs and make life difficult for their developers. They have the right to change the terms of service, and increase prices on services that their developers depend on completely.

The lockout effect could be even worse, because Google and EBay own the servers, and changes can take effect in real time. When Microsoft bakes DRM into every copy of Windows, users don't need to upgrade their PC immediately. But if Google or Ebay changed terms of service, those dependent on the service would need to comply immediately.

Google and Amazon, and Ebay's big servers are a big deal. A web service can start small. But once service becomes popular, it takes a good amount of capital to complete. Currently, competition between GOOHOO and AMABAY are keeping things lively. But oligopoly could lead to complacency and extractive economics, as in other industries.

The owner of a dominant API/service is in a very powerful position. Google has the ability to adhere to its corporate slogan, "do no evil." That ethical stance does make a real difference. A powerful ruler can choose to be a benevolent dictator or a tyrant. But the temptation is there for power to corrupt.

I can imagine a way out of this oligopoly bind.

What if there was peer to peer for web service requests. Many small servers could run the popular service, and publish their availability. When a client issues a request, the request would be taken by an available server. This wouldn't work for services that require a pre-existing content store (like maps?). But it would work for services that require large amounts of individual content (like calendars?).

Maybe the technology already exists somewhere, and is waiting for the killer app. Maybe I'm missing something -- this is just musing outloud. What do you think?

Google kicks open closed IM services

Yowza! How long will it take for Google's IM and voice chat to meet and surpass the usage of the whole sorry proprietary lot of AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. And how many minutes will it take to open their networks after Google's announcement?

In a world where you can phone anybody and email anybody and fax anybody, the IM vendors created absurd islands.

Google's service is based on the open Jabber protocol, unlike Yahoo, which fought and lost a guerrilla war last year against the third-party clients Gaim and Trillian, which patiently reverse engineered the repeated protocol changes that Yahoo used to fend off other clients.

By contrast, Google's site proudly advertises other clients, including Adium, Gaim, iChat, Psi, and Trillian. The developer site invites developers to build more tools to help more people connect.

The vile AOL terms of service claims that AOL owns the content of its customers' conversations: ""Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content." AOL makes customers agree to those draconian terms, and then has the gall to claim that they don't really mean it, it's just boilerplate, the lawyers made us do it.

By contrast, Google's lawyers know who's the boss: " Your Intellectual Property Rights. Google does not otherwise claim any ownership in any of the content, including any text, data, information, images, photographs, music, sound, video, or other material, that you upload or transmit from, or store using, your Google Talk account."

I look forward to hearing from voice gurus about Google's choices for security and voice -- they're starting off with XMPP, and adding support for SIP, and are federating with Earthlink and Sipphone service.

Summary -- the anybody talks to anybody approach will destroy the island approach. Reed's Law wins: the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

tip from Chip, who explains that the server supports TLS security to encrypt your words in transit.

p.s. critique from the folks at Techdirt that the Google IM client is missing some important features -- it doesn't save conversation history, and it doesn't search. It's hard to imagine that Google will forget search in future versions.

I still think that major provider + open network + developer community will beat the closed islands over time.

Yahoo personality crisis?

via Peterme, an Economist article argues that Yahoo's business strategy is contradictory -- they want to provide content, and to provide tools for user-generated content.

The Economist's analysis misses two key points about networked business models.

• the Long Tail. Chris Anderson rightly argues that businesses providing "niche content" benefit from having popular content as a draw. A shopper might come for ColdPlay and find less popular artists through the recommendations. There's no conflict, and a lot of benefit, to having a broad spectrum of content from commercial hits through homegrown productions
  
• the Lead User. Services like search and blogging and mapping are streamlined for convenience-seeking, mainstream users. At the same time these services have APIs that allow "lead users" to craft more specialized applications that build on these basic services.
  

The Economist quotes John Battelle to make its point:

Yahoo!'s “business model is necessarily in conflict,” says John Battelle, the author of a forthcoming book on the search industry. With so much content owned by Yahoo! or generated within its site by users, the quandary for the firm will be: “Do you point people to your own stuff or to the most relevant stuff?” If the former, Yahoo!'s reputation as a trusted internet search and navigation brand may evaporate; if the latter, its content may not earn the returns to justify Yahoo!'s investments in it. By contrast, says Mr Battelle, Google, which has chosen not to make content, does not face this conflict.

Jeremy Zawodny says that Yahoo is becoming less of a "walled garden" because they are opening up to more user-generated content. More user-generated content is good, but they're not actually in conflict with each other.

In a world of infinite shelf space, Britney Spears doesn't crowd out obscure bluegrass. Battelle is concerned that Yahoo will favor popular commercial content. But that would be self-defeating -- Yahoo will make more money if they use the "head" to help cultivate business in the "tail." Amazon discovered the opposite of the "Battelle effect". Amazon makes more money when it sells gear from merchants than its own gear. So it adds feature to recommend third party goods.

So, I don't think there is a conflict between popular content, niche content, and peer content. The more the better, with search and community tools to find and share.

There is a conflict, I think, but it's different than the tension between popular content and peer content -- and Google has just as much of a conflict as Yahoo.
For both companies, part of the product line is software, not just content. Google provides its own search software which is optimized for mass use. And it provides APIs for developers to extend searching to a million niches.

The conflict between central provider and developer is perhaps greater with software. Google and Yahoo owns their own mapping APIs. Its developers don't. The big kids have some benefit from keeping its APIs stable to gain network effects. But if they choose to change the APIs, developers are stuck rebuilding.

Lead users vs. "Crossing the Chasm"

MIT professor Eric Von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation studies the role of user innovation in product development, and concludes that businesses should follow their lead users to find profitable new products.

The book cites research showing that a surprisingly large number of users —from 10 percent to nearly 40 percent—develop or modify products. Open source software is the example that first comes to mind, but user innovation is found in a wide range of business and consumer products ranging from pipe installation to medical equipment to camping gear.

People who customize their products belong to a class of "lead users" who are "ahead of the majority of users in their populations with respect to an important market trend, and they expect to gain relatively high benefits from a solution to the needs they have encountered there." In one study, Von Hippel's team followed the product development process at 3M. The researchers concluded that following lead users can lead to greater success in the development of new products than following traditional market research methods that focuses on identifying the needs of broader market segments.

