As David mentioned in his previous post, plaintiffs' lawyers in online defamation suits will typically issue a sequence of two "John Doe" subpoenas to try to unmask the identity of anonymous online speakers. The first subpoena goes to the website or content provider where the allegedly defamatory remarks were posted, and the second subpoena is sent to the speaker's ISP. Both entities—the content provider and the ISP—are natural targets for civil discovery. Their logs together will often contain enough information to trace the remarks back to the speaker's real identity. But when this isn't enough to identify the speaker, the discovery process traditionally fails.

Are plaintiffs in these cases out of luck? Not if their lawyers know where else to look.

There are numerous third party web services that may hold just enough clues to reidentify the speaker, even without the help of the content provider or the ISP. The vast majority of websites today depend on third parties to deliver valuable services that would otherwise be too expensive or time-consuming to develop in-house. Services such as online advertising, content distribution and web analytics are almost always handled by specialized servers from third party businesses. As such, a third party can embed its service into a wide variety of sites across the web, allowing it to track users across all the sites where it maintains a presence.

Take for example the popular online blog Boing Boing. Upon loading its main page while recording the HTTP session, I noticed that my browser is automatically redirected to domains owned by no fewer than 17 distinct third party entities: 10 services that engage in advertising or marketing, five that embed media or integrate social networking functionality, and two that provide web analytics. By visiting this single webpage, my digital footprints have been scattered to and collected by at least 17 other online entities that I made no deliberate attempt to contact. And each of these entities will likely have stored a cookie on my web browser, allowing it to identify me uniquely later when I browse to one of its other partner sites. I don't mean to pick on Boing Boing specifically—taking advantage of third party services is a nearly universal practice on the web today, but it's exactly this pervasiveness that makes it so likely, if not probable, that all of my digital footprints together could link much of my online activities back to my actual identity.

To make this point concrete, let's say I post a potentially defamatory remark about someone using a pseudonym in the comments section of a Boing Boing article. It happens that for each article, Boing Boing displays the number of times that the article has been shared on Facebook. In order to fetch the current number, Boing Boing redirects my browser to api.facebook.com to make a real-time query to the Facebook API. Since I happen to be logged in to Facebook at the time of the request, my browser forwards with the query my unique Facebook cookie, which includes information that explicitly identifies me—namely, my e-mail address that doubles as my Facebook username.

In order to integrate a bit of useful social networking functionality, Boing Boing enables Facebook, a third party in this situation, to learn which articles I visit on Boing Boing and the dates and times of my visits. The same is true for Tweetmeme, which can now positively link my Twitter account—which I'm also logged in to—with my Boing Boing visits. Even without an authenticated login, the 15 other third parties present on Boing Boing could track me using any number of different methods, including browser fingerprinting, to build detailed dossiers that slowly begin to piece together who I am.

From the perspective of a plaintiff's lawyer, even if Boing Boing is unwilling or unable to produce any useful information, these third parties might be able to uniquely identify me as the likely defamer, or at least narrow the list of possible speakers down to a handful of users. But tracing speech is not always this easy. Tomorrow, I'll discuss more complicated discovery strategies and the extent to which they are technically feasible.

Why raise the cigarette tax when you can just tax breathing?

So asks Andrew Samwick in an effort to explain the illogic behind replacing a tax on gas with a tax on miles driven.

Isn't it a bit embarrassing for an "expert on counter-terrorism" to be quoted as saying this?

Bill Tupman, an expert on counter-terrorism from Exeter University, told BBC News: "The problem is trying to predict the mind of the al-Qaeda planner; there are so many things they might do.

"And it is also necessary to reassure the public that we are trying to outguess the al-Qaeda planner and we are in the process of protecting them from any threat."

I think it's necessary to convince the public to refuse to be terrorized. What frustrates me most about Abdulmutallab is that he caused terror even though his plot failed. I want us to be indomitable enough for the next attack to fail to cause terror, even if it succeeds. Remember: terrorism can't destroy our country's way of life; only our reaction to terrorism can.

1. The Michelangelo Marriage?

2. Russ Roberts is eloquent on trade.

3. More funny stuff from Yoram Bauman.

4. GMU, Feb.16, I am speaking on Haiti.

5. Scott Sumner on the Great Depression, in a nutshell.

6. Immunity-on-demand?

7. Articles which communicate awe are most likely to be emailed.

Happy Safer Internet Day! Today marks the seventh edition of the event. Celebrations are taking place in more than 60 countries on all 5 continents across the world, from Canada to South Korea, and Russia to Kenya and including all 27 countries of the European Union.

" Online safety concerns all of us. Young people across Europe spend a good part of their leisure time, playing, interacting and learning on the web. The overall traffic on social networking sites has grown enormously over the last three years," said Viviane Reding, patron of Safer Internet Day for the sixth consecutive year, European Commissioner for Information Society and Media. "Therefore, it is even more our responsibility as Europeans to make the online world a safe and secure environment that everyone can enjoy."

Safer Internet Day 2010 celebrates the theme "Think B4 U Post". Once an image is posted online, it’s hard, if not impossible, to take it back. Anyone can see it. The goal is not to prevent young people from using these sites, but to make them aware of the risks of sharing personal information online and to encourage them to control their online identity by thinking carefully about the consequences.

Visit www.saferinternet.org and look up the website of your national awareness center to get tips on how to protect your privacy online. To learn more about Safer Internet Day meetings in your region or at the international level this year, stay posted at: www.saferinternetday.org and check out the SID fair www.sidfair.org.

About Safer Internet Day

Safer Internet Day is part of a global drive by awareness-raising partners to promote a safer Internet for all users, especially young people. It is organised by INSAFE in the framework of the European Commission’s Safer Internet Programme.

Over the last few days I’ve got this blog and my documents blog to conform to valid XHTML according to the W3C validation service [1].

One significant change that I made was to use lower-case for HTML tags. For about 15 years I’ve been using capitals for tags to make them stand out from content and my blogs are the latest in a long line of web sites with that. Naturally I wasn’t going to correct 900 posts manually so I ran a series of SQL commands such as the following on my database server (where X is the Wordpress table prefix):

update X_wp_posts set post_content = replace(post_content,'<PRE>','<pre>');

But make sure you have a good backup of your database before running SQL search and replace commands on your blog data.

After running such commands about 90% of my blog posts conformed, so I only needed to edit about 90 posts to correct things. This process gave some real benefits. One issue is that an apostrophe in a URL must be quoted, otherwise some browsers will link to the desired URL and some will link to a truncated URL. Fixing a couple of variations of this problem resulted in some broken links being fixed. Another issue is that you can’t have paragraphs (<p> tags) within list items, fixing this made some of my posts align correctly – it was a tricky fix, in some cases I had to use <br/> to break up text in a list item and sometimes I replaced lists with different sections delimited by <h3> headings (which apparently is rumored to give better SEO).

It would make a really nice Wordpress feature to be able to do W3C validation as part of the publishing process, ideally an attempt to publish or schedule a post would result in a message saying “saved as a draft because it’s not valid XHTML” if the checks failed. The source to the W3C validation software is significantly larger than Wordpress [2], but it seems to me that there are two main types of Wordpress installations, small ones for personal use (which tend to be on fairly idle servers) and big ones that have so much traffic that the resource usage of validation would be nothing compared to the ongoing load.

As there seems to be no way of validating my posts before publication my best option is the W3C button I now have on my blog. This allows me to validate the page at a click so while I can’t entirely avoid the risk of publishing a post with invalid XHTML I can at least fix it rapidly enough that hardly anyone will notice.

It also seems like a useful feature to have aggregators like Venus [3] check for valid HTML and not display posts unless they are valid. It’s not a feature that could be enabled immediately (I’m sure that if you click on this link to the W3C validation service [1] from a Planet feed you will see lots of errors and warnings), but once bloggers have time to fix their installation it would allow preventing some of the common annoyances of Planet installations. It’s not uncommon on popular Planets to have unmatched tags in a post which results in significant amounts of the content being bold, underlined, in italics, or for the greatest annoyance struck-out. I know that this may be a controversial suggestion, but please consider why you are blogging – if you are blogging for the benefit of your readers (which seems to be the case for everyone other than sploggers) then it seems that the readers will benefit more by not having a broken post syndicated than they would benefit from having it syndicated and thus messing up the display of many following posts.

The next thing on my todo list in this regard is to do some tests of accessibility. The work that I have done to pass the XHTML validation tests has helped to some degree – if nothing else the images now all have alt= descriptions, but I expect that it will be a lot of work. The Wordpress Codex has a page about accessibility, I haven’t read all of it yet [4].

Does anyone have any recommendations for free automated systems that check web sites for accessibility? What would be ideal is a service that allows different levels of warnings, so instead of trying to fix all problems at once I could start by quickly fixing the most serious problems on the most popular posts and finish the job at some later date.

• [1] http://validator.w3.org/
• [2] http://validator.w3.org/source/
• [3] http://intertwingly.net/code/venus/
• [4] http://codex.wordpress.org/Accessibility

Dear Mr. Williamson:

I am writing to complain about the changes you have made to the Alameda Daily Noose. First of all, the new colors are really hurting my eyes. The bold, bright yellow and stark, manly black of the Alameda Daily Noose always put me in the mood for a good rant, but as I look at these cool shades of blue, I feel a strange sensation. I think it's called "relaxing" and I don't like it!

I also want to complain about all the advertisements. I don't get it, we fought long and hard to have those ugly billboards banished from Alameda streets and now suddenly you're putting them up all over the interwebs! There ought to be a law against it! I was going to write a grumpy letter to my councilman about it, but I look at these darned colors and suddenly I can't be bothered. Please change everything back, preferably now.

You know, I had high hopes for you, young man, but now I'm starting to wonder. Didn't you promise Roger that you weren't going to change anything? I don't understand, and although I'm seething mad, all I want to do is search for videos of kittens playing the piano on the U-tubes. Darn those new colors!

Sincerely yours,
Jean Kerkwilligers

[Editor note - right from the start we worried that some old loyal readers of the old Alameda Daily Noose may not - how do we put this delicately? - "get" the technologically advanced concept of Noosepaper 3.0. We suggest they educate themselves on the latest marketing trends, which they can read about in the all-new vigorous and youthful Inaction Alameda Alameda Daily Noose by Inaction Alameda. If this doesn't do the trick, maybe they should just go back to their needlepoint or taxidermy or whatever it is they do.]

Social media marketing is pretty tricky - but it is too tricky to ever roll out international campaigns? Where do you start from when you're targeting international social networks - success at home or do you need to start all-over?

....

The Economist has a good write-up of the sorry state of the patent system and the Supreme Court’s impending Bilski decision:

Another field where patenting is pursued aggressively is semiconductors. But it is done there not so much to make money, nor even to bar others from using the acquired know-how. Its main purpose is for negotiating cross-licensing deals with competitors. Of necessity, inventions in chipmaking rely on lots of existing technology, which is itself covered by hundreds of patents held by numerous other firms. Without a large portfolio of patents to trade beforehand, semiconductor firms developing incrementally improved products (next-generation microprocessors and memory chips, for instance) would run into litigation and injunctions at every turn.

Pursuing patents aggressively for cross-licensing agreements has little to do with encouraging innovation, though. Indeed, by increasing transaction costs, such deals are in effect a tax on innovation. By the same token, how much of a contribution have the 12,000 or so business processes patented annually in America (but few places elsewhere) made to innovation? Precious little, by all accounts. It is hard enough to find evidence (outside the pharmaceutical and biotech industries) showing that the patent system generally spurs innovation. It is harder still to find justification for business-process patents.

What is clear is that the “non-obviousness” part of the test for patentability has not been applied anywhere near rigorously enough to internet and business-process patents. Because they lack a history of “prior art” to refer to, examiners and judges have granted a lot of shoddy patents for software and business processes.

One place the Economist errs is here:

It is not simply a failure of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to scrutinise applications more rigorously. The Federal Circuit (America’s centralised court of appeal, established in 1982 to hear, among numerous other things, patent disputes) has been responsible for a number of bizarre rulings. Because of its diverse responsibilities, the Federal Circuit—unlike its counterparts in Europe and Japan—has never really acquired adequate expertise in patent jurisprudence.

The reality is close to the opposite: patents dominate the Federal Circuit’s docket, and as a consequence the court tends to strongly reflect the pro-patent views of the patent bar. I’ve argued before that we’d get better results if patent appeals were handled by the regular appeals system, with its 11 circuit courts.

1. Track DC -- informative drill-down report from Washington DC government about the different departments. (via Sunlight Labs blog)
2. Errors in Scientific Software -- a 1994 study of scientific software that found inconsistent interfaces (1 in 7 for Fortran, 1 in 37 for C) and poor use of arithmetic such that significant figures declined from 6sf in the data to 1sf in the result. (via "If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too" in the Guardian)
3. How Farmville Scales -- 75M players/month (28M/day), 1/4 of disk activity is writes, 50% higher load spikes, 3G/s traffic go between Farmville and Facebook at peak, LAMP stack, nagios+munin+puppet. (via Hacker News)
4. Mathematical Philology -- when two manuscripts of the same text differ, which is correct? This PLoSONE paper looked at all such discrepancies in Lucretius's De Rerum Natura and found that the traditional principle of choosing the more difficult reading (on the grounds that errors are from humans unconsciously simplifying) has a strong information theory justification for it. Interesting to see this less than a week after an MIT Technology Review article on quantum teleportation remarked, There is a growing sense that the properties of the universe are best described not by the laws that govern matter but by the laws that govern information.

The Banshee Project released 1.5.3 on January 27th. This release brings a slew of improvements to the already impressive media player that gives iTunes a run for its money, if not hype.

For those not familiar with Banshee, it’s a media player written in C# on the Mono platform, started by Aaron Bockover. Since its debut in 2005, Banshee has seen contributions from nearly 100 developers. Banshee is Free Software, licensed under the MIT/X11 license, and has been packaged for ‘all major Linux distributions' as well as recent releases for Mac OS X. The most recent Mac OS X release removes the requirement for the Mono and GTK frameworks, bundling everything in one binary for installation on Mac OS X. Note that Mac builds are beta quality and may be missing some features present in Linux releases, or may not be quite as stable.

Read the rest on GNOME Journal

Download ogg Download mp3

When Google Wave was first announced back in May 2009, the hype-o-meter almost went off the scale. While bollocking Google is the new black, Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge have a play with wave, explore it and talk about whether the hype is justified, what it’s opportunities are and what Wave needs to do to succeed.

Of course, we are the very beginning of the conversation. What do you think? Have you played with Wave? What did you think? Did you use it for anything other than type ‘here is a test of wave’? Do you think Wave will change the way we communicate? Share your thoughts in the shot comments below…

If your eyes can see it, you need to worry about it. That's the rule for any faint mark or strange speck on artwork headed for the printer. Otherwise, if you want something to show up, it won't and if you don't want something to show up, it will. Submitted by: Michael Rider, art director, American Demographics

"Marigold I gotta say, your milkshake definitely brings the boys to the yard!"

"Wh-what does that mean? Is that some sort of rap thing?!"

As promised -- or rather, threatened -- last spring and fall, at least one group that opposed the adoption of Lesson 9 (which was designed to teach children not to bully children who have gay parents) has now come out against both the Master Plan and parcel tax. Alameda Concerned Parents , led...

‘Boredom can kill you’ ANI

Genes reveal ‘biological ageing’ BBC

Re-Engineering the Human Immune System h+ (hat tip reader David C)

Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change? National Geographic (hat tip reader Diane R)

Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything PhysOrg (hat tip reader Nick)

Sarah Palin caught cheating, proving to the world once again she’s a colossal IDIOT! Zeitgeist Watch (hat tip reader John L)

Unaccountable America Archein

Traders make $8bn bet against euro Financial Times

The Option of Last Resort: A Two-Currency EMU RGE Monitor

‘PIGS’ Crisis Is Opportunity for Euro to Stand Up Matthew Lynn, Bloomberg

Greek crisis intensifies as Joe Stiglitz calls for Europe to ‘teach the speculators a lesson’ Telegraph (hat tip Swedish Lex)

Mervyn King goes dog sledding but all avoid seal meat at G7 summit in Canada Guardian

Treasury is failing to force banks to lend, warn MPs Independent

The second lien sticking-point FT Alphaville (hat tip Richard Smith)

China says it shut down online academy for hackers LA Times (hat tip reader Sundog)

Dollars Flow Out as Data Flows In New York Times

In praise of mammoth deficits LA Times (hat tip reader Scott)

We’re Weimar James Howard Kunstler (hat tip reader Scott). Whether you agree or not, it’s a lively read

All roads lead to the renminbi Chevelle

Could we start industrial society from scratch today? Kurt Cobb (hat tip reader Robert M). From 2008, but the discussion is still pertinent

Name change: ‘Dynamite Prize in Economics’ Real World Economics. Vote for the economist most responsible for the crisis! (I did see this earlier, forgot to link, a nice reader reminded me, cannot find the message, so apologies for lack of h/t).

This Trend is Not Your Friend: Wall Street’s Killer Instinct Spells Death Knell for Jobs Pam Martens, CounterPunch (hat tip reader Stephen V)

Antidote du jour (hat tip reader Steve S):

Regulators have been making a concerted push for banks to hold more equity as a protection against loss and overly-optimistic valuation of trading assets. But the head of the Bank of International Settlements, Jamie Caruna, argued at a secret (not) central bankers’ conference in Sydney that banks also need to carry more in the way of liquid assets (note that this recommendation apparently came in the form of a paper, but we can find no such document at this hour at the BIS website).

Caruna recommended that banks hold enough to allow them to survive a month without access to funding. Note that idea only seems radical now, since banks have spent decades perfecting the art of running lean. The rule of thumb in banking is to lend out $9 of every $10 in deposits. In the 1960s, only $5 of loans versus $10 in deposit was considered prudent.

From Bloomberg:

Capital and liquidity buffers need to be built up in good times so that they can be drawn down in bad times,” Caruana said. “Banks should hold a sufficient stock of high-quality liquid assets to be able to survive a month-long loss of access to funding markets.”

The Basel Committee proposed in December that banks should keep assets that are simple to value and wouldn’t have to be sold at fire-sale discounts during times of stress.

Lenders should also increase the amount of equity and retained earnings they hold to help them cope with losses better, the Basel Committee said last year. Banks’ core capital should exclude stock with preferential dividend rights to reduce risks to the financial system, it said in a report.

“Capital requirements are the speed limits of banking,” Caruana said today. “Capital requirements should draw on deep pockets that can absorb losses. An idea worth exploring is whether those pockets might be usefully deepened by debt that is convertible to equity when times are bad.”

Simple and slow banking is, of course, less profitable in good times than the kind we’ve had over the last two decades. But banks were kept comfortably profitable and low risk via strict regulation for nearly five decades without having a major crisis (from the 1930s through the sovereign lending mess of the late 1970s). Although the financiers will fight it tooth and nail, simple, stupid banking looks a lot better than what we have right now.

Google Maps has added more user photos to its Street View (above). Now the Yahoo-owned Flickr is joining the Google-owned Panoramio and Picasa photo sites as a supplier of alternative street views. GeoBloggers reported it earlier today and also noted that the photos are available in the Panoramio 3D view (below).

This is significant for two reasons:
1) Flickr has millions of geotagged photos (2.3 million photos with location data were uploaded this month; 95,634,285 in total as this writing). These photos document the earth and with the addition of location metadata they can become useful for more than just photo-lovers. User-generated data and content is being used in significant ways to represent the earth -- especially online. Human contributions show up in base mapping data (in products like Google MapMaker and Open Street Map) and in routing data (in products like Tele Atlas MapShare). This is another proving point in the case for the human built map.

2) The web is a platform and it is great to see excellent, rival services able to work together to build a superior product. I have put out some questions to the Flickr team about how this came about and some of the inner workings of the deal, but I am pretty sure that it would have only been done if the Flickr and Google Maps teams were working together. I am curious if any money was exchanged (none is my guess), how often the Flickr photos get updated, where else these Flickr photos are going to show up in Google's services (Google Goggles perhaps?) and will they show up in new search partner Bing? I am doubly curious if Facebook will ever let its photos be used in a similar way.

We'll be discussing Mapping, Mobile and Local trends with Google and Yahoo! (and others) at Where 2.0. The three day conference runs March 30- April 1 in San Jose. Radar readers can register with this discount code for 25% whr10pcb.

With UTStarcom’s news and likely move to China over the next few weeks, it’s worth asking: what companies can be expected to stay around the Island for a while? Perforce Software – with its bright yellow and purple buildings on Blanding (off Park) — could be one such company. The company does not have publicly traded stock, [...]

Motions in limine are flying in Utah like snowflakes in a winter storm, filed by both parties in SCO v. Novell. But there are a lot more from Novell than from SCO.

