You know that scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole past all those miscellaneous chairs and birds? That same feeling of confused dread is often how users feel when they're attempting to navigate a site that has never been tested. We know that developers pour their souls into their projects. But that's also why it's sometimes difficult (and even personal) to point out the flaws. A developer has to ask, "Do I want it built my way without compromise or do I want users?" If you want to run a business, rather than spending months speculating on what you think users might want, it's sometimes best to simply ask them.
Launchly is a web application review site where developers can upload screen shots and links and ask for user advice and feedback. Released this past week, Launchly appears to be a beefier version of Feedback Army with the additional abilities to track changes and request multiple rounds of recommendations.
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The site allows developers to submit and resubmit their projects in iterations. Each iteration must be at least a week from the last one and new iterations are bumped to the top of the "New Launches" section. This placement in the "New Launches" section prompts user responses via Twitter and RSS. From here, developers gain a new round of suggestions, traffic data and social buzz aggregation. Older iterations are then stored in the "Iteration Archives" for review.
Says Minnesota-based Launchly founder Brian MacManus, "When my own launch day came, I did the typical submissions and SEO stuff but still found myself wondering what people thought of the idea and site in general. I turned to HackerNews and requested feedback there."
MacManus was thrilled with his feedback but unfortunately his post was shortly buried below a slew of other posts. He could resubmit for further discussion, but he'd lose the thread of suggestions he'd already received. In order to track his site changes and show the evolution of his own work, he created Launchly. MacManus is currently charging $40 dollars for the standard launch package and he plans to roll out two additional tiers to incorporate the added features of polls, custom sub-domains and usability testing.
The truly interesting part about this service is that it allows reviewers to see sites evolve as per their suggestions. In essence, Launchly creates a sense of ownership and site-loyalty for those who've contributed feedback. While it's too soon to say if the site will take off, it's a great way for developers to gain new insight into the projects they're often too close to. It's also a non-violent and civil way to settle team disputes and make a case for changes to stubborn executives.
Now that I've shifted to wearing my consulting hat, I'll be giving more presentations and facilitating more workshop sessions on Web 2.0, collaboration, Generation Y, and other topics. I have a couple of sessions to prepare and deliver over the next two weeks. I thought I'd take some time to "sharpen the saw" by planning how I can do this more effectively.
I need to organize frequently-needed concepts. For example, I often talk about multi-generational workplaces. Organizing key messages, case studies, and other material will make it easy for me to see at a glance which points are relevant to an intended audience and customize the presentation accordingly. A mindmap or outline is one way to do that.
I need to scan what's going on. Most of the discussions and case studies for my areas of interest appear on blogs. Investing time in expanding my reading and organizing my notes will pay off later, when I can refer back to stories and examples I've seen. I can also analyze previous presentations and discussions to look for talking points and results.
I would like to organize my presentations more effectively. I often find interesting charts or explanations in other people's slides, and I sometimes reuse my slides as well. I would like a visual way to organize those slides so that I can easily include them in presentations Microsoft Sharepoint allows Powerpoint 2007 users to organize individual slides in a slide library, but I don't have access to that, and I may move to a Linux/Mac setup soon. One thing I can do is to build a master deck of slides (possibly broken down by topic), keeping track of the provenance of borrowed slides in the speaker's notes.
The ideal scenario would be: The team tells me about an upcoming workshop. I retrieve my notes about that industry, and I do a search for new information about the company. I select some basic talking points with screenshots and case studies that they might be interested in. I put together a brief presentation designed to be a conversation-starter. I deliver this presentation, and we brainstorm scenarios or ideas. I document the results and my notes afterwards.
Okay. Bringing it back to my two upcoming workshops… For the first workshop, my role is to help the client learn more about Generation Y. We have some material around this already thanks to our work with other clients, and there are some thoughts out there as well. For the second workshop, my role is to help the client learn more about incorporating Web 2.0 features (community, rich user interfaces, etc.) into a website. They're also somewhat interested in Generation Y.
For each workshop, I need to:
perform an industry scan to find examples from their industry and related industries
review past presentations to see if there are case studies, statistics, or talking points I can reuse
Come join us for one of our semi-regular happy hours as we celebrate the Digital Revolution (while also denouncing the scourge of centralizing, totalitarian Digital Jacobinism).
All those interested in technology, the freedom of technology and technologies of freedom are welcome. We’ll be at the Science Club at 1136 19th St NW, Washington DC from 5:30-8 pm.
Post from: The Technology Liberation Front, the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters.
Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.
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Is Twitter in a position to make more acquisitions? We suspect so. It has cash but more importantly it has stock. Think of it this way: Google is afraid of Facebook and Facebook is afraid of Twitter. Would startups bend over backwards to become a part of Twitter? We suspect most would.
Some of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game.
Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already
Bit.ly is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real time click tracking to semantic analysis for topic keywords from the links that people tweet.
One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity told us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change." [Becoming the default shortener.] Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future.
Could Happen...
Tweetmeme is another fast growing Twitter analytics services that tracks sharing on the service. With another chunk of new features just added today, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could compliment Bit.ly quite well.
Twitpic is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's YFrog, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at Enjoysthin.gs, it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.
Tweepz is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out this search, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also Twazzup, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data.
Longer Shots
An iPhone app company could be a good buy for Twitter, there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be AteBits, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though.
A desktop Twitter app company could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, Tweetdeck, or it could bring Seesmic in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Seesmic is probably getting cheaper by the day (sorry!) and has some really talented people working there. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target.
Geo-location could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. Brightkite is popular and well developed, Shizzow is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data.
A semantics company could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)
Topify is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself.
FriendFeed plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment laden and highly ambitious OneRiot is a close second.) None the less, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter.
Ultimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid. A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff makes relatively simple use of its own service, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream.
Maybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen.
I jogged (yes, me, jogging!) from Tim O’Reilly’s talk to a session on immigration reform at Aspen. I was still late, so I arrived during David Kennedy’s historical perspectives on American immigration. He reminds us that, despite our myths about people coming to the US out of a love of freedom, before World War 1, 44% of immigrants to America went home. Immigration was at a historical high, which dropped sharply between the wars and after WWII. During that period of time, less than 5% of population was foreign born. We tend to think of this as “normal” in terms of our national history, but it may just have been a historical anomaly.
For the last four decades, we’ve been living under immigration reform undertaken in the Johnson administration. We’ve now got roughly 36m Americans who are foreign born - that’s less in percentage terms than we had in 1910, around 13%. Around the world, we’re a less popular destination than we were 100 years ago - then, 40% of global migrants came to the US, while now it’s about 18%. And we’re low in immigrants compared to Canada (19%) or Australia (24%).
People migrate now for the reasons they did years ago. He quotes an old Roman saying, “Where there is bread, there is my country.” The industrialization of an economy tends to send people looking for new lifestyles and often towards becoming migrants. What’s different, in part, is that so much migration is coming from one state, Mexico. There’s the possibility of a “chicano Quebec”, a cultural state within a state. And the notion of illegals is pretty new - before 1924, there really wasn’t illegal immigration to the US since migration was legal.
Alan Greenspan suggest that there are major economic imperatives to act on immigration reform. He’s careful to pull immigration into two problems - one affecting low-skilled labor, and another involving some of our most skilled jobs. In the low-skilled sector of the US economy, there’s a very strong concentration of illegal immigrants. Roughly half of this at-risk group are illegal immigrants. On the high end, 40% or more of our science PhDs are foreign born, and many of the entrepreneurs are foreign born. This is an indictment of our primary and secondary schools, which are inadequate to cope with our labor needs. Greenspan tells us that we tend to overfocus on the low-skill illegals. “If we fail on the high-skill issues, we’re going to have a very hard time reestablishing hegemony.”
Alex Aleinikoff tells us that we’re still a nation of immigrants, but that the system is basically broken. We shifted enforcement of immigration to the worksite, but we’ve got no deterrance there. In the meantime, we’ve got ossified categories of permitting skilled labor, and long backlogs in reuniting families.
We tried to fix the system a couple of years ago, with a Republican president and a Democratic congress. It failed for a set of reasons - strong opposition from the right on legalization (with rhetoric around the idea of “amnesty”), opposition from important constituencies like AFL/CIO who didn’t want a guest worker program, and very little effort to create a “theme” that got Americans to embrace the idea of immigration change.
It may be hard to work on immigration in the current environment. But we’ve got a Democratic congress and President, a recognition of the importance of the Latino vote, and an economic crisis, which can be a double-edged sword. It sounds difficult to legalize 10 to 12 million workers in a situation of 10% unemployment, but with this unemployment, illegal immigration is falling sharply.
Greenspan reminds us that we tend to argue against immigration for economic reasons. We worry that immigrants lower the salaries of American wageworkers. But academics are pointing out that these sectors of our economies are shrinking - we simply don’t have many low-education, low-wage jobs… and there’s a set of jobs we need to fill and might be in trouble if we lost our illegal migrants.
Alexander points out our odd belief that people come here undocumented to avoid paying taxes. This isn’t true, and immigrants pay payroll, real estate and sales taxes. But by legalizing immigration and linking it to taxpaying, we could turn this into a tax and law enforcement issue.
Kennedy (I think) tells a funny story from southern Arizona, a massive fence with a six mile hole in it. “It looks like border patrol by Christo.” The wall ends at the Indian reservation, which won’t let the border patrol build a wall or enforce border security.
As it turns out, walls may have a paradoxical effect. When we tighten border security, transaction costs rise. The effect? People still immigrate, but they stay… and they try to bring in their families. It’s a perverse consequence of increased border security.
We get GREAT questions, including:
- Ambassador Karim Kawar, whose biometrics firm IrisGuard uses iris scans to enforce deportation from the UAE - why is the US using this sort of technology?
- A Kansas schoolteacher wants to know how to give bilingual students more time to graduate
- A Mexican-American advisor to Calderon who points out that we need to think of the US and Mexico in dialog - we supply guns and buy drugs, and we need to take ownership of parts of our border security problems.
Pioneering technology publisher Tim O’Reilly tells us that “government as a platform” is the definition of government 2.0. To explain to a non-technical audience what this means, he explains that his company specializes in finding innovations at the edge and amplifying them, through events, publishing and market research. This involves watching alpha geeks like Rob Flickenger. Tim says he knew Wifi was important when he saw Flickenger on the roof of the O’Reilly building using a cantenna to bring Wifi to his favorite coffee shop. Similarly, they were able to anticipate web services by watching developers build screenscrapers, using other websites as data sources.
Tim helped coin the term “web 2.0″ and offers a definition of the term. “Top internet sites are built on huge databases which get better the more people participate,” This is a new paradigm - “data, not some sort of hardware, is the ‘intel inside’, the source of lock-in” to appealing platforms.
As an example of how this works, Tim points to Google Voice Search. It gets better each time we use it, learning from user input. And it coordinates three databases - speech recognition, a search database and a location database linked by the Internet into a common platform.
Innovators have begun bringing government into this new paradigm. Carl Malamud helped put the SEC online, using a small NSF grant, data from the SEC and a lot of persistence. Fifteen years later this has helped turn into a vast movement for government transparency. In the UK, Tom Steinberg founded MySociety, and introduced tools like They Work for You, which increases parliamentary transparency, and Fix My Street, which allows individuals to report potholes and ask the government to fix them. This has now been picked up by 311 services throughout the US.
Our new president appears to understand this in a deep and fundamental way. His campaign platform was a self-service organizing platform much as Craigslist is a self-service advertising platform. The question is whether we’ll actually see this in governance. Tim reminds us that “government has always been a platform for collective action,” reminding us of Ben Franklin’s quote, “We must all hang together or we will assuredly all hang seperately.” Franklin’s version of government invited lots of citizen participation, including ideas like a government matching grant - citizens could raise a certain amount of money, and government would match the funds raised.
Somehow, Tim says, we got lost and turned to “vending machine government”, a model where we put in taxes and take out services. Can we undo this, and build government that enables four types of interaction:
- Government to citizen - providing services and information to citizens
- Citizen to government - citizens report on probelms that need government assistance
- Citizen to citizen - not every problem needs to be solved by government
- Government to government - we need better cooperation within government agencies
Tim suggests that there are some lessons from the technology space that could be useful in building Government 2.0
Build open, expandable systems
The rise of the IBM PC platform had to do with the fact that anyone could build compatible hardware, or that Michael Dell could built his own low-cost machines. The web succeeded because Tim Berners-Lee allowed anyone to use his code and build their own website. This is an example of what my colleage Jonathan Zittrain calls “generativity” - the “capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions…”
In open government this might mean open, portable health records, or open data that allows competition by third parties on government contracts.
