T

Google talk

Once again, a CES keynote is unsupported by wi-fi connections to the net.

After some fun stuff in the intro (stunning, actually, but not news).

Now he's showing Google Earth for the dashboard, whcih they're working on with VW. Very neat. 3d models of the hotels of las vegas. Will this run on Linux? Betcha.

Now Google Earth for phones. Something that can run right now, thanks to the Google API, presumably. You can zoom in and out. Who makes this mobile device. One that's downloadable for blackberries from http://google.com/glm.

Now he's talking about Vint Cerf. Will he bring Vint out? Nope.

Now, "no gatekeepers anywhere in the process." (15:30)

"You can't possibly think about all the possibilities."

"Insteade make devices that support reasonable open standareds." Good. but what does "reasonable" mean?

We should enable software people to do what they want to do?

Wy shuoyldnt you be able to plug your TV into any outlet? USB, Ethernet, wi-fi. Shouldnt be a big deal. sxhouldnit require software.

YOur bluetooth car is probaly near a cell phone. Why shouldn't?

A wire should be able to do whatever is possible.

whatever the software people should think of doing, a device should be able to do it.

The reason we don'thave devices like this is that we lack standards.

adapter picture.

also a big hassle for the manufacturer. Specific for a country.

they're also inefficient.

they all suck power.

the consumer can pay for the universal power supply, rather than the supplier.

most devices should be connected through adaprers.

whjat we need

transpot protocols, usb+

make adapters work with everything, let the best transport hareware win adapt standards, for security discover, ypeering, forwarding to internet protocols audio video displays, indicators...storage, keyboardes, au io devices, power transmission

this is an appeal to the CE industry.

something to talk about and get people thinking about.

provideed wifi over maountain view for frree. to get these thigs talking together and working,.

most of the world does not have good access. How do you make that happen?

you can email everyone, but can't IM.

email was developed in universities. the IM we know wasn't.

we released Google talk. voice on nokia 770

almost no queries coming from afvrica

mit $100 pc. No doubt google is supporting it.

So far I;m moved by this.

switch gears. device problem.

I recently installed a printer and 400 megs of softrware, all unnecessary.

difficult to keep the compauter maintained, progected, problems. .pdf readers, browsers...

we had a team excited to solve the problem. Gologle pack.

I take back being moved. Google pack is for windows.

enforced guidelines. that software makes don't annoy you. doesn't step on other settings.

modtv has tagging, in google video.

artisan news service

back from iraq

announceing google video store.

watch videos in google video

nba

the marriage of google and content... ? 52:20

very best content. split from viacom.

the first week of the new corporation.

the supermodel couldn't find a rat to eat.

wifi initiative is an experiment for us

110 OEMs. "consumer PCs"

Prices below $900. Available today or in the next two weeks.

what happened to Sage?

InteractTV

This is about Microsoft's move into the digital home. Windows Media, David Berlind said last year, already has a monopoly. this extends it.

high definition media library.

At the beginning of his CES keynote, where I'm sitting now, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said "We expect a wifi connection at the coffee shop, and we're disappointed when we dont get it." Well, the same goes for the CEO keynotes at trade shows. And there's no wi-fi here. <i>But</i> I have a bluetooth bridge to the net through my cell phone, so these are my public notes about the keynote, live &#151; or as close as my typing can get to it.

First, Intel actually introduced two new CPUs here. The first is its Core Duo, a dual-core for general and countless purposes. It's main virtues are low power consumption, and mutiple process execution. The other is the much-awaited VIIV ("vive" as in "vibe").

Some of us (myself included) have been concerned about the DRM capabilities reportedly built into ViiV, but in his presentation Otellini made clear that Viiv has been in development with Microsoft, as a new Wintel platform for home entertainment that comprises the next generation of Microsoft's home media offering.

There are 110 OEMs already. "The end of TV as you know it", "all served up over the internet".

There's a kieretsu of sorts here. DirecTV, for example. AOL.

It's being presented as the Complete Replacement for TV.

What about non-OEMs? Good luck. This is a juggernaunt.

One of the few outright-linux home media center companies I spoke to here

Identity Gang II is the second annual year-end Gillmor Gang featuring a gaggle of leading voices on the subject of user-centered identity. Since I was getting over a cold, my voice wasn't up to leading the pack, so Doc Searls, who also convened the first one, took over the show until I began to chime in near the end.