Von Hippel recommends a business strategy to "follow the lead users". This can mean taking their lead on product direction. Many "lead user" customizations are one-offs. But the ones that are repeated point the way to the most innovative and successful new products. Companies can supporting "lead users" with toolkits that help modify products. Some industries, including chip design, have been retooled to support the creation of customer designs almost entirely.

This advice is nearly the opposite of the canonical strategy in Geoffrey Moore's 1991 classic, Crossing the Chasm. Moore argues that for high-tech companies, focusing on lead users can lead to business failure. Moore observes that high-tech products follow a market adoption curve, starting with "early adopters", who are eager for advantage through innovation, and continuing through the more conservative "early majority" and mainstream buyers.

In Moore's analysis, the "early adopters" have more in common with each other than with everyone else. Because early adopters are the first customers of a high-tech product, high-tech companies can get caught in a trap attempting to please their early adopters, and never break out of the trap into mainstream success. Mainstream buyers are put off by the customizeable knobs and levers that attract the "early adopter" tinkering class. Instead, mainstream buyers prefer ease of use, packaging, and service.

Geoffrey Moore advises high-tech companies to stop trying to please their early adopters. Instead, they should identify market segments that need the product, and product a feature-rich, well-serviced package for these market segments. Once there are enough of these segments to prove the viability of the product, the product may join the main stream. At that point, the product experiences a"hypergrowth" phase, when the best thing thing the company can do is to ignore customer request altogether, and simply ship product.

Why do these two strong theories contradict each other?
* is user innovation increasing with the spread of design toolkits and open source software, so that more users are becoming "early adopters"?
* does Von Hippel's work simply focus on an earlier part of the technology adoption life cycle than Moore?

Comments are most welcome.

The phone companies entering the cable business

The phone companies are spending large amounts of money, in business investment and lobbying in order to enter the video business. In Texas, SBC just won a victory that lowers their cost compared to cable television by allowing them to start out with statewide franchises, instead of negotiating with each city.

The phone companies have been eyeing ways to diversify away from phone service for decades. In the 80s and early 90s, AT&T made a series of disastrous attempts to enter the computer business after the anti-trust settlement with the US department of Justice.

Video distribution seems a better fit than PCs. It's a familiar business model, where where a being an oligopoly owner of a distribution channel makes you the leading provider of a service. Owning big servers and pipes is surely a competitive advantage, as is managing an itemized billing service.

The phone companies know they need to slug it out with the cable companies with price wars and features. But cable won't be the only competition. The market is also seeing entrants with new distribution models."Long-tail" business like Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and Google have the ability to leverage big servers, ecommerce and ad platforms, search and recommendation engines to become major distribution channels. Peer to peer distribution is becoming a notable alternative to get video, and ad models are emerging for p2p. Content providers like the Comedy Channel can host Daily Show clips themselves. The low cost of video is starting to create a generation of video podcasters. Services like Ourmediaare emerging to host amateur audiovisional content.

This is going to make the video business much less of a comfy oligopoly. The phone company will have to fight for the market.

The Broadcast Niche

Broadcast contains two kinds of content -- things the people really want to watch at the same time, and things that people would rather watch on their own schedule. So broadcast won't die. It will be contrained to events that a great many people want to watch at the same time, like the Superbowl, or a newscast of a major breaking story.

Shawn makes this insightful point in a comment to Mark Cuban's blog. Cuban post focused on technology -- he argued that broadcast has better performance than internet, and that multi-cast technology isn't being developed aggressively enough. Other readers take Cuban up on the technical points, but Shawn nails the market evolution.

The video market has been migrating to "personal schedule" for decades. But there are two things that kept "event" and "program" content together. First is a lucrative advertising business model that applied only to broadcast. Second is capital-intensive distribution. It was expensive to distribute broadcast content, so the market became was an oligopoly. That oligopoly was able to create "pseudo-events" -- broadcasting episodes of the Sopranos, and only distributing DVDs to BlockBuster video later.

Both of these things are changing. The cost of distribution is decliningAd models are evolving for peer-to-peer distributed content. Mark Pesce's post from May of this year chronicles how peer to peer distribution of television has become a commercial force in the last year, starting with the Battlestar Galactica phenomenon. Pesce's article speculates about a number of ways that advertisers will sponsor peer to peer content.

The net result is that the niche for pre-recorded broadcast -- whether over-the-air, or on cable -- gets smaller. The superbowl will still generate large ad revenues, but programming will keep migrating away.

Information service, communication service, and bad law

The FCC exempted phone companies from having to lease lines to internet service providers. They did this by re-classifying broadband as an "information service", which was ruled not to be subject to line-sharing.

In the words of Light reading the FCC ruled that the physical facilities that deliver broadband, and the broadband service itself are indistinguishable and inseparable. The two things together -- the facility and the service -- are now called an “information service.” The “facility” part of that service can no longer be separated and called a “telecommunication service,” and as such can't be subject to common carriage rules.

The FCC is doing exactly the wrong thing to adapt to the change in telecom technology. Back when phone and cable were different from each other, there were two categories of regulation -- telecommunication services (phones) and communication services (cable companies) -- to regulate very different kinds of services.

Now, the network is the same. Internet broadband can carry phone, video, and any other kind of content.
* Broadband connectivity has a tendency toward monopoly. It is expensive to lay fiber, which creates the broadband connections.
* Broadband services are a hyper-competitive market, with low barriers to entry.

In order to increase competition, you'd want to treat the oligopolistic connectivity market separately from the competitive service market. You'd enable competing connectivity providers on the wire, to increase competition. You'd watch for signs of monopoly power, and regulate if needed. And you'd treat the hypercompetitive service with as little regulation as possible.

The FCC's response is backward -- they are squelch competition, by considering services inseparable from access.

The Success of Open Source

Steven Weber's excellent book, The Success of Open Source is a superb complement to Yochai Benkler's classic essay, Coase's Penguin. Benkler looks at peer production as an economic system and concludes that it has become a third major form of organizing production, alongside the market and the firm. Weber takes a closer look inside the open source production process, and provides a fascinating analysis of how and why it works:

• the origin of open source software
  
• why people participate
  
• how projects are organized
  
• how open source fits into surrounding organizational and economic structures.
  