Build simple systems and let them evolve
The original sketch of Twitter, Tim shows us, was half a sheet of legal paper. The system’s incredibly simple, but there are now 11,000 applications running on top of it, written by third parties. Simple systems like the Internet Protocol can act like hourglass models - they run on a diversity of systems, and support a diversity of applications around a simple protocol.
“Complex systems built from scratch never work. You need to build a simple system and let it grow… Complex problems paradoxically require simple answers.”
Design for cooperation
The Unix operating system was built around the idea that we could join together independent programs with no more than a protocol that allows these programs to work together. This allows for a very different school of software development than in Windows, where 90,000 developers need to figure out how to work together. In Linux, thousands of loosely coordinated little groups build the system together.
The notion of governance via loosely coordinated groups is a Jeffersonian one. And a system like the Internet domain name system looks decidedly Jeffersonian (as David Post points out in his new book.) We can build complex systems, like DHS Virtual Alabama, by encouraging people with lots of data to cooperate and share and build complex maps that allow for recovery from natural disasters.
Learn from your users
Google was late to the game in mapping. But Google is used by 45% of all mashups online. That’s because when innovators started building mashups of Craigslist and Google Maps data, Google didn’t shut the door, but hired the first guy to build a mashup, and then released an API to make the task easier.
Fedspending.org was a site built by OMBWatch, an NGO funded by the Sunlight Foundation. Their tool was so good, it ended up obviating a system the government was building for much more money - the government ended up throwing out their system and using theirs instead.
Lower the barriers to experimentation
The government tends to treat projects like the Apollo 11 rocket launch: “Failure is not an option.” It should be. We fail all the time, and we need to learn from it. He quotes Edison: “I didn’t fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations that did not work.”
Much innovation comes from a single engineer within an entity like the New York Times, putting archives up on an inexpensive, rented server from Amazon. The low cost of failure made it easier to experiment.
Build a culture of measurement
“If it works, do more, if it doesn’t, stop doing it.” We need to watch how our systems succeed and fail, and build systems that respond to user stimuli. And we need good metrics which we can watch carefully. As Atul Gawande demonstrated with his recent, brilliant article on healthcare, we need to ask quesitons like “How do we measure the success of healthcare?”
Google runs auctions almost continually for it ads, taking advantage of “realtime economics”. Walmart runs a system that connects a consumer purchase to an order from a factory within 14 seconds. Realtime data is the backbome of these “living organisms, responding in realtime to stimuli.”
Throw open the doors to partners
Tim celebrates the iPhone ap store, suggesting that it worked vastly better than more controlled models for aplication development on the Blackberry or Nokia phones. Governments need to stop using tools like earmarks, sole source licensing, and no-bid contracts, which lead to a less open ecosystem.
We also need to make sure eople understand what data comes from the government. He quotes an unnamed congresscritter who asked him, “Why do we need NOAA when we’ve got weather.com?” We need to show what the government can provide and what people can build on top of it. The government launched satellites, and many companies built great GPS tools on top of it.
Tim closes with the idea that government needs to be a vehicle for collective action,
a convener first, and a problem-solver second. He references an effort in Kauai, Hawaii where local businesses faced the closure of a state park due to a washed out road. “They could protest - shaking the vending machine - but instead, they coordinated.” They brought in materials and workers and fixed the road within three days.
Fixing complex problems requires figuring out what government needs to do, what private entites can do and what coordinated citizens can do. If we build systems that allow all these behaviors, we’ll see a great deal of positive change through Government 2.0
Michael Tiemann reports on his recent trip to Brazil for FISL 10. He notes that free software adoption is growing rapidly within the Brazilian government. He also describes an effort by the Malaysian government to reward use of free software, rather than the development of it, because that can lead to multiple, competing solutions that don't necessarily solve the users' problems. In addition, he also noted a barrier to free software adoption: "On the alarm front, I heard specific confirmation of a storyline I've been following, which is that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is basically telling governments: if you want contributions/investments from us, then you'll give Microsoft cabinet-level access to inform policy, and you'll use Microsoft products. For example, donations to educational initiatives require installing and teaching Microsoft products."
I was certainly too glib. Like any security countermeasure, password masking has value. But like any countermeasure, password masking is not a panacea. And the costs of password masking need to be balanced with the benefits.
The cost is accuracy. When users don't get visual feedback from what they're typing, they're more prone to make mistakes. This is especially true with character strings that have non-standard characters and capitalization. This has several ancillary costs:
Users get pissed off.
Users are more likely to choose easy-to-type passwords, reducing both mistakes and security. Removing password masking will make people more comfortable with complicated passwords: they'll become easier to memorize and easier to use.
The benefits of password masking are more obvious:
Security from shoulder surfing. If people can't look over your shoulder and see what you're typing, they're much less likely to be able to steal your password. Yes, they can look at your fingers instead, but that's much harder than looking at the screen. Surveillance cameras are also an issue: it's easier to watch someone's fingers on recorded video, but reading a cleartext password off a screen is trivial.
In some situations, there is a trust dynamic involved. Do you type your password while your boss is standing over your shoulder watching? How about your spouse or partner? Your parent or child? Your teacher or students? At ATMs, there's a social convention of standing away from someone using the machine, but that convention doesn't apply to computers. You might not trust the person standing next to you enough to let him see your password, but don't feel comfortable telling him to look away. Password masking solves that social awkwardness.
Security from screen scraping malware. This is less of an issue; keyboard loggers are more common and unaffected by password masking. And if you have that kind of malware on your computer, you've got all sorts of problems.
A security "signal." Password masking alerts users, and I'm thinking users who aren't particularly security savvy, that passwords are a secret.
I believe that shoulder surfing isn't nearly the problem it's made out to be. One, lots of people use their computers in private, with no one looking over their shoulders. Two, personal handheld devices are used very close to the body, making shoulder surfing all that much harder. Three, it's hard to quickly and accurately memorize a random non-alphanumeric string that flashes on the screen for a second or so.
This is not to say that shoulder surfing isn't a threat. It is. And, as many readers pointed out, password masking is one of the reasons it isn't more of a threat. And the threat is greater for those who are not fluent computer users: slow typists and people who are likely to choose bad passwords. But I believe that the risks are overstated.
Password masking is definitely important on public terminals with short PINs. (I'm thinking of ATMs.) The value of the PIN is large, shoulder surfing is more common, and a four-digit PIN is easy to remember in any case.
And lastly, this problem largely disappears on the Internet on your personal computer. Most browsers include the ability to save and then automatically populate password fields, making the usability problem go away at the expense of another security problem (the security of the password becomes the security of the computer). There's a Firefox plugin that gets rid of password masking. And programs like my own Password Safe allow passwords to be cut and pasted into applications, also eliminating the usability problem.
One approach is to make it a configurable option. High-risk banking applications could turn password masking on by default; other applications could turn it off by default. Browsers in public locations could turn it on by default. I like this, but it complicates the user interface.
A reader mentioned BlackBerry's solution, which is to display each character briefly before masking it; that seems like an excellent compromise.
I, for one, would like the option. I cannot type complicated WEP keys into Windows -- twice! what's the deal with that? -- without making mistakes. I cannot type my rarely used and very complicated PGP keys without making a mistake unless I turn off password masking. That's what I was reacting to when I said "I agree."
So was I wrong? Maybe. Okay, probably. Password masking definitely improves security; many readers pointed out that they regularly use their computer in crowded environments, and rely on password masking to protect their passwords. On the other hand, password masking reduces accuracy and makes it less likely that users will choose secure and hard-to-remember passwords, I will concede that the password masking trade-off is more beneficial than I thought in my snap reaction, but also that the answer is not nearly as obvious as we have historically assumed.
There is another bill [PDF] in the SCO bankruptcy for us to go over with a fine-toothed comb, this one from Pachulski Stang, their 20th bill. There is another from Tanner [PDF]. And we have finished doing the text of the exhibits to SCO's proposed sale, and I noticed some things in the trademark list I thought I might highlight. It always pays to do these text versions. You do notice things that otherwise don't seem to stand out.
First, I notice a trademark on the list is actually dead, WEBMIN, cancelled as of January of this year, so I think it might be useful to go through that list more carefully than SCO did. Certainly a potential buyer would want to know what it is actually getting, I would think. And creditors might want to know if the sale price makes any sense.
And that's not the only odd thing.
Do I belong in an insane asylum? Or should I be on the FOMC (with
Hall, Thompson and Svensson?) Damned if I know. This blog is either
grossly overrated or grossly underrated, but it ain’t average.
I can't tell what this is for. Might be a portable night market stall (for food?). There's a generator on the tail and a light bulb hanging in the middle. Seems to be in Korea. That's all I know. (Thanks Dave Gray)
Linux Journal takes
a look at a hospital with Linux thin clients for patients. "The
happy healers at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, in conjunction with
Linux luminaries IBM and Novell, as well as the networkers at NoMachine,
have found a way to insert Linux into the lives of its patients. Rather
than blank walls and bad TV to stare at, patients in the new West Tower at
Glendale Adventist have access to the outside world, via Linux-based thin
clients available right in the patient's room. The setup utilizes servers
from IBM, the networking and compression expertise of NoMachine, and SUSE
Linux Enterprise Desktop to provide patients with access to the internet,
where they can do everything from learning about their condition and
treatment to keeping family and friends abreast of their progress via the
standard cast of internet characters: Twitter, Facebook, and the
omnipresent blogs."
Elliot Gerson of the Aspen Institute introduces a conversation titled, “Your life in a surveillance society”. The discussants are Jack Balkin, legal scholar and philosopher at Yale Law School and Admiral Mike McConnell, former director of the National Security Agency. Gerson offers examples of surveillance in our lives, including the airport, cameras to detect speeding, but also activities like Twitter. He suggests that there’s an increasing acceptance of devices and mechanisms which we might have past thought as totalitarian.
Balkin rejects the term surveillance, and breaks the term down into the collection of information (which is possible via many different means), the collation of information (because the collection of information alone isn’t all that valuable), the analysis of information and producing new information out of it. The power often comes from collation, not from collection - the fact that a man bought a pork chop isn’t very interesting until we figure out it was Rabbi Bernstein.
We’ve got more powerful tools than ever before for collection, collation, analysis and, ultimately, for control. If you have an information society where problems are solved via information, you automatically have a surveillance society. The question is who’s doing it - the government, private entities, or you and me.
McConnell suggests that money won’t work without surveillance - the ability to operate transactions around the world in under a second implicitly requires surveillance. He suggests that WalMart’s success is based on surveillance, careful watching of their supply chain. In the intelligence community, he tells us, “surveillance” is a passive term, while “reconaissance” has an active connotation, of going out and seeking information.
Balkin is asked whether government or corporate surveillance is more important. He answers, “Yes”. He notes that there’s a relationship between private companies that collate data and sell it to government entities. “When you think surveillance, you think NSA… but you should be thinking about the delivery of healthcare benefits.” We’re primed to think about government information collection as a threat, but we should be thinking more broadly about powerful actors in society. This includes Walmart and Choicepoint… but this might also include the person next to you with a cameraphone, or anyone you interact with online. We should consider “democratic surveillance”, where surveillance tools are placed in everybody’s hands. Democratic surveillance sounds much nicer, but that’s not necessarily the case.
McConnell is asked “Who watches the watchers?” He offers the truism that “we’re a nation of laws, we’re governed by the Constitution” and that oversight needs to be in the law. Asked whether we got the law right in the Patriot Act, he observes that it was passed very, very quickly and is likely to be changed at some point. But he points out that there’s been government abuse of surveillance as far back in history as we know. He reminds us of FBI surveillance of chief Justice Earl Warren under Hoover.
He looks at the complexity of our FISA laws. In 1978, at the heart of the Cold War, the structure seemed pretty easy: if it’s foreign, it’s okay to surveil, but if it’s domestic, it has to be for foreign intelligence interests and needs to be of an agent of a foreign power. But technological change forced a three-year process to change the laws to reflect technological change. That said, “we don’t even know how to think about surveillance.” As such, the danger is that “bureaucracies will define reality in their own interest”, and may prevent the changes we need in telecommmunications as a whole.
