garagefodder

J.P. Rangaswami at Reboot

The talk will be in three sections. The first will be how I see technology. The second sectino, which has to do with the cycles in which i fibve this talk. At least in anglo saxon cultures, you speak of the sesssion after lunch as the "graveyard talk" .;.. it;'s not an easy thign to do. So I thought I would talk about htings that I discover in the graveyard: in a few years to come; preferably tomorrow; preferably today. This may irrriatate some people. It may insult some people. I just want to say these are my personal opinions. they are not the views of my bank. And I don't necessarily believe I am right either. I'm not stupid enough to believe my own propaganda. I'm just sharing things that occur to me, things I think must die (laughter). I'm going to end that session with some of the things thsat should live. And I]ll attack the renaissance theme (of the show) by seeing what it is we are re-discovering.

What have we actually seen these last twenty, thirty, forty years? I repeat the theme of markets being conversations. Because it's critical to the rest of this pitch.

About twenty years ago a guy named Kenichi Ohmae, in a book called The Borderless World, spoke of three drivers: globalization, disintermediation and the Internet. But the World Wide Web hadn't been created yet. The idea of offshoring and outsourcing and the world getting flatter hadn't occured yet. The disintermediation that the Web would provide had not yet begun to happen. But Ken was a pretty clever guy, and he could see it. And want you to know that these things themselves are not new. these were not predicted by Nostradamus. but tyhese were drivers that were connected to some other things that were happening.

[Language development at first was by mouth...] This was very hard to scale.... Whenthe written word was created you had some form of persistence. When the printed word was created, you had some form of reproduction capacity. Now with the web you actually have is the ability to transmit and share.

So sharability is at the heart of this place that we call the Web. And point to point interests me not a jot.

You can think of tefchnology history as saying, above and beyond claude shannon, and information theory and where that came from, you caould say "Well, Moore's Law has something to do with the life we live today." If we'd hadn't seen the price performance that Moore predicted in '64, ''65, some of the things we'd talked about doing, some of the things we'd talked about being able to acquire, would not have happened. The concept of network effects and what that means without Metcalfe's law, we would not understand as much. But these are real and active. I'm not going to go into depth about Moore and Metcalfe and Gilder's dilemma, as some people call it, that bandwidth will get virtually free — other than to note that these things, price performance, network effects and virtually free bandwidth, have had an impact on the things we do now, and could consider doing now. I like to htink of information rather than technology, and particular where the two meet, as having, again a sideways view that englebart and kaye and what they did, allowed us to consume structured information. The mouse, the pointer, the concept of the desktop. These things allowed us to go for direct manipulation of information, on a stream. then visicalc and wordstar and things like that allowed us to produce relatively structured information. And I will say as little as possible about unproductivity that those tools have gained us over the last twenty years. I just record the fact that human beings were suddenly empowered to produce structured data.

What the Web did was allow us to consume unstructured data. The concept of the browser, the concept of html, site pages, etcetera, allowed us to stop consuming data that was relatively unstructured in comparison with what we used to call structured data.

And what the blogosphere, the wiki, and social software do, to use Doc's term, is to make the web live. Because now we can also produce unstructured data. Right? We don't have to go to some IT department and find a FrontPage specialist, or take some 80-column card with things punched out for somebody else to encode. The smoke and mirrors are gone. The holy of holies has been torn apart. Because as individuals we have all been empowered to start consuming and producing structured and unstructured information, being able to share it and reproduce it at very low transmission costs, zero marginal reproduction costs. And these things have a lot to do with the empowerment we have.

However, despite all this, unless we understand what drives us, unless we understand the mistakes and errors we have made, we can't really take advantage of where we are going. So as a leader to discussion of the things I think are dead or dying, we need to understand that Maslow is a crock of shit. Fundamentally a hierarchical structured need is, "Frederick Taylor meets human beings."

People are not assembly line things. What makes us different is that we are different. And to try to create standardized norms of us is where evil starts stepping into organizations. It's builds where hospitals where you centralize ill people. Very clever, right? Why would people do that? You know many people die of exposure to illness while they are ill? The last place you want to spend any time is in a central hospital. That place is a production of industrial thought, not human thought.

Nitin Nohria ... created something he called the Four Driver model. Which I feel personally a lot more comfortable with. That man is born with a drive to acquire, man is born with a drive to defend, man is born with a drive to learn, and man is born with a drive to bond.