Among the gathered were Kim Cameron, Johannes Ernst, Mary Hodder, Paul Trevethick, Aldo Castañeda, Dick Hardt, John Clippinger and Drummond Reed. Some voices from the first gang were missed (notably Dave Winer, Marc Canter and Craig Burton), but the real star was progress. One year ago, Kim was challenged to defend Microsoft's intentions in the space. This time, he was talking about meetings with Mike Shaver and "other parties" (I think the careful language was) about interoperability between Microsoft's Infocard and FireFox (on which Mike works), among other good things &#151; all within an inclusive Identity MetaSystem, and respecting the Laws of Identity. A new open source identity system called YADIS has also emerged from Gang workshops. We talked about that, too.

Speaking of progress, the Identity Gang that was born on this podcast a year ago now has an identity of its own, manifested in a wiki hosted by the Berkman Center.

Beyond monoculture

I became convinced today that our biggest problems are monocultures. What's bad for lawns and farms is also bad for classrooms, churches, industries, governments, political parties, banks, credit card companies and every other organization that lives by controlling and isolating its members. In other words, silos.

Today there's been some interesting back and forth between Steve Gillmor (to whose gang I belong) and myself on the subject of what Steve calls the "page view model" vs. the "attention model". I've been representing the former and Steve the latter.

Background is provided by Dave Winer, who writes, Links are now devalued. Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. It won't be long before Google itself is infested. Tim Bray is right, below, it's time for Google to get on top of this. They're both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank. You could drive a truck through it. I was the early warning system on this, the canary in the coal mine. They don't like to listen to me, maybe they'll accept Verisign's help. (Context: Dave just sold Weblogs.com, the ping site on which all RSS search engines rely, to Verisign.)

I believe links are devalued because Google has become a monoculture, both as a search engine and as an advertising system. Blog spammers, or sploggers, are taking advantage of that monoculture in the same way boll weevils take advantage of a cotton field.

I've been a canary in this coal mine for awhile too. And I don't see much sign that Google is doing a lot more than putting a little notification flag on blogspot blogs, to allow readers to notify google that the blog in question is possibly a fake one.

I know a fair amount of what Technorati is doing about blog spam, or splogs. I salute Mark Cuban for being the first search engine honcho (he's an investor in IceRocket) to call major attention to the problem, and for coining the term "splog".

But Google remains largely opaque. No doubt they are dealing with the problem. So is Yahoo, from what I'm told (and see in results). But we need to hear more (perhaps from Google's AdSense blog?).

In the long run, the devaluation of links will result in a polyculture. But in the meantime, we're still here inside monocultural silos.

Dave says in that same post that he has been a

http://digitalpodcast.com/podcastnews/index.php/2005/09/28/podcasting_one_year_later

In this post here, Timothy Grayson expands on a back-and-forth with Jamie Lewis about reconciling differences around digital identity. (All the source links are in Timothy's first paragraph.) Timothy:

I was hoping that podcasting would get easier — for both production and consumption. But, so far, it hasn't.

It's still easier for me to manually download files, put them somewhere that makes sense to me, and listen to them on the computer — than it is to use ANY of the conveniences offered by anybody, including Apple.

Note that what I described in the last paragraph is no different on my two laptops: an IBM ThinkPad running Linux and a Mac laptop running OS X.

Now, I have to say that our family makes heavy use of iTunes and an the iPod it fills with music and podcasts. Have to say, Apple makes music easy. But the new iTunes 4.9, with Podcast support, flunks the obviousness test.

Almost nobody talks about it, but iTunes has an imperfect but excellent "radio" built into it. In the list of sources in the left pane, right below Library and Party Shuffle, and ahead of Music Store, the Radio is the title for an outline:

... and so on.

Each of those bullets is a little triangle indicating collapsed categories. There's a lot under each. I'd like to see a lot more, and to be able to add my own to the list; but I can form a playlist with my own additions, so lack of user input isn't a huge deal at a practical level (though it would help Apple if they provided the means). There's a list of about 20 stations under Public, most of which would be better categorized as College. (e.g. KUCI, KEXP, KZSU). KQED, WNYC and KCRW are all listed, which is cool. I would add KCLU, WUNC, KUOW and WEMU, all of which also stream in MP3 format.

Anyway, that's the Radio precedent.