• Counter to the myth, the open source development process is not a teeming bazaar, with "bottom-up" self-organization composed of local signals. The largest and most successful open source projects have identifiable, hierarchical organizational structures, with a leader and/or inner circle, up to a few hundred active contributors, and a much larger group of occasional participants.
• While Open source licenses protect the right to "fork", to take the codebase off in a different direction than the original project, projects stay together more than a skeptic might think. Weber observes that project leaders depend on developers and developers depend on the community. The ability to get more done together than separately.

• Developers contribute to open source projects even though most users are "free riders" who benefit from the software, and contribute little or no code. This is less of a paradox than it might seem, since software is a "network good" that gains value the more people who use it. The more people who use a program, the tbugs that are reported and fixed, and the more robust the system becomes.

• Since the origins of the phenomenon, there have been different approaches to licenses. The West Coast, Berkeley-style licenses are easy-going about the ability to include open source software in other, non-open source code, so long as credit is preserved. The East Coast, Free Software Foundation GPL (Gnu Public License) is strict about requiring that redistributed code must always be free software, and any software including free software must be distributed by GPL
  

Perhaps the most insightful conclusion Weber draws is the relation between open source and intellectual property. Weber observes that open source redefines property around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude.

Weber is able to make this observation because he avoids polemic. Weber doesn't try argue that open source software is good because intellectual property is bad. And he doesn't argue that that open source software is bad because intellectual property is good. Instead, he is able to observe how open source redefines property itself.

Weber's pragmatic analysis leads him to focus on the vibrant intersection between open source production and traditional business, with a look at a variety of hybrid business models, from IBM's focus on hardware and service, to Red Hat's packaging and branding, to MySQL's service and customization, to Apple's addition of proprietary chrome and polish. Weber predicts continued evolution and innovation and this boundary.

The book was published in 2004, and so it misses one of the most interesting trends in the last couple of years -- the rise of open source software that's not just for hackers. Netscape/Mozilla is included in the book as an example of failure. Weber looks around at Linux, Gnome, KDE, etc, and concludes that open source software may never be able to make software that works for non-hackers. This was before before the breakout success of Firefox, and the popularity of GAIM, an instant messaging client with a consumer-quality interface.

Weber examines the brash and blunt hacker culture, with its focus on technical decision making through vehement debates on project mailing lists that hash out solutions to technical problems and decisions about technnical direction. I wonder about how the culture will evolve as interactions grow with non-geek users, and hybrid companies face decisions that have external constraints driven by customers.

Towards the end of the book, Weber speculates about how the organizing methods of open source software might affect the production of other kinds of goods -- writing, music, biotech, business ideas. I thought it was interesting, but less substantial than the parts of the book focused on open source itself, with analysis based on observation.

The end of innocence for Mozilla?

Dave Coursey laments the End of Innocence for Mozilla with the founding of a taxable subsidiary.

The danger of the Mozilla Foundation forming a for-profit business, Mozilla Corp., is that the result may be as nasty and political as your average nonprofit and as money-grubbing as your typical software company. Nothing wrong with that, except that it's a wide departure from the egalitarian notion of "free" software that has carried Mozilla this far. And with that departure, I am feeling a touch of loss.

Richard Stallman, the prophet of free software idealism, says that free software is intended to be "free as in speech, not free as in beer". Open source software never was intended to be free of commerce. You can make money with open source software. IBM makes oodles of money with Linux and Apache. MySQL makes money with its database. You just can't sell the source code.

I think Mozilla lost its innocence a long time ago, and in a different way. Much of open source software is by geeks, for geeks. Open source developers have focused on creating tools for developers, and avoided the burden of developing for people who aren't programmers. An open source developer is "scratching his own itch", not developing code to please other people.

For whatever reason, Mozilla isn't like this. Mozilla is designed to be usable and attractive for ordinary people, and extensible for geeks. The Mozilla team designs with empathy for users. They have already lost the innocence of solipsism -- they are serving others than themselves.

I can't help feeling that the foundation is crossing a line from which it can never retreat, taking with it a bit of the romance of software by the people, for the people.

Coursey writes these sentimental lines for a salary earned from a magazine publisher that makes money from advertising.

Mozilla is maintaining its license terms. That means that people will continue to be able to look at the code, modify the code, and fork the project to create their own products, following the terms of the license. That's the freedom that counts -- not freedom from being able to make a living.

Thanks, Joi for some clarification about the business structure.

Does Technorati Top 100 count

The conversation at BlogHer is about how and whether to break into the Technorati 100. This misses the point of the Long tail-- what makes the Blogosphere different from the mainstream media. You can aim to be a top celebrity. Or you can be an authoritative voice on an important topic, and be the media for an important issue. The blogosphere isn't just about celebrity, it's about subcommunities.

When will IM standardize?

What about other communications protocols?

Telephone interconnection is mandated by law. For example, Texas law says:

Sec. 60.204. INTERCONNECTION. A telecommunications provider shall provide interconnection with other telecommunications
providers' networks for the transmission and routing of telephone
exchange service and exchange access.

Internet email standardized back when academic institutions were the primary users of the internet. This is very good -- connectivity became universal. And bad -- the protocols were very trusting, creating a medium for spam.

Fax was born from a standard. In the 1970s, the CCITT (now ITU) created a standard for digital fax that allowed the creation of an industry.

Thinking about these examples, the non-standardization of IM is an artifact of history and business model. IM is a free rider on top of the internet, and is offerered for free. Because the underlying network already exists, IM didn't need the jumpstart of a standard in order to proliferate, unlike fax. Because IM is offered for free, it is only a minor inconvenience for end-users to connect to a contact, using whatever IM service that contact prefers. So far, the business IM market hasn't been large enough to force standardization.

It seems plausible that IM will standardize someday. But the current situation could persist for a long time. Currency is an example of persistent lack of standards. There are well-established methods of currency exchange, so differing currencies don't pose a huge barrier to commerce. And currency providers have a strong interest in controlling their stock of currency, since regional money supply is a tool by central banks used to steer the economy.

