After almost a thousand years of trying it out, I think it's safe to say that the book as a way of publishing things is a success. Yet all the things that make books work are being abandoned in the latest tool to make ebooks.

A "book" still means something made out of paper-like material; the word origin comes from a word referring to a slab of beechwood or (in the case of the latin word codex), bound leaves of some kind. The idea of printing being involved is not at the core of what a book is, and to have the object is to have access to the knowledge there. Ebooks are any kind of publication produced for electronic reading; again, what produced the content is not at the core of what an ebook is.

So what is basic to being booklike? I'd suggest it's two things: some kind of package for publishing, and one that belongs to the reader. A book and an ebook are more alike than they are different from this perspective, and it's a recent development that they have diverged. Because of the success of Amazon and other companies in creating closed systems for people to buy and read ebooks, suddenly the idea of a book is contingent on a particular company giving a key to a locked box, etc.

And now, Apple's new iBooks Author program requires publishing a book in one proprietary format and for sale on one store, in such a way that can only be read on one kind of device. A truly faustian bargain.

The marketing for iBooks Author says it "allows anyone to create ...just about any kind of book for iPad," but given that what it actually makes is very far from the actual definition of a book (or even an ebook for that matter), I don't think it's accurate to say that. It's something, maybe more like an old-school CD-ROM. It's just not a book.

A lot has changed in the past year in the ebook world; the ePub format has gained a lot of interest and activity as an open format. Open standards are, of course, the reason that the Web has had its spectacular growth and vibrancy as a new medium, so you'd think that the creators of a new reader device would see which way the curve of history is going. I had no idea what to expect from the new nook color, but I did hope that (as an android device) it might be slightly more open than other things on the market.

And, in fact, it is. Very slightly. It is news that you can actually go to a Web site and download an ePub (that is not copy-protected) and read it. The browser (a version of Chrome, included in Google Android) is good enough to be useful. The touch screen is a little balky but not nearly as bad as the first nook.

However, the nook color still makes it hard to get and read books in any other way than the B&N store. To download non B&N books and read them, I can copy them to the nook over USB, but if I download them over the browser they only appear in the "my files" part, not in "my books." If I download an ePub from a Web site via the nook Web browser, it is placed in the "my downloads" directory. I can go and open it there on the nook, but since I have no way to move files on the nook itself, the only way I can make it appear in the nook "library" is a workaround. That is, connect the nook to a computer, move the ePub file from the "my downloads" to "my books" directory; and only then (after a refresh button-press on the nook) it shows up in the nook "library."

The nook mounts as a regular mass-storage device, similar to a Kindle, but allows me to see the entire document tree (including the DRM'd ePubs). This is more transparent than an iPad/iPhone at least, but that doesn't mean I can just rearrange files myself in anything other than the "my files" directory. Maddeningly, if I add or move files to the B&N directory, it doesn't show them -- only the DRM'd files are recognized. And, of course, I can't get applications from the Android Market for any price (that much I expected).

The small roadblocks that the nook color places in the way of getting and reading non DRM'd files feel petty and stupid. For the price ($250) it can't be getting subsidized by B&N, so why the desperation? So much work must have gone into ensuring that I can use the device in only one way; if only B&N had just let it be a decently-sized android device in that way only (even sans-apps). At some point someone will make the equivalent of an iPod Touch with Android software that is tied to a good content store (but is a flexible device that I can geek out with). I am surprised that (given the market dominance of the iPod) someone hasn't.

Top: Tricycle, Memphis, 1969-71 William Eggleston, Dye transfer print

Over the last twenty-five years, I went to school to be an artist, abandoned that, became a designer, married, and had a daughter. After many life changes, I think about almost everything differently. But I still have this incoherent desire to make pictures, not much different (and not much more understood by me) than when I was much younger. Then, I thought that people make things for their own sake, because they are beautiful or some part of the truth. I am not sure about that anymore. There are many much more important things to me now, but nothing more mysterious than that (despite only extremely sporadic and privately satisfying pictures) I keep wanting to do it. It could be just my own personal hang-up. At this point, I want more to understand this drive than do anything meaningful with it!