Now there's a new source called Podcasts. This has an outline, too, with one item: PodFinder ("the iTunes Weekly Podcast Guide"). Below that is one gray entry, PodFinder Podcast, with the same description. At the bottom is a Podcast Directory link, which takes you directly to the iTunes Music Store.

Here I'm glad to find that KCRW, our leading public station in Los Angeles (and one I listen to here in Santa Barbara, though its Oxnard outlet, KCRU). And I suppose it's cool that ESPN and Disney are in on the podcasting game, I'm wondering where the directory is. After I subscribe to KCRW's On The Media, I see that it suddenly populates the directory. (That's the actual directory outline, not the music store, which is called a directory but isn't.)

I see there's a Search line, where I can look for fave podcasts like Evil Genius Chronicles, Morning Coffee Notes, The Roadhouse,

Here are Kim's answers (and then some) to the post above:

saved offf...

Can you say ApTel?
Submitted by doc on Mon, 06/06/2005 - 22:56.
Well, now we know Apple will move its OS and apps to Intel (x86) — and has been getting ready to make the move for years. Here's a blow-by-blow of Steve Jobs' speech this morning. Key item:
10:29am PDT - “I stood up two years ago and promised this (3.0G PowerMac), and we haven’t been able to deliver.” Steve says it’s bigger than that, though. No roadmap for the future based on PowerPC - they can’t see a future.
Few thoughts...
First, Apple is going to push Intel harder than Microsoft did. This will have implications for the rest of the world. Apple's influence will be several generations out, but it will be there.
Second, how can this do anything to motivate sales of systems on lame duck CPUs? Did Apple just Osborne its hardware?
Third, betcha Steve is the first one to negotiate not putting "Intel Inside" stamps on boxes. No co-op money for Steve, huh?
Fourth, this gives Apple a way to compete with Microsoft OEMs at the mid-to-high end, directly. Gotta be interesting. Expect dual-boots with Windows, and with Linux.
Fifth, this greases more Apples into the enterprise. Just a bet it reduces sales resistance. And, finally, Apple doesn't lose the GHz race.
Sixth, a downside, is less competition for Intel. AMD is still great to have around, but we need more competition from nonderivative manufacturers. Unfortunately, new smaller-geometry production fabs cost billions. Moore's law is expensive for the manufacturer. If "real men have fab," as somebody (T.J. Rogers?) once famously said, we might be looking forward to when there's just one man standing.
Seventh, alliances and consortia suck at persistence. It's creation by committee. I was around to watch the AIM alliance (Apple, IBM, Motorola) up close. A client of mine, Groupe Bull in France, participated, quietly. Their piece was SMP. Symetrical MultiProcessing. IBM's original POWER design didn't do it... or do it well enough. Bull was strong at that. Anyway, truth is, nobody other than Apple really cared enough. The economics of CPUs require really immense volume sales. Millions of them wasn't enough for IBM. And maybe IBM doesn't really want to compete with 'tel any more. So, it's like the end of the Soviet Union. There's only one superpower left: Intel. Apple is complying with the realpolitik of semiconductors.
Eighth, I remember Larry Tesler, then of Apple, saying that the RISC architecture of the PPC chip would strip Intel's CISC gears. I also remember Andy Grove laughing off that conceit. Wasn't worth arguing about. Which is why the argument ended years ago.
I can think of more, but I'm out of time.

I believe the Identity Metasystem is a barn-raising project, in the open public marketspace we call the Internet. Once raised, it becomes part of the Net's infrastructure, kinda like this diagram shows. Also this one.

We build the metasystem with Microsoft's leadership (Kim Cameron's especially) and participation — even using Microsoft's architectural drawings — but in a public space, for public use, in the open marketplace, without any ownership encumberances. The result will be NEA: Nobody will own it, Everybody can use it, and Anybody can improve it. (Yes, there are exceptions to that principle, especially around ownership — even in the LAMP stack — but the virtues are clear, and it's those virtues that make LAMP components adoptable infrastructure.)

The main concerns, naturally, are around trusting Microsoft. (We all have our reasons. Also our reasons to look past them.)

Other questions are technical. Or political. Or combinations of those two (licensing is a good example).

I think we need to be able to talk about the technical questions without getting too bogged down in the politics or completely bogged down in distrust.

So I have some technical questions that I'd like to get answered, or at least approached. And I hope we can drop the distrust stuff while we try to answer them.