Balkin suggests that it’s hard for legislative branch to oversee surveillance. The executive branch tends to stonewall these inquiries, and so “the executive branch is where the action is.” We may therefore need checks and balances and internal policing within the executive branch on these issues.
McConnell mentions that the Navy has never initiated changes internally. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, the Navy’s football program featured a battleship and the legend, “No one has ever sunk a Navy battleship.” The Pearl Harbor attacks moved the Navy from battleships to aircraft carriers. Congressional pressure in the 1980s forced the armed forces into joint command, which made the US military the strongest in the world. With these examples, he suggests that it’s Congress’s responsibility to hold the executive responsible.
Asked a question about tradeoffs between privacy and surveillance, and the willingness of youth to sacrifice privacy, Balkin again parses a question into parts. He suggests that, if you have the benefits of an information society, these security concerns come with the services you demand. You adjust to the information sharing that comes with these new services. He mentions that feelings about privacy have a great deal to do with your age cohort: what technologies did you grow up with, and what do you use? Some of these technologies require trade-offs - Facebook requires some information sharing, but it allows people to do things they never did before. Finally, we experience “privacy myopia” when we encounter tech we don’t understand. We don’t know what GPS in our mobile phones could be used for, so we let it slide and hope that nothing bad happens.
McConnell makes the point that, to participate in the intelligence community, you need to pass a security clearance. To pass a clearance, you subject yourself to extreme surveillance and scrutiny. That work is currently done by contractors - while those contractors are under the same laws as the intelligence community, it’s potentially a concern to all of us.
The panel is asked a question about the US government’s “cybercommand”. McConnell takes ownership of the idea: “The Cybercommand was created because I recommended it.” He argues that we need the capacity to do more than just passive surveillance of bits - we need to seek ways to exploit holes in enemy systems so we can shut down their air defenses. We need to protect banks, so we need to figure out how people are attempting to break these systems and block those attacks before they happen. This need to be a function build on the NSA, McConnell argues, because we need their unique codebreaking talents. He reassures us that domestic surveillance needs to focus on international targets - domestic surveillance must be of foreign targets and needs to be warranted. But he sees a domestic role for cybercommand in supporting the department of Homeland Security. (He doesn’t address whether the militarization of cyberspace is a more appropriate paradigm than crimefighting, or an engineering paradigm of repairing holes.)
Balkin suggests that forgetting may be harder than remembering in our current digital environment. He suggests that we may not want institutions to remember forever - we may want them to have a form of institutional amnesia. He’s challenged on this point from an audience member - why would we want to forget information that could help solve a long-cold murder, for instance? Balkin’s answer involves distinguishing between different kinds of information states. Authoritarian states are information gluttons, in the sense that they want to know everything about you, and information misers, in which they don’t reveal data about their own operations. We want a democratic information state, which is an information gourmet, not a glutton. We need some government collection of data to operate social services, but we don’t want a government to know and remember everything. If it does, we want it to either forget or forgive. And we want it to be an information philanthropist, offering as much information as possible about its own operations.
n.
Lower back pain caused by sitting on an overstuffed wallet kept in a back pants pocket.
Example Citations:
Physiotherapists have coined the term 'wallet-neuropathy' for the lower back pain caused by men sitting down (such as when driving or in the office) on wallets always carried in their back trouser pocket.
The condition is a form of sciatic neuropathy, since it affects the sciatic nerve. But it's becoming so common that it has even been given other names — hip-pocket syndrome or wallet neuropathy.
—Abaidullah, "Wallets and Back Pain," Scribd, June 16, 2008
Earliest Citation:
According to experts, there's an explosion of 'wallet neuropathy' as men damage key nerves by sitting down with their wallets in their back pocket.
Take heart, chaps, there's a simple cure — get your wallet out more often.
—"Barometer," Daily Mail, January 27, 2003
Notes:
Wallet neuropathy is also called wallet neuritis, wallet sciatica, fat wallet syndrome, and hip-pocket syndrome. However, my favorite is credit carditis (presumably because the wallet is overstuffed with credit cards), which has been around since at least 1965:
"Back-pocket sciatica," caused by carry thick wallets or golf balls in the hip pocket (with a variation called "credit carditis" caused by carry a wallet [stuffed with credit cards])."
—"RQ", American Library Association Adult Services Division, 1965
Nobody else appears to have reported this - at least not anywhere I can find - but last week marked a major turning point for China's engagement with ICANN. It was probably also a major turning point in China's strategy on Internet governance.
(It's likely that some of my more China-focused and less-techie readers have never heard of ICANN - the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This California-based non-profit corporation is responsible for making sure that the Internet functions as one globally inter-operable system. Its primary job is to coordinate the global assignment of domain names and IP addresses - which turns out to be a very complicated and increasingly political job. Click here,here, here, and here for useful background.)
One reason the Chinese government disengaged and from ICANN and is now re-engaging will be familiar to China wonks: Taiwan. The issue of what it should be called. Beijing was not interested in lending any legitimacy to Taiwan's government under the pro-independence president Chen Shui-bian, and the Chen government wasn't big on compromising with Beijing either. Now it's agreed that Taiwan will officially be referred to as "Chinese Taipei" at ICANN (though the .tw designation won't change), and the two governments in the Ma Ying-jeou era are more willing to be pragmatic with one another, in cyberspace as well as in "meatspace."
The second reason for China's re-engagement with ICANN is that the Chinese government is that ICANN and China have both realized they need each other, at least for the short and medium term.
Some background (skip this paragraph if you are an Internet governance wonk): The Chinese government has long suported Internet governance reform. The fact that ICANN (founded in 1998) ultimately answers to the U.S. Department of Commerce has for most of this decade been a matter of concern to a number of governments, from China to Brazil, Iran, and the European Union. Reform proposals have ranged from ICANN "internationalization" - with supervision by multiple governments - to scrapping ICANN completely and transferring its functions to a U.N. body like the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). Arguments over ICANN's future reached a climax in 2005 during the run-up to the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, at which governments agreed there wasn't enough consensus to change the ICANN-based status quo. Instead, the Internet Governance Forum was created with a 5-year mandate to continue inter-governmental and multi-stakeholder dialogue on how the global Internet should be governed, managed, developed, and regulated in the future. That mandate will end next year. In May of this year China publicly opposed the renewal of the IGF's mandate, declaring it a costly, messy, time-wasting shop and reiterating its longstanding position that Internet governance should be in the hands of sovereign governments, not other groups. Meanwhile the Joint Project Agreement between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce expires this September. The U.S. Congress, concerned with U.S. interests, wants to keep things as they are. The European Union issued an official statement last month calling for "a more open, independent, and accountable governance of the Internet." African nations, interestingly, have shifted from supporting reform to supporting the status quo. Chinese officials have continued to express concern about a "monopoly" controlling the Internet, and have made it clear that they want to continue discussing the JPA, but I've not seen anything to indicate an official Chinese comment on the EU position or any other government's position.
According to Paul Twomey who stepped down as CEO of ICANN last week, China has not recently made public statements on ICANN and the JPA. Meanwhile he, the ICANN board, and the other members of the Governmental Advisory Committee have been working hard to make China feel comfortable engaging with ICANN. Here's what he said to me in response to my question about China's position:
In terms of the relationship with the United States government and the Joint Project Agreement, I haven't actually heard what the position of the Chinese government is but they have publicly said things in the past. But I dont think we're in anything like the bipolar situation that we had three four five six years ago, where we're sort of "ICANN love it or hate it." I don't think it's in that space anymore. I think it is, much more pragmatically, that this is an institution where there's a space for the Chinese government to participate in, that it's looking after the interests of the Chinese internet community, that they're dealing with real issues that really affect their concerns, and they're welcome. And i think that's important.
China can't afford not to engage with ICANN at this point in time. The Internet is about to undergo a huge real estate expansion and the Chinese government - along with China's domain name registrars - wants to make sure that Chinese government interests are well served as the rules and technical arrangements get laid out between now and early next year.
In 2010 ICANN will implement two big changes, and China has a big interest in how these changes are implemented. First, ICANN will soon allow anybody (who can pay the six-figure registration fee) to apply to run a "generic top-level domain" (gTLD) (Explanation for non-wonks: .com, .net, .cn, .asia, .mobi, .org, .gov, et cetera are all "top-level domains;" the word before the dot, for example "cnn" in cnn.com is called a second-level domain and that's what individuals, organizations, and companies buy when we purchase a domain name for our website. So for instance, if I was extremely rich and had the technical resources I could apply to create and operate .rebecca). So a religious organization, a political party, a company, or anybody with the resources who wants to administer a distinctive Internet address can apply to establish a new gTLD.
But that's not all. In 2010 ICANN will not only allow more gTLD's to be created, but it will also enable the creation of "internationalized" top-level domains, in non-English/non-Roman letter scripts. In other words it will for the first time be possible to have internationally accessible top-level Internet addresses in Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Thai, Japanese, and whatever other language can be input onto a computer. This is huge because it will make the Internet much more accessible to non-English speakers who have difficulty dealing with the current English-based global domain system. If we really want a truly global and multilingual Internet, having "international domain names," or IDN's as ICANN calls them, is essential. These new international top-level domains (IDN TLDs) will be divided into two categories: "country code TLDs" (ccTLDs) and "general TLDs" (gTLDs). For existing English-character ccTLD's (like .cn) each relevant country gets jurisdiction over how it is administered and the same will be the case for international ccTLD's. So .中国 will be controlled and administered the same way as .cn, and websites under that top-level domain will be subject to Chinese law. (Chinese bloggers have informed me that they stay away from .cn domain names because they lose their web address if their website is too politically controversial.) gTLD's, however, are different. ICANN's intention is that anybody anywhere in the world (with adequate resources) can apply to run a Chinese language gTLD. I asked Twomey what happens if people in, say, Canada or Australia apply to run .falungong and the Chinese-language equivalent. Here's what he said in response:
First of all our process, and the process of moving our policy forward, are neutral processes. And we have a series of objections mechanisms through which people can bring objections, one which we're still working through, which is morality or public order, which is a term that exists in international treaties. There's still a great deal of discussion including in the Government Advisory Committee about how that can possibly work, and should it even be there.... But ICANN is not in the business of the application level. We're not in the business of content. So the strings that people might put forward, were not in the buisiness of deciding whether its a good string or not. There are opportunities, but we're not in the business of saying that's a good string or a bad string. We dont like that one we like this one. And its global. The generic top level domains are global top level domains.
So, in other words, I followed up, anybody can apply to run a generic TLD in any language from anywhere? He replied:
That's right. Its a global technology. The technology doesn't recognize geographic boundaries so we support that. Now whatever governments might decide to do in terms of access or filtering is their business not ours... and we leave that.. because we are if you like the guardians of the single inter-operable internet, our community and the ISPs [internet service providers] are the people who provide the single inter-operable internet. We think it's very important that the issues of the addressing and routing system are separate from the issues of content carried on them. And so we don't comment, we dont condone, but we don't make comment upon those sort of content issues. But what we do say is: you know, if a government has a content issue, don't break the domain name system to try to fix it. Because that's like killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Finally, here's what Twomey said about jurisdiction of gTLDs:
Let's make it clear that generic top level domains, when they're created, will have contracts with ICANN. And those contracts will clearly state that the applicable law is the law of California. And they will be contracts. Right? You know, any national laws that apply to end registrations we can't comment on, but the law under which the TLD will actually operate will be the law of California.
Many of the details, however, in terms of how a government or anybody else can object to the creation of a new TLD on the grounds of "morality and public order," and under what criteria the ICANN board then comes to a final decision, have yet to be worked out. Also, in the case of multiple applicants for the same TLD, there will be some kind of process for the ICANN "community" to decide who deserves to get that particular domain. So being there at ICANN meetings is very important if you want to influence how the rules get shaped and who has rightful claim over various names. Having the ear of board members by developing a personal relationship with them is also very important, I'm told by people who currently run generic TLDs.
Then there are trademark and other issues related to who has the "right" to a particular TLD name. There is already a big fight over the extent to which brand names can be protected or reserved by companies that are worried about their trademarks being (in their view) appropriated by others. The Chinese government and Chinese companies have an interest in trademark protection not overly favoring Western business and industry on the one hand, while still protecting Chinese companies on the other, while also making sure that arbitration mechanisms are properly internationalized and not overly Western-centric. There are also concerns about who has a right to register and administer, say, .beijing or .guilin - to name a couple examples. The Chinese are also concerned that fights over trademark protection and proposed attempts by ICANN to create a new trademark arbitration body will delay the roll-out of gTLDs in general, and internationalized gTLD's in particular.