This capacity to bond was denied us because of the divide-and-conquer garbage that we were exposed to, probably for the last four or five hundred years. And made a lot more sophistacted through the any-color-you-want-as-long-as-it's-black assembly line production factory approach to humanity. And it doesn't scale. It doesn't work.

We've been living with things we shouldn't have been living with, which were the contstrainst of thinking and technology over the last 150 years or so. The thing that Nohria did, that was different than Maslow, is that he didn't say this was sequential. These work in parallel. Or drives to bond, learn, acquire and defend all act at the same time. And they consist of different intensities at different times of the day.

So understand that that's what we are. That bonding — being able to have feedback loops for what other people think of us, being able to rate, getting the peer respect. These are not brand new things that our children have discovered, or that the open source movement have discovered. We used to have it: the instinct to bond. But we were denied it. We were isolated. And through that usilation we discovcreatedered a whole lot of other vey painful things.

Three things that I believe are going to hold us up, which I will not spend any time on because they are not easily classifiable as dead — and I want to talk about dead things — are:

First, the Internet, in terms of Net Neutrality. If we allow the evils that people think of today, as to how to make the network stupid or not stupid as the case may be... But rather than the network saying where information goes, we decide, and tell the information, which the tells the network, which is essentially stupid. But unless you buy that and understand that... again, this is not new. David Isenberg, it's probably fifteen years, at least ten years since he wrote that. We seem to have forgotten it since we have gotten used to vendor lock-in. We got used to not being able to do things and believing that is normal. Actually the renaissance is more important than rebirth. It is not nascent or something new. it is actually getting back to us as a community the things we used to have. Because technology has caught up, and the price points and performance points are there. Now we have the opportunity to engage.

The second element is identity. If you go to many eastern countries, identity is not about who I am, because the I is very unusual,. Identity is about what I belong to. Identity is a statement of the community that I belong to. Identity is a statement of things that I will associate with me, that empower me as a result of bvelonging to something. Identity is not individual. And I will come to privacy as a result of that because this becmes an issue.

There are many things you can use identity for. But if you understand that even a passport, three hundred or four hundred years ago, used to say "I know this person. Will you please look out for him." Not "These are his permissions and these are the things he can do and this is what he needs a visa for." None of that stuff. It was elective to say, "Since I know you and I know this person, look after this guy. He's a good guy." It was a trusted domain-type statement. And then say, "If he needs anything, if he's ill, if he needs some food, if he needs shelter, help him out." That's what the passport used to be. Look what it's become. And we've allowed this to happen. We've allowed things to be taken away from us, rather than saying "Let's build new things." I only want us to get back what we had.

Okay, that's number one. I'm now in the graveyard.

The first death is device lock-in. Imagine today most of you have phones. But when I was growing up in India, it was bakelite, black... any color you like as long as it's black. It was rented from the phone company. I couldn't even buy that device. And it took some years before it became color. I could choose to have a pink phone, or a white phone. It became years before I could say I could buy my phone, because I could only buy it from the phone company. And so over a period of something like thirty years — from "you can only rent it from the phone company" to "you can buy it at a service station or a supermarket." That is a change. But there are still countries today where the only phone you can get is from the phone company, and you don't own the title. This device lock-in is evil.

At our bank we tell people it doesn't matter what PC you are using or what laptop you are using, we will sort out the security, we will sort out the firewall, the confidentiality etcetera. Instead of having to say "Thou shalt not use anything except my computers." This is what has changed.

Can you imagine my telling people, "You cannot use your own pen." Or, "You can't use your own voice."

The devices that people are going to have, that people will elect to use — PDA vs. phone vs. laptop, palmtop, desktop or whatever — (are going to be) what people are comfortable with. We have to design software that is agnostic to that set of devices. That is agnostic to the nature of the connect. Whether it is hard lines, whether it's wireless, whether it's Wimax or alphabet soup. It shouldn't matter — Bluetooth, greentooth — what you provide as a device (should be like) a person's own pen. You want to use a fat fountain pen ... you use what you are comfortable with. We have to stop this process of communications devices being locked in either to a form of communication or to a vendor.

We've seen it happen with writing. We've seen it happen with phones. It is only a matter of time before it happens with computers. It has to happen. So the first death is that of device lock-in.