First, some reading material, in logical (if not always chronological) order.

Now, here's where we set up the question. Johannes says,

In order to accomplish this, InfoCard employs:

Julian adds,

And So:

- User end requires Longhorn or an XP upgrade
- Depends on SOAP and the WS protocol stack
- Uses HTML OBJECT tag wth DLL support
- Multiple commercial licensing but with probably no open, free, license.

So that counts out Apple and Linux clients. It may well count out Firefox and other browsers. It almost certainly counts out PHP-Apache websites. Java/Perl server environments probably won't work because interop between MS implementations of the WS stack with Java/Perl implementations is extremely patchy.

Microsoft Implementation Plans (from the very first link, above) Kim and Microsoft say,

Microsoft plans to build software filling all roles within the identity metasystem (while encouraging others to also build software filling these roles, including on non-Windows platforms). Microsoft is implementing the following software components for participation in the metasystem...

... and then lists four items, the first two of which have InfoCard in their titles. The paper continues,

The identity metasystem preserves and builds upon customers' investments in their existing identity solutions, including Active Directory and other identity solutions. Microsoft's implementation will be fully interoperable via WS-* protocols with other identity selector implementations, with other relying party implementations, and with other identity provider implementations.

Non-Microsoft applications will have the same ability to use "InfoCard" to manage their identities as Microsoft applications will. Non-Windows operating systems will be able to be full participants of the identity metasystem we are building in cooperation with the industry. Others can build an entire end-to-end implementation of the metasystem without any Microsoft software, payments to Microsoft, or usage of any Microsoft online identity service.

The boldfaces are mine, and meant to draw attention to both the literal meaning of the passages, and what is clearly Microsoft's intention for the metasystem to serve as an open environment and not a walled garden or a silo.

I think what we have here (looking at Johannes' and Julian's posts, which are representative of questions I hear quite often elsewhere) is an insufficient distinction between an open environment (Identity Metasystem) and one vendor's implementation inside that enviornmemt (InfoCard). Because both come from Microsoft, it's easy to conflate the two.

From the beginning of these conversations, Kim has made it clear to me that he (and Microsoft) want to see other implementations on other platforms, to demonstrate the open and inclusive nature of the metasystem, and to invite more implementations into the marketplace.

So, here's the first big question: Does the metasystem require adoption of SOAP and the whole WS-* suite of protocols (or whatever those are) — that whole bulleted list above — or something much less than that? I've gathered from Kim that WS-Trust is an essential component. But what about the rest of the list? Seems to me that Kim conceives hist as a wide-open and inclusive concept in which all kinds of current (LID, Sxip, XRI-XDI) and future identity systems can participate. Is this possible if the required protocols aren't really open or usable in a practical sense, as Julian contend? And, for that matter, is the WS-* suite a done deal, either? What, if anything, needs to be done there to make it (or parts of it) acceptable to those who inclined to dismiss it?

The second big question (especially for my constituency) is, What will it take to get open source developers, and the rest of the non-Microsoft world, to adopt and deploy stuff that works within the metasystem? Licensing is clearly an issue. What else?

Let's go for technical answers at this point. If it helps, imagine that the Laws of Identity, and the Identity Metasystem concept, had come from somebody outside of Microsoft.

Here's a pile of links on the Identity Conversation, coming out of last week's DIDW conference in San Francisco...

On the one hand, it's clear that most of the folks following this thing are giving Kim and Microsoft a lot of slack (no "Passport 2.0" this time around, thankfully). On the other hand, we still have a long way to go.

I'm at Kim Carmeron's 7 Laws talk at DIDW, in the front row with Eric Norlin, Craig Burton and Steve Gillmor.

No simplistic solution is realistic.

We need a system in which all the parties are served.

Youo can have a simple solution without having it be simplistic.

The difverse needs of heh player mean integrating multiple constituent tecnologies

hardware became loosely coupled from

tcp/ip didn;'t maek the underlying techs disappear. (craig: or topology)

i call myself the hair at the end of the long tail

It's not just "I thought this." It's I've watched the careers of people who thought this go down the drain."

I couldn't have done this, except through the blogosphere.

(look up crucible)

dealtwith?

I tried to make them three. I love newton.

but if we can get to these seven, we can build a metasystem on it.

I didnt'; call this precempt you must buy hook line and sinker.