Novell has filed 19 more motions in limine, all filed on February 8, for a total of 20, as well as motions for a Daubert hearing to disqualify Dr. Christine A. Botosan, Dr. Gary Pisano, and G. Gervaise Davis III, three of SCO's experts. The Novell motions in limine are mainly to exclude testimony from certain witnesses of SCO's "for lack of personal knowledge," among other reasons. Like Ed Chatlos. Remember when Judge Dale Kimball was on the case, and Novell filed motions to disqualify that same testimony? Well, now they are raising it again.

SCO has filed 5 motions in limine, but they are not described in the docket, and I haven't read them yet. We can read them together. But I see one of them is titled a motion asking that certain statements of Michael Anderer "as an independent contractor" be excluded. You remember Darl McBride's once longtime friend and business associate, Mr. Anderer, the man who said that proprietary software companies would keep suing Linux until they killed it? And they don't want the jury to hear about what Judge Kimball earlier ruled about who owned the copyrights, I gather. Well, would you, if you were SCO? And they want witnesses to be told they can't mention Groklaw. Say, what? Why would anyone ever mention Groklaw in the trial? I can't imagine any circumstance where that would happen. Anyway, jurors are told not to do outside research, so even if it happened, jurors couldn't visit Groklaw, not that they wouldn't find it enlightening, until the trial was all over.

In other words, as is normal in filing motions in limine, both parties are asking the judge to decide what the trial is going to be about, in essence, by determining before anything goes before a jury what evidence will be allowed to be presented. Of course, Novell has already filed a motion in limine pointing out that one of Judge Ted Stewart's earlier orders seems to provide the meets and bounds of the trial. If he grants that first Novell motion in limine, I think this list will get pruned. Should he not grant that motion, however, he faces all of them.

Back in December, I happened to click on a Greasemonkey script in Chrome and was shocked that it just worked. At the time, I wrote a note within Google that said

Whoa. I just clicked on a Greasemonkey script in the latest dev version of Chrome (4.0.266.0 on Linux). Chrome offered to install the GM script, so I said okay. The script ran perfectly in Chrome with no changes at all! I don’t know how many Greasemonkey scripts will run in Chrome unchanged, but at least some will.

Last week brought that news as an official announcement. My guess is that scripts that don’t use specific Greasemonkey APIs should be fine.

(Side-note: I found a good post from November that claims that ~60% of Greasemonkey scripts don’t use any sort of special API calls at all. The top API calls appear to be GM_getValue and GM_setValue (16.5% of Greasemonkey scripts), plus GM_xmlhttpRequest (15.5% of Greasemonkey scripts). It’s unclear which of these functions might be worth supporting. Some could have security implications (GM_xmlhttpRequest). Others like the get/setValue functions could be done by using other ways to store data.)

So this is cool. There’s a good chance that your favorite Greasemonkey script might just work in Chrome. Personally, I recommend the dev channel version of Chrome. It gets all the cool features early, and it’s been very stable/fast for me.

Youth social networking researcher danah boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the U.K., then got into game development. After moving to L.A., he spent six years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where, thankfully, he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after going independent again.

After spending five years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool that analyzes the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people the user has exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past six months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using the Web crawling service 80legs, but over time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make it available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial Friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared user last names to U.S. Census data, which allowed them to estimate changes in Facebook's racial composition over time based on the likelihood of people with particular last names to report a particular racial backgrounds.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted that exposed a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5,000 last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the Internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades, and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

Discuss

While Eric Margolis’ entire comment in the Toronto Sun is a must-read, the following two quotes really hit the nail on the head:

More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion…

If Obama really were serious about restoring America’s economic health, he would demand military spending be slashed, quickly end the Iraq and Afghan wars and break up the nation’s giant Frankenbanks.

Margolis is right.

As I have repeatedly shown, war is bad for the economy. According to a Nobel prize-winning economist, the head of JP Morgan and others, the Iraq war and the war on terror in general were huge factors in destroying our economy.

America is a dying empire, destroying the last of its resources to fight unnecessary wars. Instead of rebuilding our economy so that we can once again be a strong nation, we are wasting trillions fighting those unnecessary wars, thus guaranteeing that we do not have the economic resources to defend ourselves in the future from real threats.

Don’t believe me?

Well, our military and intelligence leaders say that the economic crisis is now the biggest threat to America’s national security.

And as leading economic historian Niall Ferguson recently wrote in Newsweek:

Call the United States what you like—superpower, hegemon, or empire—but its ability to manage its finances is closely tied to its ability to remain the predominant global military power…

This is how empires decline. It begins with a debt explosion. It ends with an inexorable reduction in the resources available for the Army, Navy, and Air Force…

If the United States doesn’t come up soon with a credible plan to restore the federal budget to balance over the next five to 10 years, the danger is very real that a debt crisis could lead to a major weakening of American power.
The precedents are certainly there. Habsburg Spain defaulted on all or part of its debt 14 times between 1557 and 1696 and also succumbed to inflation due to a surfeit of New World silver. Prerevolutionary France was spending 62 percent of royal revenue on debt service by 1788. The Ottoman Empire went the same way: interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent of the budget in 1860 to 50 percent in 1875. And don’t forget the last great English-speaking empire. By the interwar years, interest payments were consuming 44 percent of the British budget, making it intensely difficult to rearm in the face of a new German threat.

Call it the fatal arithmetic of imperial decline. Without radical fiscal reform, it could apply to America next.

And William R. Hawkins (formerly an economics professor at Appalachian State University, the University of North Carolina-Asheville, and Radford University) fills in some details on the fall of the Hapsburg empire:

Spain was the first global Superpower…With Spain as its political base, and gold and silver flowing in from its American colonies, the Hapsburg dynasty became the dominant power in Europe. It controlled rich parts of Italy through Naples and Milan, and Central Europe from the Netherlands through the Holy Roman Empire to Austria. In the 16th century it added the far distant Philippine islands to its empire. The Hapsburgs held off the Ottoman Turks, whose resurgent wave of Islamic conquest in the 16th century swept across the Balkans and nearly captured Vienna.

The Hapsburgs went into decline in the 17th century, and while any such momentous event has many causes, for our purposes the focus will be on the economic collapse of Spain, which not only sapped the empire of strength but served to build up the power of its rivals.

The demands of empire required a strong and growing economy, but Spain did not keep up with the economic expansion that was taking place in other parts of Europe. Madrid’s financial base fell out from under its empire. Spain could continue to consume in the short term because of the flow of precious metals from American mines, but it could not produce the goods it needed at home, which in the long-run proved fatal to its standing as a Great Power and as an advanced society.

Spanish imports were double exports and the precious metals became scarce within weeks of the arrival of the American treasure fleets as the money flowed to Spain’s many creditors. What industry there was, along with banking and shipping, was in the hands of foreign owners. As a modern historian, Jaime Vicens Vives, has concluded, “This was one of the fundamental causes of the Spanish economy’s profound decline in the seventeenth century, maritime trade had fallen into the hands of foreigners.” This, plus the “opening of the internal market to foreign goods,” produced a “fatal result.” Spain’s exports were at the same time under heavy pressure by competitors in third country markets. A nation that cannot control its domestic market will seldom be able to sustain itself in foreign markets, which are inherently less accessible and more unstable.

Yet, Spanish leaders were deluded by a sense of false prosperity. This is testified by the statement of a prominent official, Alfonso Nunez de Castro in 1675: “Let London manufacture those fine fabrics of hers to her heart’s content; let Holland her chambrays; Florence her cloth; the Indies their beaver and vicuna; Milan her brocade, Italy and Flanders their linens…so long as our capital can enjoy them; the only thing it proves is that all nations train their journeymen for Madrid, and that Madrid is the queen of Parliaments, for all the world serves her and she serves nobody.” A few years later, the Madrid government was bankrupt. The Spanish nobleman had foolishly elevated consumption, a use for wealth, above production, the creation of wealth.

Historians have traced the flow of Spanish gold and silver across the markets of Europe. Those who “served” Spain by establishing industries to manufacture goods for the Spanish market gained the money. Spain’s rivals, France, Holland (which started a successful revolt in 1568) and England, prospered by their trade surpluses, and reinvested the money to expand their own capabilities. Another modern expert on Hapsburg history, Henry Kamen, has cited contemporary sources who referred to 17th century Spain as “the Indies for the foreigner.” The military empire of the Hapsburgs became the economic colony of other powers, or, to use a current phrase, Spain was the “engine of growth” for the rest of the continent.

Where there were jobs and prosperity, there was also rapid population growth, and rising tax revenue. Rival powers were able to field and finance military forces that could defeat the once superior Spanish forces both on land and at sea. The irony of this is that Spain was ruled by a warrior aristocracy tempered by centuries of constant warfare against Islamic hordes and Christian heretics. These nobles looked down on merchants and manufacturers and disparaged their mundane professions only to find that without a strong domestic business class they could not afford the fleets and armies that guarded the empire they had built.

Today, the American “empire” is also trying to consume more than it produces. The U.S. trade deficit is nearing Spain’s nadir of imports being double exports. Both government spending and private consumption are financed heavily by debt. Washington is printing money, the modern equivalent of digging gold out of the ground, rather than earning the means to pay its bills. And the political and military elites are apparently indifferent to the fate of domestic business and industry. Americans must learn … from the Spanish experience … and take corrective action while they still can.

As for the need to break up the “Frankenbanks”, see this.

If you've been a geek your whole life then you understand the term "Canadian girlfriend." The Canadian (or sometimes British) love interest is the person you talk about when a member of the opposite sex inquires about your dating status. The story is that you met online, you've formed a solid bond and you'll probably break up with your online girlfriend when a girl in your vicinity decides she likes you. The idea is to drive up the value of your perceived social stock. In the startup world, the same principle is used in "ham and egging."

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As pointed out in a recent blog post by university professor Scott Shane, "ham and egging" was first coined by Columbia's professor Amar Bhide and Harvard Business School's Howard Stevenson. The term refers to the technique of convincing multiple stakeholders that others are working with you despite the fact that you're only in talks. The only problem is that most early partners only want to work with you if other reputable partners have already signed on.

Explains Bhide and Stevenson,"the ultimate ham and egging solution is for the entrepreneur to simultaneously convince each participant that everyone else is on board, or almost on board."

However, when ReadWriteWeb spoke to MobiTV CEO Paul Scanlan about forging deals between telecom and television companies, he suggested a different tact. Although Scanlan found himself caught between partners who were skittish to sign on without the initial validation of others, he decided that rather than ham and egging, he'd build contingency clauses into contracts. Scanlan's contracts stated that all partnerships were contingent on a set number of large-scale partners to launch. While this may not be the ideal method of closing deals, it seems like an ethical alternative to engaging in deals that begin with dishonesty.

Have you ever engaged in ham and egging and if so, was your deal a success?

Discuss

Assume for the sake of argument that we are going through a meta-economic transformation similar to that of the Industrial Revolution.

Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason.

...Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis, two economists, in their work on the American educational system some years back... pointed out that the educational system is divided into fragments. The part that's directed toward working people and the general population is indeed designed to impose obedience. But the education for elites can't quite do that. It has to allow creativity and independence. Otherwise they won't be able to do their job of making money. You find the same thing in the press. That's why I read the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and Business Week. They just have to tell the truth.

I’ve probably posted something about this before. But I’m really getting fed up with the Eclipse Development Process. Its a frelling nightmare for a committer to work with. I’m really starting to regret moving JGit there.

Right now, if I have X hours to work on a project, I seem to be averaging what feels like X/2 hours in paperwork and other “important steps” of the development process. None of which have helped my project to ship higher quality, or more feature complete code. Which means either my or my employer’s time is being wasted. I don’t have time to waste when I have 108 bugs open in Gerrit Code Review, and 64 bugs open in EGit and JGit.

Based on a private email chain I’m having with the Eclipse IP review team, it looks like the initial EGit code contribution was bungled not just by myself, but also by the foundation’s IP review process. Which means I probably have to run EGit back through IP review, almost from scratch. But only after I write a script to datamine contributors out of the old EGit history and inject a complete, per-file git short-log into each file header. Its a good thing I have an awesome version control system like Git to keep these records for me. Too bad nobody else on the planet can use it to obtain information they might want to know about our source code. I guess running software to read information about a file is too scary for some individuals. So I have to do it for them. Now, and for every change we make in the future. Yay.

The astute reader may notice in that above paragraph, “private email chain” doesn’t jive with other publications from the Eclipse Foundation demanding that projects be run in an open and transparent manner (see how do I start a project on Eclipse Newcomers). I really do feel like JGit is a less open project now that it has moved to Eclipse.org. Conversations with the Eclipse IP team about the legal status of any contribution is always discussed by private email. These things never make it to the project mailing list. The IPzilla database is closed to everyone but committers. There are backroom deals going on about what our file headers should look like in order to sufficiently convey that the source code is under the new-style BSD. The discussion that led to the approval of the EGit IP log for 0.7.0, approved despite what appears to be an error in the initial review, also happened by private email.

It took a significant amount of effort on my part to even get JGit hosted at Eclipse.org. Originally, the new-style BSD license wasn’t permissible for a hosted project, and I had to seek a special exemption from the Eclipse Board of Directors. A process that required significant backroom conversations, over at least 6 months. Again, not exactly open. The only reason I think I haven’t pulled the project back is because of the huge initial investment I’ve already made in this.

Maybe JGit and EGit are just unique projects. But in my experience, I am not a unique snowflake, and neither is my work. I’m not as special as I might seem at first glance.

I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve lost at least 2 days every month to paperwork. That’s about 30 days, or 1.5 person-months since the project really started this move in January 2009. 1/12 of my time over the past year has just gone to catering to the Eclipse development process. Food for thought. Join Eclipse… make sure you pick up at least 1/12 of another full-time developer just to deal with the red-tape.

The part that really troubles me with the red-tape isn’t so much that it is there, but that committers bear the brunt of the effort, while large corporations that are strategic members reap the benefits of having a concise change history listed inside of each source code file, or knowing that every contributor who ever touched this source code has been grilled in detail on a bug tracker.

So back to my post title. The real tragedy is, these corporations who sell commercial products based on top of Eclipse.org distributions are pushing not just the open source development work, but also a whole ton of onerous legal and reporting constraints back onto their project committers. Its enough to make this committer start to reconsider things. I wish I had been using a time clock this past year, to accurately record how many days the Eclipse development process has robbed me of since the start of all of this. It feels significant enough that if I went to my manager with it, I think he’d go ballistic.

I do not like it when people tell Web 2.0 sites to send me invitation e-mail. I won’t enumerate the reasons here. But there is one reason for why I don’t like you passing on my address to those sites, which is subject of this article:

Unlike popular belief, the Web 2.0 is not a money-printing machine. It’s a long road until you can actually generate real money with user content. Therefore, some shadey sites are probably selling contact details to advertisers to make ends meet while hoping for the big cashflow.

I don’t have any data to back this up, and I want to change that:

Please tell all your Web 2.0 sites to send me an invitation! Please use an address in the signmeup.madduck.net domain for that, and make sure to include the domain name of the service to which you sign me up before the @ symbol. Also append a hyphen/dash and a random, short string. More on that in just a sec.

For instance, if you are one of those people that believes that letting people know where you are (and have been) at any point in time, tell Foursquare to send an invitation to:

foursquare.com-ponies@signmeup.madduck.net

The reason for the random, short string (“ponies”) is simply so that I can later cross-check that a message receiving spam actually went through a social networking site — I intend to catalog the invitation messages.

Thank you for your time. Keep in mind: the more, the merrier. I’ll make sure to report back on the outcome of this little experiment right here, so watch this space.

NP: Billy Joel: Cold Spring Harbor

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discovered a way to hang gnome-terminal for an arbitrary time when you ask it to open an url. gvfs == crud

Green Goose is a new financial management service that launched today, which connects sensor activity to your savings account. At first Green Goose sounded a little gimmicky. Using green Internet-connected eggs, it measures how much energy you expend on your bike or how much water you use in your shower - and transfers amounts from your checking account to your savings account based on the 'savings' you made doing those activities.

What's interesting though is that the savings are calculated based on the actions measured by small battery-powered, wireless sensors. You stick these sensors on your bike, thermostat, showerhead "and even your keychain."

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Green Goose is a web-based service, along with "a very low-cost set of Savings sensors." - these are literally green eggs (see picture to the right). The web site tracks specific actions and behaviors from users - then computes that into dollars saved.

Co-Founder Brian Krejcarek told ReadWriteWeb that's "like a Twitter feed of personal green savings."

Here's how the sensor part works: the sensors communicate with a "Green Gateway" that then sends messages to the web site. The Green Gateway - which is also "egg-like" - has an Ethernet port that connects to your network hub via a router. The bike sensor measures miles ridden. Green Goose also plans to offer sensors for your automobile, shower (hot water), and thermostat (heating and cooling).

In the future, Green Goose might also be able to pull savings data in "from open APIs like that proposed by Google Power Meter for savings earned by using less electricity." It also plans to eventually move beyond energy to capture savings earned from making "other lifestyle decisions."

You can get started today with a "Green Goose Bike Sensor Kit," which retails for $49 plus $10 for postage. The Portland and San Francisco-based company is currently in talks with the BTA (Bicycle Transportation Alliance) in Portland and they're already installed "in a number of coffee shops."

As well as consumers, the service is targeting employers with a "a unique sustainable savings benefit" offering for their staff. One of the features for employers is managing and auditing details for the IRS bike commute tax credit.

Green Goose is currently in pre-production and running beta trials. Right now it's offering 100 Savings Kits for bicycle owners.

Eventually this type of connection, between sensors and mainstream services like banking, will be commonplace and probably won't need to rely on gimmicks such as green eggs. But for now, Green Goose seems like a cute, interesting Internet of Things service for green conscious early adopters to try out.

Discuss

I'm in the middle of writing proposals for Invited Talks and Tutorials at Usenix LISA 2010 and I thought I'd throw this question out to the readers of this blog:

What would you like to hear me talk about?

I speak at LISA a lot. I talk about Time Management, tips for running an IT department, and a few other things. But what would you LIKE to hear me teach or talk about?

I’m worried about the people in DC fighting over fresh vegetables and empty shelves as another 10-20 inches of snow arrives.  And I received an alarming email yesterday from someone on the Eastern Shore, saying there was no power, no hope of being dug out any time soon, and an elderly neighbor who couldn’t cope with the cold any longer.  The government will be closed again tomorrow.

The Facebook creation of a 2000-person-strong snowball fight in Dupont Circle is a good moment for social networks.  It’s hard not to love #snowpocalypse and #snowmageddon. I remember “snow-lympics” that my generation held in DC, but we probably arranged that by plodding one-off phone calls.  (I also remember the managing partner of my law firm dispairingly saying after that week-long closure:  “What happened to all those hours?  Did the clients just not need the work?”)  My favorite new tag is #snoverkill.

Meanwhile, in Ann Arbor, nothing.  Not that I’m complaining.

openSUSE is looking for information from its users about the distribution by way of a survey, which runs through the end of February. The survey is meant to "give feedback to the openSUSE project about the distribution, the openSUSE tools environment and the project in general. Let us know where things are in good shape and areas where improvement is needed." Click below for the full announcement.

In Social Media Crisis Management By This Fluid World, Jonathan MacDonald reviews his own reporting of a real-life incident in the London Underground — and what happened next, as the ripples spread. Good stuff. In the midst of his talk (slides are presented in the post) he cites my own small contribution.

Interesting how normative practices continue to improve even as variants emerge, and even as supporting technology changes, along with users and uses. For example, reporting is still reporting, whether you’re doing it by blogging or tweeting or texting or phoning or … whatever the next thing is (or things are). The basic principles are the same. There are just more, and better, means, more people in a position to use them, and more discovery and improvement in the processes. (Of course, there are more bad behaviors, but those yield learnings too.)

Some of us are old enough to remember “New Journalism“, back in the 1960s. The lenghthy retrospective at that last link is fairly academic, but what was “new” back then boiled down simply to getting real. Tom Wolfe, writing back then and in the present tense: “And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what power it has’: the simple fact that the reader knows all this actually happened. The disclaimers have been erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of but never achieved.”

The newest journalism is practiced in a reality that allows anybody to participate, anywhere, anytime — all together improving the old with the new. Reminds me that journalism is NEA, just like free code: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it and Anybody can improve it.

For those who think Journalism (with a capital J) is still owned by the Old Schools, stories like Jonathan’s are a reboot in the pants.

As we’ve talked about on ReadyMadeWeb previously, FeedBurner is must-have tool for any blog or website. It future-proofs your feed so it can move with you to a new CMS, it ensures that your feed is compatible every sort of feed reader, it tracks your subscriber numbers, allows you to monetize your feed, and pushes your posts out to update services around the web.