The second death may irritate some people. It is the death of marketing. Where is Hugh when I need him in case I'm wearing his shirt. This is (garbled). We can go from this concept of customer relationship management (CRM), which is just a nice way of saying "customer exploitation". To say it's not targeted selling we need. We need targetted buying. We have to invert that pyramid to say "I, as a consumer want to able to discover things that will help me buy. And not have you sell to me." The role of sales is to make it easier to buy. (Garbled.) What does that really mean?

[Power supply went out.]

The issue is that, more than anything eslse, when I want to buy something, then I want recommendations. I am far more interested in knowing what people I trust think about something and aggregating that, than I am in some central control of inventory telling me what I would expect them to tell me, which is "Everything in my inventory is good". We've had that problem with independent financial advisors (for ages). We've had that problem with, when you go to a car lot and the only thing they'll sell you is what they've got there.

It changes. It changes because of the Web. It changes because your cost of discovery is that much lower. It changes because you can get many opinions that you could not get before. But marketing then, from a central "We will put these messages out and you will listen" (perspective) has fundamentally died.

The next element that has died, and this may irritate more people, I'll give a quota on marketing. Because again it is about how all marketing up until now has been about attention, picking up your eyeballs — how people can get their product acrss to you, rather than how you can get your intentions known to them. And again, this is something which, the man himself is sitting out here, or at least one of the men himself.

But this is important because we used to be able to do it. When you sat in a small community, and you didn't have mobility, you didn't have written words, how did you buy things? How did you trade things? You traded things by talking to people you trusted — markets are conversations again — they recommended things, they gave you their experience. And then you bought. The process of making the trade, when you buy the hole and not the drill, because you are not interested in that drill yet — you are telling other people you have a hole, and other people tell you "I'll solve that hole this way" or "I created that hole this way" and that's what you buy.

We've got it all mixed up. And this is post-Taylor, post-MacLuhan nonsense. Because this is the way the last hundred years have rolled out. Technology has caught up. We don't have to do this any more.

The next thing that has died is privacy. I am sick to death of seeing articles in the press telling me that the Semantic Web is going to kill the individual and his privacy because suddenly we have made it easier to connect the bits that have already been out there. You tell Generation M, the twelve-to-twenty year olds or whatever, that they should be worried abour privacy, that they shouldn't be posting their personal photos on Flickr, they shouldn't be talking about their interests in Facebook, they shouldn't be saying what music they listen to on LastFM. They don't think that way because they don't have this convoluted idea about privacy.

If you go to India where they sleep six, seven people to a room, because they don't have the same physical flat or accommodation space, yes,your concept of your own personal space and your privacy is different. We only had one PC, if that, to cover a whole community, and everyone used it. Then you wouldn't be sitting around and making these assertions about individual space the same way.

And people didn't have this in the past, when they lived in smaller houses, when they didn't have personal storage space identified. There is a big reason why I am worried about (this) and why these concepts of personal privacy have died. Because the garbage of digital rights management (DRM) is being sold to us a lot at a time, in order to create walled gardens of information that we didn't want to build walls around in the first place. What is the risk of some of this information being made available? Because I am choosing to put it out there. If I choose not to, that is my choice.

If you want to keep a secret, don't tell anyone, right? (Laughter.)

To build a way that says "Information starts closed" and then you open it out selectively, sells chips, sells storage, sells software integrators, etcetera. Data mining. The idea of integrating between two vendors' systems, and you pay money to take your own information out of one vendor's system to pass through another, and they make you feel bad that you're trying to do this in the first place... It's your information! We should not have had this lock-in. Not when our community standards would not have allowed this to happen. We paid for it because of the past. But we don't have to pay for it any more. We have to rethink about what privacy means.

It doesn't mean that everyone's medical records are put out on the Internet. And

Fodder from Freedom to Connect — f2c.

Bob Frankson: Telecom is Just a Phase We're Going Through.

Ben Worthen - Who owns the Internet?

Martin Geddes' blog. Worst nightmare, in Skype Journal.

Ed Felten on Network Discrimination.

"Government can be bought. It's even cheaper than standards committees." — Brad Templeton.

"You can choose any cable company you want in North America. Just move your house. How can they call cable a monoply?"

A similar speech by Brad, at eTel.

David Weinberger on Martin Geddes, Michael Copp, Tim Wu, and f2c itself.

Jerry Michalski on the conf.

The BarCamp planned right after f2c.