28 minutes

the user has a veto on the internet

in prison the user does not

1 law is an integrity i9ssue. Nort a moral one.

I'm a collector of disturbing identity dialogs.

bad people can always pose as good people.

? it might pay to consider these as rights...

I names is cool, because it allows me to... 1:15

an interesting to do public and semipublic interactions

I went looking at Netcraft to see how the IRS' server was holding up on Tax Day.

So The Head Lemur wrote this about customer service, got this response, and replied back.

For me this brings up the larger subject of CRM, or Customer Relationship Management. It's a big business, made bigger by SugarCRM's open source-based offerings. Which is fine as far as it goes, which isn't very far, mostly because approximately all CRM systems are silos. They isolate the vendor's customer relationships to those only of the vendor. They don't care a whole lot about what else the customer might be doing in the marketplace. There may be some knowledge of customer relations with partners — such as you'd find with hotels and airlines, for example. But for all their virtues as technological solutions, CRM systems in some ways cause more problems than they solve.

The problems I'm talking about here are in the form of lost market opportunities made possible by relationships on the customers' terms. Which may be far more rich and complex and potentiated than those contemplated by the CRM system.

This isn't any CRM's fault. I'm sure they're all fine, as solutions to the customer relationship problems that usually come up. But the conceptual framework is not the open marketplace where fully empowered customers interact with vendors open to more than what their sales and CRM systems contemplate.

What we need is a reciprocal of the CRM, on the customer's side. Drummond Reed came up with CoRM, for Company Relationship Management. It's how the customer relates to various vendors with which he or she has relationships in the wide-open marketplace.

CoRM is what we'll eventually get out of a truly distributed, non-centralized, real-world, customer-centric identity system such as what we called the Common Identity System when Kim Cameron described what he's doing for his part, at Microsoft, in compliance with his Laws of Identity.

So much is happening around this thing right now that I hardly know where to begin. I suggest reading... Hmm... Kim's Final Witness, explaining, with a remarkable combination of intelligence and grace, how he's trying to do the Right Thing. Also Drummond's response, which is no less smart and gracious, especially considering that Drummond has probably done more, single-handedly, to create human-friendly identity standards, than anybody else out there, so far... Then there's this by Eric Norlin. And whatever Craig Burton writes next.

Meanwhile, I'd like to invite some Linux hackers out there to take an interest in All This. (Or to reveal what interest you may already have.) I'll be writing it up for Linux Journal soon, and I'd like to cover What It Means for the Linux community, if not also What's Going On there as well.

Glen Martin (who posted this item yesterday) has also posted Free Beer Doesn't Hurt, on his own blog. It's an invitation to an open house (beer included) at SpikeSource, his employer.

Like SourceLabs, Optaros, Gluecode and OpenLogic (and probably some other companies I can't think of right now), SpikeSource belongs to a new category of independent open source company with offerings for enterprises with a need to deploy, integrate or otherwise deal with combinations of open source goods. Defining the category hasn't been easy for any of them. Stephen Walli does a good job of explaining the matter.

IBM, HP, Red Hat, Novell and Sun have offerings and services in the same space, too, of course. So does JBoss.

That makes the category sound crowded, but I don't think it is. Though still nameless, it's huge.

See, even though they don't talk about it very much in public (too many have lawyers that remain victims of SCO FUD poisoning), lots of large companies are suddenly dealing with the fact that they, too, will be building more and more of their IT on open source infrastructure. So they're like, Oh no! Our sex has changed! What do we wear?

These companies have answers. In time those answers will start getting more sharp and distinct. Meanwhile, the category bears watching.

Disclosure: I'm an advisor to SpikeSource. But my professional interest here is in making sense What's Going On.

Maybe some of the rest of ya'll can help with that.