Just thinking out loud. It's interesting how the patterns of standardization trace the social structure and power structure of the underlying community.

Will HDTV hasten the decline of over-the-air broadcasting

Network broadcasting has fallen behind cable tv in audience share. Broadcasters are supposed to switch over to HDTV by the end of 2006, but broadcasters saythey're not ready and customers are confused.

Instead of switching over to broadcast HDTV, will customers just abandon broadcast for cable, DVD, and emerging internet video? Will the confusion about HDTV hasten the decline of on-air broadcast?

The recording industry switched from LPs to CDs to mp3s without the government having to pass a law. The wireless market is migrating from 802.11b to g, and may get to WIMAX without a federally mandated transition. The requirement for federally regulated standards for on-air broadcast formats seems like a competitive disadvantage for for on-air broadcasting.

File this under "insufficiently informed speculation" -- I don't know enough about this market to have a good opinion. I don't watch much tv, so indifference to the glories of HDTV maybe clouding my judgement.

Lessig on Municipal Wireless

At the hearings last week, Chairman Phil King asked why governments should provide network access, when the same service can be provided by private enterprise.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig answered this question in Wired Magazine last week.

Ever think about the poor streetlamp companies, run out of business because municipalities deigned to do completely what private industry would do only incompletely? Or think about the scandal of public roads: How many tollbooth workers have lost their jobs because we no longer (since about the 18th century) fund all roads through private enterprise? Municipal buses compete with private taxis. City police departments hamper the growth at Pinkerton's (now Securitas)... If private industry can provide a service, however poorly or incompletely, then ban the government from competing. What's true for Wi-Fi should be true for water.

There's a range of services like roads, transportation and security, where the government provides services. Even though there are private-sector alternatives, the government plays an major role in providing these services, because they are "public goods".

The government even put the private streetlamp industry out of business, because it was so much more effective to have city lights on every street than a patchwork of lights in front of a few businesses and rich people's houses.

The conservative movement is right to question and scrutinize the functions that government provides. The failure of Soviet factories and farmes proved that private enterprise is better at most economic activities.

But there are functions like roads, streetlights, police services, and in the 21st century, network access, where the government has a justifiable and important role to play.

Firefox seems to fix memory problems

Using current Firefox instead of old Mozilla seems to (toss salt over shoulder and spit twice) improve the memory behavior of the aged win98 ex-laptop by a LOT.

I have seven tabs open, have been checking email for a few hours, and the system seems happily stable.

I still want my laptop back NOW, but daily experience may have gotten less chronically miserable.

Tangled up in Skype

One new developer at Socialtext recommended Skype, and suddenly 9 people were Skyping. At the same time, I opened the box on my cute little Plantronics headset phone for the landline.

Skype is two parts good -- free, excellent voice quality when it works -- and one part annoying -- "are you there, are you there." Suddenly, I can talk on the phone from the local wireless cafes (the cell was unbearable with the background noise). It's fun being a small part of a network adoption trend -- watching a technology adopted, one group at a time.

And I live in a tangle of headphone cords. I almost never have the right headphone on, or near to hand. "Wait, let me get that headphone..." (trips across home office). The headphone cords have an unnatural fondness for each other, the phone cord, and the laptop power cord. I impersonate the fates, weaving and unweaving the destiny of the world, except unravelling and untangling the headset cords. When everything is untangled, I think the world will end.

*The landline is wired -- I gave up on cordless after years of phones that didn't quite work, with battery life that didn't support working with a distributed team.

Red Penguin?

Dan Hunter's article arguing that open source development is a form of contemporary Marxism led me to read Coase's Penguin, the classic paper by Yochai Benkler that provides an economic explanation of open source software and other peer production endeavors like Wikipedia.

Marxism argues in favor of collective production and against monetary rewards out of political belief that capitalism is inherently exploitative. The way to ensure a just society is collective production where production is organized and rewards are distributed fairly through central planning. But centrally planned collective production proved inefficient and corrupt.

The first puzzle about open source peer production isn't whether or not developers have marxist political beliefs, but why it works, especially since the Marxist collective model failed miserably.

This is what Benkler explains elegantly. Coase's Penguin builds on the theory of Ronald Coase, who explained in the 30s that firms exist when the cost of separate transactions with many independent parties is greater than the price-efficiency of a competitive market. The problem Coase was trying to solve at the time was to explain the persistance and dramatic growth of centrally managed corporations, if a market is an ideal way to allocate economic resources.

Benkler solves today's version of the same problem. If money is the ideal way to incent and co-ordinate production, why are we seeing the persistence and dramatic growth of production methods that don't use money?

Benkler explains that commons-based peer production is more efficient than either firms or markets for information goods, where the costs of communication and distribution are low, and the difficult problem is allocating human creativity. When there are masses of potential contributors, and it's easy to participate in little chunks like an open source plugin or a wikipedia article, the best way match skills and work is a million little decisions by independent contributors.

Mandatory, Marxist-style collective farming doesn't benefit from these resource allocation efficiencies. Workers on collective farms have pre-defined work and can't leave. Collective farms don't gain the benefit of unique, voluntary contributions by thousands of distributed workers.

Another attribute of political marxism is an belief in mandatory equality. Peer production projects often have a meritocratic culture with dramatic inequality, where founding leaders and high-value contributors have greater prestige, influence, and sometimes financial reward. It's not considered inherently unjust that leaders of open source projects like Perl and Python have received grant, foundation, and corporate funding to do their work (although visible leaders of peer projects can also become lightning rods for criticism).

Another marxist value is opposition to a money economy. Cash is seen as a symptom of the alienation of workers from the products that result from their labors.

Clearly, the motivation of many thousands of open source, wikipedia, livejournal, and other peer content producers is non-monetary. But is it anti-monetary?

Benkler deals with the incentive question in the excellent third section of Coases Penguin. Benkler makes an astute distinction between activities where money is commonly thought to be an inverse motivation (sex), and where it is seen as complementary (sports, music). Many people who like basketball would love to be NBA stars. By contrast, most people who like sex would not like to be prostitutes.