I'm interested in photography, since it has some of this same mystery. In contrast to painting, sculpture, or even film, millions of people take photos meaningfully. Photographs can be completely mundane for even close family, or epic and affecting to anyone, and the difference is usually pretty ellusive. After I took a picture of a tricycle I saw a similar picture of a tricycle by William Eggleston, but there's no meaningful relationship between the images (other than to point out just how great he is). There are plenty of good images in the world, more are not needed. What is meaningful, then? Why do it?

So, I read Photography After Frank, by Philip Gefter, and Why People Photograph, by Robert Adams, to see if there was some vocabulary people use to write about this and how to make sense of it. They are both good books with strong ideas and clear thinking.

Gefter was the front-page picture editor for The New York Times and a critic for that newspaper. He surveys a lot of recent good photos and motives behind them. Usefully, he offers themes like "the document," "staged documentation," "photojournalism," "portraits", "collections," and "the marketplace." He offers a way to anchor and understand the work of good artists. For example, he writes that in

...the 1980s the photograph underwent a rigorous, necessary, and unforgiving examination by postmodern artists and critics. They challenged its fidelity to fact, its role in constructing social realities, its validity as a form of art, -- to the point where straight documentary photography seemed conventional, even retrograde.

Adams' book is much more personal about the 'why' in photography, divided into sections on "what can help" ("...humor, teaching, money, dogs"), "examples of success," and "working conditions." He speaks as someone who has spent many hours with the desire to make images and struggling with the results. Speaking of "living in several landscapes," he mentions living "in hope" but mostly of "a simple, generic" place, a

country crossroad on the high plains. There are thousands to choose from. Often there doesn't seem to be anything there at all--just two roads, four fields, and sky. I feel foolish to have stoopped, but small things can become important-- a lark or a mailbox or sunflowers. And if I wait I may see the architecture-- the roads, the fields, the sky. [...] We might find there a balance of form and openness... It would be the world as we had hoped, and we would recognize it together.

There is something visceral and silent about taking pictures. Analysis is useful for understanding 'why not,' but not why. After abandoning the wish for importance, insight, understanding, beauty, or connection, why does the drive stick around? It seems too easy to just say that the meaning of making pictures is the work itself.

David Foster Wallace, giving the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, among many other things, said:

I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us...

There's a good deal of evidence from an excerpt from his unfinished book, The Pale King (about a man that works for the I.R.S.) that he was thinking along these lines:

Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rubber pinkie finger, sat at his Tingle table in his chalk's row in the rotes group's wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month. Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once, except to put the completed files and memos in the two Out trays side by side up in the top tier of trays, where the cart boys could get them when they came by.

Bliss -- a second-by- second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious -- lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

Of course, Wallace calls such awareness and compassion 'unimaginably difficult' in his commencement address, and when he says he is not claiming any special knowledge or authority on how to do it, he's not being modest. He is talking about his own struggle, a struggle that few are conscious or smart enough to try, and almost no one (especially not these smug Zen monks) would be able to express in such clear and heartbreaking terms.

Those who practice Zen, I think, would say they strive to achieve a "mind as the mind that faces life like a small child, full of curiosity and wonder and amazement. 'I wonder what this is? I wonder what that is? I wonder what this means?' Without approaching things with a fixed point of view or a prior judgement, just asking 'what is it?'" Undoubtedly, this is a wonderful way to exist, and I would myself very much like to live that way.

But imagine Mr. Wallace, bristling with talent, supremely gifted with words, aching to wrestle with a good chunk of what people have done with literature. Could he actually do any of that while detaching himself in that way? It would be like cutting off an arm, or at least a finger. Buddhism seems to offer one track of fulfillment, but it doesn't seem like it encompasses enough for someone like him. Maybe he needed two tracks, one for his life and one for writing, each with different rules. I wish he was still around, so I could see what he would undoubtedly have figured out.

New methods for managing people making Web sites are big these days, with the most popular being Agile. Basically it boils down to making a small team of builders completely responsible for a project, and enforcing constant communication as people work on it in well-defined chunks. There are many engineer/programmer proponents for this, but few designers seem to have adopted the approach (though there some, but others are skeptical or downright hostile to it).

The difference is another example of Aristotle vs. Plato, the scientific, evolutionary approach vs. the aspirational large vision. Design wants to create a beautiful vision up-front for what a new world would be, but divorced from the deeper and more meaningful design that engineers do.