Then there are a bunch of technical issues related to this multi-lingual rollout, including an appeal by the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans among others that ICANN must change it's current rule that non-country TLD's must be 3 characters or more - given that most Chinese words are two characters in length, the three-character minimum requirement is obviously unreasonable. While the Chinese have actually already implemented Chinese-language TLD's within mainland China, they don't work outside of China. Asian ICANN participants last week repeatedly expressed frustration that it's taking too long for ICANN to move forward on this.
So there are lots of reasons why the Chinese need to engage with ICANN now, and not wait till it's restructured or its functions re-appropriated to its greater liking. Here's how Twomey put it:
First of all there's a much better understanding of what ICANN does, what it is and what it's not. I think secondly ICANN is working on issues that really are important to the internet communities of China, for instance. So particularly on the internationalized domain names and the internationalized domain names for the country codes, these are core areas of interest to the Chinese, especially to the Ministry of Information Industry and Technology. But also for the broader Chinese internet community. I'm very pleased that not only has China come back to the GAC but that there's a broad commitment in China now to have Chinese institutions and organizations participating in the ICANN context. ...ICANN is looking at the role of the GAC and what it does and how it participates. And how it interacts with the board. we've continued to have that discussion. I think it's useful that China's at the table to have that discussion.
I was a first-timer at ICANN last week, but sitting through a week of meetings, I got the distinct impression that few people expect ICANN to be radically restructured this year. Most people seemed to expect that the JPA will be renewed in some fashion for now, due to lack of consensus over an alternative. Meanwhile the Government Advisory Committee seems to be getting an expanded role, with more opportunity to lobby the interests of governments as ICANN moves forward in radically expanding the Internet's real estate. How things evolve in the longer run is harder to say, but the people running ICANN are clearly trying to make governments feel welcome to engage and work for change from within - pointing out that this is more likely to be conducive to a stable global Internet - rather than try to dismantle or radically and suddenly restructure it from the outside.
Bringing in China was likely a critical step by ICANN to ensure its own survival, at least in the short to medium term. For now, ICANN and China need each other.
Psystar has filed a Debtor's Motion to Voluntarily Dismiss Case [PDF]. They would like to leave Chapter 11, and of course that means they have to have a viable plan to present to the bankruptcy court.
They claim they have a new product that will dazzle the world and be more profitable. But they kind of had to say something like that, I think, because they already told the court in their bankruptcy petition back on May 21 that they don't make "a significant profit" on each sale of their prior products. So they couldn't just say, "Oops. This didn't work. We thought we could stay in business while in Chapter 11 without Apple being able to sue us, so we could make money while they could only grit their teeth in frustration. But they got the judge to lift the stay. So get me out of here."
They have to show the judge instead that if they leave Chapter 11, they will be able to make a profit and pay off creditors. So they have to show the court a plan for survival after they leave Chapter 11. What can they show? Something had to be different. The old business plan wasn't enough. Hence a new product announcement.
In short, bankruptcy didn't protect them from Apple the way they hoped, I surmise. Apple on June 17 prevailed on its motion to lift the bankruptcy stay on the litigation, and Psystar says it can't afford to do both the litigation and the bankruptcy. So it wants to be relieved of the bankruptcy expense. They can't get out of bankruptcy now unless the court believes they can be viable. So they announce a new product. I expect Apple will oppose and instead ask for Chapter 7. A plan based on a hope for future profits? Sounds like SCO to me.
A few months ago during a protest outside City Hall a curious onlooker passed by. While people waved their signs and chanted against the latest development proposal for Alameda Point, the onlooker slowed down his vehicle, which he moved forward and backward a couple of feet to remain relatively stationary so he could get a [...]
This is Bram's Cube, an idea I'm very fond of. It's very interesting to solve, since the middle layer and everything else can be thought of independently and solved on their own, but that scrambles the part you weren't thinking of.
My latest article for LWN explains (!) soft updates. The "(!)" is because soft updates are notoriously difficult to understand. If you go to a file systems conference and get people drunk, they will eventually confide to you that they don't really understand soft updates either.
This is a free link; if you like the article, please consider subscribing to LWN. You'll still need an account if you want to make snide comments on the article. :)
Hey, fellow armchair copyeditors, do you see anything wrong with this sentence at the Los Angeles Times website?“Two senior Los Angeles Times editors were given new responsibilities today as part of an effort to create a 24-hour newsroom serving multiple mediums.”The blunder, of course, is the inappropriate use of “mediums” as a plural of the word medium.As everyone in the media business ought to
If you're a developer, you're probably already running the version of Chrome released to the Dev channel, but many "regular folks" are hesitant to make this switch because moving from the stable release to the beta or from the beta to the dev release is a one-way conversion. You can't go back to an earlier build without re-installing Chrome. So how's another ordinary techie supposed to play around with all the cool new stuff coming to Chrome? The easiest way is to install a build of the Chromium browser side-by-side with your (stable) version of Google Chrome.
How to Install Chromium and Chrome on Your PC
First thing's first, if you haven't already installed a copy of Google Chrome on your PC, you should do so now. This new browser built on WebKit is winning converts right-and-left among the early adopter set these days, mainly for its blazing speed. From google.com/chrome you can grab the latest release or, if you're a little more daring, you can click the link to download the public beta version instead.
That was the easy part - the trickier part is installing Chromium, the open-source project that powers Google Chrome. You may have already visited the Chromium site over on Google Code in search of the download only to be confused when no obvious download link jumped out at you. Home, Docs, FAQ, Blog, Group, Terms - but no "Download." In fact, the only download link on the main page points you back to the stable version of Google Chrome. What gives?
They're probably not trying to hide the download from you, it's just a matter of knowing where to look. Developers get this but us "ordinary" tech enthusiasts may need a little assistance. You see, all the Chromium builds are all stored online at build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots. If you're a Mac or Linux user, this is where you can grab your copy, by the way.
To get the most recent one, scroll to the bottom of the page and click through to the files listed. The easiest way to install Chromium is to download the "mini_installer.exe" file. This is a simple executable that installs Chromium on your PC.
Make Chromium Extension-Ready
Once installed, there's one more step before you can begin playing around with extensions in Chromium - you need to enable them. To do so, you're either going to need to modify the Chromium shortcut or create your own new shortcut.
Windows XP
On a Windows XP computer, you can just modify the "Target" field in the file properties. To do so:
Go to C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\Application\ and locate the file called "chrome.exe."
Right-click on the file and choose "Properties." Click the "Shortcut" tab.
In the field labeled "Target" change the text to read (and yes, you need the quotes): "C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\Application\chrome.exe" -enable-extensions
Click "OK" when you're done.
Make sure this modified shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure.
Windows Vista/Windows 7
On Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can't simply modify the "Target," you have to create a new shortcut instead. To do so:
Go to C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Chromium\Application
Right-click in the white space of that folder somewhere and click "New" on the menu that appears.
Choose "Shortcut" from the menu to launch the Create Shortcut wizard.
In the window that appears, enter in the following where it asks you for the location of the item: C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Chromium\Application\chrome.exe -enable-extensions
Click "Next" then "Finish"
A new shortcut will appear in the folder. Make sure this shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure.
Launch Chromium and Install Extensions
Now that you have Chromium installed and modified, you can play with extensions. To install an extension, you simply click on the hyperlink for the extension which is usually labeled "extension_name.crx." A box will pop-up asking you to confirm, just click "OK."
Here are some extensions you can try now:
AdSweep: an add-on that hides advertising on web page you visit similar to how AdBlock works. It uses JavaScript to adjust the CSS of a page and is also available as a user script.
PageRank checker: a simple extension that shows the Google PageRank for the current web site.
Gmail Checker: One of the Chromium sample extensions that displays a toolstrip that shows how many messages are in your Gmail inbox.
Subscribe in Google Reader: Another sample extension which adds a button to the URL bar when a page has a feed that can be subscribed to. Clicking the button takes you to Google Reader.
BuildBot Monitor: A third sample extension which shows the current status of the Chromium Build Bot.
Chritter: a Chrome Twitter notifier that shows recent tweets in the tooltip
Delicious: the official alpha version of the social bookmarking extension. (Note: you may have to save the file on disk and then drag on Chrome window to trigger the install instead of just clicking on the link).
Final Note
Keep in mind that Chromium isn't going to give you the same everyday experience of using the stable version of Chrome. While playing around with it, the browser actually crashed on me a couple of times - two times too many to make it worth switching over to permanently. This may just be an issue with the particular build I installed and will be corrected in a future version, but that's what you get when you're playing with cutting-edge tech.
At least I was finally able to get my hands on the extensions and really see what they were all about. And for that, it was well worth the headaches. Extensions are incredible!
This morning at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Brian Lehrer show is being broadcast live as we act as breakfast-eating studio audience. The first guest is Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty. Lehrer introduces Pawlenty as the Republican’s Obama - young, smart, charismatic and a party leader, who was considered a front-runner for McCain’s running mate.
Pawlenty admits that he didn’t get the result he would have liked in the Coleman/Franken recount, “but the process was fair.” The problems, he says, weren’t with the voting process but with absentee ballots - rather than seeing interest groups encourage people to abuse the absentee ballot problem, he argues that we’d be better served with limited early voting.
Framing Pawlenty as a likely frontrunner against Obama, Lehrer asks how he governor thinks the President is doing. He concedes that Obama inherited a tough situation, but worries that the federal government has allowed spending to get out of control. “They’re not even trying to balance the budget anymore.” Asked whether this spending is necessary for stimulus, Pawlenty argues that most stimulus money isn’t directly benefitting the economy. Asked whether Minnesota considered refusing stimulus money, Pawlenty points out that Minnesota is 5th lowest recipient of federal money.
In reference to the future of the Republican party, Pawlenty concedes, “the Republican party’s in a rebuilding year. We need draft choices, maybe some trades…” Lehrer wonders whether the Republicans simply need some new ideas - Pawlenty’s new idea is a very old one, nuclear power.
Lehrer points out that perhaps Pawlenty’s most radical idea is “unallotments”, unilateral actions by the governor to eliminate spending approved by the legislature. “This has been aroud since 1939, and we believe we’re on solid legal ground,” he says, but concedes that there are likely to be some lawsuits from public interest groups.
Pawlenty is here to talk about educational innovation. Lehrer asks whether Minnesota would sign up to a national educational standards test that’s indexed against an international standard. Pawlenty’s hesitant about signing up, because he’s worried about federalization of education, but he concedes that there’s a problem with state-based standards. He favors a voluntary standard, not a federal mandate. Lehrer quipps, “Republicans don’t like federal standards because they’re federal. Democrats don’t like them because they’re standards.”
Te heart of Lehrer’s show is a conversation about digital natives and how a new generation is using the internet. The discussants on stage are legendary game designer Will Wright, University of Washington learning expert Dr. Patricia Kuhl and my colleague John Palfrey, author of “Born Digital”. To frame the conversation, Lehrer calls on four high school students at the Ideas Festival as visiting scholars. They tell the audience that they spend hours online a day, at least half on social networks, notably Facebook. One sees a difference between how she uses the internet - a quiet, isolated process - and how a sister from Ethiopia does, favoring personal contact over online.
Lehrer asks John Palfrey whether digital natives are a different species, as one reviewer of his book suggests. He admits that “digital natives” is an uncomfortable term, one that he and Urs Gasser tried to reclaim in the book. He argues that it’s a population, not a species - digital natives are based on access, not just on their generation. He’s especially interested in gaming, because it has a “flattening effect”, crossing socioeconomic groups.
There is, he argues, an emerging global culture of digital natives. And there are common problems for digital natives, problems of privacy and safety. Asked the impossible “a good thing or a bad thing” question, JP suggests that the internet and computers are incredibly powerful tools for creativity, enabling kids to do things that parents find literally unbelievable. On the downside, he worries that kids could get a less good education online because they don’t have navigation skills to find the information they need. This could lead to a problem of “driving a larger digital participation gap.”
Will Wright sees “a tidal wave of change” in how people are using technology, moving into a different way of thinking. Digital natives are surfing the top of the wave. Educational users know they need to be riding the wave, but might be in the middle, while others are being washed over. His games, he concedes, are influenced by a constructivist approach to education. Kids connect to the things they’ve made, and revel in the ability to create.