However, just because you’ve changed your WordPress site’s link from the built-in feed address to your FeedBurner feed, doesn’t mean your users are necessarily accessing your FeedBurner feed. The built-in RSS feed your site can also be accessed through the RSS auto-discovery feature which is now standard on all the major browsers. In order to ensure that this feature detects your feedburner feed, you’re going to need the FD Feedburner plugin. The plugin will redirect these auto-discover tools to your FeedBurner feed, ensuring that subscribers are accessing your feed the way you want them to be.

FD FeedBurner also gives you the option the redirect comment, category, and search feeds to ensure that every single one of those built-in WordPress feeds is overridden by FeedBurner.

Between Y Combinator's Startup School, the influx of seed fund incubators, the list of legendary mentors and investors and the dotcom bust's school of hard knocks, is there really any reason to go to grad school? At ReadWriteWeb we're supportive of lifelong learning and universities that coach entrepreneurs, but a recent post by Venture Hacks founder Naval Ravikant has us wondering, "What is the value in grad school?"

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Ravikant suggests that incubators and accelerators like YCombinator and Techstars are the new grad school.

He writes, "In some ways, it's better," and that unlike business schools, YCombinator pays entrepreneurs, which allows founders to be their own boss and encourages original work.

In addition to Ravikant's points, the fact that every incubator participant is connected to advisors through a financial agreement means the group may be motivated to maintain their network and share contacts. Nevertheless, before dismissing the idea of grad school altogether, it's good to remember many of the top entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley are MIT, Harvard and CalTech grads (including some of the Venture Hacks team). Perhaps the argument here is not so much about incubators over traditional institutions, but in the value of good mentors that have a stake in your success and do not rest on the laurels of a tenured position.

As a startup entrepreneur, what is the best lesson you've ever been taught and who taught it to you?

Photo Credit: Duncan Hull

Discuss

Pardon me in advance if this is incoherent and raging. It’s mostly because, well, I’m incoherent and raging currently.

So here’s the deal. The Lancet is going to retract Andrew Wakefield’s study about MMR and autism.

Just think about that for a moment.

I don’t give a wet slap about whether or not you think vaccines have anything to do with autism. Just throw that out of your heads for a minute. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Wakefield’s paper was the worst piece of garbage science you’ve ever seen. I don’t happen to believe that, personally, but go ahead and run with it, for the point of the argument.

The Wakefield study is 12 years old. T-w-e-l-v-e. Do you really, genuinely think, that the Lancet has only published one bullshit paper in twelve years?

OK, how about this? The Hannah Term Breech Trial. This one paper, published in 2000, is the reason that a breech baby is considered an automatic cesarean section. And it’s complete crap. Dr. Marek Glazerman ripped it apart (also in the Lancet), and Hannah herself also published a retraction of sorts which showed that her data was not spot on, but they should go ahead and cut women open anyway.

This particular piece of peer-reviewed dogmeat continues to be cited over, and over, and over again. And gee, you don’t see the Lancet retracting it, do you?

Vaccinations are more profitable than non-vaccinations (and I won’t even go into the profit involved in vaccine damage, because we’re playing along with the Wakefield-is-a-loony side for the purpose of argument).  Cesareans are more profitable than non-cesareans, and I’m not going to go into the profits of cesarean damage here either, I’ve done it elsewhere.

Maybe it’s just that my cynicism is showing, but I’m pretty sure that what we’re seeing here is not any sort of scientific method that Al-Biruni or Roger Bacon would recognize. Oh, that’s right. That’s because they were scientists, and what we’re seeing now is more the purview of economics.

• PeteSearch: How to split up the US : wow. fascinating results from social-network cluster analysis of Facebook, splitting up the entire USA into 7 clusters
  (tags: clusters facebook data statistics maps culture analytics datamining demographics socialnetworking graph dataviz)

Ask.com has ended its NASCAR sponsorship after one year. That’s according to The Sporting News, which reports that the sponsorship was actually fairly successful for Ask.com. Jared Cluff, Ask’s senior VP of marketing, says the deal produced some measurable results in 2009: “We saw double-digit increases in usage among NASCAR fans. With the fan cards that our [...]

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• Still Counting? 27 More Websites Opened in Xinjiang | Xinjiang: Far West China
  The internet in Xinjiang opens up a little bit… but as a constrained, whitelisted network. Is this the shape of things to come? Or specific to one of the more restive corners of China?
  (tags: internet censorship xinjiang china whitelist freespeech)
• Born Poor? | Santa Fe Reporter
  Interesting overview of Economist Sam Bowles on the need for American economic theory to consider inequality and build strategies that lessen it, otherwise we'll waste money on sectors of the economy which essentially exist to maintain economically unfair structures
  (tags: economics capitalism society development education research poverty labor economy markets employment inequality bowles)
• Is ChatRoulette the Future of the Internet or Its Distant Past? — New York Magazine
  What does a webchat service that randomly pairs you with other individuals tell you about the Internet? Or humanity as a whole? A cautionary tale, perhaps, about trying to engineer a very simple form of serendipity
  (tags: internet technology culture video community chat interactive chatroulette webcam serendipity random)
• Democratic, but dangerous too: how the web changed our world | Technology | The Observer
  Aleks Krotoski is presenting a history of the Internet that worries about the implications of technologies that allow us to "become our demographic" rather than differentiate ourselves as individuals. Some interesting quotes in this short description on insularity and extremism.
  (tags: socialmedia media internet technology cyberutopianism xenophilia serendipity sorting)

Hi Readers: As a Free-Range parent I believe in preparing kids to be independent and safe. Just as we teach them to “Stop, drop and roll!” in the unlikely event they’re ever on fire, it makes sense to teach them to yell, kick and run in the equally unlikely event some creep tries to grab [...]

Geolocation social networks are set to be in 2010 what microblogging was in 2008 - the next big thing. Currently the space is being dominated by Foursquare, with others like Gowalla, MyTown and Loopt trailing in its wake.

While Gowalla has secured a large amount of funding, some $8.5 million, and My Town claims more check-ins than the other services, Foursquare is happily ticking along on the seed money provided by its founders (after they sold their original effort, Dodgeball, to Google), and creating a community of developers who are eager to build secondary applications. There are two reasons Foursquare is gaining so much ground over its competitors.

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This is a guest post by Simon Salt, the founder and CEO of IncSlingers. He is a writer and blogger whose work has appeared in a wide variety of places, including Chris Brogan's Dad-O-Matic.com, American Marketing Association News and the Austin Realtor. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal on social media and is a recognized national speaker on that topic as well.

Firstly, it is available on all phone platforms. While this is also true of Loopt, the game play element of Foursquare makes it more attractive to many users. Secondly, it took the very sensible step of opening its API early on. This has generated a wave of new secondary applications.

In addition to this, it set up a developer community forum and is extremely active there, providing support, information and assistance to developers that are creating these secondary apps. Just as with Twitter, it is not just the service itself that will create demand, but the applications that run from that service.

There are hundreds of applications that run on the Twitter API now (most of which are listed at oneforty.com). It is very likely that by the end of 2010 we will see similar numbers of applications for Foursquare, and, should Gowalla and the rest open their APIs, for those services too.

The reason geolocation social networking is so popular is quite simply its ease of use. Arrive at a destination, be that your work, the gym, a coffee shop or even the grocery store, fire up the application on your phone, "check-in", and get points, badges and even increased status in the game for doing so.

As with Twitter, early adopters are the ones using the sites the most at the moment, but the services are rapidly spreading beyond the hard core. Unlike micro-blogging, you need no talent to be entertaining, informative or stylish - you simply check-in as you go about your day. You attract "friends" by doing this, or by connecting with people you already know, either online or in real life.

The Next Step: User- and Location-Focused

As with so many other early-stage social network platforms, extending the service with secondary applications is what makes the service truly useful.

At present, the secondary applications that are being developed fall into two main categories: user-focused and location-focused. A good example of a user-focused app is wheredoyougo. This service provides a heat map visual of all of a user's check-ins. Another, foursqpic allows users to upload pictures as part of the Foursquare Venue Tips section, supplementing simple text tips with visuals as well. These are great apps and certainly add to the fun and extend the functionality of the service. However, the real gains are coming in the location-focused apps. So far, the most developed of these is placewidget, which allows owners of a location to promote, via a website widget, the "Mayor" of their location on their website. Until now, any real marketing revolving around Foursquare was offline, and had to be location-specific. By bringing the ability to market both their involvement in the Foursquare community and promote a loyal customer, this widget gives a lot more power to businesses looking to leverage this type of social networking.

Foursquare recently announced it had signed two deals with media outlets. The first is an agreement with Metro, Canada's number one free daily newspaper, to have content for venues provided by the newspaper. The second is with Bravo TV, which will include Bravo Celebrity Tips and Bravo-branded badges for over 500 locations. A game is great, but a content-rich social network is something a lot more valuable.

Photo credit: Agata Urbaniak Discuss

This week the Alameda Real Estate Inventory showed a niced increase with an additional nine units for sale. The increase in Single Family Residences was the most positive part of the increase in inventory.

The SFR market was below 60 units for the past seven weeks, so any bump even a small one is encouraging. Since most of the Island's housing stock is SFRs then an increase in this category is good for the current market, which has been suffering from a lack of inventory. There are 11 news single family listing since last Monday.

New Listings

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. List Date List Price Adress Beds Baths Sq Feet Type . 2/5/2010 $648,000 336 LINA AVENUE 4 3.5 3150 SFR . 2/5/2010 $549,000 2015 BUENA VISTA AVENUE 2 1 1318 SFR . 2/5/2010 $619,900 404 KITTY HAWK RD 3 2 1438 SFR . 2/5/2010 $430,000 3116 LA CRESTA 3 2.5 1628 TNHS . 2/4/2010 $450,000 2017 LINCOLN AVENUE 3 2.5 1443 SFR . 2/4/2010 $639,000 404 CAMDEN RD 3 2 1503 SFR . 2/4/2010 $698,000 227 INVERNESS CT 3 2.5 1891 SFR . 2/3/2010 $565,000 7 KINGSBURY COURT 2 3.5 1503 CONDO . 2/3/2010 $470,000 3037 LINDA VI 3 2.5 1628 TNHS . 2/2/2010 $354,900 1819 UNION ST 2 1 997 SFR . 2/1/2010 $250,000 1825 SHORELINE DR #112 1 1 621 CONDO . 2/1/2010 $517,000 1618 6TH ST 2 2 1422 SFR . 2/1/2010 $310,000 447 LINCOLN AVE 2 1 722 SFR . 2/1/2010 $1,300,000 2809 SEA VIEW PKWY 5 3 2744 SFR . 2/1/2010 $779,000 105 SHEFFIELD RD 4 2 1954 SFR

Overall, Inventory still remains low, but relative to the the current sales levels it may be an appropriate level of housing stock until more buyers come to the market. This is the proverbial chicken and egg; in this case buyer and seller. More people will sell when they have people to buy and buyers will buy when there is something that fits their needs to buy.

A shift needs to happen to shake the market loose, but until then I will just continue to monitor the numbers.

Alameda Inventory February 8, 2010

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. . 2/8/2010 . Total 113 . 94501 89 . 94502 24 . SFR 61 . Condo 31 . Multi-Family 19 . Short Sale 18 . Foreclosure 11 . Price Reductions 29 . High List $1,999,000 . Low List $188,000 .

Dear Friend of the Tocqueville Forum,

I regret to inform you that we will postpone the "Are the Suburbs a Mistake" lecture and the Great Encounter with Philip Bess to a later date due to adverse weather conditions.  Apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.  We are eager to host Professor Bess and are working to reschedule his visit for a later date.

All the best,

Dr. Brust

There are several reports today that Google is set to announce a new social feature inside Gmail, allowing users to see (and add to) a stream of status updates from friends and connections. While Twitter is all abuzz over the news, this is something that Yahoo Mail has offered its 300 million users since last [...]

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After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. "banned" list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it's putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site.

According to SourceForge's Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn't trigger a block. So it will leave that up to the individuals running the project:

Read the rest on OStatic

Police are investigating what they are calling a suspicious death of a Driftwood Lane resident. The woman’s identity is not yet being released. Police said the 87-year-old woman, who lived on the 300 block of Driftwood Lane was found dead on her garage floor at 10:49 p.m. Sunday. Police said the woman’s daughter found her after [...]

James Bottomley has announced this year's Linux Storage and Filesystems Summit, which will be held just prior to LinuxCon in Boston on August 8 and 9. It will be held in conjunction with the Virtual Memory (VM) summit, so there will be three tracks (storage, filesystems, VM) as well as joint meetings for all participants. Proposals for discussion topics and requests for invitations are being solicited; click below for the full announcement. "Presentations are allowed to guide discussion, but are strongly discouraged. There will be no recording or audio bridge, however written minutes will be published as in previous years."

A gifting economy is different from a barter or market economy in that valuable items are given away to those that need them, without any quid pro quo, exchange, or payment.  Gifting economics (lots of great papers on this topic) were/are the economic heartbeat of hunter-gatherer tribal cultures, the social organization where we spent 99% of our time as homo sapiens sapiens.  Barter was, in contrast, a mechanism for economic interactions between tribes.  

This gifting economic system wasn't based on pure altruism.  It did have an enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance with the system over the longer term.  On the positive side, there was an intangible increase in the social status (using personal or societal metrics) of a tribal member that gifted an item.  On the negative, a failure to offer hospitality or gifts to those in need was considered a mortal slight that could incite violence or expulsion from the tribe.

There were also a considerable number of drivers for gifting at the tribal level.  Here are some:

• The survival of the tribe, as a group, was more important than the survival of any individual.  However, the loss of any individual could put the tribe at risk.
• The generation of surplus and innovation was highly uncertain.  Sharing reduced that uncertainty to manageable levels.
• Sharing reduced internal friction that could put the tribe at risk.

Scalability

It's pretty clear that the societal drivers of tribal gifting economics and the mechanisms of enforcement didn't survive the transition to a global social system composed of billions of members.   Simply, the connections between any two individuals (outside of immediate familial relationships) are too abstract for these drivers and enforcement mechanisms to be relevant.   As a result, market based mechanisms for economic interaction have gained dominance.

However, the ongoing shift of the global market-based economy from a trade in rival goods (tangible items that invoke zero sum economics) to digital non-rival goods (items that can be copied at no expense or diminishment, endlessly) provides a window of opportunity.  It may be possible to revive gifting economics for non-rival goods to amazing beneficial effect.   Some ideas on how this could scale:

• Automated reputation metrics that enhance social status based on contributions.
• Mechanisms built using MMO gaming as a way to tie successful gifting to status improvement (leveling) or an ability to attract investment.
• The creation of an inside/outside barrier that separates a gifting economy from the global economic mainstream.   Automated mutual interdependence (see my friend Bruce Sterling's absolutely brilliant story on this:  "Maneki Neko").

If you're releasing products integrated into the VMware ecosystem, you're likely enjoying enjoying the Las Vegas Strip this week. VMware Partner Exchange 2010 kicked off at the Mandalay Bay hotel today, and it is the place to learn about the current state of affairs and how to quantify tangible benefits of virtualization for partners and customers.

We've found that the virtualization layer is becoming a key place to launch enterprise products. All of this momentum is being translated in how to more effectively sell virtualization into the enterprise - and VMware isn't holding back in building the relationships to sell into the channel.

Sponsor

So, we ask, is the virtual layer the new platform for delivering value to the enterprise? If so, what tangible benefits are being offered today?

First an analysis of the momentum. According to this release from VMware , despite the down economy there has been 60% increase in participants this week from counties all around the world. What happens when we crunch the language in that release? We find that "partners", "exchange", "customers", "network", "cloud", and "desktop" are the most important subjects.

Using those ideas, let's condense that statement into our own words: Virtualization partners are exchanging information on how to win customers by leveraging the network and cloud to reach the desktop.

At the partner exchange, there are early previews of next-generation products and programs as well as in-depth technical training. The conference agenda is packed with sessions including practical training and a host of supported discussions from over 50 sponsors, including HP, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Netapp and EMC.

Looking through the sessions, several things stand out. First, networking and storage are merging together. Second, security is catching up - quickly - to support and define how virtualization and cloud applications are deployed and managed for business-critical applications. VMware is being baked into partner go-to-market strategies and product releases. There is more partner surface area and more angles for sales. All of this bodes well for virtualization.

Are VMware partners building an ecosystem that makes you want to move faster with your deployment of business-critical applications? What is missing?

Discuss

Today is not only the day after the Super Bowl, it’s also National Clean Out Your Computer Day – the day was created by the Institute for Business Technology as a way to remind PC users about all of the clutter on their systems. Regardless of the day’s motive, it’s pretty clear that computer users are just as much packrats as they are in their homes. According to the Consumer Electronics Association,...

Transmaterial 3 just came out!

If you are not familiar with this series, you should definitely pick one up. A great resource and inspirational guide to all kinds of innovative materials, techniques and applications.

Need another reason to pick it up?
We're in this one! Showcasing our Interactive LED tables

Here's an interesting idea from Jane McGonigal (Berkeley) and Ken Anderson (Intel). It's called place storming :

Place Storming is context-driven and play-based, combining real world environments with the immersive and performative aspects of gaming. Place Storming combines elements of street games, improvisational theater and brainstorming to enable participants to get out and get physical, in order to find real everyday contexts for technology innovation. Place Storming participants break into teams, take on roles, visit a series of situated places in targeted environments, and use props to accomplish site-specific missions. In completing their missions, Place Stormers become active, playful performers engaged in first imagining and then enacting technological innovations in context.

The key word in this is: context. Instead of brainstorming in a corporate office on a whiteboard (with beanbag chairs), the experts/amateurs actually engage with a real world environment (i.e. a specific town) and play an open ended game that forces them to apply the technologies at their disposal to solve real problems.   Nice.

What's more interesting to me than corporate brainstorming, is to use it as a way to add resilience to a community. Essentially, every local environment is unique (geography, people, etc.). The technologies and the methods/processes (particularly if they are software based and can be easily tweaked/modified as needed) available to add resilience (self sufficiency) are myriad. A large number of players (both virtual visitors and real inhabitants) interacting with each other and with an unique local environment, to figure out how to make it resilient could be fun and very innovative.

Fedora has updated chrony (F11, F12: denial of service) and ocsinventory (F11, F12: multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated squid (denial of service) and kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

We are all told to never judge a book by its cover, but let's face it, when we find ourselves at an ugly website, we automatically make assumptions about the quality of the services that site provides. A topic we have begun to cover more often, and one that we strongly believe in, is the importance of design for startups. In the last several weeks we've provided tips and best practices for sign-up buttons and registration processes, as well as an inside look into at Boxee's user experience overhaul.

Sponsor

According to Silicon Valley angel investor Dave McClure, design needs to be one of the top priorities for Internet startups, not an afterthought. These days, as McClure explains in a recent BusinessWeek.com article, the technical expertise it takes to engineer a basic back-end framework is at a much more accessible level than it was in years past, which means payroll dollars can be better spent on masterful designers.

"It's actually pretty easy to write a Web-friendly app or Web site these days," writes McClure. "But it's still incredibly difficult to create visually appealing interfaces and, beyond that, to design them in ways that are compelling and engaging, drive calls to action, and are measurably adept at getting more customers to use your products."

While coding languages can be learned through study and practice, having an eye for design is more of an innate talent. This isn't to say that there aren't people out there who are code masters and were probably born to practice their craft, or that solid engineering isn't critical to the success of a startup, but design is a more artistic and creative talent that you either have or you don't.

More importantly, the design of your product is what your users will interact with directly on a day-to-day basis. Opinions will be formed, rightly or wrongly, within seconds of laying eyes on your site and before they even have a chance to put your code to use. So before you go hiring a crack team of code monkeys, make sure to reserve some roster slots for design all-stars.

Photo by Flickr user zaphodsotherhead.

Discuss

The 2010 Linux Storage and Filesystems Workshop has been announced:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/2/8/221

One of the things I like most about the file systems workshop is the avoidance of canned presentations:

Presentations are allowed to guide discussion, but are strongly discouraged. There will be no recording or audio bridge, however written minutes will be published as in previous years [...]

Edward Tufte would be proud.

One of the benefits of doing my annual "25 Geekiest 25th Anniversaries" list is the e-mail these trips down memory lane generate. For example, reader Jeff Little was taken by the inclusion this year of the first laser printer for the Mac, Apple LaserWriter. Read more

The first step is often the hardest, but don't let that stop you. If you've ever wanted to learn how to write a shell script but didn't know where to start, this is your lucky day.

If this is your first time writing a script, don't worry — shell scripting is not that complicated. That is, you can do some complicated things with shell scripts, but you can get there over time. If you know how to run commands at the command line, you can learn to write simple scripts in just 10 minutes. All you need is a text editor and an idea of what you want to do. Start small and use scripts to automate small tasks. Over time you can build on what you know and wind up doing more and more with scripts.