Without going into the problems and tensions that have been common in these projects, I think it's safe to say that no one has developed a great 'best practice' for how it can actually work (and I've worked within dozens of Agile teams and read quite a bit about it, so anyone who claims to have it solved I can say is probably pulling your leg). So what could work better, at least?

Just Start

Often there is the assumption that designers need time to develop separate deliverables and have their ideas specified out before they can talk to builders. This is a breeding-ground for mistrust, and more importantly the designers shouldn't be working without an intimate knowledge of the technical design--what information is gathered, how it moves around, and what's done to it. Designers should get into the project at the very start, talk through the project in detail with the whole team, and make decisions with the team. They should be making sketches or prototypes the first day.

Visual and Interaction Design Comes Last

Many sprints I've worked on have tried to have design done a sprint ahead of implementation, or a week, etc. This is sadistic. When engineers are iterating and improving as they go but designers get one shot at it before they've seen any working code, everyone is set up to fail. Rough interaction design and pages should be done collaboratively with engineers as they work, and detailed interaction design and visual design should come last, as a refinement of that.

Actual Alignment

Much of the attempts at collaboration between designers and engineers in Agile projects have put the designer in a rough spot, between the product owner and their team. The designer makes mocks/comps/boards to should how the thing could look, and the product person signs off on that before the sprint starts. The documents for what will be built, however (e.g. the stories, acceptance criteria, etc.), doesn't include the designs. Inevitably, the team makes changes to the designs as they implement, and the designer is either out of the loop (working on a different part, or not part of the team), or has to redesign on the fly in mid-sprint. Designers and engineers should put aside time for 'alignment' tasks, where they discuss and agree on what they will build, either as part of the pre-sprint tasks or the sprint itself. This is similar to 'engineering-only' sprints, which focus on the 'plumbing' of a project and not what users see.

The alternative to having these kinds of deep integration of designers into Agile teams, I believe, is mediocre work, or a lot of additional work to fix the inevitable breakdowns that happen when talented people work together. This is actually much more simple human nature stuff that's been going on in offices everywhere, for a long time, probably since cave-people first called a meeting.

Palin posted her beliefs about the health care bill. The only one that's available is the House bill HR 3200, so that's what she must be referring to. Below is her text's assertions (minus the characterizations and other material that doesn't deal with facts) and the facts as best I can glean them from reading the bill.

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care...

...but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost.

And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care.

Through researching other blogs and sites, it seems that this is referring to section 1233, "ADVANCE CARE PLANNING CONSULTATION" (it starts on page 425 of the bill). This section sets standards for providing information on what options people have to create legal instruments concerning life and death concerns in their health care, specifically a "living wiil," health care proxy, and other advance directives for individuals to express their decisions about their care if they are unable to themselves. The section establishes a panel of health care 'practitioners' to create a set of national standards for how information about these options is communicated.

The section only mentions providing anyone eligible for Social Security information on these legal instruments, and the panel mentioned has no power to make any decisions about any persons' health care, let alone end-of-life options. The phrase "level of productivity in society" does not appear anywhere in the bill. The section is designed, so far as I can tell, so that people can set down their preferences to choose how they will die themselves, rather than having others make those decisions.

Nationalizing our health care system is a point of no return for government interference in the lives of its citizens.

I believe that there are two kinds of ideas in the world: those that divide things into two types, and those that don't... and then there's a third, which tries to wriggle out of either. This is one of those.

The basic idea: a better interface to data would be to turn the data itself into the interface, as a flow between an overview and actual experience.

What is an 'overview'?

• visual language of overview: parallel


• movie trailer, menu, signage


• graphs, piles, sorts, maps, matrices


• optimizes attention


• optimizes action


• browsing, analysis, editing, outlining, listing


• powerpoint, excel

What is 'experience'?

• visual language of experience: serial


• long, slow changes


• reading content


• still photos


• based on important details


• narrative


• based on sustained attention


• email & twitter

This is false duality of course; the actual value of either references the other, and both are necessary and interesting and have been around since the dawn of time. The reason this is an interesting thing to revisit is that there is a huge advantage in new media and social contexts: you can jump between them quickly and continuously, so that they start to merge into a 'flow.' This flow is an interface, perhaps a good one.