Some Free Software activists are in fact marxists, with beliefs that money is inherently exploitative, and visions of a world that is socially and economically organized without money.

The GPL license, a strict license that forbids the redistribution of modified code with a nonfree license, doesn't forbid selling the software in a package, or customizing software for money, or selling services based on knowledge of open source tools.

For many people, software development is pretty clearly in the complementary category, where the rewards of prestige and satisfaction coexist with monetary rewards. There are Apache developers on corporate payrolls, and companies supporting open source technologies, ranging from IBM to MySQL, Zope, and Jabber. There are developers who make a living consulting based on free software expertise.

So, while some software developers are marxists, it doesn't follow that peer production is inherently Marxist.

Hiring open source developers

Socialtext loves to hire developers with open source experience and reputation. We know people are good developers. We know they have initiative and have gotten things done. We know they have creative ideas, because thos ideas are public. People who've been active in open source have a public community reputation.

And I'm beginning to think that it is a great way to do the R part of R&D. One of the big problems with classic corporate R&D is that innovations don't see the light of day. The typical corporate reaction is to put researchers on a short leash, and tell them their blue-sky research needs to turn into a commercial product in a finite amount of time.

An alternative approach is to do open source experimentation. If the experiment is interesting and valuable, it will attract other developers. So you're building an ecosystem from the start rather than stifling it. If it works and seems valuable, you can package and develop and commercialize it -- or leave it to an independent noncommercial life.

It increases one risk, because new ideas aren't secret. It decreases the risk of developing products in the lab that don't ever work or get done or find users.

Two open source business models

John Koenig has a nice article in the IT Manager's Journal listing seven open source business models: Optimization, Dual License, Consulting, Subscription, Patronage, Hosted, and Embedded.

From the perspective of software developers, however, there are only two. Patronage works for individual developers who are so brilliant, innovative and famous that a corporation or foundation will hire them to do whatever it is they do next. A few people merit this approach.

All of the other business models are based on a single principle -- provide software and services that someone else wants. The stereotypical open source model is to "scratch your own itch" - build software that you want. That is a powerful motivation that gets a lot of software built.

But if you want to make money, you need to do something that somebody else wants, and that is valuable enough that they're willing to pay you to do it. That something could be optimization, custom consulting, service and support, or a packaged product that uses your code (Koenig's list). There's also a patronage model that's at the level of a project, not an individual -- IBM's sponsorship of Apache fits this model. In this case, the sponsor is paying for ongoing development and maintenance.

The solipsistic/bohemian model of open source -- artists make software only for other artists, and talk only to other artists -- falls short if those artists are looking to make a living. Unless you're one of a handful of superstars, you need to provide a product or service that's of immediate value to someone else.

The Daily Show by Paid RSS/Bittorrent

I wish it was available now. I would pay.

As is, I don't watch enough television to subscribe to cable. Just not in the habit. I watch series' occasionally on video.

As is, Bittorrent will do. I'd rather pay for reliable, high-quality, scheduled delivery, and compensate Jon Stewart.

I hope the industry takes this opportunity instead of suing it out of existence.

On Programming Productivity

.. when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous. That's not a new idea. Fred Brooks wrote about it in 1974, and the study he quoted was published in 1968. But I think he underestimated the variation between programmers. He wrote about productivity in lines of code: the best programmers can solve a given problem in a tenth the time.

But what if the problem isn't given? In programming, as in many fields, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve. Imagination is hard to measure, but in practice it dominates the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code.

My favorite quote from Paul Graham's essay, based on his OSCON talk and book, Hackers and Painters. I need to go read the book, carrying questions about the craft vs manufacturing models of software development.

The article also repeats some unhelpful stereotypes about hacker's lack of empathy. Graham appreciates the Mac and Google as examples of beauty. But he also describes the natural habitat of the geek as tools rather than applications.

Graham suggests optimizing a tech company's development process by sic'ing the best developers on infrastructure, far away from customer applications. "have the smart people work as toolmakers. If your company makes software to do x, have one group that builds tools for writing software of that type, and another that uses these tools to write the applications."

Graham says that hacker's hate having to "customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs." To use Martin Fowler's image of "bad smells in code" that hint at poor design, this is a bad smell that suggests poor account management -- somebody on the developer's team hasn't done the hard work of understanding the customer's needs, and helping the customer prioritize. (though it is a genuine problem sometimes -- customer truly is internally conflicted, hopelessly confused, and is impossible to please.)

The stereotype isn't 100% right -- there are counterexamples of software developers with empathy -- but Graham echoes the cultural prestige given to hackers who stay the furthest away from the people who use their work.

Laptop back from the shop

Thanks to the techs at PC Guru on South Lamar, and no thanks to Fujitsu. The inside portion of the power connector was loose and needed resoldering. I needed to hold the power cord at an angle just so to keep it from depowering, and it didn't seem that far from not working at all.

I called Fujitsu tech support. The repair would take 5-7 days. The guy on the service line wanted a deposit of $100, and said the repair would be up to $600, if they determined I did anything that broke warranty.

And the kicker -- they wanted advance permission to reformat the hard drive. "Why on earth do you want to reformat the hard drive?" "We want to do the best possible job at warranty service. " "Sure, we'll mow the lawn. Please give us advance permission to cut down the trees if we need to."

At PC Guru, the repair was $120 with one-day turnaround. Nobody threatened to reformat the hard drive. What a pleasure to deal with real live geeks, who chat about Linux in the background, and are authorized to use their brain on the job.

Graphic Literacy

John Udell laments the tendency for vendors, including Macromedia, Microsoft, and Apple to hype next-generation graphics capabilities with tasty eye candy that doesn't help users create valuable visualizations, and doesn't give users a compelling reason to use the technology.

Udell cites Tufte as the guru of graphic communication, suggests the need for easier-to-use new tools. But tools are only part of the answer. Nifty visualization tools have underperformed for about fifteen years that I've noticed.

It's not enough to show pretty pictures -- you need to have something to say. Tufte's perennial complaint is "Chart Junk" -- frivolous pictures that don't say anything. Powerpoint and friends enabled people to make pointless pretty pictures long before the current generation of graphical infrastructure. People don't know how to tell compelling and meaningful stories with visualizations.