The students in the audience seem to agree. While none play Spore, they’ve all played Sims, and they admit that they enjoy the building creation aspects, as well as the ability of bringing digital characters into conflict.
Dr. Kuhl is asked how computer gaming is affecting learning. She mentions that there’s an enormous amount of learning that happens in informal settings, implicit learning, rather than through explicit, classroom learning. People learn an enormous amount from reading each other’s intentions - it “feeds the social brain”. Kuhl is running an experiment on language acquisition, seeing how 9 month old children learn second languages. She’s got graduate students who are native speakers of Chinese and Urdu. They play with one set of children for 12 in person sessions. Another set hears the second language on television, a third on tape. She then does brain studies to see whether brain centers are activated by the sounds or words of the language. Kids who learned in person show the same patterns as native speakers of these languages - kids who watched TV or listened to the tape showed no effect. “Under age two,” she says, “don’t put the kid in front of TV to get them into Harvard.”
The scholars in the room tell the audience that they watch almost no television - one admits to being a Top Chef fan. John Palfrey addresses the issue of multitasking, suggesting that most digital natives are watching television while doing homework and using the Internet. Palfrey tells us that “multitasking” isn’t a word kids identify with. He prefers the term “task switching”, moving rapidly between different activities. Students at Harvard Law, he tells us, are often switching between note taking, Twittering, answering email. Those who are focusing on something other than the class - checking email - don’t learn as much, where as those who are using the laptop to research and participate often learn more.
Brooke Gladstone offers a question from the audience, worrying about the lack of in-person connections in virtual environments. Dr. Kuhl acknowledges that the research isn’t definitive, but reminds us that “People need people to learn.”
Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on Techmeme, it has. Apparently, marketers are calling for Twitter to filter out spam and other adult content from the microblogging service. You know, so their all-important tweets about the products and services they're pushing don't have to share the same web space as that other nasty stuff. But fighting actual spammers is still relatively easy for an end-user: it's called the "unfollow" button.
Ironically, if anyone's to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it's the marketers themselves. They've managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead.
Sponsor
If You're Getting Real Spam, Blame Yourself
We're not sure where anyone, marketers or otherwise, get off telling Twitter that it's their responsibility to filter the content that flows through their service mainly because Twitter is already doing so. The company itself currently addresses the spam issue by providing an @spamaccount where you can report spammers and other abusers in the Twittersphere. If the account in question is indeed a spammer, Twitter boots them from the service. That sounds good to us. Simple and effective...at least for the end user. (It's probably a nightmare to deal with at Twitter HQ).
Of course, Twitter doesn't want their service overrun by spammers - no one would. However, they're probably more concerned with wasting their resources to support these fake accounts than they are with the annoyance it causes for their users. But do they have it under control? Perhaps not - fighting spam is sort of like fighting computer viruses. You block one and someone makes a new one. The same goes for spammers - kill one spammer and another appears to take his place. It's an ongoing fight, not a plague that can be wiped out overnight through some magic filter.
Besides, what you consider spam, I may consider "valuable information about a product." Probably not, but there is a grey area there that has to be taken into consideration. Some spam is out-and-out spam, but others may just be "hot deals" from a legitimate company. However, if you didn't want to see said hot deals, you might consider them spam. Still, how would you see them unless you actually followed that account to begin with? Or maybe you turned on auto-follow using a service like SocialToo? If that's the case, it's a little ridiculous for you to get annoyed when half your timeline turns into a slew of "buy this" messages - you only have yourself to blame for that.
Where Actual Spam Hurts Us
The only place that honest-to-goodness spam can really affect you on an everyday basis is not in your own personal timeline of friends' tweets, but when viewing a trending topic's stream or when doing a keyword search. In these cases, spammers hijacking a currently popular hashtag may show up in the timeline, potentially diluting the results with irrelevant information. For this reason alone, we support Twitter's spam-fighting efforts.
Even More Dangerous? "Tweet to Win"
What's actually more concerning than spam, however, is the new trend we'll call "tweet to win." Legitimate companies have begun using Twitter to promote a message - essentially an advertisement about their business's offerings. To cajole twitizens into "spamming" their followers in this way, they're offering prizes or the chance to win prizes in return. (Full disclosure: this author did this once and still regrets it).
This situation hasn't gotten out-of-hand just yet, but it seems like it's only a matter of time before it does. Because really, how many of you could resist yourselves if all of a sudden a company started giving away free Macbook Pros? Oh, apparently not too many of you because you've already spammed up trending topics today with #moonfruit. What's Moonfruit? Why, it's a company that's giving away a free Macbook Pro every day for 10 days. Is this a brilliant social media promotion (as Adam Ostrow of Mashable claims) or just a new, inventive way to junk up the twitterstream with advertisements? We think it's closer to the latter.
The only consolation in this particular case is that Moonfruit doesn't care what your tweet says, so it can just be appended to any ordinary tweet. That's not usually the case - most companies provide a message for you to re-tweet.
What's frightening about this "it's not spam, it's a message from your friend" is that it's really not. My friend isn't actually telling me that Moonfruit is this great new company they just heard about and I really have to go check them out. This isn't a word-of-mouth recommendation - my friend just wants to win a new laptop. They know this, I know this, and the company knows this. And that makes the message just as spammy to me as any other in-stream tweet from an actual spammer.
So, what can be done? Well sure, I could unfollow that so-called friend, but why would I? It's not like they do this regularly and 99% of the time, I like what they have to say. But while one day that friend is tweeting to win a Macbook, another may be tweeting to win something else. Even if only a small percentage of an ever-shifting group of my friends tweeted a promotional message every day, it would be enough to junk up my timeline.
Sadly, that's one kind of spam that Twitter can't really block. And neither can I.
Although I am a professional writer and blogger, although I keep up with the latest tech trends, although I am, might I say, something of a geek, I do not iPod. I don’t even iPhone. This is not a political nor even a religious position, it is simply the Way That It Is.
When Microsoft released the Zune, I scoffed. Until one day, I sauntered past the Zune display at a local Mega-Duper-Mart and, out of the corner of my eye, caught a glimpse of a sight so hideously ugly, so repulsive in all its aspects, that I stopped dead in my tracks. The Brown Zune. Truly glorious in its ugliness, the Brown Zune features design that puts Soviet prison designers to shame – a squat, brick-like shape sheathed in a brown exterior whose ugliness is only increased by the green highlights when the light hits the device just so.
I had to have one. And that dream came true one happy Christmas morn when I opened my present from my then-girlfriend – pure Brown Zuney goodness.
To be honest, it’s not at all a bad media player. The desktop software is pretty good, if a little resource-hungry; the sound and video are great; the device’s interface is at least as good as any other media player’s interface (yes, including iPod’s) – all in all, I’m happy with my Zune.
Except for one big thing. Although a firmware update some time ago added audiobook functionality to the Zune, in its infinite wisdom Microsoft decided they wouldn’t add it to the desktop software. Instead, Zune users need to use third-party software – Audible’s for Audible audiobooks, Overdrive for everything else – to transfer audiobooks onto the Zune. I am not an Audible member, so I haven’t really used their audiobook manager, but I do use Overdrive quite a bit. Unfortunately, it’s a little weird, especially when it comes to deleting audiobooks from your Zune.
One thing neither Microsoft nor anyone else has seen fit to make easy, though, is how to get audiobooks from non-Audible and non–Overdrive sources onto your Zune. Maybe you have an audiobook on CD that you’ve checked out of your library, or one that you own. Because of licensing issues, it can be difficult and in some cases impossible to find those files online – and in any case, why should you re-purchase an audiobook you already have in your possession, just for the “privilege” of listening to it on your Zune instead of on 18 CDs?
Now, you can rip the files and install them like any other music file, but you’d better listen straight through, because you won’t be able to resume playing from wherever you left off. You can also rip the files and edit the ID3 tags, setting the genre as”Podcast”, which will put all the files onto your Zune as a podcast, allowing you to stop and resume – but in my tests of this technique, the files came out in a random order that was useless. Since many audiobooks have tracks every 2 or 3 minutes, you can end up with hundreds of files for a long book, and searching every few minutes for the next one when you’re barreling down the freeway isn’t exactly a relaxing way to enjoy a book.
Fortunately, there is a way to make the Overdrive audiobook manager work for you and, with a little work (not a lot) you can rip audiobooks to your Zune, and remove them, quite easily. Here’s how.
Using Overdrive with Overdrive Audiobooks
The Overdrive Media Console is used most often by libraries for handling DRM’ed, time-limited audiobook downloads for their clients. My library, for instance, offers audiobooks for a three-week “Checkout”, during which the title is unavailable to other patrons. It’s not the greatest thing ever, but it’s a fair-enough compromise between publishers and rights-holders who would prefer people buy books and libraries and their patrons who are committed to the free exchange of information.
When you check out an Overdrive book, you download an ODM file to your hard drive which is opened by default with the Overdrive Media Console, which will download the actual book. Once it’s on your computer, you can listen to it in Overdrive, or transfer it to a device. To install it on your Zune, connect your Zune and then close the Zune software (which will probably open when your PC detects that the Zune is present). Now, simply select the book you want to transfer (unfortunately, Overdrive Manager cannot transfer multiple titles at the same time) and hit the “Transfer” button, which will open the Overdrive Transfer Wizard. The Transfer Wizard will find the Zune, then ask you which parts you want to transfer over—usually, you’ll select “All”, hit “Next”, and wait; when the files are all transferred over, click “Finish” to return to the Overdrive Manager.
Deleting audiobooks you’ve already put on your Zune is… well, it’s weird. If you delete the book from the Overdrive Media Console window, it deletes it from your hard drive, but not from your Zune. So don’t do that. Instead, you want to select the book and, in a stunning break with intuition, click “Transfer” as if you were going to put the book on your Zune. Wait for the Zune to be detected, then deselect all of the parts of the audiobook in the Transfer Wizard. Hit “Next” and wait for the Transfer Wizard to do it’s thing – think of it as replacing the files that are on their with the no files you want. Hit “Finish” and the audiobook is gone from your Zune.
Creating Audiobooks from Your Own Mp3s
If you have your own audiobooks that you’d like to listen to on your Zune, you’re going to have to do a little prep-work, essentially fooling Overdrive into thinking you have an “official” Overdrive audiobook. You’ll use a couple of pieces of free third-party software to make this all work.
1. Rip the Audiobook
First of all, if the audiobook isn’t already converted to mp3, you need to rip the audiobook. I use CDex for this, although you can use any ripper, even the one built into Zune. To save space on your Zune, you can greatly reduce the bitrate from what you’d use for music – the spoken voice simply isn’t all that complex. 128k is more than adequate for most audiobooks – 64k will sound perfectly good, even. You can also rip in mono, cutting the file size in half. If your mp3 convertor has a setting to optimize for speech, use it – it will make sure that the least data loss occurs in the richest parts of the human voice.
2. Merge the Files into One Big File
This step is not strictly necessary, but when it comes time to delete files (see below) you’ll be glad you did it. Use an mp3 merging program – I like mergemp3, which is free and easy to use – to combine all of the files in your audiobook into one giant mp3 file. This is much easier to work with – some long books take up 25 or more CDs, each with 10, 20, or more tracks – that’s a lot to keep track of! Using mergemp3, you just select the folder where your files are, hit “merge”, select a file name and a place to save the file, and wait a few minutes. Make sure you save the file to its own folder – this will be important in step 3.
3. Create the Guide File and Transfer with Overdrive
Now you have a great big mp3, but you don’t quite have something the Zune will recognize as an audiobook. What you need is a WAX file, which is basically the meta-information that defines the mp3 (or mp3s if you did not merge them) as an audiobook. To create this, download the Zune Overdrive Wax Creator. Before you run it, tough, go online and find a picture of your book’s cover and save it in the same folder as your ripped audiobook (make sure it’s in JPG format).
When you run the Wax Creator, it will immediately ask you to choose the folder where your audiobook’s files are stored. Find it, click next, and wait – the program will scan the folder, create a file listing all the mp3 files in the folder (which is why you want just the audiobook and the cover image in the folder), add the cover image, and open the Overdrive Transfer Wizard. Now, you can transfer the file just as you would any normal Overdrive audiobook.
Delete Audiobooks with Overdrive
What you’ll notice when you make your own audiobooks is that they don’t show up in the Overdrive Manager like “proper” Overdrive audiobooks do. And if you try to delete them the same way – by running the Transfer Wizard and opening the Wax file for your audiobook, then deselecting the files associated with it – the Transfer Wizard will give you an error.