In basic terms, the flow interface resembles a lot of existing interfaces:

• a list of emails > reading an email


• table of contents > page


• map > walking

• use content itself in the overview, not a label/symbol/sign


• browse and refine both the overview and the experience


• interact with one through the other


• interaction with an overview element shows an experience


• interaction with an experience element references an overview

Now speed things up, so that the interface can offer:

• "you can sort this stuff into piles three ways, which one works the best?"


• "we have these three prototypes that show how the product could work"


• "have a taste of 12 dishes before you pick your meal, then change your mind halfway through"

And of course, this can benefit from the language of data visualization, but we need a framework for overviews and a framework for experiences, not just one, and the ability to pick the framework itself should be content-based and usable through familiar conventions:

• show proportional distances instead of vertices or measurements


• make maps


• show size relation, piles


• show a tree graph


• show nodes and edges

And here is where I sketch some actual designs for the very vague concepts I'm throwing around, but of course I haven't got there yet. But I think it would be easy to show new interfaces for twitter, netflix, and digg that work this way.

The below is my attempt to remove the frothy and breathless tone from "Generation M manifesto" by Umair Haque, because I liked it in many ways. It is definitely more boring, but I hope more real as well. I don't believe any manifesto can express the right amount of humility towards these questions, but it can emphasize belief in the possibility for something better, so I focused on that.

Dear gradualists, ideologues, and partisans,

We are in a time of large differences between groups, young and old, east and west, rich and poor, but one where many of the traditional ideologies seem to have been scrambled both by a global economy and crisis and fundamental changes in how information is shared through technology.

Everyday, we see the costs of doing the same things. It looks like some big, new, and huge problems are looming, but the solutions that are talked about are old, timeworn, and plain unambitious.

Old ideas of generational shift and left/right politics no longer seem to work. We can't use simple terms in this new, hypercomplex and interdependent world. We need a new way of seeing and strengthening the relationships we have, not a manifesto of ideas.

These times demand not single solutions, but systems of solutions, involving less large-scale business and more individual opportunity. Less ideology, and more practicality.

Businesses and governments must get connected to and become responsive to a public that is comfortable using social tools to express themselves in massive ways. The hyper-connected "sea of green" in Tehran is the model for a new, speeded-up politics.

Much of this new world no longer requires massive capital or leverage to work, and banks should play a smaller and more supporting role. A smaller role for finance means less focus on lucrative return.

The huge accumulation of risk and the massive gaming of global markets resulted in crisis. This should drive a lot of wealth away from financial instruments and towards tangible, collective works and accomplishments that everyone can benefit from.

Growth as a goal incentivizes distortion. We should prize flexibility and agility, so that no matter which way the markets go, business can prosper and act to benefit everyone.

Rather than nurturing a few elites (or even oligarchs), the new economy should be a huge number of distributed markets. It wouldn't be entirely controllable, and those that would want to profit from it will have to compete for influence just like everyone else.

We've seen the consequences of short-term thinking in spending and debt and felt the pain; now we should start working on ideas that are built to last a generation, not 5 years.

Our sense of ourselves has moved too far towards what we can do as individuals; it's time to nurture some shared beliefs, projects, and experiences.

Our culture should connect us to our shared past, and remind us that when it comes to the most meaningful things for human beings, there's usually nothing new under the sun.

In order to provide some label for what's needed, let's call it Generation "M."

This is not a movement in the traditional sense (our society is too distributed one manifesto, one protest, one set of ideas). It's more the recognition that a new set of norms is needed for a new time, the recognition of a shift. It's the belief that we can come up with practical ways to live and work together that do a better job at caring for each other.

Ideologies and manifestos will always run up against their own logical extremes. Gen M is the belief that innovative ideas married with historical consciousness and brutal practicality can be vastly more powerful, and meaningful.

Big changes will be necessary. The institutions and norms that we've lived within for a long time are too fragile to pass on to our children.

Since the end of the Cold War, we've lived with cheap, easy, expensive lifestyle, but one that was empty of meaning and for which we have little to show. Every age has a large responsibility, and this, I think, is ours: to foot the bill for yesterday's profligacy -- and to create, instead, an authentically, sustainably shared prosperity.

Anyone -- young or old -- can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you want to build the new relationships, businesses, and systems we need? Or do you want to keep repeating the same old ideologies, marching in protests, or clinging to dying institutions?

Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook have seemingly converged on what has become the major reason to be connected to others on a social network: sharing short updates, links, photos, etc. A concept for mozilla's Firefox also looks similar, and lifts ideas from iTunes to help organize things. The designs share some major elements:

1. Publisher an area to enter some text, a url, or other media, to publish it out to friends or the public.
2. Items an area where items are listed, either most popular or latest items, or some subset of items
3. Sets an area where the set of items to show is chosen; it can be all items, items from certain friends or other sources, or user-created sets
4. Notifications two of the designs have an area to surface notifications, recommendations, alerts, or otherwise push to the user stuff that might be interesting

I like this design convergence, if only because establishing a vernacular for these kinds of sharable media apps will lead to more familiarity with the interface as more people start to use them, and form the basis for the next leap towards an interface that supports more sophisticated forms of sharing and publishing.

Douglas Bowman had to quit Google, and Valleywag explains it all for you (to hell with Owen!). I had a similar experience at Yahoo, so I'm only surprised Douglas lasted this long. The comments on Valleywag are really sad though; a palpable hostility towards "precious," "childish," "short-sighted" designers (you can look for yourself, I'm not linkin'). A lot of product design is really bad, sometimes the designers get a chance to do something really good with a job, but not often.

Jared Spool, an Extremely Important Person, once told me over Pad Thai that "visual designers are just failed artists." I took that personally, being a failed artist (heh), but didn't understand why the "visual" distinction was necessary... I guess he would have to be a failed artist as well if he just said "designers"? Or he has to get the frustration of just speaking at conferences out somehow.

Facebook's redesign inspires widespread unhappiness and derision. On Techcrunch, incredible bile is thrown at the designers. I can't say I like it, but why does anyone think that Facebook is anything other than an ongoing experiment? Facebook users are not "customers," they are collaborators in inventing new ways of being connected, and much is required of them sometimes. The new Facebook stuff is not very good, but at least they haven't given up like Irene Au and the crew at Google.

I have attempted to be useful as a designer, and had enough failures and successes to know a good deal of humility. There's no research method, process, innovation technique, conference presentation, or even extra-talented designer that magically makes good stuff.

UPDATE: Another comment thread at an article about designers quitting Google, filled with ignorant stuff. It really does seem that there is a cultural lack of understanding about design and what it is. I suppose the only real solution is to increase the overall cutlure's understanding and ability to parse visual and experiential elements; then (and probably only then) will people want a specialist to make the choices about those things instead...

• Breast Cancer Society
  
• Cancer Fund of America
  
• Children's Cancer Fund Of America
  
• Children's Charitable Foundation
• Detectives Benevolent Association
• Disabled Veterans Services
  
• Firefighters Assistance Fund
  
• Foundation For American Veterans
  
• Law Enforcement Alliance of America
  
• National Children's Leukemia Foundation
• United States Navy Veterans Association
  
  

Google has created a slew of innovative products, born from original thinking and supporting experimentation and new ideas, and Marissa Mayer has been a large part of the company's success. Google's success was not built on design however; it was built on the humbling (if you're a designer) fact that the thinking and engineering was so good that design was almost irrelevant. I think that's generally a good wake-up call to designers, and I've tried to reinvent what I do for myself around a deeper definition of design, one that tries to encompass engineering. This is a pretty typical story for a Silicon Valley tech company design decision:

A designer, Jamie Divine, had picked out a blue that everyone on his team liked. But a product manager tested a different color with users and found they were more likely to click on the toolbar if it was painted a greener shade. [...] Mr. Divine's team resisted the greener hue, so Ms. Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps. Her decision was diplomatic, but it also amounted to relying on her gut rather than research. Since then, she said, she has asked her team to test the 41 gradations between the competing blues to see which ones consumers might prefer.

If Google took design as seriously as they do engineering, they would not focus on details, but remaking interaction design and visual sensibility. Marissa Mayer wouldn't make a comment about grey text, she would be wondering how Google could give users better interfaces to information than an empty box. Google should swing for the fences again with new thinking, not imagine that because they are successful they do everything right.