Read the rest on Linux.com

In Search Month European Edition we bring you a monthly update of European search news, with related links to full coverage. Here’s what happened in January. Germany content owners call for investigation of Google. German newspaper publishers association (BDZV), Microsoft owned Ciao and online maps service Euro-Cities AG called the German cartel authorities to investigate Google’s [...]

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Google leaps language barrier with translator phone from The Times Online reports Google is working on a new tool that would bring instant translation to people. It appears that Google is a couple years away from this coming but they would build on their existing Google Translate and Google Voice features to create an instant translator. [...]

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RIM's BlackBerry platform is still the most popular mobile smartphone platform in the US, but Google's Android was the big winner in the last quarter of 2009. According to comScore, Android's share of the US mobile market more than doubled from 2.5% in September 2009 to 5.2% in December. While the Nexus One might not be a bestseller just yet, it's clear that the Android platform is poised for rapid growth in the next few months as more and more manufactures continue to release Android-based phones.

Sponsor

Good News for Android - More Bad News for Palm

Among the top five mobile platforms (RIM, Apple, Microsoft, Palm and Google), Palm lost the largest amount of market share in the last few months. Palm, the current number four, now owns 6.1% of the US mobile market (down from 8.3% in September). With Google's Android rapidly growing in popularity, it's only a matter of time before Google will overtake Palm in the United States.

As we reported in January, according to ChangeWave Research, a growing number of US consumers plans to buy an Android device in the next few months. In September, Android was still tied with Palm as the least-preferred mobile platform. Today, Palm remains in last place, with Android now being the second-most preferred platform - right behind Apple.

Discuss

Sez Dave (now back in Metsland), “As the 1969 Mets undid the betrayal of NY fans by the Dodgers, the Saints give hope to a city that was betrayed in so many ways.” Exactly. And let’s not forget the betrayal of NY fans by the Giants too. Losing both was a double-whammy for me as a kid. For live major league baseball, Dodgers/Giants fans had to go to a Yankees game — and root against them. Did that a few times. It was way cool. And affordable back then too.

I believed the Saints would win. The whole run-up felt like the ‘69 Mets AND the ‘69 Jets in Superbowl III. Both were supposed to lose to overpowering Baltimore teams. In the case of the Jets it was the same Colts that also lost yesterday to the Saints.

The sports prophets all said that the Colts were too good. Peyton Manning was the greatest quarterback ever, yada yada. Nobody seemed to notice that the Saints had a pretty good season too. Also its own Hall of Fame quarterback. And, while everybody had some sympathy for the city of New Orleans, there was also this half-tragic, “Well, it’s too bad that the Colts will win this thing.” It was like the Colts could phone it in.

Truth is, it could have gone either way. If a Colts player was found with the ball at the bottom of that scrum after the Saints’ onside kick, the tide might have turned the Colts’ way right there. Same with that pass interception on Manning. But games have a psychological side too. The Saints had the edge there. They believed. And they performed. They were the better team and the more deserving city. And I wish I’d been in New Orleans last night.

But then, I’d been there, in that vindicated, affirming place. Twice, in ‘69.

The rise of cloud computing looks like it has lead to the fall of SAP CEO Léo Apotheker, who resigned over the weekend.

It's not that cloud computing has been absent at SAP. There are a number of efforts underway. But it's the lack of any unified strategy that is most notable.

"They have been exploring the cloud," said Ray Wang of the Altimeter Group. "It's how quickly they have responded is the question of contention."

Sponsor

SAP's headquarters are in Germany, and Wang says that may have contributed to the company's scattered approach to cloud computing. Compared to the United States, Europe is more concerned about privacy issues, which leads to questions about the path a company can take: Private cloud? Public cloud? Hybrid? This may reflect somewhat on SAP's hesitancy.

John Wookey, a former Oracle executive, is leading SAP's cloud computing efforts. At the SAP Influencer Summit in Boston last December, Wookey said that SAP would open its Frictionless Commerce platform to developers. In 2014 the company will release its next generation technology, according to Wang. The idea is to leapfrog what we see today in SaaS offerings.

Today, though, customers are speaking out. They were hit last year with higher maintenance fees. They have been pretty vocal about their discontent. For SAP's part, the company is starting to acknowledge it has made mistakes.

What do customers want? Wang said they want to run their operations in a cost efficient manner and augment what they already have with SAP. That means a unified cloud offering, not a scattered approach like what they see now.

In contrast, a company like IBM looks unified in its approach to cloud computing. You can build, host and partner with IBM. Its offerings are diverse yet unified. You know that IBM has a focus on the cloud. That's not so clear as with SAP.

Currently it's the SaaS players in the market that are the most exciting ones to watch. Plex, Workday and NetSuite are targeting the SAP customer base.

They are ready competitors even if incoming co-CEO Bill McDermott doesn't think so.

Here's what he had to say in an interview last January with John Foley:

"McDermott contends that now more than ever companies need a full-featured, integrated applications platform for running global business operations -- mySAP, for example -- not half-baked applications from unproven SaaS upstarts. He points to SAP's 36 years of experience developing a "stable core" of enterprise software and a service-oriented architecture that makes it easy to add on third-party and custom applications. "It will take another 36 years for software-as-a-service vendors to do the same thing in the cloud," he says."

Thirty-six years? That has to be an exaggeration.

We'll have to see what happens. But without a unified strategy cloud computing, SAP's future does not look as exciting as the emerging SaaS players in the market.

Discuss

I had two lessons this weekend, both on tall dark handsome Scottie. Here’s a video of him jumping at Woodside a couple of years ago. Note that lovely cadenced canter. Note also his serene confidence and unruffled calm. The rockinghorse canter is still in place and a big part of the delight that is the riding-Scottie experience. The confidence and calm? Not so much. Something scared him last year and now he rushes his fences and worries. Colin, the top trainer and resident genius, says Scottie is (and I quote) “chickenshit.” Michelle and I, because we like him very much indeed, prefer to say that he is anxious. We mean that he’s chickenshit.

A year after starting again, I’m still a pretty sucky rider, but I suck at harder things on better horses. Scottie has to be one of the nicest horses I’ve ridden in my entire life – even Colin says he is super-nice – and that hypnotic canter is easily, far and away, the best canter I ever sat. The trick is to learn to give him confidence, which gets harder as we try harder things and jump bigger fences. Yes! I am actually jumping him at last, over teenytiny rails it is true, but high enough that he transmits clear mental images of falling poles and pain and fear. As well as staying on and keeping my position absolutely correct and relaxed and soft, I have to reassure him of my competence and his ability. When he gets too fast I have to slow him, not with the reins, but with the rhythm, making the footfalls slower and more sure by asking for it with my abdominal core.

It’s a miracle to me that I can even try (and mostly fail at) this. A year ago I had never asked for a flying change! Now I am riding this glorious made hunter and I mean really trying to ride him, awake every stride, trying to unlock my arms, keeping my leg on but soft and quiet, doing my utmost to lull him into that beautiful rhythmic canter so he is in a cadenced trance over fences, so he forgets the fear and the falling poles, so all he thinks about is the music of his footfalls. What joy.

(If you like how I write about riding, you should go read Hannah, who says very precisely what I am always struggling to get at.)

Two years ago, I posted a nice long article about what I call “Superman Syndrome” – a tendency for people to try to demonstrate their worthiness to others by buying things for them.

Just yesterday, a reader emailed me about that article:

Superman syndrome is just another example of poor self-esteem and how it can entrap you and your money. It’s no different than keeping up with the Joneses or anything else like that.

It’s true. We only need to impress other people if we feel that somehow we need to impress them, that we don’t have enough already on the table to make them happy and make them want us.

Do you buy clothes because they fit you well and keep you warm, or do you buy them based on how they impress others?
Do you buy electronic gadgets because they fill a real use in your life, or do you buy them with an eye towards showing them off to your friends?
Do you go out to dinner and pick up the tab because there’s a real reason to do so (like you’re treating someone for a special occasion), or are you thinking about how it’ll butter someone up?
Do you throw money into redecorating because it’ll improve how you feel about your living quarters or do you do it to impress and stun your guests?

In other words, is your personal worth based on what you value or what you think others value?

For most of my life, I placed an inordinate amount of value on what others thought of me. I was only cool if others thought I was cool. I was only worthy if others thought I was worthy. Thus, I would strive to make others feel as though I was cool so that, by osmosis, I would feel as though I was cool.

The end result was that I would constantly spend money to make others think I was somehow cool or worthy. I’d take people out to dinners. I’d buy gadgets based largely on impressing others (”This one would be fine for what I need, but this higher model… that’d impress ‘em!”). The list goes on and on.

There are lots of problems with that kind of attitude, of course. I’ll just outline two of the most relevant ones.

First, other people are fickle. You might impress someone one day, but the next day it doesn’t matter. Why? Once a person’s opinion of you is set, it takes quite a lot to alter that opinion, and it’s a change that you usually can’t buy. Sure, in the short term, you can get their attention with something shiny and new, but they’re fickle and they’ll soon revert to their already-established view of you.

Second, the only person that you always have to live with is you. At the end of the day, when you close your door, you’re the only person there. All of the cash you’ve spent trying to impress others has turned out only to drain away the resources you need to do the things you want. You’ve got a shiny car and a lot of cool gadgets that impress people, but when you close that door at night, do you have the life and the career that you want? Are you fulfilled when you’re alone?

It took me a long time to realize that I often wasn’t fulfilled when I was alone – and that, underneath the bravado, the shiny things I owned, and my material generosity, others knew it, too. Their opinions of me weren’t made of the things I bought (for myself or for them), but from my personal character.

Spending time with someone, genuinely listening to them, and helping them when you can (usually in non-material ways) goes far more towards building a positive reputation with others than throwing cash at them – or at things to impress them – ever will. Even better, you can save your financial resources to put yourself in a better position in life, doing whatever it is you dream of doing.

Interesting research:

Target prevalence powerfully influences visual search behavior. In most visual search experiments, targets appear on at least 50% of trials. However, when targets are rare (as in medical or airport screening), observers shift response criteria, leading to elevated miss error rates. Observers also speed target-absent responses and may make more motor errors. This could be a speed/accuracy tradeoff with fast, frequent absent responses producing more miss errors. Disproving this hypothesis, our experiment one shows that very high target prevalence (98%) shifts response criteria in the opposite direction, leading to elevated false alarms in a simulated baggage search. However, the very frequent target-present responses are not speeded. Rather, rare target-absent responses are greatly slowed. In experiment two, prevalence was varied sinusoidally over 1000 trials as observers' accuracy and reaction times (RTs) were measured. Observers' criterion and target-absent RTs tracked prevalence. Sensitivity (d') and target-present RTs did not vary with prevalence. These results support a model in which prevalence influences two parameters: a decision criterion governing the series of perceptual decisions about each attended item, and a quitting threshold that governs the timing of target-absent responses. Models in which target prevalence only influences an overall decision criterion are not supported.

This has implications for searching for contraband at airports.

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a "Twitter-killer" feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users can currently broadcast status messages via the Google Talk feature. The main difference between the current offering and the new feature is that status messages aren't available in a timeline format. With the new "Twitter clone," they will be.

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UPDATE: While we're still waiting for an official response from Google's PR team, we've been invited to an event at the Googleplex tomorrow "to see some innovations in two of our most popular products." The event will begin at 10 a.m. PT (UTC -8) - stay tuned tomorrow for RWW's live coverage of the event!

This is the current option for updating statuses in Gmail:

Google's new tools, however, will better integrate with Google's multimedia sites, YouTube and Picasa. (Currently, Google Talk users can share YouTube videos via chat, which prompts a miniaturized version of the video to pop up above the chat in progress.) Users will also be able to see "a stream of status updates from people they choose to connect with."

We're contacting Google for more information and will update this post as we learn more.

In the meantime, however, we're wondering how this feature will integrate with other status-sharing sites. Will Gmail and Google Talk's new feature act as Google's first steps into developing a social media client (like Tweetdeck) in its own right?

The new feature could start appearing on users' screen as soon as this week. If you had this tool, would you use it?

Discuss

Lately, quite a few TV channels - like CNN - have replaced their man-on-the-street interviews with the cheaper solution of just doing a Twitter search and displaying the results on TV. Curatorr's mission is to help these media companies make the process of finding tweets to put on air even easier. Developed by Wiredset, the company behind Trendrr, Curatorr gives media companies, brands and publishers an easy way to find tweets and put the best of them on air.

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Curatorr offers a very streamlined workflow. First, you create a folder for your tweets. Then you perform a Twitter search and pick out the tweets you want to put into these folders. Curatorr offers a number of advanced search options that make it easy to filter tweets by sentiment and location, for example. From there, users can easily export the curated tweets as CSV files for further use and analysis. Curatorr also offers companies the ability to skin their Curatorr pages so that they can just put the actual site on air if they want to.

One of the first broadcast companies to use this tool was MTV, which used the Curatorr platform to identify and publish tweets during the Hope for Haiti Concert.

For the time being, Wiredset will only offer Curatorr to on a limited basis and the company is mostly targeting TV networks and other media businesses. Pricing will depend on usage and scope.

Discuss

By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns

In the lead-up to the credit crisis, I really didn’t write a considerable amount about second mortgages despite my focus on credit writedowns. At that time, I was more focused on writedowns from securitized mortgage paper (and later construction loans and commercial real estate because of the stress these loan types put on regional financials). However, second liens are a very big deal and I believe they will loom that much larger in 2010 because of the rise in strategic defaults in prime and Alt-A categories.

When the crisis first developed, in February of 2007, it was subprime where the worries were, with the lion’s share of writedowns coming from mark-to-market losses in the securitisation market.  However, subprime was a relatively small part of the overall market, making up 14% of loans outstanding at that time. Alt-A loans were 27% and prime loans were 57% respectively of loans outstanding according to a Banc of America Securities report.

As the 2004-2007 co-horts of Alt-A option ARM mortgages have started to reset and prime borrowers have come under stress, we have started to see defaults in markets which are an order of magnitude larger than subprime.

Diana Olick of CNBC says:

There are no specific numbers on how many option ARM loans there are. But analysts estimate that as many as 1.3 million borrowers took out $389 billion in option ARMs in 2004 and 2005 alone.

Many of those option ARM loans have already re-adjusted to higher payments, but more are on the way. Some 88 percent of Option ARMs originated between 2004 and 2007 are going to adjust higher between now and 2012. Those option ARM borrowers could see their housing bills go up as much as 63 percent, according to Fitch ratings.

The chosen solutions thus far has been to arrest the fall in house prices so that they are still at elevated levels. This is one reason the Fed is loath to raise interest rates; doing so would make interest payments unaffordable for many homebuyers and homeowners.

Nevertheless, the reset and strategic default issues are still with us and they bring second mortgages into view. I have been interested in the problem presented by second mortgages since I wrote a few posts on legal cases involving foreclosure, second mortgages and mortgage servicers.

What was clear then is that mortgage servicers were not incentivized to modify existing mortgages.  The incentive for servicers is to service an existing mortgage for as long as they can in order to collect the fees associated with that servicing. The big four commercial banks are by far the largest servicers of loans. Here is the breakdown from an October post linked just below.

• Bank of America: $2.1 trillion, up from $530 billion a year earlier (via its acquisition of Countrywide – this is WHY bank of America bought Countrywide)
• Wells Fargo: $1.8 trillion, up from $1.5 trillion a year earlier
• JPMorgan Chase: $1.5 trillion, up from $795 billion a year ago (thanks in large part to its acquisition of Washington Mutual)
• CitiMortgage (a division of Citigroup): $792 billion, down from $799 billion a year earlier. Citi is hurting i everywhere)
• ResCap: $391 billion, down from $449 billion in the first quarter of 2008.

See Why mortgages aren’t modified and what a ruling stopping foreclosures means.

But, as coincidence would have it, the big four commercial banks are at once the largest mortgage servicers and the largest second mortgage lenders. Here are the numbers from Amherst Securities’ Laurie Goodman via FT Alphaville.

The interesting bit is that, according to Reuters’ Felix Salmon, the lion’s share of writedowns on second liens to date come from that small sliver of ABS Issuers. The reason of course comes from the dichotomy between how loans and securities were treated before mark-to-market rules were liberalized last year.

You should have noticed that most of the assets written down in the past two years have been marked-to-market. Securities traded in the open market are marked to market. Loans held to maturity are not.  This is one reason that large international institutions which participate in the securitisation markets have taken the lion’s share of writedowns, despite the low percentage that marked-to-market assets represent on bank balance sheets.  But, this should end because of new guidelines in marked-to-market accounting.  However, the new guidelines do have two major implications.  First, there are still many distressed loans on the books of U.S. banks that if marked to market would reveal devastating losses.  Second, there will also now be many distressed securities on bank balance sheets that if marked-to-market would reveal yet more losses.  In essence, the new guidelines are helpful only to the degree that it prevents assets being marked down due to temporary impairment.  If much of the impairment is real, as I believe it is, we are storing up problems for later.

-The Fake Recovery, April 2009

So, when people default strategically, two things happen to the mortgage holder’s balance sheet. First, the losses become realized and must be accounted for. Second, the second mortgage gets vaporized.

I’m still trying to get to grips with the motivations of the too-big-to-fail banks given their outsized holdings of both second mortgages and service contracts and the lack of first mortgage holding. But, it seems that the interests of the servicer are to extend and pretend existing mortgages in order to get as much fee income as possible.  So the Home Affordable Modification Plan (HAMP) isn’t going to be the preferred approach here and that’s why it is largely a failure.

But what about the second mortgage holder? They clearly don’t want a modification either because they are subordinated to the primary mortgage and must take all of the initial hit in a modification. So the government has set up a second lien modification program.

The Second Lien Program announced today will work in tandem with first lien modifications offered under the Home Affordable Modification Program to deliver a comprehensive affordability solution for struggling borrowers. Second mortgages can create significant challenges in helping borrowers avoid foreclosure, even when a first lien is modified. Up to 50 percent of at-risk mortgages have second liens, and many properties in foreclosure have more than one lien. Under the Second Lien Program, when a Home Affordable Modification is initiated on a first lien, servicers participating in the Second Lien Program will automatically reduce payments on the associated second lien according to a pre-set protocol. Alternatively, servicers will have the option to extinguish the second lien in return for a lump sum payment under a pre-set formula determined by Treasury, allowing servicers to target principal extinguishment to the borrowers where extinguishment is most appropriate.

-Obama Administration Announces New Details on Making Home Affordable Program, U.S. Treasury Department, April 2009

Sounds pretty complicated if you asked me. As a large servicer who also has a lot of second liens, why would I agree to this if I could extend and pretend – especially since most modifications end up in foreclosure anyway? As I see it, the optimal response would be:

• extend the loan and get as many payments as you can from the homeowner
• meanwhile collect all the servicing fees in that time frame
• at some juncture, this pretense comes to a close. So, avoid a foreclosure by inducing a short sale in which you (secretly?) get some compensation (see my post “Short sale fraud”).

That way if you end up getting a foreclosure anyway, you can get the most money out of the situation. Again, this assumes you don’t have any residual exposure to the primary mortgage since you securitized that. What am I missing here?

Your thoughts on this subject are appreciated.  See also “This Crisis Won’t Stop Moving,” a recent article on second liens from the New York Times.

Lovins observes that power inputs in many industrial processes go into a bottleneck that makes power conservation hard if you start at the wrong end.  The power goes into a long pipeline of process that emerges on the other end with some useful (in theory) work. If you start on the power input end, then reducing power x% requires percolating incremental improvements down the chain of linked machinery with each step reducing work at the step further down the pipeline. But if you start on the other end, changes automatically flow upward. The same, obviously, holds true for data centers. If you start by improving power efficiency of air-conditioning – a good thing in itself – you cannot obtain the scale improvements that can be gained on the other end of the pipeline by reducing the activities that use power and generate heat. That is, if you can increase work-done/computational-steps you drive savings up the pipeline. And the kind of large scale savings Lovins achieves in other industrial processes seem plausible: if you reduce power demand at the work end enough to reduce the inputs of cooling needed so that a smaller air conditioning unit can be used, you have a potentially greater savings than by improving the efficiency of the air conditioning unit.

Now that Google Chrome has entered the world of fully-extensible browsers, with its recent addition of extensions and Greasemonkey scripts, you've likely found yourself perusing the libraries and tweaking until your heart's content. With that, however, comes the inevitable - browser crashes.

While Google Chrome doesn't have a safe mode in the same way the Firefox or Windows does, it does offer another option that provides the same functionality and can save you a whole bunch of trouble.

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The folks over at the Google Operating System blog pointed out this tip today and we thought it was a worthwhile how-to for our readers.