Forbes: Unbundled Media Poses a challenge.

Background: What happened to streetcars.

Bruce Kushnick: The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal.

More background.

Commnity Telestructure.

Paul Starr's The Creation of the Media.

Muni Broadband Wireless map.

powell. the legislative process does not owrk well

wouldn't it be cool to have a simple paradigm that's sacalable that lets peio[pe do things on ehte web.

he's using firefox.

screen scrape websites.

Michael Powell...

First... There is a very shallow current understandingn of tech. If you go give a quiz about the seven layers of the Internet—good luck. So, be careful of inviting the legislative process when they have a very bad understanding of the technical underpinnings. Becauswe the secondary consequences of their errors can be enormous.

Number two: Be careful. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. I'm a big believer in subversion or jujitsu when it comes to this stuff. Which is: Let the weight of inertia be on your side. Which (means) I would rather try to constantly position my industry where I succeed if government does nothing. Versus positioning it in a way where I need them to do something or I'm dead.

Because, if you're in a position where you desperately need to do something or you're dead/ start ordering your coffin and digging the plot, because this process is cumbersome, slow and deliberative.

The other thing is, you can believe in a snapshot of time, you can trust the government — by the way who will have a vague definition because they don't get it well enough — If this community doesn't understand it, as I heard... I can tell you right now, very few people in Washington do. Which means you're going to get a potentially very ambiguous, subject to massive variations in interpretation, pile of law.

Now, personalities change, political power changes, congressmen come and go, presidents change. You're living with something that's a perpetual cycle of interpretation. And, by the way, it's always easier to get a law on the books than to get it off again. If it goes on, be prepared that it's there for fifteen, twenty years. And the ohter thing is, government has a way of turning on people. Ask Bill Gates. Which is, it may be about networks today; but those same principles can be used against any business model, or applications and other contexts. And I submit to you they would be. It might have to do with interoperability of your new product with somebody else's product. it might have to do with servers and caching. Someoone will think it's a good idea to apply the same basic principles to the other side of the community.

Third and lastly I would say, be careful because you're playing their game. Regulatory battles are an art form and these guys are the maestros. It's always a little like Brer Rabbit. "Oh, woe is me. Throw me on the briar patch and don't regu— oh, regulate me. Yeuch. The average one of these incumbents, whether a cable or a phone company, have forty lawyers in Washington, dedicated to this work. Resources. Ability. One hundred years of skill. Not criticizing, only saying a reality. And then I meet entrepreneurs who have twelve guys and can't afford a legal cost center, to research. And then let me add the judicial process. Every decision you get from the Congress and the FCC, will spend the next three and a half, four years, in court.

Tara Hunt asks, What are your reasons for tagging?

Since we're into DIY stuff here, I thought this would be a good place to give my own answer and see how the rest of you feel as well.

I tag for categories.

Because that's what tags are: categories. They are a categorical way to label, organize and find pieces of, the Live Web searched by the likes of mashupcamp. Well, it's a category. Not just a keyword.

Let's step back a bit.

There aren't many ways to organize things: aphabetically, numerically, hierarcically, categorically, spatially (or geographically), chronologically.

The Web was born, perhaps blessedly, without any organization beyond DNS: the Domain Name System. After the domain name, the Web is a haystack of Unix file paths. This may be organized schematically (it's a library of nested folders)

I want radio stations to archive programs as podcasts for the same reason I want newspapers and magazines to save stories as Web pages. Especially since it's so darn easy.

This occured to me this morning when I was listening to KZSB/1290, the live news outlet of our local daily newspaper, the Santa Barbara News-Press. KZSB has no website, but it does stream live, using Windows Media Player. This brings up the Kaffeine Media Player in my Linux laptop, but ... nothing after that. Pretty annoying.

The same idea occurred to me again a few minutes ago, when I wished I could hear the Tabitha Soren interview of Ana Marie Cox, better known as Wonkette, which I had heard on a Commonwealth Club radio broadcast in the Bay Area earlier this week while I was driving down to Mashup Camp. (Here's one blog report on the 'cast.) So I looked up Commonwealth Club podcasts on Google. The top result wasn't useful; but the second result was Commonwealth Club Radio Program, an "unrecognized" file format that turns out to be http://audio.commonwealthclub.org/audio/podcast/weekly.xml. An RSS file, for podcasts.