It seems like there is a fairly straightforward deal possible to save the business of putting out newspapers (the news is fine, doesn't need to change!). Make it a much cheaper version of the cable business, where subscribers buy into a much-enhanced version of something they get a basic version of for free. Major ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, etc. could create a open news consortium that users could buy into by adding $2 to their monthly bill (this has nothing to do with network neutrality, by the way, just creating the same mechanism that supports free pop music radio).

Assuming that only 5% of broadband customers of the top 5 U.S. ISPs agree to that, that's $120 million each year. If even just newspapers banded together for this, ISPs would have a strong business incentive to offer the surcharge to their subscribers. Any content provider with a certain level of traffic could offer their content only to subscribers of the consortium, splitting that dollar 50/50. This money would be paid out to content providers on a strict traffic basis. Providing content this way would be much more efficient than via paper, and the writers, editors, and photographers would be responsible to their audiences first, as it should be (with advertising revenue on top of that). And they could continue to provide news summaries and headlines to news aggregators like Google News.

It wouldn't be the 40% margin of years-ago, but it would be a going concern. All that it would require would be placing the needs of the business as a whole above the fantasy that there is something basically wrong with journalism, Web sites, any particular newspaper, or an attachment to paper as media. And also the willingness to take action instead of letting things slide further towards... nothing.

Walter Kirn's review of David Denby's book Snark is pretty fun reading:

He wants to correct and restrain, using scholarship and logic, perhaps the keenest, most reflexive, prehistoric and anarchic of simple human pleasures, short of eating or achieving orgasm. The act of laughter, this would be. Or, for Denby, the act of low, illicit laughter -- laughter enjoyed for the wrong reasons and provoked by the wrong lines. Whether laughter for the right reasons is even possible, given humor's subversive, corrosive history, is a difficult philosophical question, of course, but Denby feels that it is. This follows from his belief that the impulses to giggle, grin and cackle (and the various means for stimulating these impulses) can be, and ought to be, consciously aligned with civic virtues and literary standards, lest our society laugh for no just cause, at jokes that aren't witty enough to laugh at and that may even be plain stupid and malicious.

I like the quote from John See's on the cover of the plan, start with the applications, not the technology:

Typically, technology committees go before school boards asking for a computer lab, or computers for classrooms. The first question board members will ask is, "Why do you need them?" Why not answer that question in the plan? It may be better to go to a school board saying, "This is what we want our students to be able to do"

• reading, researching, exploring
• writing, editing, taking pictures, collecting research, making docs
• sharing, messaging, commenting, evaluating
• planning, calendaring, collaborating (via the above applications)

• A campus-wide wireless network, 54Mbps or so.
• An internal and external Web server.
• Any computer that can run Mozilla Firefox 3
• A bunch of new Web sites that enable the above applications (could be built on top of an application server like Drupal)
• A set of policies for learning contexts that govern what data and work can go from internal network out to the public Web, and vice versa

• A lot of fancy new computers are not needed (just more older 'commodity' computers that can run a good Web browser well)
• No further work on the internal ethernet network is needed (better to replace ethernet with more wifi hubs or extenders)
• The real time, resources, and energy should be spent on the Web-based applications that will be directly part of the curriculum, instead of equipment

• Standardize on free, bulletproof software instead of a single hardware platform: a robust Web browser that can use Web-based applications like Firefox 3.
• A 1 year-old refurbished Dell laptop with Ubuntu costs $400, new MacBook costs $949, but they have identical performance running Firefox.
• Computers can be more easily maintained by standardizing on one simple configuration for everyone. If a computer is running badly, it can be wiped and re-imaged (instead of troubleshooting software installations).
• Software can be limited to what's free and available on all operating systems (Mac, Win, Linux): a Web browser like Firefox 3, a text editor, and media management applications like Songbird & Picasa.

Recently I've found myself having very unpleasant conversations with people about work. Often, both of us are in a bad situation, and there is no easy way to make the project better, only 'least bad' answers. It's a negative situation. Dealing with the disappointment and upset in this situation often leads people to act badly, myself included. I push too hard, questioning people's conclusions too much, and generally am a nuisance. One might even say an "asshole." I am not mean, but probably irritating.

When I went to school and worked my first few jobs, demanding bosses were the norm. Animated discussions, arguments, and emotion were part of caring about the work. I had a boss who extracted good things out of bad situations on a regular basis. I hated him at first, but eventually grew to admire him and respect him. Bewilderingly, I no longer have passionate arguments with people about work. Instead, discussions and meetings are meant to reinforce decisions already made. Negativity is to be avoided, and any criticism is almost offensive (even if just in tone).