If you've found yourself in the terrible position of having a broken version of Chrome and you don't want to uninstall and start over from scratch, you can instead launch Chrome using "incognito mode", which disables extensions and allows you to disable the bad apple extensions.

Setting up a shortcut to launch Chrome in incognito mode is a simple four-step process:

1. We recommend first making a copy of your shortcut, that way you can access the browser normally too, once you've fixed whatever problem you're experiencing.


2. Find your copied Chrome shortcut, right click on it and select "Properties".


3. Select the "Target" field and append "--incognito" to the end of the command.


4. Click "Apply" and then "Okay" to save your changes.

Now, all you have to do is double click on the edited shortcut to enter into a "Safe Mode"-style Chrome. From here, all you'll need to do is enter "chrome://extensions/" (minus the quotes) into the browser's navigation bar to edit the extensions.

If you're unsure which extension broke Chrome's back, simply disable them all and switch back and forth between incognito Chrome and regular Chrome until you break it again.

And while we're speaking of Chrome extensions, we recommend going and getting the ReadWriteWeb extension to keep up to date with everything we post here. After all, if your Chrome shuts down from extension overload, now you know how to fix it.

Discuss

News Monday!

Matt Assay to JOIN Canonical as COO

This took me a bit by surprise at first. I don't find myself often agreeing with Matt. Most of what he tends to write/argue for is what I have referred to in the past as "crippleware". Canonical in recent time has taken to opening up their platform. I've been a strong advocate for Launchpad, it is a great service. I love that they opened it up in recent time. When it comes to infrastructure software on the size of LP, I don't believe that many others will ever install it. Slash, G-Forge, and the Livejournal software are examples of infrastructure software that approach the size or outweigh the LP codebase. They have rarely been successfully deployed by others. The advantage in the Launchpad software being open source is the potential for others to audit the code. I suspect that they will receive some patches, but I doubt that the number of patches will ever out pace what the conical staff itself creates.

This morning I got a number of worried pieces of email over Matt's new position at Canonical.

Do I find that I am worried about Assay joining Canonical?

Not really.

The job of the COO is too keep the company moving on a day to day basis. With his background at Alfresco, the COO role makes sense. Canonical has a lot of strong open source advocates so I wouldn't expect change in a direction that would create issue. Canonical's Ubuntu One is their longterm play. Service based revenue work hand in hand with open source go well together (...how many online services can you name that aren't based on open source?).

The COO position is one of the key positions that a company will hire for, yet, many smaller companies tend to pass over the creation of this position in lieu of having the CEO also fill this role. This is a real shame since you can often have a great CEO, who makes for a poor COO.

Ken Jacobs leaves Oracle

When Innodb was first acquired by Oracle there was a lot of shock and dismay within the MySQ Ecosystem. MySQL INC's reaction to the acquisition, which then rippled to the community, created a mistrust of Oracle. Ken Jacobs really changed that reaction in the community. There has been a number of times over the years that I found myself on the same side of the fence as Ken when it came to both leadership and technical vision about MySQL. I am sure Oracle has other competent executives to fill his shoes, but Ken has been a real asset to Oracle over the years. I am sad to see him leave the ecosystem, he played a very positive role in the community.

Oracle buying Innodb was never the killer move most envisioned at the time. It kick started engine development around MySQL, which was the only real innovation we saw for many years. Around the time of the acquisition all but one of the engineers who knew MySQL well, worked for MySQL. Having multiple companies working on engines re-invogorated outside development in the project. Without Oracle buying Innodb, the MySQL ecosystem would have never been forced into an innovators cycle again.

As more and more of our friends and favorite organizations start publishing updates online, being able to organize them well is becoming even more important. Niche-popular desktop social media stream-reader Tweetdeck issued a software update this morning and the most striking change is in its handling of user groups. It's beautiful. The new Tweetdeck is faster, more flexible and easier to navigate.

Groups, we have argued, are the secret weapon of the social Web. Here are five ways that the new Tweetdeck gets groups right, and that Facebook, the world's dominant social-media-stream reader by a long-shot, could learn from what Tweetdeck is doing. That would drastically improve Facebook's own user experience.

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Internet startup investor John Borthwick of Betaworks has told us that he invested in Tweetdeck specifically because its column metaphor represented a drastic break from the page-based metaphor of the rest of the Web and the Instant Messaging metaphor of most other Twitter clients. That's how Tweetdeck works: It lets you put your friends and contacts on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn into grouped columns across your screen. It's a powerful system and the clear leader in the ecosystem of interfaces built around Twitter. Competitor Seesmic has a similar offering and is also based on columns for groups.

These applications may be more overwhelming than many mainstream users are looking for, but the principles could be adapted to Facebook's own interface in some very interesting ways.

The Problem With Facebook's Group Support

Groups of users, which Facebook calls Lists, are extremely helpful in prioritizing messages by their source. They enable users to subscribe to more sources of information in total without fear they will miss high-priority content. Groups help contextualize messages in a stream, and with good search support they can help you target queries and unearth the information you're looking for within a limited space of trusted, topical sources of information. Last month, Facebook suggested its users subscribe to news organizations on the social network and put those updates in a special list called News, for example.

Unfortunately, Facebook has never treated Groups with the respect that they deserve. The newest redesign pushes friends Lists a click removed from the front page of the site, even. (It took me three clicks from the home page to see the view pictured on the right, for example.) The company is instead focused on serving up content from favored sources using the new News Feed (vs. Live Feed) algorithm. This algorithm says that the more you've interacted with a source of information in the past, the more likely you are to want to read that person's updates in the future. News Feed is a self-reenforcing paradigm that simplifies and narrows a user's universe by taking editorial control out of their hands and putting it in the hands of a black-box formula.

How could Facebook better handle groups? Let's take a look at how Tweetdeck does it.

Tweetdeck's Superior Handling of Groups

• Buttons to navigate directly

  The new Tweetdeck update today added a series of buttons at the bottom of the application for your group columns. Hover over them and you'll see the column name. Click on that button and you'll be brought immediately to that column, a much nicer experience than the awkward old scrolling. The hover display does show some information that's probably not useful to anyone (API calls remaining) but putting rapid group navigation in a good place in the app makes a big difference. It would also be nice if those buttons were configurable in some way - like the red one or #3 is for my @ replies column. But Tweetdeck now makes it much, much easier to navigate between groups than Facebook does. Facebook almost seems to be discouraging use of groups by burying them several clicks below top level options.




• Different Notification Priorities

  Tweetdeck makes it easy to set up different levels of notification for different groups. For example, my "high-priority" Twitter group sends full messages as a pop-up in the corner of my screen when it updates, but my column for people I actually know in real life on Facebook (like my family members) throws a pop-up and an audio notification in Tweetdeck when there's something new. That's awesome.

  Facebook is all about the notifications - why not let me get a special notification when someone in a particular group has posted an update?



• Shareable Groups, Suggestions etc.

  For years Twitter has been fundamentally public and Facebook private, but for better or for worse that's changing on Facebook. Isn't it time for Facebook to offer bundles of pages or people that you can follow all at once? Twitter and Tweetdeck make this easy with lists, sharable lists and the Tweetdeck directory of recommended lists to follow. Facebook users would love something like that! My college newspaper staff as one big list of Facebook users to follow? My football team? Suzy Bright's curated list of top sex writers to follow on Facebook? People would eat that kind of stuff up.



• Keyword Filters

  Last week I was working when the season premier of Lost came on TV. I'm likely to watch it later on DVD. Tweetdeck let me add a filter to all of my groups to hide any posts that included the word Lost! Sick of hearing about the iPad? No problem! Tweetdeck does a great job of building value on top of these groups of contacts: filter for, filter out keywords, analyze a group for its most-used words. There are lots of possibilities. Facebook users would probably like these same options.



• A Group for New Friends

  Tweetdeck has a great feature that lets you create a column to display the bios of people who have just started following you. From there you can click once to follow them back. Facebook could easily do something like that, bring new friends and/or recommended friends up higher into a very visible place in the interface. Facebook wants users to go beyond connecting with people they already know in real life (sorry, users, that's what Facebook has decided) so why not create a group that's made up of people who are fans of the same pages you are or are otherwise recommended to connect with?

There are all kinds of ways that Facebook could offer meaningful support for user groups and turn the News Feed into a more powerful tool, with more control for users and more value in the long run. Tweetdeck is doing a pretty darned good job of exactly that.

Discuss

• kidyos - the best of the web for kids
  Pre-screened videos, games and educational content for 1-6 YO kids. Thanks, Oren!
• Baby Toolkit: Dock those tails: Streamlining adjustable elastic pants
  YES! My no-waist daughter always has these thingies sticking out. Thank you, Adrienne (by way of Tracy)!
• Smart-Bottom Enterprises: Personal ABC Books
  I always admire when parents put time into projects like these. Thanks for sharing, Darcy!
• glue sky » Fixing Crazy Action Figure Eyes
  Hilarious. Sharpies to the rescue!
• Cook Play Explore: Avoiding Mealtime Battles
  Interesting...may help some, although in my family it would create more battles. Thanks for passing this along, Cindy!

With scareware/rogueware/fake security software continuing to be the cash-cow choice for the Koobface gang, keeping them on a short leash in order to become the biggest opportunity cost for the gang's business model is crucial. The following are currently active blackhat SEO redirectors/Koobface-infected hosts redirectors and actual scareware domains courtesy of the gang.

Blackhat SEO redirectors, also embedded at Koobface-infected hosts, with identical redirector ID (?pid=312s02&sid=4db12f):
vincentvangoghsite .com - 96.44.128.245 - Email: contacts@ferra.hu
jacksonpollocksite .com - Email: contacts@ferra.hu
lady2gaga .com - Email: contacts@designt.de
nigeriaworldtours .com  Email: info@montever.de
americanpiemusicvideo .com - Email: mail@suvtrip.hu
superstitionmusicvideo .com - Email: mail@suvtrip.hu
umbrellamusicvideo .com - Email: mail@suvtrip.hu
discounts-org .com - Email: mail@haselbladtour.com
littlediscounts .com - Email: mail@haselbladtour.com
winterdiscounts5 .com - Email: mail@haselbladtour.com
chevroletvmodeltoys .com - Email: CourtneyRWebb@aol.com
volvomodeltoys .com - Email: CourtneyRWebb@aol.com
manilawebcamera .com - Email: monkey22@live.com
mumbaiwebcamera .com - Email: monkey22@live.com
karachiwebcamera .com - Email: monkey22@live.com
delhiwebcamera .com - Email: monkey22@live.com
istanbulwebcamera .com - Email: monkey22@live.com
lexusmodeltoys .com - Email: monkey22@live.com
chevroletvmodeltoys .com - Email: CourtneyRWebb@aol.com
bmwmodeltoys .com - Email: CourtneyRWebb@aol.com

Upon redirection, the scareware is served from malware-b-scan .com - 96.44.128.245; 91.212.226.97; 91.212.226.185; 91.121.45.67, 91.212.226.203, 94.228.209.195 - Email: mail@bristonnews.com.

Sample detection rate for newly introduced scareware samples: Setup_312s2.exe - Result: 3/40 (7.5%), Setup_312s2.exe - Result: 4/39, Setup_312s22.exe - Result: 2/39 (5.13%), Setup_312s2.exe - Result: 6/39 (15.39%), Setup_312s2.exe - Result: 1/40 (2.5%), Setup_312s2.exe - Result: 1/39 (2.56%), Setup_312s2.exe - Result: 3/39 (7.7%). Setup_312s2.exe - Result: 4/40 (10%), Setup_312s2.exe - Result: 1/40 (2.5%), Setup_312s2.exe - Result: 4/40 (10%). Upon execution the sample phones back to winxp7server .com/download/winlogo.bmp - 94.228.208.57; rescuesysupdate .com/?b=312s2 - 83.133.125.216

Parked on the same IPs are more scareware domains part of the portfolio:
spy-detectore .com - Email: admin@clossingt.com
dis7-antivirus .com - Email: admin@vertigosmart.com
v2comp-scanner .com - Email: admin@vertigosmart.com
new-av-scannere .com - Email: missbarlingmail@aol.com
smartvirus-scan6 .com - Email: info@terranova.com
spywaremaxscan4 .com - Email: out@trialzoom.com
super6antispyware .com - Email: mail@ordercom.com
spyware-max-scan3 .com - Email: out@trialzoom.com
max-antivirus-security5 .com - Email: mail@dynadoter.com
winterdiscounts5 .com - Email: mail@haselbladtour.com
11-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
1-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
1m-online-scanner .com - Email: stellar2@yahoo.com
2m-online-scanner .com - Email: stellar2@yahoo.com
2pro-antispyware .com - Email: mail@yahoo.com
3pro-antispyware .com - Email: mail@yahoo.com
6-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
7-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
9-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
a0-online-scanner .com - Email: stellar2@yahoo.com
a9-online-scanner .com - Email: stellar2@yahoo.com
aa-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
aa-online-scanner .com - Email: call555call@live.com
ab-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
ac-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
ad-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
adv1-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com
adv2-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com
ae-antivirus .com - Email: call555call@live.com
antivirus-expert-a .com - Email: 900ekony@live.com
antivirus-expert-i .com - Email: 900ekony@live.com
antivirus-expert-r .com - Email: 900ekony@live.com
antivirus-expert-y .com - Email: 900ekony@live.com
antivirussystemscan1 .com - Email: 900ekony@live.com
antivirussystemscana .com - Email: 900ekony@live.com
army-antispywarea .com - Email: beliec99@yahoo.com
army-antispywarei .com - Email: beliec99@yahoo.com
army-antispywarel .com - Email: beliec99@yahoo.com
army-antispywarep .com - Email: beliec99@yahoo.com
army-antivirusa .com - Email: beliec99@yahoo.com
army-antivirusd .com - Email: beliec99@yahoo.com
army-antivirust .com - Email: beliec99@yahoo.com
army-antivirusv .com - Email: beliec99@yahoo.com
army-antivirusy .com - Email: beliec99@yahoo.com

b1-online-scanner .com - Email: stellar2@yahoo.com
best-antivirusk0 .com
bestpd-virusscanner .com - Email: SusanCWagner@yahoo.com
bestpr-virusscanner .com - Email: SusanCWagner@yahoo.com
crystal-antimalware .com - Email: mail@vertigocats.com
crystal-antivirus .com - Email: mail@vertigocats.com
crystal-pro-scan .com - Email: mail@vertigocats.com
crystal-pro-scanner .com - Email: mail@vertigocats.com
crystal-spyscanner .com - Email: mail@vertigocats.com
crystal-threatscanner .com - Email: mail@vertigocats.com
crystal-virusscanner .com - Email: mail@vertigocats.com
extra-spyware-defencea .com - Email: fabula8@live.com
extra-spyware-defenceb .com - Email: fabula8@live.com
malware-a-scan .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
malware-b-scan .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
malware-c-scan .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
malware-d-scan .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
malware-t-scan .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
mega-antispywarea .com - Email: fabula8@live.com
mega-antispywareb .com - Email: fabula8@live.com
mm-online-scanner .com - Email: stellar2@yahoo.com
my-computer-antivirusa .com - Email: dillinzer1@yahoo.com
my-computer-antivirusb .com - Email: dillinzer1@yahoo.com
my-computer-antiviruse .com - Email: dillinzer1@yahoo.com
my-computer-antivirusq .com - Email: dillinzer1@yahoo.com
my-computer-antivirusw .com - Email: dillinzer1@yahoo.com
my-computer-scanc .com - Email: clintommail2@yahoo.com
my-computer-scane .com - Email: clintommail2@yahoo.com
my-computer-scanl .com - Email: clintommail2@yahoo.com
my-computer-scannera .com - Email: clintommail2@yahoo.com
my-computer-scannerl .com - Email: clintommail2@yahoo.com
my-computer-scannerm .com - Email: clintommail2@yahoo.com
my-computer-scannern .com - Email: clintommail2@yahoo.com
my-computer-scannerv .com - Email: clintommail2@yahoo.com

my-computer-scanw .com - Email: clintommail2@yahoo.com
my-pc-online-scanm .com - Email: dillinzer1@yahoo.com
my-pc-online-scann .com - Email: dillinzer1@yahoo.com
my-pc-online-scanr .com - Email: dillinzer1@yahoo.com
my-pc-online-scanv .com - Email: dillinzer1@yahoo.com
n1-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com
n2-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com
nasa-antivirus1 .com - Email: call555call@live.com
nasa-antivirus3 .com - Email: call555call@live.com
nasa-antivirusa .com - Email: call555call@live.com
nasa-antivirusb .com - Email: call555call@live.com
nasa-antiviruso .com - Email: call555call@live.com
pc1-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com
pc2-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com
pro0-antivirus .com - Email: mail@yahoo.com
pro0-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com
pro1-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com
pro2-antivirus .com - Email: mail@yahoo.com
pro4-antivirus .com - Email: mail@yahoo.com
pro6-antivirus .com - Email: mail@yahoo.com
pro8-antivirus .com - Email: mail@yahoo.com
remote-antispywarec .com - Email: teresa2mail.me@live.com
remote-antispywared .com - Email: teresa2mail.me@live.com
remote-antispywaree .com - Email: teresa2mail.me@live.com
remote-antispywarey .com - Email: teresa2mail.me@live.com
remote-pc1-scanner .com - Email: teresa2mail.me@live.com
remote-pc-scannera .com - Email: teresa2mail.me@live.com
remote-pc-scannerr .com - Email: teresa2mail.me@live.com
remote-pc-scannerv .com - Email: teresa2mail.me@live.com
remote-pc-scannery .com - Email: teresa2mail.me@live.com

scan3antispyware .com - Email: o@mozzilastuf.com
scan6antispyware .com - Email: o@mozzilastuf.com
scan8antispyware .com - Email: o@mozzilastuf.com
scan-antispywarea .com - Email: o@mozzilastuf.com
scan-antispywarec .com - Email: o@mozzilastuf.com
scan-antispywared .com - Email: o@mozzilastuf.com
scan-antispywarez .com - Email: o@mozzilastuf.com
spyware-01-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
spyware-03-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
spyware-05-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
spyware-06-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
spyware-07-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
stcanning-your-computerc .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stcanning-your-computerd .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stcanning-your-computerq .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stcanning-your-computerr .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stcanning-your-computert .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stcanning-your-pca .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stcanning-your-pcb .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stcanning-your-pcc .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stcanning-your-pcd .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stcanning-your-pce .com - Email: mitra66@yahoo.com
stealthv1-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
stealthv2-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
stealthv7-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
stealthv8-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
stealthv9-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
ver1-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com
ver2-system-scanner .com - Email: JayRKibbe@live.com

virus-a1-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
virus-a1-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
virus-b1-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
virus-b1-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
virus-c1-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
virus-c1-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
virus-d1-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
virus-d1-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
virus-e2-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
virus-e2-scanner .com - Email: mail@bristonnews.com
windowsv5-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
windowsv6-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
windowsv7-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
windowsv8-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
windowsv9-antispyware .com - Email: SteveLCartwright@yahoo.com
z0-online-scanner .com - Email: stellar2@yahoo.com
z1-online-scanner .com - Email: stellar2@yahoo.com

Active scareware domains portfolio (blackhat SEO/Koobface pushed) parked at 212.150.164.190 - AS1680 - NV-ASN 013 NetVision Ltd :
antispy-download .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scanner-virus-free .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-best-porn .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-sex-porn .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
download-free-files .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-porn-best .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scan-your-pc-now .org - Email: michaeltycoon@gmail.com
scanner-virus-free .com - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-sex-porn .com - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scanner-free-virus .com - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-porn-best .com - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
antispy-download .info - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
soft-download-free .info - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scanner-virus-free .info - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scanner-free-virus .info - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scan-your-pc-now .info - Email: michaeltycoon@gmail.com

adult-tube-free .net - Email: michaeltycoon@gmail.com
scanner-virus-free .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-sex-porn .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
download-free-files .net - Email: michaeltycoon@gmail.com
scanner-free-virus .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-porn-best .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
ekjsoft .eu - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
antispy-download .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
soft-download-free .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scanner-virus-free .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
free-malware-scan .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-best-porn .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-sex-porn .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
download-free-files .biz - Email: michaeltycoon@gmail.com

scanner-free-virus .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
download-free-soft .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-porn-best .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scan-your-pc-now .biz - Email: michaeltycoon@gmail.com
porn-tube-sex .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
alrzsoft .in - Email: petrenko.kolia@yandex.ru
antispy-download .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
cool-tube-porn .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
cool-tube-porn .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
download-free-now .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
download-free-now .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
download-free-soft .com - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
download-free-soft .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
download-scaner-free .com - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
ekjsoft .eu
fdglsoft .in - Email: petrenko.kolia@yandex.ru
free-virus-scanner .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
kleqsoft .in - Email: petrenko.kolia@yandex.ru
kltysoft .in - Email: petrenko.kolia@yandex.ru
ktyjsoft .in - Email: petrenko.kolia@yandex.ru

kyezsoft .in - Email: petrenko.kolia@yandex.ru
lkrjsoft .in - Email: petrenko.kolia@yandex.ru
lkrtsoft .in - Email: petrenko.kolia@yandex.ru
mgtlsoft .in - Email: petrenko.kolia@yandex.ru
porn-sex-tube .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
porn-sex-tube .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scan-free-malware .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
scan-free-malware .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
spyware-scaner-free .com - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
spyware-scaner-free .info - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
spyware-scaner-free .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
spyware-scaner-free .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-best-porn .biz - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-best-porn .com - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-best-porn .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-best-porn .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-porn-sex .info - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-porn-sex .net - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
tube-porn-sex .org - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com

What's so special about the robertsimonkroon@gmail.com email anyway? It's the fact that not only was the email was once again used to register scareware domains two times in July, 2009, but also, as pointed out in November 2009's "Koobface Botnet's Scareware Business Model - Part Two", the same email was used to register the following download locations for scareware domains pushed by the Koobface botnet:

0ni9o1s3feu60 .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
6j5aq93iu7yv4 .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
mf6gy4lj79ny5 .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
84u9wb2hsh4p6 .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
6pj2h8rqkhfw7 .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
7cib5fzf462g8 .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
7bs5nfzfkp8q8 .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
kt4lwumfhjb7a .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
q2bf0fzvjb5ca .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
rncocnspr44va .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
t1eayoft9226b .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
4go4i9n76ttwd .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
kzvi4iiutr11e .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
hxc7jitg7k57e .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
mfbj6pquvjv8e .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
mt3pvkfmpi7de .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
fb7pxcqyb45oe .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
fyivbrl3b0dyf .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
z6ailnvi94jgg .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
ue4x08f5myqdl .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
p7keflvui9fkl .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
gjpwsc5p7oe3m .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
f1uq1dfi3qkcm .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
7mx1z5jq0nt3o .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
3uxyctrlmiqeo .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
p0umob9k2g7mp .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
od32qjx6meqos .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
bnfdxhae1rgey .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com
7zju2l82i2zhz .cn - Email: robertsimonkroon@gmail.com

Stay tuned for a massive Koobface related activities update, analyzing the gang's multi-tasking throughout the entire January, 2010 -- descriptive historical OSINT offers long-term value in cross-checking for connections.