The public radio model

Last year KSBX went on the air at 89.5fm in Santa Barbara. It was a new station, though for most listeners it seemed nothing more than a move two notches down the dial by San Luis Obispo's KCBX/90.1, which for years had served Santa Barbara with a translator (repeater) signal on 89.9. KSBX was, and remains, the first NPR affliate licensed to Santa Barbara. I may be wrong, but I believe Santa Barbara is the only upscale college town in the country without its own full-size NPR station. We've had to make do with KCBX, a tranKCLU/88.3 from Thousand Oaks does a remarkable job of filling that hole, since they do it with a 4-watt translator on 102.3. They include Santa Barbara in their station IDs, and run local news features during NPR's Morning Edition. KSBX doesn't. To KCBX, KSBX is less a sister station than a translator signal for Santa Barbara. I might be wrong but I don't believe KSBX has ever done any local programming for Santa Barbara. And it might not be fair to ask, either. KCBX's resources are limited, and So, as I was driving out of town yesterday, listening to the end of a classical piece on KSBX, the host came on to talk about the station's pledge drive, and how they listen to their listeners, and how that's one way they keep the classical programming on the air. For San Luis Obispo, 100 miles and several mountain ranges up the coast from Santa Barbara, Terry Heaton in The Devaluation of Information: The fatted calf of the mainstream media is under a severe whack attack these days. The battlefield is the World Wide Web, and beneath the surface, it's producing an ongoing economic drama of biblical proportions. In discussing issues relative to the communications revolution that was taking place on his watch, FCC Chairman Michael Powell made this remarkable statement: I have no problem if a venerable institution disappears tomorrow, as long as that value is distributed elsewhere in the economy. The idea of value being distributed elsewhere is the whacking stick in today's media revolution, and it's something that should be of concern to everybody. The value of information is the issue, because that value is being redistributed away from media companies and back into the pockets of people who used to spend it on books, newspapers, magazines, Internet subscriptions, cable and many forms of self help and education. Institutional, top-down media had their cake and could eat it too in a passive, mass marketing world. That's gone forever, and, as Sports Illustrated President John Squires told newspaper and magazine circulation types last fall, "Get over it." He concludes, Time has value, and it's high on the list for Postmoderns (Pomos). They don't want to give it away like they were forced to do in a media world of passive participation. If they don't want to give us their time, what WILL they give us? We ought to ask them. The revenue models of tomorrow will likely be quite different than they are today, and nobody has all the answers just yet. Value is value, however, and we ought to be spending more time studying what people are prepared to give us, as we attempt to meet their information and entertainment needs, rather than working overtime to raise old revenue models from the dead. The fatted calf of today is tomorrow's steak and french fries. Let's shift our thinking and enjoy the meal.

I don't know who does Entrepreneurship: Life Long Learning (subtitle: Just another WordPress weblog), but I just added the blog to the Linkbag. What caught my eye (or my aggregator's attention) was CTO Breakfast Recap - January 2005, where the author writes this:

Some similarities between HP and Novell where discussed. Both companies seem to be struggling to know who they are. Both at one time had a very clear idea. Novell was a networking company that should have become the next Cisco, according to some present. HP likewise lost their position and market to Dell. Novell may be finding some identity in being a Linux company, but I believe it is too soon to tell. One interesting comment was that Novell had a business strategy of destroying their competition, Microsoft. Irregardless of success or failure, Novell didnŐt have a post game plan for their match with Microsoft. As a result their market share has dwindled. Phil commented that this idea, is often referred to as Vendor Sports by Doc Searls. Vendor Sports exists largely as a revenue stream for the tech press. Several attendees agreed that Customers donŐt care about Vendor Sports. I agree that many customers disregard the vendor sport commentary, but I bet that customers waste more time and resources following vendor sports than we or they would like to admit. Item to note, Attempting to annihilate your competition is not a good business plan. Customers DONŐT CARE.
First, it's gratifying to see that I'm saying things that make sense to customers. Second, this post brings to mind something Guy Kawasaki said in a speech several years ago. He said his investment company, Garage.com, liked to have women review potential investee's business plans, because men too often wrote plans that were about "killing other companies". Third, I remember, when Craig Burton was a leading light at Novell (back during its best years, in the 1980s), how smoothly the company both competed with and complemented Microsoft. I also remember how, many years later, he used the expression "resistance created existence" to describe how fighting something is often the best way to cause its success. One example was Novell's quixotic head-on attacks on Microsoft (ludicrously positioning NetWare as a straight-up competitor to NT, among other dumb moves). Another example was Sun's fighting of Linux for many years. Another is Microsoft's similar strategy today, against Linux and open source. By fighting something, rather than by accommodating it, or at least adapting to it, you force partners and customers to make a sharp OR choice, rather than an AND choice. Meanwhile, most markets, and most customers, work by AND logic, not OR. But hey: OR logic does make for better stories. Unfortunately, it's easier to run a business on nonfiction rather than fiction.