I certainly can understand the desire to make work fun, lighthearted and focus on the positive at work, but I think something was lost. Progress and good work doesn't come easily. In fact, it's really easy to do mediocre work when everyone is afraid of failing (and getting laid off). There are great people who can avoid that and still be full of sweetness and light, but those people are few and far between, and the emotions involved are not going to last as long as good work. Abusive, mean behavior is wrong no matter what. But I find myself wishing for a couple of assholes at work, people who would shake things up, force the issues, and push past the usual solutions. But for now, I'll just try to stay positive :)

Newspapers and magazines are losing money very quickly. News content remains very popular, but most of it is available for free. News aggregator sites serve newspaper content to large audiences for free, and Craigslist has killed the major source of ad revenue that newspapers need, and people are used to getting magazine content for free online. Newsweek is exiting the mass-market, and it appears that many large newspapers will as well. Many people agree that journalism is an important part of a functioning political culture and society, but no alternative to the present course has emerged.

Henry Blodget points out that even if it stopped printing on paper, the New York Times could not pay for it's news room full of reporters and writers. Walter Issacson proposes a "pay by the slice" model, like iTunes for music. Amazon introduces the Kindle 2 as an analogous device for newspapers. Chris Anderson says "free" is the only business model that works, and it's okay if that doesn't support a lot of journalism. Andrew Keen says "mass-amateurization" is destroying our culture and must be fought. Michael Kinsley says that it's okay if we have a much smaller number of newspapers. Dave Winer says kill all the elitist journalists, we can make a new journalism out of bloggers and participatory media.

The conclusion I come to is that the sea change that has happened is the end of 'passive' culture, not journalism. It should be possible to re-invent journalism as a richer, participatory medium, with experts and professionals directly collaborating with (and directly responsible to) the enthusiasm and amazing creations of bloggers, makers, photographers, people of all kinds. The more sharing and creating of things that's happening online, the more engagement and value there will be there, and it will become something that can pay the bills for those who do it well.

Large media companies and newspapers could protect their futures best stopping the attempt to hold on to existing ad rates and formats, and instead moving their best advertisers quickly into performance-based online properties and formats. No one yet knows what will work, but they can do themselves a huge favor by trying a dozen experiments instead of moaning. And the bloggers & geeks can help invent new things, instead of imagining that this is a revolution where it will be a victory if a valuable part of society goes away.

The feet of one of three Palestinian siblings from the Al-samoni family, killed by an Israeli tank shell, are seen in the mortuary of Al-Shifa hospital, on January 5, 2009 in Gaza City. Seven members from the Al-samoni family were killed including the mother, three children and a baby, when an Israeli shell struck their house south of Gaza city. (Abid Katib/Getty Images, boston.com)

Marc Ambinder writes

Many a friend has asked me what I think of the Israeli invasion. I have some private thoughts on the subject, but they're not particularly interesting. I've studied enough, prayed enough, spent enough time in Israel to get the hang of why the conflict appears so tragic and intractable...

...nothing works for very long in the Middle East. Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die. Gaza is where the dream of Palestinian statehood goes to die; Gaza is where the Zionist dream might yet die. [...] My paralysis isn't an analytical paralysis. It's the paralysis that comes from thinking that maybe there's no way out. Not out of Gaza, out of the whole thing."

Here, journalists on the ground in Gaza talk to a Current Vanguard reporter:

What has happened in Gaza is/was, as far as I can tell, cruel, pointless, and another example of how little we know as human beings about how not to totally fuck everything up. It is nauseating to watch the father lamenting the death of his daughter, alive just two hours before. I feel that I have to respond, but in the face of this overwhelming suffering and with such overwhelming problems, is that the right way to be thinking? The above smart people who have actually been there, etc., sound like they are stating the truth of the situation to me; for my own actions, that is where I would leave it (with thanks that U.S. role in the region will probably be a lot different with Obama). But I have been prompted by other people to do more to protest the obscene amounts of innocent death in Gaza, through small gestures like groups on Facebook or marching in protests with signs. It feels wrong and weirdly beside the point to me, but a lot of people feel strongly about it, so here goes.