Related Koobface gang/botnet research:
How the Koobface Gang Monetizes Mac OS X Traffic
The Koobface Gang Wishes the Industry "Happy Holidays"
Koobface-Friendly Riccom LTD - AS29550 - (Finally) Taken Offline
Koobface Botnet Starts Serving Client-Side Exploits
Massive Scareware Serving Blackhat SEO, the Koobface Gang Style
Koobface Botnet's Scareware Business Model - Part Two
Koobface Botnet's Scareware Business Model - Part One
Koobface Botnet Redirects Facebook's IP Space to my Blog
New Koobface campaign spoofs Adobe's Flash updater
Social engineering tactics of the Koobface botnet
Koobface Botnet Dissected in a TrendMicro Report
Movement on the Koobface Front - Part Two
Movement on the Koobface Front
Koobface - Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are
Dissecting Koobface Worm's Twitter Campaign

The Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software Series:
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Twenty Four
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Twenty Three
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Twenty Two
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Twenty One
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Twenty
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Nineteen
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Eighteen
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Seventeen
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Sixteen
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Fifteen
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Fourteen
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Thirteen
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Twelve
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Eleven
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Ten
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Nine
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Eight
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Seven
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Six
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Five
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Four
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Three
A Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software - Part Two
Diverse Portfolio of Fake Security Software

This post has been reproduced from Dancho Danchev's blog. Follow him on Twitter.

Cloudscape comics will be on the road this Spring to promote Exploded View at as many comic conventions as they can.
Here is a list of the confirmed conventions we will be at:

March 7 - The Hollywood North Entertainment Expo

March 13-14 –  Emerald City Comicon

April 24-25 – Stumptown Comics Fest

May 8-9 – Toronto Comic Arts Festival

Aug 13-15 - Anime Evolution (Our official sponsor!)

Sept 4-5 – Fanfair Fest

We also have our eye on Word Under the Street, SPX and APE.

Apple clearly recognizes the importance of the mobile web, but did they get trigger happy and launch the iPad too soon? The launch of the new Apple device has lit up the internet with all sorts of criticisms, praises, questions and opinions. A question remains for those of us in the search marketing and social [...]

....

China Stimulus (217 mph):

 

U.S. Stimulus (Napa Valley, Wine Train):

 

Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.

Last September, Google launched Sidewiki, a Web annotation service that makes it easy to annotate any page on the Internet. Sidewiki, however, hasn't attracted a lot of users yet and the public discussion about online content continues to happen in comments and on Twitter.

While it's easy to browse comments, finding Twitter mentions of a specific article can be hard. With the Twitter Reactions Chrome extension, however, you can see quickly see what Twitter is saying about a given page without every having to leave the site.

Sponsor

Sadly, Twitter Reactions doesn't apply any filters to the tweets it displays, so you often end up with long lists of retweeted links. Twitter Reactions uses the BackTweets API to aggregate messages. The extension would be even more useful if it used a service like BackType, which does a good job at filtering out the most boring tweets.

Unlike similar projects like Arc90's TBuzz bookmarklet, the extension doesn't connect to your own Twitter account, so you can't tweet and retweet from within the extension.

While it doesn't offer any advanced features, Twitter Reactions is a quick and easy way to see what the twittersphere is saying about any site. If you are not using Chrome, also give TBuzz a try.

[via Lifehacker]

Discuss

1. Life in Sierra Leone.

2. Are more educated people more likely to own cats than dogs?

3. What will the supermarket look like after the blizzard?

4. ADHD people have "hyper-focus" (a flawed article, though).

5. Google voice transcriptions, formatted as poetry.

6. Does bicameralism matter?

How do you keep track of the about-town activities you might want to do if you feel like it and have time and noone's sick and...

My next post for the Intel-sponsored site Life Scoop shares my solution: a personalized "Possibilities" calendar.

Related: Life Scoop: Five ways texting can make your life easier

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. The old cliche is true, and it applies to the Web sites of FLOSS projects as surely as it does a first date or a job interview. Unfortunately, all too many FLOSS Web sites make a very, very poor first impression. Not surprising, since many FLOSS developers are much more talented at coding than they are at Web site design. How to fix the problem?

Sawyer X writes about "marketing the entire box," and how it relates to Perl, Ruby, Python, and PHP. Specifically, he notes that many Ruby sites have beautiful sites not because they understand how to design sites better, but because they view sites as part of the product:

Ruby programmers see the marketing as relating to not just the product, but its wrapper. That is, that many Ruby programmers understand at a very core level (more than most programmers - at least me) that the website which shows the project is the actual wrapper of the project and is just as important, if not more so.

The same is true of any project. Users and contributors look at a site and form a first impression based on the look of the site before they ever take the time to download code and install it. It's hard not to look at sites like the LESS site or the Banshee Project and think that the projects are going to be solid and more professional because the sites are solid and professional looking. On top of the visual impact, the sites are well-designed and easy to navigate. So when a potential user decides to take the next steps, they can find what they're looking for in a hurry.

But so many sites look amateurish and just plain ugly. Unless you're already motivated to use the project, there's a good chance you're going to turn around and go to the next project. I'm not saying CPAN sites are ugly, by the way -- but the LESS site is far more appealing, wouldn't you agree? Sure, Perl developers may be fine with the existing CPAN design. It's functional. They understand the layout. It's part of the Perl culture, etc. But marketing a project isn't just about making the existing community happy, it's about attracting new members and growing and changing to fit their needs.

I'm glad to see Sawyer X (presumably not his real name) putting out a call for help to beautify Perl projects. On a larger scale, how could the FLOSS community harness the talents of Web designers who might want to contribute to FLOSS projects or simply find projects to showcase their skills? Or perhaps provide some site templates that allow developers to simply plug in details and wind up with a prettified site?

This is a topic that has grabbed my interest not just because of the marketing FLOSS angle, which is important, but also because I've been tweaking my own site design. While it's fun, site design is not one of my core skills. I can mangle HTML just fine, but actually making things look pretty from a Web design angle... not so much one of my strengths. Better resources for site design would be greatly helpful!

You need a fire extinguisher in your kitchen. One that really works well rather than one that looks really good. Most fire extinguishers that easily put out a kitchen-type fire use a mix of chemicals that are not food safe. Cleaning up the sticky powder left after a short blast for even a small grease fire will be quite a chore. The benefit of this new Kidde extinguisher is that this regular 3-pound, high power, dry powder class B/C fire extinguisher is packed with only sodium bicarbonate, or baking powder. It will extinguish fires as well as equivalent models, but the deposit left is not only edible, but a cleaner in its own right. While testing this extinguisher in our kitchen I had no qualms in tasting the discharge: it was indeed just bicarbonate of soda. Put out the test pan fire, too.

-- Kidde FX10K
$25

Available from Amazon

Manufactured by Kidde

While successful technology entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs founded their respective companies after dropping out of college, research universities have still succeeded in fostering their own innovative technologies. Currently, however, when a professor or student develops a particularly extraordinary idea or product, the process of spinning-off the intellectual property into its own company is usually a slow and expensive process. David B. Lerner, an entrepreneur, angel investor and director of Columbia University's Venture Lab/Spin-Off program, recently proposed that universities work to reverse this trend and better facilitate startup spin-offs.

Sponsor

Some schools, like the ones we recently profiled in our list of the best entrepreneurial college programs, are doing a great job of facilitating entrepreneurship on the educational level. But as Lerner points out in his blog post Why and How Universities Should Embrace Startup Culture, most schools could benefit from revamping their spin-off practices.

"If universities wish to continue to be in the business of spinning-out game-changing companies such as Google, Netscape, Genentech, Lycos, Sun Microsystems and Cisco, they must be willing to steadily embrace the startup culture through these dedicated programs," writes Lerner on his blog.

This "startup culture" Lerner references contrasts the "transactional/legal culture" which most universities are currently stuck in, making the spin-off process painful and unattractive. Lerner points to a post by fellow entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon who writes that the Silicon Valley startup scene has become increasingly based on trust and community as opposed to the legalities and formalities universities are mired in.

Changing the culture of university tech innovation is just one of the suggestions Lerner proposes. He adds that schools should follow in the footsteps of Columbia University and create a venture lab headed by an experienced entrepreneur and investor. Along with simplifying and streamlining the spin-off process, Lerner suggests universities place a vested interest in the success of the IP that it creates.

"As an equity partner in various startups, the University must treat its portfolio as partners, not simply as licensees," writes Lerner. "This implies working with its partners to facilitate success and to back-end its compensation and up-side as much as possible."

Essentially, colleges across the nation could become their very own startup incubators. These schools should be doing everything in their power to help researchers in scientific labs uncovering new technologies or entrepreneurial go-getters in business schools to get their ideas off the ground. If their spin-off processes remain too arduous, the talented and brilliant innovators will continue to find resources outside of the university for seed funding and assistance.

As author Thomas Friedman recently wrote, the national economy would benefit from a ground surge of innovation and entrepreneurship, and universities could certainly benefit from helping lead that charge.

Photo by Flickr user Pink Sherbet Photography.

Discuss

...this is that post about the future of web publishing that I promised Charlie I would write.

As many of you probably already know, I am a writer. I write science fiction, fantasy, mystery, young adult, nonfiction (notably book reviews and criticism--which are actually two different things), short stories, novels, poetry--basically, anything that will sit still long enough for me to slap a keyboard on top of it.

As of the end of this month, I have published sixteen novels, a handful of novellas, and almost a hundred pieces of short fiction. It's been critically well received, garnered me some praise and a handful of awards, and has performed modestly well in terms of what the publishing industry refers to as "the numbers."

Like every other narrative-prose writer on the planet who does not have the covers pulled up over her head (and believe me, the temptation is enormous) I am trying to figure out how the heck to continue doing what I am good at--what I have spent twenty years learning how to do at a professional level--in the face of developing technology.

I do believe that books (both paper and electronic) are here to stay, for a long time to come. Paper books are a mature technology: they're a durable and inexpensive way in which to archive information. While modern books are not the thousand-year technology that a medieval or even Renaissance book was, they can still endure for many years undegraded. Ebooks, meanwhile, are tremendously portable, revisable, and information-dense in terms of bits per pound. They adapt admirably to multitasking--I often read on my laptop between IMs or emails, for example--and you can carry six hundred of them in your carryon as easily as one.

But ebooks are not optimized to the web, because the web can do all kinds of things that a print book cannot--and an ebook often can.

I'm currently engaged in a crowdfunded side project with a group of other SFF writers and visual artists (and a computer geek or two) that's attempting to explore some of the options for things a web-optimized written narrative can do. That narrative (what we're calling a "hyperfiction environment") is called Shadow Unit. While it exists in various places around the web (a wiki, some livejournals, some web pages linked to pieces of fiction), the launchpad is here.

We've been at it for three years now, and we've learned some very interesting things.

• A hyperfiction can be nonlinear.

So that might seem self-evident, but it's one of the most interesting things for us as writers. While the main narrative of Shadow Unit (the "episodes," a serial comprised of short stories, novellas, and (so far) two short novels) is linear, it forms a kind of scaffolding on which other shorter stories are hung. Meanwhile, the characters who maintain blogs maintain them in real time, and they are interactive--as long as participants respect the fourth wall and their privileged information, and engage with the characters as if they were real people.

Which leads us to the next point:

• A hyperfiction can be interactive

Self-evident, right? But tricky. The people playing along have to be willing to separate their in-character and out-of-character knowledge, just as they would in a roll-playing game. But if they are willing to do that, it allows ARG-like possibilities to emerge. There are several instances in Shadow Unit where the narrative (which sometimes happens in real time in the stories as well as the blogs) was significantly affected by things the fans did or information that they provided to the characters.

• A hyperfiction can be multimedia.

Shadow Unit has not exploited this particular element particularly well. We've got some music, some web pages, some visual art (and we're working on more), but most of the people involved in the project are writers first, so we've not been as successful at broadening out into things like comics, video, and audio as we would have liked.

• A hyperfiction can be confusing.

It's easy as heck to lose people in the corners. Hyperfiction by its nature is sprawling--it rewards curiosity, investigation, peering into corners. (Reading dozens of blog comment threads for scraps of narrative, for example, is much easier at the beginning of a five-year narrative run than the end.)

It will help, in the future, to develop protocols for mapping hyperfictions (a sort of table of contents, perhaps, graphically represented in the form of a web? Shadow Unit has done this with a "suggested reading order" page on the wiki, but experience has revealed this to be helpful but not entirely adequate.).

On the other hand, some of the fun is the discovery, and the fan community delights in sharing their discoveries with each other, so we intentionally hide stuff in inobvious places. There's a balance to be struck between the fans who adore logic puzzles and the ones who just want to read a damned story, and accommodation must be made for both.

We do this with a BBS where (a) can show off their finds to (b).

• Fan engagement is key.

We have discovered that the more we gives the fans the keys to the enterprise, the more they enjoy it. There's a wiki, a BBS, interactive blogs--and a thriving and integrated fan community. We've creative-commonsed the whole endeavor, and fans have put together Kindle versions and programmed Shadow Unit Google widgets that sound the alert when new content appears.

• Keep the content coming.

Something new every week is ideal. Two or three times a week would be better, but we are mortal and all have other work.

Also, keep clever with the content. We've run contests (an Easter-egg hunt, a vidding contest), put up websites, mailed out boxes of goodies "from the characters" to their internet friends, run episodes in real-time day by day with blog posts that reflected the narrative as it happened, and so on.

And there's room for playfulness. One of the characters wrote a short story about his alternate life as a Texas sheriff and posted it to his livejournal for "Down The Rabbit Hole" day, as an example.

This is part of what makes hyperfiction unique and wonderful--along with the nonlinearity and interactivity. It also keeps the creators scrambling to come up with ever niftier stuff.

• Making it pay for itself?

We're donation-funded. (We decided early on not to sell advertising, but that may someday change.)

So far, we're making beer money, and the site is paying for itself, but not for our time. First season was better than second, but then, the bottom fell out of the world economy in our second year, so it's nonconclusive--and we just started our third year, which so far seems to be more on the level of the first.

Merchandise has largely been break-even so far, though we are planning dead-tree versions of the primary narrative arcs, and those should be out this year. We'll see if anybody wants them.

So we haven't cracked the number-one problem of making a living telling stories in the information era, but this was an experiment, and we're still playing with variables.

• Have a plan.

Since we're keeping an enormous number of balls in the air, it's essential that the team have a plan, that somebody or at most two somebodies be in charge of keeping track of how the narrative is adhering to that plan, and wow, is shared-calendar software a godsend.

Also, everybody has to be prepared to work together to cover crises and pitch in when something breaks.

• A hyperfection presents the opportunity for extraordinary richness.

It's astounding how real this world has become to me, and to others. Because I am not the only one writing the characters, because they have lives outside the story arc (they live in and around Washington, DC, and lately have been blogging up the storm of the century) they feel like friends to me rather than people I made up. I hear similar things from the fans--that it's a unique experience to be able to drop a fictional character an email and get a response, or to get a package from one in the snail mail.

That's the baseline so far: we have learned that this stuff is really cool. And that there's tons of unexplored potential for similar narratives out there.

Sometimes I feel that, to what hyperfiction will eventually become, Shadow Unit is the equivalent of very early television--shot like a stage play, not yet quite exploiting its medium, balancing between fish and fowl.

Which is one of the reasons, I suppose, that our mascot is the platypus. Because what we've got here is weird and curious and hard to classify, but hey, somehow it works, and I, at least, am finding it utterly fascinating to spend time working on.

No, says the dad of the boy in question. Here’s the story: Boy #1, age 14, had a girlfriend who sent him a nude picture of herself. Then he and the girl broke up and he, repulsively, forwarded the photo to kids at three other schools. It seems that some of the kids who got the [...]

SourceForge, the world's largest open source software development website, has backed off a widely unpopular, end-of-January decision that had banned entire countries from accessing the site's vast assortment of open-source software projects. In a blog post yesterday, SourceForge announced that it would discontinue its blanket ban, which was done using automatic IP blocking.

The new policy puts the responsibility for restricting access to certain projects in the hands of project administrators.

Sponsor

According to SourceForge's original statement, certain countries were banned as a way to come into compliance with US law. The IP ban had affected users from a number of countries, including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria.

Under the site's new policy, the most restrictive settings will be set as default, leaving the impetus to change who can access a project, and from where, up to the project administrator.

"Our action provoked a strong, angry reaction from those it affected and from the community at large," reads the blog post. "We recognize that, for some people, the recent site changes called into question whether your support of us is justified. The changes that we deployed today are intended to empower our projects and reward your continued trust."

It will now be up to the administrator to determine that their project can be exported and how access might be restricted according to "the Denied Persons List and the Entity List, and other lists issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security," which SourceForge identified in its original decision.

While this opens the doors back up to users in a number of countries, we can only wonder what type of problems project administrators might run into now. Is this an admirable move or is it like a news organization not backing up its reporters? Instead of making a statement about US laws and how they might apply to the open-source movement, SourceForge is instead saying it will go with the flow and leave any stance-taking up to its users.

Right now, all projects remain restricted by default, so we'll have to wait and see if the open-source community rallies behind their stated outrage and opens up the projects en masse, or if it cowers behind uncertainty over US export laws.

Discuss

Our story so far:  Security expert Frank Adversego comes under suspicion when the Library of Congress is hacked by a mysterious cracker with motives unknown and a taste for the bizarre; to protect himself, Frank had better get to the bottom of things.

Back in his cube again, Frank powered up his computer and reflected on what he’d just learned, which was both not much and a lot. Not much, in that he still had no idea who was behind the attack, or what he was trying to accomplish. But a lot because the only people targeted besides himself were George and Rick, and because only the files in one directory had been affected. That meant that what had hit the Library of Congress was no virus unleashed against Web sites generally, bent on spreading random mayhem. Instead, it was obviously an attack targeted just at the LOC. And once it had made its way through the LOC firewall, the attack had been manually controlled rather than automated.

Read the Rest Here

There are concerns in the GNOME accessibility development community about what the Oracle takeover of Sun means for the efforts led by Sun's Accessibility Project Office (APO). Orca project lead Willie Walker has been laid off and is looking for work, possibly in areas that will not allow him to continue contributing to Orca. In addition, assistive technology specialist Joanmarie Diggs has published an open letter to Oracle concerning the future of the APO and its work. "Last week, Oracle laid off two more members of Sun's already-decimated APO. One of those let go happened to be both the Orca project lead and the GNOME Accessibility project lead, Willie Walker. I truly hope this was an oversight on Oracle's part, and one that will be rectified very soon. Because if it is not, and if no other company steps forward to continue this work, the accessibility of the GNOME desktop will become the open source equivalent of an unfunded mandate, doomed ultimately to fail."