So how do you delete your audiobooks? If you haven’t updated to version 3 of the Zune firmware, there’s a registry hack you an use to mount your Zune as a hard drive, allowing you to browse the directory structure and manually delete the files. This doesn’t work for people with up-to-date Zunes, though.
All is not lost, however – you can still fairly easily remove your audiobook files from your Zune, using Overdrive. To do so, initiate a transfer and click the “Advanced” on the screen that pops up after it’s detected your Zune. In the new screen, click the “Browse” button, which will open a new window allowing you to examine the contents of the Audiobooks folder on your Zune. Drill down to the folder containing the book you want to delete and right-click it – there’s only one option in the right-click menu, and that’s “Delete”. Select it, cancel out of the Advanced options, cancel out of the Transfer Wizard, and you’re done.
Hopefully Microsoft will add better support for audiobooks in the next version of the Zune Desktop – ripping audiobooks and listening to them on your Zune should be at least as easy as ripping music CDs to your Zune, which the Zune desktop software does automatically (it will even set that as the default action to take when you insert a CD, if you let it). Until Microsoft comes to its senses, though, it’s nice to know that you don’t have to carry a box of 26 discs and a CD player to listen to your latest audiobook. Like me, you can fly your Ugly Brown Zune with pride!
Today's Alameda Snapshot is courtesy of the Mayor's Parade website. Mayor Beverly Johnson riding in a carriage in last year's parade. Wishing everyone a happy Forth of July. Enjoy the weekend.
Not enough to do on the Island this coming fourth of July? Well, here’s two more events.
The Aeolian Yacht Club is holding a free open house and BBQ from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, one of two membership events they’ll be holding this month.
They’re promising lots of fun activities plus raffles of items donated [...]
One of Alameda Municipal Power’s continuing efforts to go green with its power came online this week: The Ox Mountain landfill in Half Moon Bay.
Working with Framingham, Mass.-based energy company Ameresco and the City of Palo Alto, they’ve built an energy plant to capture gases at the landfill and turn them into electricity. Now that [...]
A few weeks ago a friend told me about PlayBall! Alameda’s Sandlot Blog, which chronicles the glorious tenures of kids who played Rec & Park league ball at local parks in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
My friend, a onetime “park rat” himself, told me the kids used to show up, sign themselves in and play [...]
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more questionable in Washington, then along comes this (hat tip Tom).
Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper’s own reporters and editors.
This is not a joke, it was a serious plan whereby the Washington Post was set and ready to use its publisher’s home to bring together lobbyists on the one side and White House and congressional people on the other. Boy, I wish I had that kind of access. But, then again, I would have to pay a lot of money. On second thought, maybe it’s not a good deal. But, hey, if you are a health care lobbyist (the type of lobbyist this event was designed for), then you’ve got the dosh. Why not? Apparently, not every lobbyist felt that way.
The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."
To sum up, the Washington Post, which last nearly $20 million in the first quarter, has made bringing people together another proposed revenue source. In this case, it was to bring together lobbyists and government and was to be paid by the lobbyists for doing so. When some invited lobbyists felt this was a conflict of interest, Politico was able to get its hands on an invite. As a result, the Post cancelled the event.
Oh, and by the way, if you think that U.S. health care reform proposals are not heavily influenced by lobbyists, you might want to read the full account below.
IBM has announced
the release of Milepost GCC, an extension to the GCC compiler which uses
machine learning techniques to improve application performance on embedded
processors. "'Our technology automatically learns how to get the
best performance from the hardware -- whether mobile phones, desktops, or
entire systems -- the software will run faster and use less energy,' noted
Dr. Bilha Mendelson, Manager of Code Optimization Technologies at IBM
Research - Haifa. 'We opened the compiler environment so it can access
artificial intelligence and machine learning guidance to automatically
determine exactly what specific optimizations should be used and when to
apply them to ramp-up performance.'" The code can be downloaded
from the Milepost site.
Not much to say as I am in Long Weekend mode. Race, Parade, Jubilee, Fireworks, you name it, it’s happening in Alameda tomorrow.
Although, I’ve always wondered where folks would say the best place to view fireworks in Alameda is. Last year, we thought to try out Alameda Point near Hangar One, but it was a [...]
How many times have you heard stories of people who hired web firms to design and develop their web sites and either got substandard sites or the developer ran off with their money? Or what about the entrepreneur who “hired” his nephew/friend/daughter to design the site for free, and the results were disasterous and this small business owner didn’t feel comfortable offering much constructive criticism on a job done for free?
As a small business consultant, I’ve heard these stories so many times. And I go back and forth between feeling heartbroken and really angry on behalf of my clients, for what they endured before finally seeking help. That is why I decided to write this series of four articles on web sites for small business. Today, in the third article in this series, I’ll share with you my best tips for hiring a web design firm.
When you hire a web firm, your job as a savvy consumer is to make sure your web firm has the right components as well as the answers to several questions before you give them your hard-earned money. Here are some things to look for and questions to ask, as well as a few red flags to watch out for:
Look For This: A Real Business
Your web design firm should be a real business. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they need a big office and overhead. What it does mean, however, is that you should probably avoid hiring your family members, friends, and “that guy you know from church” as your web developer. You need a business relationship with your web team for many reasons, including so that you can feel comfortable negotiating, providing honest and critical feedback, and being straightforward if there’s ever a time when you aren’t happy with your firm’s work.
Don’t be afraid to ask for references. You should be able to get a couple of client names and phone numbers so you can talk to real people and get a solid feel for what it’s like to work with this team.
Look For This: A Web Site
Your web firm should have a web site — a good one. It doesn’t have to be designed in a style that you like, but generally speaking, it should have the components I talked about in my last article. Don’t let any web firm tell you that they’ve been so busy working on clients’ projects that they haven’t designed their own site. If they don’t know that a strong web site is the calling card for their business, they probably shouldn’t be designing a web site for your business.
Further, you need to see a portfolio of their previous work and it should be easy to find on their web site. Most of the porfolio sites should still be live. However, if you come across some sites have changed or that are no longer live, don’t necessarily hold that against the developer. In this economy, companies are going out of business right and left. Plus, companies often re-design their sites and may or may not use the same team to do it.
Question to Ask: What are the components that my web site should include?
If your web firm starts to answer this question without asking about your business, consider that a pretty big red flag and run the other way. There are some general components that most business web sites should have (print out my last article for easy reference), however when you’re working with a web firm, they shouldn’t answer this question unless they know more about what you do, what industry you’re in, and what you want your web site to accomplish for your business.
Question to Ask: Will you design my site from scratch or use templates?
A strong web design firm will design an original site for you. They won’t send you a site design that looks generic, or that is based on a pre-fab template. Price can be a good indicator for whether your team is using templates or original designs. If the estimate for your site is under $1,000, it’s more likely that you’re not getting an original design. However, I’ve seen several firms charge what I consider a ridiculous amount of money to provide a pre-fab template site.
Why is a template bad? You want your web site to stand out as original and distinct. Your site should be designed to carefully reflect your brand. How much can a template design represent your brand, if others around the world have the exact same web site that you have? What distinguishes you from them? Smart investing in your business makes sense, and for most businesses, investing in a solid web site that incorporates at least the elements I recommend, as well as embodies your branding, makes for a strong ROI.
Question to Ask: How will you incorporate search engine optimization principles into my site?
When you ask this question, if all they do is talk about meta tags and keywords, that’s a big red flag. If a web firm is serious about their business, they should know and understand principles of SEO and how these principles apply to the code, the copy, and all of the content of your site.
If they talk to you about using Flash for your site, ask them if that will cause any problems getting your site content indexed. Take note of how they answer this question. The actual answer is murky and complex and they shouldn’t just say, “Flash isn’t a problem for Google.”
Question to Ask: Do you work with or have a business relationship with any small business consultants?
The best web firms often have business consultants on staff or have a relationship with small business consultants who can work with clients on developing business concepts that may not have been addressed previously. For example, if a client wants a web site that reflects his/her brand, but that brand hasn’t been fully developed, it helps the web team create a better site if a small business consultant is involved.
But beware: the wrong consultant can muddy the waters, while the right consultant, one who understands both sound business principles as well as technical jargon and web lingo can often bridge the gap between developer and client, making the communication smoother and providing key contributions that make the end product much stronger.
In fact, you may want to look for a small business consultant first, before you hire the web team. A good consultant should have a relationship with designers and developers s/he’s worked with before. This is a great way to get the benefit of working with someone your consultant has already vetted, and your consultant can get better pricing than you’d get on your own. Plus, if you choose the right consultant, you can have him or her working with you and your web team as an intermediary, and s/he can head off any potential disasters, keep your team accountable, and manage the project for you so you can focus on your business.
Look For This: Pricing
Just like any other industry, there are those who will overcharge and those who try to undercut the competition. Your challenge is to find the pricing balance. If you pay too little in terms of the dollar amount for your web site, you may pay more in other ways.
Several experts suggest that you can outsource your web design to overseas developers to get a fabulous web site for a very, very low price. While there are cases where this strategy can work, you must be cautious. There are many unseen costs associated with this kind of overseas outsourcing.
First, if you don’t know how to find a reliable, high quality team overseas, you risk giving your money and/or sensitive personal information to unscrupulous vendors.
Second, when you work with overseas vendors, you may experience language barriers that are difficult to overcome. This can result in disaster for your web site. Don’t get me wrong — there are some phenomenal web firms around the world, and you can get a good price, but road to finding these firms is littered with firms that will provide shoddy work or worse.
[Note: I'm frequently asked if eLance is a good place to find a web design firm. On the whole, there are both phenomenal and terrible designers on eLance. You'll find freelancers who are excellent at what they do, folks who are just average, unscrupulous people who will do poor work and run away with your money, and people who are just starting out and using eLance as a means to providing low-cost web sites in order to build their portfolio. Like eBay, you can check ratings and reviews from former clients, but in my experience, these reviews aren't always accurate indicators of future performance. Can you get a fantastic price working through eLance? Sure. But you're taking a gamble: you may ultimately pay a higher price if you don't get what you want and can't get your money back, then have to pay another designer to fix things. My best advice for working via eLance is to use the Escrow system. Don't pay more than half upfront, and don't pay for the completed design until everything is done.]
The best solution is to work with a reputable firm with references that will take your budget into account and find high quality solutions that fit what you can afford.
Question to Ask: Can you develop my site in a content management system?
If you want to manage your site yourself without learning HTML or Dreamweaver, ask your web team if they can develop your site using a content management system. Within this framework, you should be able to manage your site, including editing, adding pages, deleting pages, and more, from virtually anywhere in the world that you can access the web via a browser.
The Most Important Thing You Should Know:
Your contact at your web firm should be able to talk to you in your language, but also be able to easily converse with the programmers. You need someone who can explain things that you don’t understand without being condescending, and make web principles you should know accessible. Customer service is paramount in the web industry, and you want someone who will return your e-mails and phone calls in a timely manner.
Keep in mind that while the design responsibilities fall squarely on the shoulders of your web design firm, you have some responsibilities as well. Next week, in the last article in this four-part series, I’ll talk about how you can help your web design firm create a phenomenal web site for your business.
Susan Baroncini-Moe started her entrepreneurial adventures with a lemonade stand. Now, Susan is the CEO of Business in Blue Jeans, dedicated to helping you turn your passions and expertise into a passive income-generating business you can run from home or anywhere in the world. Learn more at businessinbluejeans.com.
Other links:
Business in Blue Jeans BlogBusiness in Blue Jeans e-zine
We buy cloth diapers for our baby, as a greener, cheaper and healthier alternative to disposables. Several companies make cloth diapers with snaps or Velcro fasteners, but those can hit $20 apiece or more.
Flat diapers are much cheaper, and can be folded to fit any size baby, but there’s no built-in fastener. The traditional approach used to be safety pins, but it’s a daunting task to pin a diaper without stabbing the baby or yourself with the sharp point.
The Snappi diaper fastener is a rubber elongated “T” with plastic teeth at each of the three ends. The teeth hold the diaper securely, but are too short to go through the diaper and into the baby. Putting the Snappi on is about as easy as using Velcro, and taking it off is even easier. It’s simple to clean and has a lifespan of about six months.
We tried an off-brand version first, and it nearly sent us back to pins -- the teeth wouldn't hold, and the plastic bits that connect the teeth to the stretchable body of the “T” always separated from the rubber. The Snappi brand fasteners never gave us any trouble.