Jack handy gave the IBM press conference. Bored my as off.

Martin Fink.

for linux the value shift... snore...

It's such a stgruggle not to fall asleep.

Back in the 1950s, McGraw-Hill ran a famous ad with this copy:

I don't know who you are.
I don't know your company.
I don't know your company's product.
I don't know what your company stands for.
I don't know your company's customers.
I don't know your company's record.
I don't know your company's reputation.
Now - what was it you wanted to sell me?"

This was a business-to-business ad.

Sean Bonner reports,
In a totally bad ass move Councilmembers Eric Garcetti, Wendy Greuel and Jack Weiss introduced a motion today to divert millions of dollars spent on potentially unnecessary software expenditures into a fund dedicated to the long-sought-after expansion of Los Angeles' police force. Anyone with half a brain knows this is a good idea, unfortunatly it's been a long time since anyone with half a brain was making those decisions.

The press release says,

Councilmembers Eric Garcetti, Wendy Greuel and Jack Weiss introduced a motion today to divert millions of dollars spent on potentially unnecessary software expenditures into a fund dedicated to the long-sought-after expansion of Los Angeles' police force.

The motion asks the Information Technology Agency to report on how the city could forgo paying for proprietary software licenses and instead transition to open source platforms and programs. "Open source" means that any programmer can see the software code and propose changes; a community of users creates, supports, and freely distributes applications. Some users pay a fee for technical support, but free support is available on internet message boards. The city spent $5.8 million on proprietary software licenses in FY2003-4.

"For taxpayers, this is a no-brainer," said Councilmember Eric Garcetti, member of the Information Technology and General Services committee. "By engaging this online community, we can make our own communities safer. Free open source software can be as capable and more secure than products that cost the city millions."

In the comments, Jim

Open the Pod(casting) bay doors, Steve.

Don't believe Apple is the Microsoft of music? I tune, You Tune (PITA subscription required), by Chana R. Schoenberger, is a feature in the latest Forbes with the subhead A youthful duo wants to merge Wi-Fi with portable music. Nice idea, except for something called Apple. The duo has a company, MusicGremlin Inc., that "hopes to launch this year what they say is the first mobile music subscription service". It's proprietary and full of DRM; But that's not the issue here. It's who gets to play Microsoft (or Wal-Mart, or any other Market Dominator) in stories the trade press tells. In music players (which constitute radio's replacement), it's Apple. Witness the final paragraph:

One little problem: Have these guys ever heard of Apple? With 84% of the market for hard-drive-based players, according to NPD Group, and 200 million iTunes songs sold, it could easily take its iPods wireless (it's not commenting now). Plus, a handheld MusicGremlin player sucks up battery power. And its wireless chip, at $40, is "a pretty expensive component to put into something you're trying to sell for $200 to $300," says Forrester analyst Ted Schadler.

Forenote to folks who say I don't "understand" Apple: 1) I do; and 2) This isn't about Apple.

This is about a marketplace that needs to be free. Apple doesn't just dominate the music playing marketplace; it has a silo so huge and comfortable (so long as you don't leave) that it works like a Truman Show for millions.

Which is fine, if you like living inside the silo.

Podcasting will best thrive in a free markeplace that includes but is not limited to Apple's (or Microsoft's, or Sony's, or MusicGremlin's) platforms and the silos built on them.

Here are a few links (courtesy of Jim Thompson) that provide hope for free market expansion in podcasting:

Plus, of course, Ogg Vorbis.

Got any more? Put 'em in the comment section below.

DIY -- Do It Yourself -- is still more the exception than the rule inside IT organizations. "IT shops want vendor-independence, more than ever before" says Phil Windley, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University (but still best known as the former CIO of Utah). He adds, "But IT shops still get most of their technology from vendors. Because they have to. And because that's a big part of How They Do Things."