A word processor doesn't make eloquent prose on its own -- and graphical tool tool won't create meaningful visualizations.

In the social network analysis of Ziff Davis Media, we started with a story -- teams of writers, editors, developers, and marketers collaborating across space and group boundaries -- and questions about the intensity and frequency of collaboration.

Here's the picture . And the story.

Agile vs. open

The two liveliest software development models are open source and agile.

In some ways, these models are orthogonal. Open source is primarily a licensing model. Open source projects can use agile practices -- short cycles, test-first, pairing -- or they can have long cycles with compartmentalized development. Agile is a set of development methods which can be used with open or proprietary licences.

In another way, they seem to conflict. Classic open source projects are put together by programmers seeking to "scratch their own itch". Agile projects are oriented around meeting the needs of a customer.

Agile projects bring the customer on the team; make the customer responsible for setting priorities; develop shared understanding of requirements with conversations remembered as stories. The best way to make sure customers get what they want is to give them software soon, and let them respond to real stuff.

By contrast traditional development processes formalize customer requirements in long, structured requirements documents, which get delivered in big lumps of software. The goal of management during the development cycle is to fend off changing customer requests.

The extreme open source position contends that software developers won't ever develop for other people unless they have to. This can be explained as Asperger's -- a physiological lack of empathy. Or it can be explained as a Romantic/Bohemian view of artistry -- true artists paint and poets write for themselves and their muse, and their small group of starving but virtuously anti-bourgeois friends.

The extremes are wrong. Introversion isn't "better", open source doesn't have to be solipsistic, and development for money doesn't have to be corrupt.

Introversion isn't better I think that the Romantic view of open source software is as fallacious in software as it is in art. Artists have always had relationships with audiences -- Homer was a storyteller, Shakespeare was a crowd-pleaser. There are always "artists' artists" -- those whose work is difficult and revered by the cogniscenti. Software made for customers isn't guaranteed to be bad any more than art made for audiences.

Open source can have empathy The goodness of the Mozilla project disproves the notion that open source projects make software that only ubergeeks love. The Mozilla crew are building lovely software -- see the Scott Collins interview over at Ars Technica.

Commercial development can have integrity Agile development practices are intended to work around structural temptations for commercial projects to be build on lies. First, salespeople lie -- they promise things to customers without listening or wanting to believe developers about how long things take. Then, developers lie. Out of eagerness to please or fear, they tell management and sales what they want to hear. Reality intrudes eventually. Customers get mad. Really mad customers sue. Agile planning is based on continual delivery and continual conversation, to avoid the built-in temptations for lies and self-deception.

Money communicates priorities When people are developing for others, money focuses attention. When customers want things that don't yet exist, dollars vote. Willingness to pay focuses the mind of the customer on what's important to them, and the developer on what's important to the customer.

What do you think?

I don't get Mailblocks

And the other services that require human intervention before an email address is whitelisted.

Don't folks realize that they have anti-network effects? They'll work for the first few people who use them. But what happens when a mailblock bounce comes back to another mailblock service?

People will have to wait for the singularity to get their email.

Identification -- on or off?

Jon Udell contends that we're hard-wired to recognize other humans:

Humans are hardwired to recognize faces, voices, gaits. We do it always and automatically. Perhaps so automatically that we don't notice, for the most part, that we are doing it. When my teenage daughter comes downstairs there's rarely any ambiguity about who she is.

Jon is disagreeing with David Weinberger, who says that identification defaults to off:

In the real world, we don't identify everyone. We only identify those about whom we have doubts that we have to resolve for some purpose. Identifying is not the default in the real world. Nor, IMO, should it be online.

They're both right. We instinctively recognize other people -- nod to neighbors, chitchat with baristas, and identify those we know well by the smallest of gestures.

But we don't ask for deep ID until its necessary. The social protocol for data is progressive disclosure. When do you learn someone's street address? Their home town? Their salary? The default is to start shallow, and to get deeper with trust.

Computers are literal-minded critters. Knowing hair color and HIV status is all the same to them.

Perhaps identification defaults to on, but disclosure defaults to off.

LinuxChix

LinuxChix is an online community that hosts courses on Linux-related topics. This makes me very happy. A forum to learn without being chronically anxious about violating the Raymond Rule.

via Dorothea Salo on Misbehaving.

The Raymond Rule

"Only at grave peril shall you ask a question for which there already exists an answer somewhere in the world." This principle drives me batty, and causes geeks to waste hours of time. It's the macho-geek version of guys refusing to ask directions and driving till they are hopelessly lost.

Erik Raymond wrote the canonical explanation in How To Ask Questions. The geek world is run by wizards who don't have time to answer newbie questions and keep the earth orbiting the sun.

Therefore, if you have a question, you must read the man pages, scour google for diagnostic phrases, spelunk through code, and test your hypothesis. If you still haven't found the answer to your question after two hours, three hours, eight hours... then you may ask the wizard who may know the answer off the top of his head.

Otherwise, you risk scathing criticism, and a permanent deduction of 20 points from your interlocutor's estimate of your IQ.

I'm really glad to see LinuxChix which looks like it provides a forum for improving one's tech skills without facing the consequences of the Raymond Rule.

Technical support by RSS

Last week I was scanning my RSS reader and stumbled across a Socialtext bug report. The Shifted Librarian wanted to scan the RSS Winterfest weblogs, and ran into a bug in our new RSS feed. I reported the bug. Pete diagnosed the problem in the blog comments.

RSS for information discovery, and weblog for collaboration. It works.

RSS Attention Management

RSS readers are very handy for people to manage attention to incoming information.

Debates about the relative superiority of RSS readers and web browsers are missing the point. Nobody wants the whole web coming to their desktop reader.

You use RSS for sources that change periodically, that you visit again and again. Bug-tracking is a great application -- several people in the RSS-Winterfest IRC mentioned bug-tracking as handy use of RSS.

A few people in the IRC mentioned RSS for alerting. The RSS polling design isn't intended for real-time notification. For that you need IM or Jabber or Tibco. Real-time notification and periodic updates can be used nicely side-by-side -- for example, a system administrator might want routine human and system notifications via RSS, and system-down or danger-zone alerts by IM or pager.