One of the issues I have with the Free Software approach is that advocates have habit of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when discussing issues that they see as in any way negative to free software.

I was reminded of this while reading Bradley M. Kuhn’s criticism of Mark Shuttleworth’s reported views on copyright assignment.

Having read the original interview with Mark, and then Bradley’s response, it is pretty clear that the two have very different perspectives on copyright assignment: Mark is speaking from the perspective of a commercial business, Bradley form that of a non-profit foundation.

The two entities have very different reasons for enforcing copyright assignment policies, and Bradley is right to point out that a potential contributor should approach a copyright assignment policy from a commercial entity with a great degree of caution.

However, the ultimate reason for enforcing copyright assignment is about control. From a vendor’s perspective the desire for control is often to produce closed versions of the code. From the FSF’s perspective the desire for control is about keeping the code, and derivatives of it, open.

However, the fact that the FSF “promises to never proprietarize its versions of the software assigned to it”, does not support Bradley’s assertion that Mark “wants to confuse us about copyright assignment so we just start signing away our software”.

This claim is especially problematic given that Mark appeared (and it must be said we are reliant on the reporting of his statements to understand what he meant by them) to be attempting to reduce confusion around copyright assignments by, if possible, introducing some sort of standardization.

This is a suggestion that deserves more consideration. However, Bradley is so busy protecting the FSF from being maligned by Mark that he completely ignores the point raised by Mark - that copyright assignment policies are confusing, complex, and potentially problematic.

As the iTWire report demonstrates, the issue of copyright assignment is not just one that impacts contributions by individual developers (which is a common way of looking at it) but also of contributions from employees of Canonical to projects led by the likes of MySQL, Zope, Novell, Red Hat, Intel and others.

As previously noted, Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, and with it MySQL, has highlighted the issue of copyright control in encouraging/restricting community development in vendor-led development projects and providing acquirers with the potential to close an open source project.

Clearly, the issue is not as problematic for non-profit foundation-led projects, but the issue of copyright assignment needs more thoughtful assessment than a response that amounts to “non-profit=good, for-profit=bad”.

For more considered analysis of the issue of copyright assignment see:
Dave Neary: Copyright assignment and other barriers to entry
CAOS Theory: On the importance of copyright assignment
Daniel Chalef: OSBC, Community Engagement and Contributor Agreements
Michael Meeks: Some thoughts on Copyright Assignment
Tarus Balog: More on Copyright Assignment

My research supervisor is chairing the ACM Hypertext conference that will be held in Toronto from June 13 to 16, 2010. The conference focuses on linking and interconnectivity, and will have sessions on Web 2.0, social computing, and the semantic web. Tracks:

• Social computing
• Adaptive hypermedia and applications
• Hypertext in education and communications

The deadline for paper submissions is February 14.

ACM Hypertext2010

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

ACM Hypertext conference in Toronto this June; paper deadline Feb 14

Greetings! As Charlie mentioned in the exceedingly cute robot post, I am Elizabeth Bear, and I will be helping keep this space active while he's visiting my native New England. I told him I was going to blog on publishing and futurism and futuristic publishing...

<.< **looks shifty** >.>

...but by now he's safely over the North Atlantic, and we can party.

Just remember the kick the empties under the couch before he lands.

...Okay, no, I really am going to behave. But the publishing post is going to come in a bit, after I tell you how virtuous I am, because I come bearing... chocolate.

I am so virtuous that I spent the morning making "brownies" out of black beans, good chocolate, agave nectar, and ground-up walnuts, because I am on this refined-carb restriction and woman does not live by brown rice alone. They're actually pretty good--not vegan, but safe-ish for diabetics and celiac sufferers. The base recipe is here, but I don't mess around with all the fussiness--I just melt the chocolate and butter, puree the beans and walnuts in the food processor, and then add the other ingredients one at a time until it makes a smooth paste, which I then panify and bake.

I sub in black cocoa powder for the espresso, and use about twice as much vanilla extract as the recipe calls for. And a good shot of chocolate liqueur. Ahem. What? It cooks out. Mostly....

Tasty and high-protein, which is what I'm after. They make good energy bars for caving, climbing, and long hikes, though they do smush.

Kobie's hack solves two problems at once -- mess and babyproofing:

My daughters have recently discovered the delight of playing with HAMA beads (also known as Perler beads or fuse beads). This is small beads that you stack in a pattern and then iron to form a picture. When they started this hobby my middle daughter was four and rather clumsy so we were always picking more beads up from the floor than off the table. Having a 1 year-old didn't make this very safe. I happened on my roasting tray and gave this to her in a moment of genius and problem solved! She now works with the beads in the tray so we now have virtually no mess! This also works for collage making, play dough or any other games or hobbies that have tiny bits needing to be contained.

Yes! We happened upon this hack when my son got one of those million-part LEGO sets as a birthday gift. We used a cookie sheet, and, eventually, found some spare trays which we now just store with the LEGOs. Good use for disposable foil or plastic trays as well.

Expand this hack to any messy or small-parts activity: sand play, small jigsaw puzzles, even messy marker drawing and eating (keeps stuff off the table better than a placemat).

If you haven't been totally tracking AUSD's Master Plan process, tomorrow night's Board of Education meeting would be a good time to catch up. Superintendent Kirsten Vital will be giving a presentation on the district's proposed plan (you can read a draft of the full version here or flip through...

What important Web browsing feature is sorely missing from mobile Safari, the iPhone's built-in browser? If you're like us, you probably said the ability to search for text within a Web page. We're accustomed to using this feature in the grown-up Web browsers on our desktop and laptop machines, but sadly, it's lacking when we switch over to the mini-browser built into our mobile phone.

Until now, that is. In yet another case of "there's an app for that," there is, in fact, a new iPhone application that adds the "find within a page" feature to the iPhone browser. And it's well worth the $0.99 fee to finally have this function at our disposal again.

Sponsor

Find in Page for iPhone

The application "Find in Page" (iTunes URL), which was released last month in the iTunes App Store, is essentially a browser bookmarklet that adds an extra feature to mobile Safari. Not only does "Find in Page" locate all instances of a word within the displayed Web page upon launch, it also counts them, highlights them and lets you move from once instance to the next (and back again) by tapping arrow buttons. Of course, there are other free bookmarklets out there that provide similar functionality, but this one feels very much like a part of mobile Safari itself. It feels built-in.

The key differentiating factor that makes this pseudo plugin stand out from the rest is the semi-transparent toolbar that appears at the bottom of the screen once the bookmarklet is activated. From here, you can access the arrow buttons, word count information and you can pull up the search window again if you want to edit your current search or start a new one. Also, if you perform multiple searches, you can do so without having to reload the page - a definite time-saver. Finally, an "X" button closes the toolbar when you're finished.

Although this small application may not sound as exciting as a revolutionary new feed reader or a brand-new interface for Facebook, it's arguably going to be one of the most useful applications you've ever installed on your iPhone. For that reason, we think it's well worth the $0.99 the developer is charging for the app. We've certainly paid far more for applications we've used much less than this. However, for those of you who balk at paying anything for apps, especially for ones that are essentially just a bit of code, you'll be happy to know that a free "lite" version of this tool will be coming mid-month. Stay tuned to the App Store for its release. Otherwise, you can grab the paid version here.

Discuss

ComputerWorld reports on the outcome of the charity auction at linux.conf.au. "A $12,750 donation from Linux Australia on the night brought the total funds raised for the air rescue service to more than $33,000. [...] 'Free open source software is founded on generosity and these supporters have certainly taken that value to heart,' Life Flight Trust CEO David Irving said in a statement. 'The funds raised will enable 13 people to receive emergency flights, which is a great outcome for the community.'"

So, about that who “Orange revolution” thing…:

(CNN) — In a remarkable comeback, former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich seemed set Monday to become the president of Ukraine — five years after he was ousted in a populist pro-Western uprising dubbed the “Orange Revolution.”

With more than 98 percent of the ballots processed, Yanukovich had won 48.60 percent of the votes.

Because our current political reality seems pathologically incapable of looking at past Important Things and comparing predictions then to today, I have to wonder what everyone who was talking about Ukraine (including similarly clueless people like myself) five years would make of this?  I mean, I have to admit that at the time I thought it was pretty amazing, and if someone told me that the very guy who got kicked out would be back in power in only five years, I don’t think I would’ve believed them.

What does this mean?  It doesn’t help that I know literally nothing about Ukraine, except where it is on the map and that it’s hard to hold on to in Risk.  Is this proof that revolutions can’t sustain being in charge?  That previous authority figures can change, or perhaps just subvert the electoral process more transparently?  I certainly don’t know.  Insert quote about it “being too early to tell about the French revolution” here.  But I guess I should get with the program.  This is so last decade’s revolution.  All the cool kids moved on to Lebanon and Iran after that.  Green is a much cooler color than Orange anyway…

Edit 1: The one thing I can categorically endorse is the association of colors with revolutions.  I think it should be made mandatory, so that in a few years we have to dig into the obscure crayola colors to describe the rebellion in Albania.  Long live the Puce Revolution.

Edit 2: What is super double-plus ironic is that the international CNN.com has this story running parallel to “Iran Marks Revolution Anniversary.”

Amazon's taken $50 of several models of Britax car seats, which translates to about 15-20% off the regular price. In my opinion, Britax is worth the investment -- both of my kids rode in their convertible seats for years.

Imagine that you want to sue someone for what they wrote, anonymously, in a web-based online forum. To succeed, you'll first have to figure out who they really are. How hard is that task? It's a question that Harlan Yu, Ed Felten, and I have been kicking around for several months. We've come to some tentative answers that surprised us, and that may surprise you.

Until recently, I thought the picture was very grim for would-be plaintiffs, writing that it should be simple for "even a non-technical Internet user to engage in effectively untraceable speech online." I still think it's feasible for most users, if they make enough effort, to remain anonymous despite any level of scrutiny they are practically likely to face. But in recent months, as Harlan, Ed, and I have discussed this issue, we've started to see a flip side to the coin: In many situations, it may be far easier to unmask apparently anonymous online speakers than they, I, or many others in the policy community have appreciated. Today, I'll tell a story that helps explain what I mean.

Anonymous online speech is a mixed bag: it includes some high value speech such as political dissent in repressive regimes, some dreck we happily tolerate on First Amendment grounds, and some material that violates the laws of many jurisdictions, including child pornography and defamatory speech. For purposes of this discussion, let's focus on cases like the recent AutoAdmit controversy, in which a plaintiff wishes to bring a defamation suit against an anonymous or pseudonymous poster to a web based discussion forum. I'll assume, as in the AutoAdmit suit, that the plaintiff has at least a facially plausible legal claim, so that if everyone's identity were clear, it would also be clear that the plaintiff would have the legal option to bring a defamation suit. In the online context, these are usually what's called "John Doe" suits, because the plaintiff's lawyer does not know the name of the defendant in the suit, and must use "John Doe" as a stand in name for the defendant. After filing a John Doe suit, the plaintiff's lawyer can use subpoenas to force third parties to reveal information that might help identify the John Doe defendant.

In situations like these, if a plaintiff's lawyer cannot otherwise determine who the poster is, the lawyer will typically subpoena the forum web site, seeking the IP address of the anonymous poster. Many widely used web based discussion systems, including for example the popular Wordpress blogging platform, routinely log the IP addresses of commenters. If the web site is able to provide an IP address for the source of the allegedly defamatory comment, the lawyer will do a reverse lookup, a WHOIS search, or both, on that IP address, hoping to discover that the IP address belongs to a residential ISP or another organization that maintains detailed information about its individual users. If the IP address does turn out to correspond to a residential ISP -- rather than, say, to an open wifi hub at a coffee shop or library -- then the lawyer will issue a second subpoena, asking the ISP to reveal the account details of the user who was using that IP address at the time it was used to transmit the potentially defamatory comment. This is known as a "subpoena chain" because it involves two subpoenas (one to the web site, and a second one, based on the results of the first, to the ISP).

Of course, in many cases, this method won't work. The forum web site may not have logged the commenter's IP address. Or, even if an address is available, it might not be readily traceable back to an ISP account: the anonymous commenter may been using an anonymization tool like Tor to hide his address. Or he may have been coming online from a coffee shop or similarly public place (which typically will not have logged information about its transient users). Or, even if he reached the web forum directly from his own ISP, that ISP might be located in a foreign jurisdiction, beyond the reach of an American lawyer's usual legal tools.

Is this a dead end for the plaintiff's lawyer, who wants to identify John Doe? Probably not. There are a range of other parties, not yet part of our story, who might have information that could help identify John Doe. When it comes to the AutoAdmit site, one of these parties is StatCounter.com, a web traffic measurement service that AutoAdmit uses to keep track of trends in its traffic over time.

At the moment I am writing this post, anyone can verify that AutoAdmit uses StatCounter by visiting AutoAdmit.com and choosing "View Source" from the web browser menu. The first screenfull of web page code that comes up includes a block of text helpfully labeled "StatCounter Code," which in turn runs a small piece of javascript that places a personalized StatCounter cookie on the machine of every user who visits AutoAdmit, or else (if one is already present) detects and records exactly which cookie it is. That's how StatCounter can tell which visitors to AutoAdmit.com are new, which ones are returning, and which pages on the site are of greatest interest to new and returning users. StatCounter is in a position to track not only each user, but also each page, and each visit by a user to a certain page, over time. This includes not only the home page, but also the particular web page for each discussion "thread" on the site. Moreover, each post (even if anonymous) is marked with the time it was posted, down to the minute. So the plaintiff's lawyer in our story could go to StatCounter, and ask only about visits to the particular thread where the relevant message was posted. If the post went up at 6:03 p.m. on a certain date, the lawyer could ask StatCounter, "What if anything do you know about the person who visited this web page at 6:03 p.m. on this date?" Of course, if John Doe's browser is configured to refuse cookies, he wouldn't be trackable. But most web based discussion sites, including AutoAdmit, rely on cookies to let people log in to their pseudonymous accounts in order to post comments in the first place. In any case, the web is much less convenient place without cookies, and as a practical matter most users do allow them.

In fact, the lawyer may be able to do better still: The anonymous commenter will have accessed the page at least twice -- once to view the discussion as it stood before he took part, and again after clicking the button to add his own post to the mix. If StatCounter recorded both visits, as it very likely would have, then it becomes even easier to tie the anonymous commenter to his StatCounter cookie (and to whatever browsing history StatCounter has associated with that cookie).

There are a huge number of things to discuss here, and we'll tackle several in the coming days. What would a web analytics provider like StatCounter know? Likely answers include IP addresses, times, and durations for the anonymous commenter's previous visits to AutoAdmit. What about other, similar services, used by other sites? What about "beacons" that simply and silently collect data about users, and pay webmasters for the privilege? What about behavioral advertisers, whose business model involves tracking users across multiple sites and developing knowledge of their browsing habits and interests? What about content distribution networks? How would this picture change if John Doe were taking affirmative steps, such as using Tor, to obfuscate his identity?

These are some of the questions that we'll try to address in future posts.

Pledge to blog in celebration of Ada Lovelace Day

Work

• [/] Revise wiki structure
• [X] Follow up on lessons learned
• Also: Coordinated regarding logo
• Explored archetype analysis spreadsheet – understand it better now
• Created archetype presentation for an upcoming workshop
• Created Idea Lab for another upcoming workshop
• Documented Idea Lab preparation
• Set up community for industry maestros
• Gave a new team member the overview of how information was organized; documented this for the team
• Posted follow-up/analysis of  backchannel conversation from microblogging talk
• Had fun documenting things right before people needed them
• Signed up for the Art of Marketing seminar

Relationships

• [X] Book wedding chambers
• [X] Try out restaurants – looked at 12 restaurants!
• [/] Book reception
• [/] Look for photographers / videographers – decided against wedding photography package, will go for family portraits instead
• [/] Look for cheongsam (there’s a nice one for $75, but it’s probably available for cheaper)  – may opt for simple red dress or brocade jacket
• [  ] Start collecting guest addresses – will go for small wedding instead
• [  ] Send care package
• [  ] Plan February tea party
• [  ] Send thank-you notes
• Also: Met up with Quinn while she was in town
• Helped J- with her homework
• Chatted with Jeff Widman about business, life, virtual assistance
• Ordered book for mom

Life

• [  ] Group Siargao pictures into a story
• [/] Plan crafts
• Also: Had regular eye checkup, ordered glasses
• Made orange marmalade
• Sewed a number of zippered pouches
• Made a little felt case for my iPod
• Bought two pairs of jeans (it’s about time…)
• Read lots of books
• Stocked up on zippers and cloth

The week went by so quickly. I postponed a number of items on my task list so that I didn’t go crazy trying to fit everything in. At work, I prioritized supporting upcoming engagements and improving our process documentation. One of our new team members was impressed by the way we’d written down lots of stuff – hooray. Outside work, I focused on planning the wedding and on exploring crafts.

PLANS FOR NEXT WEEK:

Work

• [  ] Support upcoming workshops by setting up Idea Labs and doing archetype presentations
• [  ] Braindump more of what I know at work
• [  ] Organize teleconference for people working in my neighborhood
• [  ] Give “Shy Connector” presentation to WITI audience

Relationships

• [  ] Try another restaurant
• [  ] Check out portrait photographers
• [  ] Hand-write invitations and include in care package

Life

• [  ] Sew more zippered pouches
• [  ] Sew wrap-around zippered pouch
• [  ] Work on Siargao scrapbook, really
• [  ] Send invitations for February tea party (end of month-ish?)

Post from: sacha chua :: enterprise 2.0 consultant, storyteller, geek. Check out my blog for tips on managing virtual assistants, Drupal, and other topics!

Weekly review: Week ending February 7, 2010

Talk of Euro abandonment would trigger an immediate run on Greek banks, sending the country into an even deeper hole.  Who wants a Euro deposit to be converted into a drachma deposit?

You could imagine keeping current Euro-denominated deposits and adding new drachmas to the system, circulating at a flexible exchange rate.  That still might trigger a bank run (who expects the parallel currencies to last forever?).  Furthermore the new drachmas would bring seigniorage only if the law forces their overvaluation in some manner; refer back to the earlier discussion of the bank run.

You could imagine a surprise freeze on all bank deposits, thereby preventing an immediate bank run but leading to a later bank run.  Plus in the meantime there is no working banking system.  And if this doesn't come as a true surprise, you end up with the immediate bank run.

What is the chance of a bank run very soon -- if only driven by "sunspots" -- thereby forcing the Greek government to suspend redemption and devalue those deposits, effectively turning them back into drachmas?

Looking to history, there are plenty of countries which break pegs or leave currency zones.  But they all seem poor enough, banana republic enough, or insulated from "currency competition" more than a new Greek drachma would be insulated from competition with Euro-denominated banking.

Have I mentioned that currency substitution models do not in general imply stability or well-behaved quantity theory relations?

Can you see any coherent scenarios in which Greece (or other EU countries) can leave the Eurozone?  The forcing, immediate bank run is the only option I see and that is not a pretty one.  It also implies that the "policy decision" is up to Greek account holders and not up to the Greek government.  At best, the Greek government is making decisions about the fiscal side of the equation.

Are the nominal interest rates rising on Euro-denominated accounts in Greek banks?  (Are they allowed to rise?)  That is one good barometer for Greek depositor discontent.

If our attempts at getting such simple information as bus schedules or account balances from automated voice recognition systems are any indication, then we imagine Google has a lot of work to do in its latest endeavor - real-time, spoken-language translation.

According to the the Times in the UK, Google is working on developing software for a mobile phone that would translate what you were saying into the language of the speaker on the other end of the line, and vice versa.

Sponsor

As you may have noticed, Google already has a hand in the translation business, with its Web page translation service. Google Translate currently translates between 52 languages, which includes a number of languages with completely different alphabets.

The Times spoke with Franz Och, head of Google's translation services, who said that this new service should be up and running and would "work reasonably well in a few years' time."

"Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch," said Och. "But recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you."

Och is referring to the fact that the software would have the opportunity to learn your accent, dialect and general manner of speaking over time, becoming more accurate. But we can only imagine the difficulty of the task ahead, especially with languages such as Mandarin or Cantonese, which are tonally based. In Mandarin, for example, the word "ma" can have four different meanings according to the tone used. If the speaker uses the first tone, a constant high pitch, then the word means "mother". If they use the third tone, a dropping then rising pitch, however, the meaning changes to "horse".