That was cool, but... there's nothing about podcasts or RSS on the Commonwealth Club site, though there are pointers to webcasts on KQED and KALW, San Francisco's two main public stations. Those pointers also include "Listen Now" links (like this one here), which have other links that bring you RealAudio webcasts, rather than podcasts.

What's strange in both these cases is that podcasting is much easier than webcasting. You store files and point to them in an RSS feed. In KZSB's case, most of its broadcasts are programs. It would be easy for the station to archive those programs as .mp3 files, for downloading as podcasts. Storage is cheap these days. So, why not? As for the Commonwealth Club, same question.

So now I'm thinking it might just be a matter of tools. How about mashing up something combining podcasting with the open source Rivendell broadcast content management suite, which is written for Linux by Salem Radio Laboratories, and which I featured here a few weeks ago.

Stations with lots of programs, and not just music formats, would benefit enormously, methinks.

As for the Commonwealth Club, a simple RSS feed with pointers to extant archives would suffice.

What do the rest of ya'll think?

This post is about meritocracies.

I'm writing about the subject here because it seems to me that open source development projects are meritocracies. Your code doesn't get in unless it passes muster with the maintainers, the committers, or whatever the gatekeepers are called. No project is perfect, of course. Nor is any growing code base, which is relentlessly improved by a kind of dialog between bugs and patches.

And there are politics. Lots of judgements, even technical ones, are often personal. Or so I'm told. Still, the system is meritocratic in nature.

Or so it appears to me from the outside. As I've often joked, the only code I know is Morse. I live in user space. Kernel space is for the qualified, and I'm not. I've always been fascinated by the sharpness of the distinction between kernel space and user space, and at how open source projects are advantaged by the lack of the latter's involvement in creating the former. I've heard Linus say, more times than I can count, "That's user space. I don't do user space." And yet, think of how much Linus and crew have improved life in user space, because they make that distinction.

A few months back, I observed that Linux is a species. It adapts and evolves in an almost organic way, doing the best job it can of being itself. Not what outsiders want it to be.

I've been told more than once by honchos at large companies that employ kernel hackers that it took those companies years to learn they can't tell kernel hackers what to do with the kernel. Yes, the kernel adapts to life in the Real World, but orders by commercial entities for new features are not high on the list of stimuli to which kernel hackers respond. (Nor are lame patches.)

Yet there is an interesting relationship between kernel space and user space, that I'm beginning to think may be useful outside the arcane realm of code development. This last couple weeks I've been exploring this and related topics with Don Marti, who served for a long time as Editor-in-Chief at Linux Journal, and is a boundless source of insight on many matters. Also, he knows a helluva lot more than me about this stuff.

We could sum up one consensus with this: Dilbert works at a proprietary software company. The dude may be a good engineer, but he works for a PHB in a hell of politics and motives that are unavoidably ulterior to the mission of Writing Good Code.

See, the purpose of open-source code is not to support any one company's agenda. Near as I can tell, that's even the case with MySQL, which is a company as well as a code base. The purpose of open source code is to be useful, to anybody in user space. Hence the distinction between usefulness (kernel space) and uses (user space).

One insight of Don's is that this same distinction between creation and use, between usefulness and user, is actually something you find all over the place, and not just in code development.

My own perspective is geological. We're in era of pulsating glaciation that began in the late Pleistocene, about 650,000 years ago. Geologically, that's very recent. It takes much longer, usually, just to form a rock. Right now we're nearing the peak of an interglacial period. In other words, we've had global warming anyway, ever since the Wisconsin ice sheet vacated North America and Europe about 10,000 years ago, leaving such familiar features as the Great Lakes, Long Island, Nantucket, Cape Cod and Bunker Hill in Boston (which is what geologists call a "drumlin").

Ten thousand years ago, you could walk to the Bahamas from Florida. And the seas have been rising, almost steadily, since then. San Francisco Bay, for example is only about a thousand years old.

It's also clear that fossil fuel emissions are screwing with the cycle. This graph in Wikipedia's Timeline of glaciation tells the story. Atmospheric CO2 (carbon dioxide), which is high during interglacial periods, hit 380 ppm (parts per million) in the last century, breaking the previous record, set during an interglacial period about 325,000 years ago. On that graph it's off the scale.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  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  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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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,

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

The difverse needs of heh player mean integrating multiple constituent tecnologies

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

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

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.

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.

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.