One of the best things about living in (or just following) Santa Barbara is reading Nick Welsh’s Angry Poodle Barbeque column each week in the Independent — one of the best free newsweeklies anywhere. This week’s column, El Corazón del Perro, is a classic. One sample:
For those of us without the heart to pursue our own dream, or even the imagination to have one, Jackson provides cold reassurance. If someone so rich, so famous, and so hugely adored could wind up so agonizingly wretched, maybe the moral of the story is that one’s bliss was never meant to be followed.
This, however, isn’t just another knock on the late Jacko. It’s a column about afterdeath effects in Santa Barbara County, which was home to Jackson through his Neverland years:
This past Tuesday, a coterie of key county executives from law enforcement, public works, fire protection, public health, planning, emergency response, and communications spent the better part of the day shuttling from one emergency meeting to the next, trying to figure out what was real and what to do about it. No less than five employees of the Sheriff’s Department spent their day fielding calls from media outlets around the world. Associated Press dispatched a reporter to stake out the County Administration Building all day. By 7 p.m., Tuesday, no actual communication had taken place between county government and the Jackson camp. Instead, Sheriff’s officials relied upon contacts they have with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department for whatever vague rumors and rumblings they could get. Somehow through this opaque and osmotic chain of communication, county officials are hoping to persuade the Jackson clan to call it off, if in fact it was they who started something in the first place.
Some in the Sheriff’s Department expressed confidence that the whole thing has been an exceptionally expensive and elaborate fire drill. Personally, I like the idea that the whole thing is a big fake-out, an angry practical joke on the county that prosecuted Jackson. When Paul McCartney’s former wife, Linda McCartney, died several years ago, I remember how rumors were strategically planted that she died in Santa Barbara County. In fact, she did not. The County Coroner complained he spent so much time fielding media calls that he couldn’t get any work done. Cadavers, he said, were piling up in his coolers like firewood. Ultimately, we would discover the whole thing was an elaborate dodge so that the McCartney clan could grieve unmolested by the paparazzi. But not before Santa Barbarans — ever willing to embrace the rich and famous, even if they never lived here — held a solemn and tearful candlelight vigil at the County Courthouse’s Sunken Gardens.
Some of the worries in the piece are stale now (a Neverland funeral appears unlikely), but it’s still a good read.
It’s not really a surprise or even news that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) confirmed yesterday it was formally investigating the terms of the Google Book Search settlement. This was known as far back as April and essentially confirmed last month by various publications reporting that formal requests (called “civil investigative demands”) had been [...]
In a discussion yesterday at Daily Kos, one commenter – we’ll presume he or she is, as self-described, Honduran or of Honduran descent – typed the following words:
“You obviously do not know us. We may be a poor country but we are very proud and will not be pushed around, even by the ‘great colossus to the North.’ Remember, we went to war over a soccer game...
“Zelaya has violated the Constitution. The term limits of the Presidency are not subject to referenda and Mr. Insulza will learn something about our Constitution when he visits Honduras.”
This comment is fairly representative of many similar ones across the Internet. And it is instructive as to the attitude of what I call the Oligarch Diaspora that drives the deep disconnect between how coup defenders see themselves and how everybody else sees them.
Note the emphatic uses, in the comment, of the words, “we” and “us.”
“You don’t know us… We are very proud… We went to war over a soccer game.”
It’s as if the commenter personally was a combatant in the brief Honduras-El Salvador “Soccer War” of 1969, which I very much doubt. (Interestingly, the intervention of the Organization of American States, or OAS, was required to bring that conflict, which had no military victor, to an end).
And when OAS chairman José Miguel Insulza arrives today in Tegucigalpa for the last-ditch diplomatic effort to persuade the Honduran coup plotters to stand down and let democracy resume with its elected president restored, the attitude expressed is “Mr. Insulza will learn something about our Constitution when he visits Honduras.”
The Honduran Constitution of 1982 is a series of 375 Articles – most of them just a sentence or two long - divided into seven sections. It has been amended 22 times since its enactment, and it is the country’s twelfth constitution since 1838.
In that light, the kernel of the coup’s charges against President Zelaya – that his efforts to convene a Constitutional Convention (“Constituent Assembly”) were somehow illegal – are bizarrely extreme in a land where the Constitution already gets rewritten and amended with such rapid-fire frequency.
My point is that it doesn’t require any kind of divine birthright or special genetics to read and understand that document. In fact, two non-Hondurans, North American professor Greg Weeks (“Honduras: Summing Up Some Basic Points”) and Salvadoran attorney Alberto Valiente Thorensen ("Why Zelaya's Actions Were Legal") have offered, so far, the most astute analyses of how the Constitution applies to the current crisis in Honduras.
Attorney Insulza – widely respected throughout the world for his diplomatic skills and intellectual toughness – is not someone who would have any problem at all reading and analyzing the Honduran Constitution as it applies to the current crisis. The suggestion that he has something to “learn” about the document that can only be provided to him by those the commenter calls “us” reveals more about the commenter than the Constitution.
Insulza, part of the Allende government in Chile in 1973 when it was deposed by military coup, who later spent years of exile in Mexico, could inform many throughout the world, including in Honduras, about the nature of coups d’etat from his unique personal experience. Historic events like that – unlike legal documents – are more difficult to understand without direct lived experience. But, no, coup defenders in Honduras largely view his travels to Tegucigalpa today to be sessions in which, like the commenter said, he has to “learn something about our Constitution.”
The generalized problem with the oligarchies throughout this region is that "we," to them, doesn't include the people they look down upon, which is pretty much everybody that isn’t in their economic-social class. To them, "we" does not mean a nation, but, rather, those who purport to own it.
I think I have already mentioned somewhere the story of the Cuban exile in Miami who said, "Before Castro, everybody had a maid!" Well, unless the maids also had maids, not everybody had a maid. Think about that. “Everybody,” in the oligarchic mind, doesn’t include, well, everybody, certainly not servants and the rest of the working and poor population.
I've witnessed these attitudes first hand in Mexico, in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil... It’s widespread among a certain class that is the distinct minority in each population, but that has its hands more firmly on the economic levers of power in each country.
The current behavior of upper class Honduras and its aspirants brings to mind a scene from an episode of the television series, House M.D., in which Dr. Gregory House is on an airplane and a passenger falls ill. The other passengers go into a shared panic as suddenly everybody else on the plane begins complaining of, and even exhibiting, physical symptoms of what they thought – errantly, it turned out – to be a contagious illness.
There is precisely that kind of 30,000-feet-above-sea-level, in a closed and claustrophobic space, hysterical, shrieking tone to the pro-coup defense: That only "we" at these altitudes understand our Constitution; that "we" have to educate the rest of you, etcetera.
And it is from that zone of shared hallucination that their claim - "Zelaya has violated the Constitution" – arises.
They’ve demonstrated that they simply can't believe that anyone but members of their group (the “we” they frequently cite) would dare even try to interpret what only the educated and propertied classes of their milieu "know": in this case the Honduran Constitution.
A wisdom one learns when traveling and reporting in so many different lands: People aren't all that different from country to country. There are good and bad in all of them, and generally the different demographic types resemble each other very well across international borders. I've heard this “we” rap from the educated classes before but more to the point: I've lived alongside their attitude long enough to recognize it rather quickly when it surfaces.
There is something about elites – and its especially visible in this hemisphere – that demonstrates a kind of superiority complex wrapped around an inferiority complex, and all the while dripping with absolute bloody hatred and resentment toward "those people," the ones that don't see things as they and their demographic group see them in their shared hallucination. That's true of elites in the United States, in Honduras, the whole world over.
Insulza – who walks into that snake pit today – has also seen and heard people like that before, and lived the consequences of when their frenzied and shared hallucinations inflict upon society in brutal and violent ways. I’m fairly certain he has no illusions about changing the coup leaders’ minds with facts and reason: oligarchies are too often caught up in those shared hallucinations to be influenced by facts they perceive as external. Today’s visit is more likely to simply demonstrate that there will be no back-room deal from the OAS, that the return of the elected president is a non-negotiable demand, and perhaps to lay out explicitly what the consequences beyond Honduras’ expulsion from the OAS will be for continued intransigence by the coup.
The coup “president” Roberto Micheletti continues to labor under the illusion that he can negotiate a solution, which is why he is loudly proposing early elections and other trial balloons. But the nations of the hemisphere – and a significant swathe of the Honduran population – are not going to fall for such tricks by which an illegitimate coup government administrates an “election.” Nobody believes that such a vote could be fair or free, and to agree to such a scenario would only embolden other aspiring coup-plotters in other countries of America to then adopt the Honduran model to derail elected governments.
From the standpoint of the hemisphere, anything short of the unconditional return of Zelaya to the presidency would unleash a domino effect of coup attempts in other lands.
And, so far, in the shared hallucination of the coup defenders, they seem to believe they can bluff their way into forcing a negotiation still.
And this touches close to another misconception in some other circles that is being spoken: that if only the United States would cut off all aid to Honduras, the coup would instantly fall. (A related spin is that if only the United States had instructed the coup plotters in advance that said aid would be cut off – something that may have well occurred anyway - the coup would never have happened.)
That kind of analysis falls short for two reasons:
One, the hallucinatory nature of how the Honduran elites see themselves includes a willingness to destroy their own economy in a blazing attempt to assert their hallucination upon Honduras and the world. True or false, the pig-headed coup adherents really seem to believe they can survive and remain in power without that aid, or at least they seem willing to try for a while.
Secondly, Washington’s announcement that it has already put all but humanitarian aid “on pause” - the flow of money is already cut off - pending a decision on whether to legally define the regime in Honduras as a “military coup” isn’t having that effect.
From this vantage point, it’s strange to see people who I thought opposed the concept that Washington should dictate events in the hemisphere basically insisting that Washington should now dictate them. They seem to disregard the advances of the last decade that have made it impossible for the US to rule the hemisphere by decree anymore, something we should all celebrate.
And all this leads to the coming weekend – Sunday, to be exact – when President Manuel Zelaya says he will return to Honduras, and the coup regime says it will mobilize 25,000 people plus an arrest warrant to stop him.
This big game of chicken awaits one side or the other to blink. If neither side blinks, Zelaya will return and be imprisoned, sparking a rapid escalation of the conflict inside Honduras that might turn extremely violent. And Washington will certainly, in response, trigger the full cut-off of all US aid.
If Zelaya blinks, and doesn’t return to Honduras this weekend, he will lose popular support much in the same way that other legitimate presidents denied in this hemisphere - Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas after 1988, Al Gore after 2000, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador after 2006 - lost popular steam from perceptions among their own supporters that they did not resist the electoral frauds against them with sufficient force.
If the coup blinks, it won’t be because of the penalties from OAS or the US, but, rather, because of internal divisions, specifically from two groups: the Armed Forces, and/or the commercial media. The first group, to me, seems a more plausible source of mutiny than the second, because the Honduran military – which, importantly, is not made up of members of the economic elite (and therefore is not caught up in the shared hallucination), but, rather, has long struck a deal to service them in exchange for certain privileges and powers – does, unlike the civilian coup plotters, know that it is Washington that pays its rent and bar tab.
(I only mention the commercial media – such as the pro-coup daily newspapers in Tegucigalpa and their owners - because they are so mercenary and corrupt that they could likely be bribed into temporarily turning on the coup regime. That’s an option that, if I were the OAS and its nations, I would carefully consider. They come relatively cheaply. The problem is, with them, that as an important sector of those elites, they are caught up in the shared hallucination, too, and thus if a higher bidder then comes forward, they are capable of switching allegiances on alternate days. The Armed Forces would be, if secured, a more reliable alliance of convenience.)
What Zelaya needs to land in Honduras on Sunday without being arrested is an airfield or border entry point that is sufficiently protected either by large crowds or a sector of the Armed Forces loyal to him (which means, practically, both, since one will follow the other). If he can pull that off, he’ll quickly be president again, and the coup plotters will be seeking exile in other lands.
If he doesn’t have that, Zelaya still has to go and subject himself to arrest, which will spark another chapter in this saga that could turn more violent yet. But not to do so would ensure a much greater and permanent violence: the maintenance of an illegitimate coup regime that has already proved its contempt for the most basic of freedoms, ripping up the very Constitution that it claims it has rallied around.
Whatever happens this weekend, I'm certain of this: it will be no soccer game that comes next.