Information updates have different levels of urgency -- "the building is on fire" is more urgent than "the room temperature has increased from 68 to 72 degrees" (unless you're managing a temperature-sensitive lab culture).

A given piece of information is more urgent for some than others. A customer support query is urgent for the service reps on duty, and of background interest to product managers and developers.

We need a range of attention-getting media.

* IM/pager for lapel-grabbing alerts
* email for important, short-notice items
* RSS for alerts for discretionary attention
* Weblogs and wiki providing a "browse mode" fix for recent changes junkies, and a searchable archive for occasional readers

(We also need a Ross Mayfield trademark colorful chart to gain fame for the concept.)

These modes complement each other. They help individuals manage attention, and they help organizations focus attention on urgent matters, while building knowledge in important areas.

RSS-Winterfest -- the liveliest teleconference ever

Over 1000 participants participated in the RSS Winterfest voice-blog-wiki-IRC multi-model conference last week. Socialtext hosted the "Eventspace" wiki-blog -- we hosted the application, and we also helped to host the online party. It was lots of fun, included insightful conversation, and created useful resources.

Participants in IRC improvised conversation on the themes of the sessions. Bloggers posted session notes and questions and resources. Wiki participants built collaborative pages on RSS Tools, RSS Authentication, and other topics.

Here are some of the practices we used that helped make the conference lively:
* create weblogs with relevant topics
* set up sign-in space for people to describe themselves and learn about each other
* pre-populate the wiki with the conference program and other resources
* real-time gardening -- link interesting pages to the home page, consolidate related resource pages, help harvest quotes and references.

Maybe most important, we helped weave questions, comments, and insights from the IRC and wikiblog into the voice conference. It's a salon facilitation skill, translated to electronic media.

This RoperASW/Tandberg polllast year revealed the crushing tedium of traditional teleconference. Less than half of attendees actually pay attention to conference calls. With audience participation tools, you get an event that is more lively and intelligent.

Is RSS Ready for Prime-Time

Dylan Greene writes an insightful yet ultimately unsatisfying piece arguing that RSS is not yet ready for Prime Time.

He's right that RSS has weaknesses. The way most people use it, it wastes bandwidth. Many feeds don't include full-text (need to fix this...). Comments aren't well integrated. And, the coup de grace, an RSS reader isn't yet built into Microsoft Windows.

True, but not that useful, unless you're a Gartner analyst trying to determine whether a technology has reached a state of ultimate, top-right-quadrant maturity.

The interesting questions are:
* is RSS mature enough to do what you want?
* can you benefit from RSS as an individual, a publisher, or an organization.

If you're a mildly tech-savvy individual wanting to keep track of lots of weblogs and news, then RSS is a lifesaver.

If you're a complete novice, or if you advise complete novices, you probably want to avoid RSS -- though bloglines is pretty darn accessible -- I'd recommend it to anyone who is comfortable with a browser.

If you're a blogger or web publisher, and want to reach the increasing number of users who depend on RSS to read web content, then surely publish in RSS.

If you're in an organization where most people are drowning in email (i.e. most of us) and you have influence over technology choices, you might want to consider using RSS to complement business applications, helping individual employees manage their time and attention.

Dylan's points are correct, but they don't tell you whether the rewards of RSS are worth the trouble for you. It takes a bit more effort to use technologies that are somewhat in their life cycle. You need to decide whether it's worth it.

If you're an open source geek or work for a technology company that's not Microsoft, you have opportunities to shape next-generation syndication standards and applications. Those opportunities are here now, and will be gone in a few years.

Open source informalism

UC Irvine Researcher Walt Scacci is studying open source development, and has come across distinct practices.

It's not clear to me how the open source practices differ from agile processes in general -- a lighter, more conversational, less document-heavy design process.

What are some of the differences you've found, apart from the obvious ones?

For example, in software engineering, there's a widespread view that it's necessary to elicit and capture the requirement specifications of the system to be developed so that once implemented, it's possible to pose questions as to what was implemented, compared with what was specified.

We do not see or observe or find in open-source projects any online documents that software engineers would identify as a software requirements specification. That poses the question: What problem are they solving, if they haven't written down the problem? While it's true that there's no requirements specification, what there is instead is what we've identified as a variety of software informalisms.

What do you mean by "informalism"?

That word is chosen to help compare to the practice advocated in software engineering, in which one creates a formal systems specification or design that might be delivered to the customer. Informalisms are such things as information posted on a Web page, a threaded e-mail discussion or a set of comments in source code in a project repository. It may be a set of how-tos or FAQs on how to get things accomplished. Each is a carrier of fragments of what the requirements for the system are going to be.

Simplicity is hard

In the article about the 80/20 rule, Tim Bray explains that simplicity isn't easy.
In Tim's words, "the mental machinery involved in the design process naturally tends towards more rather than less."

The unofficial version of my business card reads "grinch." I spend a lot of time saying no to all kinds of attractive, bright, shiny jingly ideas. "Too complicated." "Not the most important thing right now, maybe later." "What's the simplest way of doing things that works"? Two parts diplomacy, one part curmudgeon. Not a good way to win popularity contests.

Before Christmas, from a biotech company, "This is much easier to use and manage than $competitive product. I can use this with much more of my team"

Yesterday, from a consultant who helps organizations improve collaboration and manage knowledge... "It's like $competitiveproduct, but easier to use and cheaper."

The 80/20 rule wins

Tim Bray has been working on a series of articles analyzing which factors lead to technology success. The strongest predictor isn't investor support, technical elegance, a compelling idea, standardization. It's the "80/20" rule, systems that yield 80 percent of the benefit for doing twenty percent of the work.

The 80/20 Tribe’s offerings are denounced as “Just a toy!”, while they hurl back accusations of pedantry, big-system disease, and so on.

Big smile. This is what makes me think that our company is really on to something. There are two kinds of skepticism that we run into occasionally.
* "Oh, it's just a wiki"
* Like Lotus Notes, but less.
I hear these occasionally from corporate buyers who are used to big collaboration and KM solutions, and from industry analysts who've been following collaboration software since the dawn of time. These are the feature-checklist folks, who want to know if you product comes with a ballpoint pen and a fish scaler, regardless of whether anybody in their shop needs these things.