The fun doesn't stop there, the Times article points out, as handling the vast number of accents and dialects is also an immense task. Much like the Web-based translation that Google does, though, the system would become more accurate over time, essentially learning from its experience.

We hope that one of the first things it learns is not to call our new Chinese friend's mother a horse.

Discuss

Cambodia blasts Google map of disputed Thai border from Reuters reports Cambodia is the latest country upset with Google over how they draw the border on Google Maps. Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen, wrote a letter saying Google was “radically misleading,” “professionally irresponsible” and “devoid of truth and reality.” Cambodia and Thailand have military [...]

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A new survey from Retrevo finds that consumers' interest in the Apple iPad died down after they heard what the new tablet PC actually had to offer. According to the company, "not only did Apple fail to convince new buyers, it may have lost many potential buyers who now say they don't think they need an Apple tablet computer." Ouch!

While it's true that the poll results do support these findings, they contradict what tech analysts have been saying about the device's potential. With sales expectations that range anywhere from one million to six million units over the course of this year, the iPad is predicted to do quite well. So is the survey wrong? Or is it the analysts?

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iPad Reality Disappoints?

The Apple iPad has the dubious glory of being one of the most over-hyped, hotly anticipated tech products of the year. Rumors surrounding the device prior to its launch had the tablet computer offering everything from OLED to multiple cameras to an innovative multi-touch enabled back. The reality was a much simpler device that looked more like a big iPod than the revolutionary product so many had built up in their minds.

But will this let-down in expectations actually lead to fewer sales? If you believe the Retrevo survey, that could easily be the case. The percentage of consumers who had heard about the iPad but were not interested in buying one jumped from 26% prior to Apple's announcement to 52% afterwards. Also, people who claim they don't need an iPad went from 49% to 61%. That certainly sounds like bad news for Apple, doesn't it?

Survey Says: Marketing Stunt!

Well not so fast. Let's keep in mind that Retrevo likes to put out these sorts of link-baiting surveys from time to time. For example, a prior survey found that iPhone owners were materialistic and fickle people. (Who couldn't write about that?) We probably should just ignore these publicity stunts...err...surveys, but this one was begging to be shot down...or shored up, we suppose. After all, their survey phrases questions in a way that almost guarantees a negative response. Case in point: "do you need an iPad?" No one really needs an iPad. Not surprisingly, many people said "no." We need water, food, shelter, and clothing. Once our basic needs are met, we then focus on obtaining other "needs" like a job, a car, an education, etc. The iPad, however, is something we want. We already have a computer. Maybe even a computer, a netbook and an iPod or iPhone. We can't in all honesty say we need an iPad. It may seem like a simple turn of phrase, but when crafting survey questions, word choice is important.

Will You Buy an iPad?

So instead of going by Retrevo's findings, we'll ask you instead. Will you buy the iPad? Will you rush right out and get one as soon as it hits store shelves? Or will you wait patiently for iPad 2.0? Or are you not interested at all? Now's your chance to weigh in and prove Retrevo's numbers wrong...or right, as the case may be. Just answer the question in the poll below:

Discuss

So I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to write about Alameda Point until tomorrow, because even though news about the Interim City Manager sending out a Notice of Default to SunCal about their Optional Entitlement Application (OEA) was very interesting news, it could wait given that the Planning Board meeting is tonight and [...]

It's now out and my review copy has arrived; the authors are Yoram Bauman and illustrator Grady Klein.  It is the next step in economics education.  You can buy it here.

Bauman is not just a good economist he is a very good economist, with an insightful philosophical bent and the natural inclinations of an educator, in the best sense of that term.  His website is www.standupeconomist.com.

Here is Yoram (and others, including Paul Krugman) on PBS, discussing economics and humor.

Google warns Chinese copycat website: report via the AFP reports Google has sent a warning to the Chinese Google knockoff, Goojje to stop using their logo. Google said the Goojje logo is infringing on its trademark since the logo could be mistaken as an authorized Google web site. The Goojje logo is still live as [...]

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Friday afternoon saw a continuation of the ever popular "Alameda, who's minding the store?" soap opera. As reported Friday by The Island , the City of Alameda sent a letter to Suncal telling them that they were in default on the Exclusive Negotiating Agreement (ENA) for Alameda Point. However,...

Updated 1:53 p.m. Monday, February 8 Last Tuesday, Measure B took a decisive drubbing at the polls – putting the decisions about what to do with Alameda Point and whether to move forward with SunCal back into the hands of city leaders. SunCal still has an exclusive agreement with the city to negotiate a development deal [...]

Welcome to this week’s Reader Mailbag!

A note: I get enough questions to do two or three mailbags a week. I’ve considered putting a second Mailbag on Thursdays. Would this be of interest to you guys?

I recall a few months ago you were thinking seriously about cutting out all or most meat from your diet? Where did you get to with this? What was it inspired by? (I seem to remember there was a book that started you thinking about this?)

- Eve

In late 2008 to early 2009, I had a bit of a health scare that prompted me to start exercising more and eating better, a trend I followed during most of 2009. However, during the final crunch for my book, my diet and exercise regimens both went downhill. Now that the book is done, I’m putting both back into place.

I found a lot of inspiration from various books when I got started with this regimen. Two really stood out from the pack: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan (which I actually reviewed here a while back) and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

My current plan is the “vegetarian until 6 PM” plan, which bascially means eating vegetarian for breakfast, lunch, and any daytime snacks, then eating a normal dinner.

Your post on Framework and distractions reminded me of an idea I’d heard of – a media fast. To drown out the noise of life and listen to ourselves and what we value rather than media outlets. No tv, no non fiction books, no music with words, no magazines. I’ve been meaning to try it soon for mental health reasons, but it also seems like a very frugal way to spend quality time. Here is a post on it from another blog.
- Amanda

I used to do “media fasts” somewhat regularly in college through the mid-2000s. I would allow myself books, but I wouldn’t watch any television, listen to the radio, read magazines, or use the internet in any fashion. I’ve done many week-long sessions of this, with one session lasting a month.

The biggest thing I noticed is how much the advertising shocks you when you stop doing this. Ads are everywhere, even in the content we read and listen to. It’s amazing how much content is there simply for the purpose of selling you stuff. Once you see it, it becomes hard to trust a lot of the messgaes out there.

I’d love to do it again, but at this point it would require a full-on vacation from The Simple Dollar, which is difficult. With my previous work, I could still easily do my job while doing a media fast, but that’s much harder when you’re basically writing for and managing a media property.

I am currently employed, but at about 1/2 the amount I was making a year and a half ago. I was making $72,000 – which helped me pay off all credit card debt, but I got laid off in Aug. 2008. I was unemployed for about three months and then found another job making around $35,000. My only debt right now is my mortgage – around $32,000 and my school loans – around $68,000 (and also about $300 in credit card purchases from Christmas, but that will be paid off within the month.) I have depleted the majority of my savings – mostly through making purchases that I probably could’ve lived without when I first got laid off, but needless to say I have about $500 in savings right now. That’s some background so here’s where my question begins, I have been making extra payments on my mortgage – my current payment is $300 a month (the joys of small town rural life) and I’ve been paying $65 extra a week – about $260 a month. I am employed in a state job and it looks like there’s a better than average chance that with the economy I could get laid off again this summer. Should I stop making the extra payments on my mortgage (currently 7.5%) and put all of that in to savings (at maybe 1.5% interest at ING), or should I keep making the extra payments until I can no longer make them? I am currently able to put about $200-300 into savings every month.
- Sandy

I would stop the extra mortgage payments (for now) and channel the difference into personal savings for a while.

The big reason for this move is that you need an adequate emergency fund, especially given your current financial situation. An unexpected event, like a car repair or a lost job, can really derail your fairly stable situation, causing you to have to dip into the debt pool to stay above water, and that can become a downward sprial.

How much should you have? I’d suggest having enough in your account to cover three months’ worth of living expenses. Since you’re fairly confident that you’ll be laid off again this summer, I’d probably keep going beyond three months.

So, I would just channel the extra mortgage payment purely into your savings for now so that you don’t have to rely on debt if you’re laid off.

I graduated last December and was blessed to get a job in my new field that began in January. My loans come due in July but I will apply for loan forgiveness with my new job and that will leave me with about $8000 principle. What I am wondering is if it is better for me to just pay it off or make a few months payment because of my credit rating. I use two credit cards monthly but pay my balance in full and I don’t have a car payment or a mortgage. I pay bills to my family where I live but my name is not on any of the utilities. I used to live in my own place so I did have bills in my name several years ago but I have no plans to change my current living situation. I am asking because of a previous post I read where a couple saw their insurance rate increase and their credit rating decrease because they had their bills paid.
- Andy

If you have credit cards and pay the balance in full each month, you’re doing what you need to do to maintain a good credit rating. Thus, I wouldn’t worry about maintaining that rating and instead would focus on getting yourself in the best position.

The advice about maintaining a good credit rating was directed towards people that had absolutely no lines of credit for a period of seven years, at which point their credit report was blank. If you’re paying off your credit card in full each month, this doesn’t apply to you. Even just leaving the card open would suffice.

I don’t know the exact ins and outs of your situation, but debt freedom is certainly a strong path to take in any situation. If you have the financial resources to pay the whole debt off, I’d do so.

I’m a 26-year-old woman working as a part-time music teacher in a local public school district. I’m extremely lucky, because my school district is paying for my master’s degree in full! I will graduate in May from a private university with my master’s in school counseling, with zero student loan debt. However, there is a clause in my teacher’s contract that states that I must stay in my current school district for one year after finishing my degree, or else I will need to pay back half of my tuition. In other words, if I leave my job next year to pursue my career in school counseling, I will owe $24,000 (my entire degree costs my district $48,000). My question is, should I stay one more year to eliminate my debt? Or should I take on the debt, knowing that I could potentially earn $45,000 in a new job? Is it ever smart to have debt? Other information: I currently have $3,000 left on a car loan, but other than that I have zero debt to my name. No credit card debt, no other tuition debt, nothing. I enjoy reading your website, and look forward to your feedback. Thanks so much!
- Jessica

There are two big questions I would think about here. First, how much would I “earn” in total over the next year if I stayed at my current job? That would be your current salary plus $24,000. Second, what’s my ability to actually get a different job this year as well as next year?

I don’t know what you’re earning part time, but if it’s even close to $20,000 a year, I would tend to argue for staying where you are. For one, it sounds like the salary at the other job is uncertain but has the potential of $45,000 a year. In this job market, that might not be a guarantee.

For two, a bird in the hand is almost always worth two in the bush. It’s rarely a good idea to turn away from a good offer to leap into the unknown chasing a potentially great one.

I have been thinking for the past several months (maybe a year) that a career change could be in order for me. I am currently in my fifth year of teaching high school English, a career I entered because of the opportunities to make a positive difference in people’s lives. I also wanted to share my passion for reading and writing, thinking that passion would serve me well in a teaching career.

I have gotten to a point in my teaching career where every day is a struggle. I dread going to work, to the point where my weekends are spent worrying about the coming week. I feel like a sizable portion of my teaching is spent on correcting misbehaviors and trying to motivate unmotivated students. I feel like I am forcing instead of teaching. I have tried several things, many that you outlined in your post on how to energize your career, but to no avail. I have been chair of a committee at school; I volunteered to mentor a student who needs to pass a crucial state test; I have tried several new approaches in the classroom; I have talked to colleagues about ways to improve my teaching or make the experience more positive. Nothing is working. I feel like I am constantly banging my head against the wall in frustration. Also, I have a 50-minute commute each way to school, which definitely adds to these frustrations.

During this year’s Christmas break, I began to seriously consider switching careers. Many people have told me I am a talented writer, and I think that if I could find a position where I could utilize that talent while still doing work that I find meaningful I could be much more successful, or at least more happy, than I am now.

The thought of making this change scares me, but it also excites me. I feel like I have been “in a funk” for the past few years because I have been so unhappy at work, to the point where friends and family have noticed. I don’t want to say that I am depressed, because I can’t make that clinical diagnosis, but I do feel like the character in the cartoons who has the raincloud directly overhead at all time. Actually my mom emailed me at one point last year and said that she could tell I was unhappy and she supported me in any decision I would make about my career.
- Justin

You should absolutely head towards being a writer. If that’s what you’re passionate about, that’s what you should be doing.

Right now, if I were you, I would spend as much of my time as I can using my current job as a platform to get ready for the next job. Ignore the drudgery of the day-to-day at your current job. View it instead as preparation for your next career. Go home from work each night and write. Write as much as you can. Get stuff down on paper (or in bit form). Start building up a big healthy cash reserve by living as cheaply as you can.

Make your big focus right now moving towards that career you want. Fill your thoughts with it. Spend all your spare time on it. Make it your focus, and cover every base you can before making that leap.

Then, reframe your current job not as your career, but as something you do to bring in cash to support what you’re really doing. You may find, eventually, that you’re earning some from writing and can move on to a part-time position doing something else to bring in supplemental income. Soon, you might be able to do it full time.

But you have to start. Today. If you don’t, you’ll be stuck where you are now, which sounds like a really unhappy place.

I’ve been a follower of The Simple Dollar for 4 years now. I paid off $15,000 in debt incurred from starting a nonprofit and paying its bills when it couldn’t afford to, and being caught in the middle of having to pay my own bills. Your website has kept me very motivated. Discussing Your Money or Your Life and getting the book myself totally changed my financial life. I paid off my credit card debts in 3 years, with a wedding thrown in between for which we paid cash. My savings have skyrocketed, my vehicles are now paid off, and so is my very humble home.

The small nonprofit cannot afford to pay me a salary, so I work full time (in a public school system). It’s a bit of a catch-22, I need a job to pay my bills, but the nonprofit can’t afford it, so I run it after work and on the weekends. I can’t continue to do both. We just signed the lease/purchase for the property we’re on, and we’re well on our way to pay cash when the lease expires and the purchase part of the agreement kicks in. I want to plant a corn maze on a section of our property that’s physically detached from the rest of the farm. If it makes as much money as I earn on my paying job, I want out and focus on the nonprofit, which, if I could spend more time on it, would generate much more income and serve many more people. And maybe even pay a salary. I’ll need two more years to make 10 years in the school system, but I’m so incredibly unhappy that I want out sooner. The 10 year retirement income would be very minimal.

I’m totally motivated to do the cornmaze, but I’m still scared to jump. The corn maze would operate for 1.5 -2 months. Costs associated with clearing and prepping the site will come out of whatever we’ve already saved for the purchase (which I found shockingly expensive: $1,500 an acre to clear, so at this point $15,000). An 8 acre section behind us is available for $25,000 and will be needed to make the maze a decent size instead of 2 acres. We can pay cash for all of it, which will take away from our savings to purchase the property when the lease expires. I’ve discussed my plan with others in the industry, as well as the county agent, feed coop, and the general public, as well as those in education, several of whom I work with. The consensus is that it would be very well received and probably successful. I want to do this, but I’m nervous. I shouldn’t be, I have experience running a small business and have all the resources. Do I just close my eyes and take the plunge?
- Anita

From what I know about corn mazes, they wouldn’t take a lot of time to set up and run. You basically plant a field, grow the corn, then chop down a maze in the corn. You then set up a booth and charge admission.

Since you work in a public school system, you have the summer off, right? Why not just plant the field in the early spring, wait until summer, then lay the groundwork for the corn maze? You can then see first hand whether or not it earns good money. If it does, just work out the remainder of your contract with the school and go with the non-profit full time.

The big thing here is this: there are a lot of businesses that seem really good on paper that just don’t work in real life. The corn maze relies on people (customers) actually wanting to go through a corn maze. It’s often hard to tell if such a market exists in a large fashion without careful market study and, while your advice from people has probably been good advice, it’s really hard to be certain it will work. Since such a side business wouldn’t require a ton of work during the school year, why not give it a shot starting this spring, get the corn maze going in the summer, and see what happens?

I read your website almost daily and one of the themes that you discuss often is having a “big, fat emergency fund”. I certainly concur with this but how big are you thinking exactly? Here is my situation: I’m 39 years old and a single mother of two. I have a steady income and contribute the maximum allowable amount for the employer-based retirement ($16500/annually). I have maxed out the Roth IRA as well and put about $50 per month into each of my children’s 529 accounts. I am focusing more on retirement savings than my kids’ college funds thinking that there are alternate ways to pay for college and my children should contribute to their college education. In addition to the employer-based retirement plan and the Roth IRA, I put an additional $500 every pay period (26 pay periods annually) into a liquid money market account. My available liquid cash is about $31,000. The only major ongoing debt I have is a $1283/month mortgage with an interest rate of 4.625%. I should be able to pay that off in about 10 years. I pay my credit cards off in full each month.

My salary is quite stable as I work for the federal govt. However, I am thinking about a career shift to nursing next year, which will require me to go back to school full time for at least 2 years. Since I will potentially be without an income for at least 2 years, I am thinking that I should have a cash fund for at least 2 years worth of living expenses, which is about $60,000 (includes mortgage, groceries, utilities, some entertainment, childcare). So, do you think that I should use the $60,000 as my target for the emergency fund? I’m only about half way there and I’m not sure that I will be able save the additional $30,000 in available cash needed by the end of this year, even if my kids and I only eat beans and rice.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
- Tas

My general rule of thumb for emergency funds is to have 2-3 months of living expenses saved per person in your household. Thus, if you’re single, 2-3 months might cut it. If you’re married, have 4-5 months or so. If you have kids, make it last even longer than that.

It sounds like you’re probably somewhere in the ballpark with that amount right now. It’s really hard to tell without more specifics on your life.

What do you do beyond that? You have to sit down and start assessing the goals you have for your life. Do you want to live elsewhere? Do you want to travel? Do you want to support certain causes? Do you want to start a business?

These are decisions that are up to you, but once you have a great emergency fund in place, they become real questions that you have to think about.

I have a question that has several different parts. First, I’m moving this year to a new city and out on my own for the very first time. I’ll be living by myself in an apartment and I’m so excited! I would like your advice for stocking a kitchen for one who likes to cook without spending a mint. I have been given leave to shop our house and I will definitely be doing that, taking my mother’s china and so forth, but there are other things I’m going to need and I’ve started a list. I definitely intend to hit the yard sales in a major way but somethings I’d like to purchase new, like knives for instance. I remember you wrote an article about buying a new knife. I don’t want an extravagant fabulous one but neither do I want cheapie cheapo. What do you recommend and how many for a moderate cook? What other things would you recommend buying new for and what do you recommend looking for in yard sales? I really appreciate any feedback.
- Sue

For plates and flatware, you can probably find appropriate material at yard sales if you look around. A simple set can often be found on the cheap from people who have upgraded their plates and flatware.

As for pans and knives, stick with buying the minimum number of items at first and study them carefully. 95% of what I do in a kitchen in terms of cutting, for example, is done with a single knife – my chef’s knife. 90% of my kitchen cooking is done in an enameled stainless steel pot – yes, everything from frying an egg to making soup. You really don’t need fifteen different kitchen implements to do variations on the same task.

In terms of bang for the buck, I usually trust Cooks Illustrated for buying kitchen items. I would probably point you towards the three piece Fibrox set to cover all of your knife needs (between the chef’s knife and the paring knife, you probably won’t need more).

As for pots and pans, I’d trust Cooks Illustrated’s Ideal Cookware Set a la carte. I would probably just get a piece at a time – and I’d start, honestly, with the enameled French oven. We have two of those and we can pretty much cook everything in them.

If you can find items similar to what’s on that list at yard sales, good luck. Once, I found a bunch of All-Clad stainless steel stuff at a yard sale, but I didn’t have cash on hand to buy it. I asked the people to hold them for me while I went to get cash, but when I got back, they had sold it because “they didn’t know if I was really coming back.” (Needless to say, I immediately left and didn’t buy a thing from them.)

How about them Saints?
- Michael

All I have to say about the Super Bowl is this. Almost three months ago, Evan wrote in with the following question, which appeared in Mailbag #89:

Peyton Manning or Tom Brady?

My response?

Drew Brees.

I think the Saints had more to play for than the Colts did and that made all the difference in the world. New Orleans should be a fun place between now and Fat Tuesday.

Got any questions? Ask them in the comments and I may address them in a future reader mailbag.

In response to my recent posts saying journalists should insist on being paid properly for their work, several people have asked how I justify blogging for free. Good question. Easy answer: Blogging for fun and profit – or, ideally, for both – is a victimless pursuit. But it is unethical to abet the exploitation of fellow journalists by working for publishers who pay nothing or something

Thanks to reader Richard Bangert for sending along this photo of Rock Wall Wine Company’s tasting and event space in progress. Two years in the making, the 33-foot-high geodesic dome (or GeoDome) is just about open for business. The GeoDome will hold a tasting room for the nine wineries at Rock Wall and crowds of [...]