Doc

Just read your great Linux Journal article re: Technorati and some of the open source tech/tools they are using. Great to see ink on stuff like memcache, spread etc

Keep writing about it; there are so many more great open source tools/frameworks available (we are heavily into Struts, OJB, Axis, etc)

Dave
Dave Hodson
CTO
MessageCast Inc
[email protected]
http://www.messagecast.net

I've been mostly lurking in a small email conversation between three alpha geeks whose opinions on technical matters are far more qualified than mine: Phil Hughes, Linux Journal's founder and publisher; Don Marti, our Editor in Chief; and Jim Thompson, who's one of the reasons Wi-Fi is so widely deployed today.

independent it really intersting development. quite aside from novell and sun, on grander scale.

when you're a cio, having support is how most compnies work. when youbuy sap you don't buy a cd and puti t in the omcpute config script. hire somebody like Cedar to come in and make it owrk.

systems integration

that's how it shops work. with that kind of help from the outside. having that sprin =gup around open source. imp developement.

go to the contractor who konws how to do what you do.

cedar won the bid to put in SAPs payroll system. By taking the cedar bid, they

ecosystem where it shops depend on ext sys integs to do heavy lifting. don't have the people on staff to change out the payroll system. need system integrators who work with open source to even have that possiboility.

Jonathan Schwartz makes a good case for why PCs will be as free as give-away cell phones. What he doesn't visit is the question of what operating system they'll be running.

Rex Hammock writes about Why iPod/iTunes won't be killed anytime soon. It's a long and interesting post, from an admitted 'phile of all things Apple, Macintosh and iPod. In the post he defends the iPod against "technology writers who spend thousands of words explaining how some feature-set or subscription model or, perhaps adding video or a cell-phone, will help another company unseat the iPod". He adds, > I wish for an editor's red pen when I see them displaying a degree of cluelessness that allows them to totally miss the forest as they describe the trees.

I agree with most of what Rex says — about the iPod's peerless aesthetics, about the substance of its style, and especially about what he calls "the design of the iTunes platform".

DIY phone code environment?

Digital Squeeze has a brief and helpfully linky write-up on the Gillmor Gang podcast on identity. Other nice follow-ups from Marc Canter, Phil Windley, Craig Burton (posted just in time for the show, actually), Kim Cameron (also here and here), Simon Grice (who couldn't make it, and was missed)

Jim Thompson just pointed me to Phonetasia,

Ten quesitons for CES

Apple and the Open Source conversation

I've never been big on speculating about what Big Vendors are up to, since mostly I cover what IT folks do for themselves. But since Apple has made it clear that they're planning a big new release ("Panther") for OS X, with a rejuvenated Safari browser, I'll be interested to see if Steve Jobs and company still thinks open source is great, which steve said (and I reported on) two Macworld/San Franciscos ago.

So, some questions:

Over at IT Conversations, Doug Kaye has a Wiki section called That Business-Model Thing, with the subhead "How Should I make IT Conversations Self-Susttaining? He begins, The one question I'm asked about IT Conversations more than any other is, "What's your business model?" After 18 months, nearly 300 programs and now with the New Year looming, the time has come to answer that question.

He's looking at two revenue sources: 1) advertisers and sponsors; and 2) listeners. Obviously, he can do either or both. There are lots of approaches on both sides. The more interesting, however, are on the listener side. Nearly all the responses so far have supported listener-side models like tip jars, per-download charges and membership fees. More importantly, they express a market — a demand — for Doug's excellent product.

I think the basic problem, for Doug and the rest of us who want to be in the same business, is technical. Tip jars, memberships, even PayPal-facilitated transactions... are all too lame, too complicated, or both.

We're planning on doing podcasting here too (in fact, we already have one sponsor lined up). But what I want to see, in the long run, for the business of peer-to-peer 'casting that doesn't exist yet, is a simple system by which anybody can pay, on a volutary basis, for everything.

I would like, for example, when I listen to anything I download on the Web, to be able to pay automatically for it. Usually the amount would be small. But the important part is, it would also be volutary. Like we have now in public radio and television, but efficient.

And I think we need technology for that. Maybe it's nothing more than a standard that already exists and hasn't been implemented. Maybe it's more complicated. Whatever it is, it needs to address the willingness, which we see among comments on Doug's wiki, of listeners to be customers.

Think about how a simple tag <enclosure> in RSS 2.0 uncorked podcasting. I'd like to see a similar standard supporting a whole new listener-driven economy in podcasting. And perhaps in other categories as well.

keynote on Tuesday, Wil Wheaton talked up blogs, and was at his most eloquent when reading (very well) from his book. He's a terrific writer. Especially moving was his story of a friend who recovered from cancer with the encouragement of countless concerned bloggers.

He even quoted me at one point, which surprised me. Ken Coar later said "his talk picked up for you right after he mentioned your name, right?" Guilty as charged.