Soon it will be time to celebrate the historic declaration of our nation's independence from that dark liquid to which its entire population had become hopelessly addicted, namely, British tea. Since nothing says "independence" quite like blowing things up, I hopped into my hybrid S.U.V. and began my annual trek to the fireworks stand. On the long drive, I started thinking about the environmental impact of the large purchase I was about to make: Just how green is our fireworks display? I resolved then and there to make this our greenest Independence Day ever!
Upon arrival at the stand, I started browsing for kinder, gentler fireworks. I skipped right past the snakes and sparklers, of course, because everybody knows those are lame. After some searching, I finally found something that looked promising:
What could be more innocent than a "warm greeting" from an adorable baby nestled in what looks like a box of fresh, delicious organic produce? However, upon closer inspection, I discovered that this adorable baby apparently "shoots flaming balls." I wasn't sure, but I thought something like that might involve chemicals, which we all know are bad for the environment.
It took me a while to get the attention of the proprietor of the fireworks stand—he was hard of hearing, and he really had to concentrate on working that cash register with his remaining fingers—but once I did, he dropped a bombshell on our plans: Apparently, all of the fireworks in his stand are made with chemicals! Greening our Independence Day was going to be tougher than I thought.
Devastated, I climbed back into the S.U.V. and hit the road. As I zipped along in the hybrid-and-carpool-only lane, the newly widened freeway that leads to our house sliced through a grove of evergreen trees, and the idea finally hit me:
Who needs a fancy, chemical-laden fireworks display when a simple evergreen bough contains just as much fun and beauty? I cut across traffic, drove off into the ditch (that four-wheel drive comes in so handy!), got out my trusty chainsaw, and cut down the biggest tree that would fit on my roof rack.
I know what you're thinking: Is cutting down an evergreen tree really a good substitute for fireworks? You're right, those needles can be very sharp, and may not be suitable for young children. If your family is not quite as adventurous as mine, I suggest substituting a head of organic lettuce for the evergreen bough:
The lettuce provides an explosion of greenery that is almost as thrilling as the evergreen, but with soft, leafy edges instead of dangerous needles. Unlike the tree, which goes straight into the wood chipper, the lettuce can even be re-purposed as a delicious post-fireworks salad…because if there's one thing children like more than safe fireworks substitutes, it's salad! I liked the idea so much that I made an extra trip to that hippie grocery store to pick some up.
I'm so excited about tomorrow, but please, if you see my husband and children, don't tell them about my alternative plans for our family fireworks display. I know the green surprises I have in store are going to knock their socks off, and I'm sure the children in particular will be speechless, crying big tears of joy over all the good they'll be doing for the planet!
Senator Barbara Boxer has led an effort to at least put together a public database of ash storage sites so that people can judge the risk to the areas where they live. However, even this effort has been blocked not by coal companies or utilities, but by the DHS. How could it possibly be a national security interest to cover up the location of material that's "not toxic or anything?" It's not. In fact, even if the ash turns out to be as bad as its worst critics fear, blocking the database is far more dangerous than revealing the location of these sites. Not only has there not been any threat against these sites by terrorists, and no workable scenario by which they might cause a problem, coal slurry impoundments are already failing with regularity, dousing parts of America with millions of gallons of this material. It doesn't take terrorists to make this happen.
Blocking the release of this information doesn't protect the citizens of the United States in any way. It's just another example of the same creeping secrecy that makes cities more difficult to manage because of secrecy over facilities. The same creeping secrecy that "blurs" national monuments from images and puts intentional gaps in public information. The same creeping secrecy that increasingly elevates the most unlikely attack -- the shoe bombers of the world -- above our right to know what's going on around us so that we can make informed decisions. The same secrecy that defends torturers.
After several of you complained, the Kindle price, for Create Your Own Economy, has been lowered to $14.27, from $20 something. Maybe someone at Amazon reads the comments at MR (really, I had nothing to do with it).
What other prices would you like changed? Health insurance -- how much should that cost? A barrel of oil? Just let them know.
Given economic bad times, many teams have overspent. But they have lots of long-term contracts, plus there is a salary cap and luxury tax for going above that cap. Real wages ought to fall but most of them cannot fall right away. If a player becomes a free agent, few teams will bid and those players will absorb a disproportionate share of the required wage cuts (the pricing of complementary inputs had some indeterminacy anyway, plus there is an AC constraint).
The lower returns available mean that a given free agent is more likely to be a self-deluding trouble maker who has worn out his welcome (Artest, Gordon, etc.). This favors teams with dominant players (Cleveland), strong systems (Boston), and strong coaches. All those teams can swallow the troublemakers without cracking up. It also favors teams which suffer from well-defined "missing pieces." It favors already-good teams and indeed we see that Cleveland, Orlando, San Antonio, and LA have been major players in the free agent or trade markets.
I predict a greater dispersion of win totals for next year's season.
I am wondering to what extent a similar analysis applies to economics departments, or to teams of bloggers, or to other groups of complementary labor inputs.
Adverse selection is an easy story to tell but a hard story to verify. In fact, empirical studies indicate that adverse selection is not an important (equilibrium) effect in the market for used cars, or used trucks, or of auto, life insurance or health insurance. See my earlier post, Adverse Selection is NOT the Problem, for reasons why markets handle asymmetric information better than most economists think.
In two excellent posts (here and here), Bryan Caplan further points out that the adverse selection model does not explain current regulations. Adverse selection, for example, implies that it's the low-risk consumers who drop out of the market so it's the low-risk consumers who need a mandate to buy insurance. But...
When you actually look at these regs, you'll notice some peculiarities:
1. Mandatory insurance is most prominent in the auto insurance industry. But these regulations don't target low-risk drivers. Their main purpose, contrary to the adverse selection model, is to make sure high-risk drivers get insurance.
2. Even more shocking: The regulations usually go on to somehow subsidize the rates that high-risk drivers pay. This is necessary because, contrary to the adverse selection model, insurance companies are able to detect high-risk drivers, and do not want to cover them at a loss.
3. Economists usually mention adverse selection in the context of health insurance. But in the market for individual health insurance - precisely where you'd expect adverse selection problems to be most severe - governments very rarely mandate insurance coverage. Instead, they focus on mandatory employer-provided health insurance, where the adverse selection problem is likely to be milder.
4. When governments do mandate health insurance, they almost always subsidize the rates that high-risk buyers pay. This is once again necessary because, contrary to the adverse selection model, insurance companies are able to detect high-risk customers, and do not want to cover them at a loss.
Bottom line: Real-world insurance regulation has little or nothing to do with economists' "moral hazard and adverse selection" mantra. The "intellectual" bases of real-world regulation of insurance are rather populism and paternalism: Big bad insurers won't cover people unless it's profitable, and simple-minded consumers don't care enough about their own health to pay for it themselves.
See also Tyler's post on this issue which makes many similar points.
I recently returned from the successful SMX-Advanced search engine optimization and advertising conference, and I had an epiphany: as a speaker, usability principles are applicable to these conferences. Which usability principle, you might ask? Before usability professionals create an information architecture and corresponding interfaces, they must identify and address various personas or profiles.
The primary persona [...]
Microsoft's Bing, the search engine formally known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search, has garnered lots of attention lately (and a bit of market share too.) WOT supports Bing search results with our ratings, in addition to supporting other popular search engines.
Porn made easy
Recent criticisms of Bing say that it's making searching for porn too easy. Bing has a feature called Smart Motion Previews which provides video previews in the search results, which is great in concept, but it doesn't know the difference between a video of sleeping puppies and porn. Any motivated middle schooler can easily turn off Bing's SafeSearch and watch porn for hours without ever visiting a porn site.
Kim Komando suggests blocking Bing until Microsoft comes up with a solution. For people attempting to surf porn at work, Microsoft has published instructions for a workaround that will make it harder to access porn from their work PCs.
Never hide an object at eye level. If you're hiding something from children, never hide it below your eye level. Submitted by: Jeff Brown, astronomer, Bloomington, Indiana
Laura at Apartment 11D offers an excellent précis
of the ways in which the blogosphere of today lacks much of the charm
of the blogosphere of four or five years ago. I would say that there
are compensating benefits to the new, more professionalized, more
institutionalized blogosphere. But it really is different and the
change has been for the worse in many ways.
Laura links to many comments. I'm more optimistic. Very few (if any) of my favorite bloggers have quit and of course there are some new ones. It's surprising how few of them have quit. (If blogging is so great, why hasn't competition competed away their returns? What about comparative advantage in this sector is so persistent?) The rest of the output you can ignore.
ESET security researchers are warning people of a massive spam campaign related to fireworks and Independence Day that will be used this holiday weekend to trick people into visiting malicious websites.
The Waledac botnet, estimated at tens of thousands of infected computers, are expected to send out links to videos of Independence Day fireworks which hide new copies of Waledac malware. ESET says that many antivirus programs do not detect this type of viruses, so, as always, do not open any links in unsolicited email. Read the report.
Chibi style AnthroPCs have an internal reservoir full of a viscous, opaque liquid they can exude through their hair follicles in order to simulate the Nervous Anime Sweatdrop. It's kind of gross, actually.
Footage of last ever Michael Jackson rehearsal released Times Online. Yes, this is morbid, ibut I was particularly taken with his dancing. He looks so gaunt. But all that plastic surgery did not ruin his visage as a stage face.
Back to the Stimulus Debate: W, Timing, the States, and Baselines Menzie Chinn, Econbrowser. Someone is trying to still say we will have a recovery? The new hope is a "temporary and substantial recovery" aka Green Shoots v. 2.0. This is looking more and more like administering a jolt of electricity to a corpse. Even if you succeed in getting it to move does not mean you brought it back to life.
Terminological interlude Lambert Strether. We need a proper name for this crisis! "This crisis" or "the financial crisis" or "the downturn" does NOT cut it. Lambert nominates "The Big Fail" which I like a lot. Points to both institutional failure and "fail" in the trading sense, which underscores that this wasn't a traditional bank crisis but took place in the brave new world of "market based credit".
New Evidence on the Foreclosure Crisis Stan Liebowitz, Wall Street Journal. Today's must read. Zero equity was the problem, which means the new FHFA 125% LTV program is no solution. We keep sayin' the answer in principal mods, not just payment reductions. but no one wants to hear it. The analysis also suggests a lot of policy remedies are misguided.
Filtering Companies Can’t Be Sued By Blacklisted Firms, Court Rules
'The [Communications Decency Act] treats security software makers the same as internet service providers when they block material they find objectionable, granting them so-called “good Samaritan” immunity from civil lawsuits. Like an ISP, such companies provide an “interactive computer service” because they pull updates from a central server, the San Francisco-based appeals court said.'
Any takers? Some smart publisher types have noticed our reviews and are sending blurbs.
If interested, ping me at yves@nakedcapitalism.com with your coordinates and a bit about your background. Thanks!
The first is A COLOSSAL FAILURE OF COMMON SENSE: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers by former Lehman VP Lawrence G McDonald. McDonald explores the trillion dollar question of the financial crisis: What the hell happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail? He gives us a real insiders view into the mind of Dick Fuld and the other Brahmins at the top whose addiction to growth lead to the collapse of the nation’s oldest investment bank.
The second is IN FED WE TRUST by Wall Street Journal Columnist and reporter David Wessel. Here Wessel takes a look at the Fed's true power and its role as a distinctly undemocratic institution. Explaining both what happened and why it happened during the great panic of 2008, Wessel provides new insight into how the Fed really works-and the fears Bernake and other key players dealt with as our economy was crashing around them.
BTW we have a good review queued up for Sunday, do check in!
You know that scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole past all those miscellaneous chairs and birds? That same feeling of confused dread is often how users feel when they're attempting to navigate a site that has never been tested. We know that developers pour their souls into their projects. But that's also why it's sometimes difficult (and even personal) to point out the flaws. A developer has to ask, "Do I want it built my way without compromise or do I want users?" If you want to run a business, rather than spending months speculating on what you think users might want, it's sometimes best to simply ask them. 
If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters.
We're sure by now you've heard about the upcoming extensions that will 
Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on 
Microsoft's Bing, the search engine formally known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search, has garnered lots of attention lately (and a bit of market share too.) WOT supports Bing search results with our ratings, in addition to supporting other popular search engines.
Porn made easy 
ESET security researchers are warning people of a massive spam campaign related to fireworks and Independence Day that will be used this holiday weekend to trick people into visiting malicious websites. 