The sweet spot is doing the right 20% of the work.

What matters about Social Software

David Weinberger says: if you want to get at the real social networks, you're going to have to figure them out from the paths that actual feet have worn into the actual social carpet.'

So right. The best examples we have today are things likeTechnorati and the Blogstreet neighborhood and All Consuming that

• reveal interesting people and ideas in the social neighborhood
  
• in a way that is valuable to the participants, not just data miners
  
• without asking participants to give anything away or do extra work.

  Here's another way of looking at things. The Social Network tools are about saying hello. Unless you're 18 months old, hello is only .1% of the conversation. Weblogs, wikis, and other public conversations are about the other 99.9% of the conversation. And the Technorati/Blogstreet/AllConsuming applications help you find relevant conversations to join.
  

  Posted by alevin at 12:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

How much does online community count?

Good scientific evidence shows that people are happier and live longer when they have a strong social network, and even when they have a pet to take care of.

In this context, how much do online social networks count? When someone spends time blogging; participating in mailing list discussions; chatting on IRC; does this strengthen the immune system? Or weaken it? Does it make a difference if the participants meet each other in person every once in a while, or never?

Has anyone done research on this yet?

Esthetics of social software

Jon Lebkowsky and Honoria have an interesting insight about evaluating social software according to esthetic, leading to some reflection about the criteria for an esthetic of social software.

Thinking out loud, here are some criteria to consider...

* ease of groupforming
* intimacy gradient -- ability to create spaces on a continuum from public to private
* expressiveness -- ability for individuals and groups to express mood and style
* shared memory -- the social software equivalent of bookshelves and mantelpiece photos
* attractive front porches -- social public areas preceding private spaces
* helpful navigation -- clear signage, or meditative exploration

I'm on vacation, so I don't have Christopher Alexander near to hand; that would bring some good insight.

Verisign + Evoting

from Wendy Seltzer back in September.

The collision of two bad ideas -- unverified e-voting and VeriSign -- is a really, really bad idea.

VeriSign has been chosen by Accenture (the former Andersen Consulting) to provide key components of an Internet absentee voting system for Americans abroad. This is the same VeriSign that recently unilaterally altered the workings of the domain name system to return a VeriSign search page when someone mis-typed a .com or .net URL.

I can see it now: mis-mark your ballot and your vote gets automatically redirected to the candidate of VeriSign's choice. "We found these similar candidates: Did You Mean to vote for Arnold Schwarzenegger?"

Anti-Social Software 2

Joi Ito on address book roulette:

It originated with business cards, but has moved to mobile phones. There are three people: two players and a judge. The two players pick someone from their address books and reveal them to each other simultaneously. The judge decides which one is more famous or important. The loser has to shred the business card or in the case of mobile phones, delete that entry from the address book. It's quite funny because you try to play important people to beat the other person, but if you lose, you lose a valuable phone number. The judge's perspective of what sort of person is important also comes into play in an interesting way.

It's no fun when you have backups of your phone numbers, but in Japan, where most people don't backup their mobile phone numbers, it's often for keeps.

Anti-Social Software 1

From Cory

On that note: I have a special request to the toolmakers of 2004: stop making tools that magnify and multilply awkward social situations ("A total stranger asserts that he is your friend: click here to tell a reassuring lie; click here to break his heart!") ("Someone you don't know very well has invited you to a party: click here to advertise whether or not you'll be there!") ("A 'friend' has exposed your location, down to the meter, on a map of people in his social network, using this keen new location-description protocol -- on the same day that you announced that you were leaving town for a week!"). I don't need more "tools" like that, thank you very much.

Joel Spolsky is dead wrong for once

"Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers." Uh, Joel, what about Amazon.com and Google? Linux core, custom applications. Possibly the most useful and broadly usable computer programs out there.

Joel Spolsky is usually insightful, smart, and lucid. His most recent essay, critiquing a book by Eric Raymond on The Art of Unix Programming, is dead wrong and confused.

To be fair, Spolsky is writing about Eric Raymond, who epitomizes the ubergeek arrogance of a class of unix infrastructure hackers. But Spolsky attributes this attitude to all Unix-platform developers, leaving out the user experience brilliance at Amazon, Google, and many other elegant and popular web-based applications.

Spolsky's essay equates Unix infrastructure development with Windows end-user applications. Apples and oranges.

RSS music feeds

Seb writes about RSS feeds from AudioScrobbler playlists. What a wonderful idea!

Using a RSS-to-HTML device like feedroll, letting others know what you've been listening to recently on your weblog becomes a snap. ...All of Audioscrobbler's data is published under the Creative Commons licence, and so are the user feeds. Which enables clever people to build crawlers ("Musicrati"?) and devise algorithms that exploit the distributed database and add value, for instance by matching participants' listening profiles (à la blogmatcher) or by building new playlists out of the raw materials.

I have friends with fabulous taste in music, and would absolutely love to be able to "listen in" to what they're listening to. Because only the titles are syndicated, there's no RIAA problem with sharing, and a feed listener could go off and get the music on itunes or somewhere. Music wants to be social.

IM at work

what better place to catch up on blogging than a flight delay at DFW?

Flemming Funch writes about a study that contradicts some popular stereotypes about the use of IM at work.

• Although a common impression of IM is that it's used primarily for simple questions and quick clarifications, we found that was true only about 28 percent of the time.
• Despite the perception that IM is commonly used for social purposes in the workplace, we found that was rarely the case. Only 13 percent of the conversations we monitored included any personal topics whatsoever, and only 6.4 percent were exclusively personal.
• Concerns that IM might distract people from their work proved to be unfounded. The majority of the workplace IM conversations we observed, 62 percent, focused entirely on work-related matters.

Socialtext is a distributed team, we use IM a lot, and this certainly reflects my experience. There's worry about the misuse of informal communications tools like IM and blogs at work, but these aren't well-founded. People probably engage in the same amount of off-topic, relational conversation about sports, recipes, kids in electronic conversation as they do in analog conversation.

Semantic Web aphorisms

from the much-discussed Semantic Web essay