As best I can tell, whatever solutions can be found to change, even in small ways, the situation will come not from protests or activism. Everyone who is at all directly connected to the conflict is desperately aware what everyone thinks, and has their own idea of justice worked out. Protests have become background noise, even at a large scale; a hundred million Europeans protesting couldn't stop Bush from invading Iraq. Politics has changed a great deal, and needs new tactics. (I have some ideas about that, but most people seem to be protesters, cynics, or oblivious, so I have some issues with finding someone who gives a shit.) Protest may be better than doing nothing, but that is about all it is. Like Marc, I am aware of how beside the point my own judgments and needs for action are, yet keep trying to create some activity, find something to do to push away the horror as it unfolds.

I follow a blog called "The Online Photographer" by Mike Johnston, an experienced photographer and writer who was the editor of Photo Techniques magazine for about ten years. It's a good blog, and he knows what he's talking about. I was sort of surprised to read this in his post (he's referring to a discussion of 'bokeh' at another site, photo.net):

It's a bit disorienting for me now when I post at other sites; despite the fact that my name was referenced several times in the thread before I commented, no one paid the least bit of attention to anything I said. Not that it was so important...it's just that, around here, I tend to get listened to. A lovely luxury, and thanks for that.

I've been taking pictures for a long time (far too long to have learned as little as I have!). When I was a teenager, I developed and printed black and white film, at the Salt Lake Art Center (now I can admit that I should have been paying for the darkroom time, but I simply walked in and used the equipment and chemicals, for months). In those days, they taught the Zone System. When I managed to get it right, it worked well, but it was tricky. Years later, I have a digital camera that produces decent exposure ranges straight out of the box, no thought by me required. Nonetheless, I thought I would look around for information on how to more directly control exposure.

The Zone System is (and here, people who know more will cringe) a way to plan how a picture's lights and darks will be captured and printed. Spot meters that older cameras had (like my Minolta SRT-303) just measured the exposure off the part of the image in the middle of the frame, so if there was another part of the picture that was much darker or lighter, that part would be way too light or dark.

For example, if I took a picture of a person in a car in bright sunlight, the spot meter would tell me to expose for the sun reflected off the car, say 1/500 of a second at f/16 (with ISO 400 film). If I did that, everything but the hood of the car, including the person, would be completely black. Following the Zone System, I decide that the highlights on the car would be the brightest thing in the picture, and the person would be in the middle range. So, I increased the exposure 3 stops, to f/5.6, and the person's face becomes visible (while the highlights on the car become pure white). It took a lot of practice to make these decisions, however.

Now, meters in cameras are using the entire image to decide the exposure, basically building in the Zone System into the camera's exposure calculation (this is the "evaluative" mode my camera has). If you are interested in more direct exposure control, then, it seems that you are left with:

• using the camera's meter in spot mode, manual exposure, and using the traditional zone system
• using the camera's meter in evaluative mode, automatic exposure, and let the camera own the exposure

Neither one of these is particularly satisfying to me; the evaluative mode is better than I am at exposure calculation even if I set the exposure manually (since I still use the meter), and I really have no desire to go back to spot metering. I found a third option:

• Underexpose everything, shoot in RAW mode, and adjust the values of the picture after it's copied to the computer

This has produced the most satisfying results so far; without any special software or too much worry about exposure, I can still use my Zone System knowledge to peg parts of a picture to particular values of light and dark I choose.

• I underexpose (I set the EV compensation to minus 2/3 stop) because digital cameras don't capture as much information about the bright areas of the picture as film does, so I want to be sure I get whatever detail is in the highlights
• I use RAW mode because it lets me change the exposure of the picture after it's shot without losing any information
• I adjust the exposure on the computer because I still want to decide what the most important part of the picture is (and what should get the 'middle range' in the photo). Almost all the time, this is as simple as adjusting is the white, grey, and black points (something every single program for handling digital photos can do; Picasa, iPhoto, etc.).

Sometimes I will set two or three other points to use a transfer curve in the RAW conversion, but not so much anymore. The photo above was taken in this way (I show it in black and white because I think it has a great middle dynamic range that illustrates the idea -- the pretentiousness of black and white is just a bonus). Next, I am going to have to figure out how to get a handle on the weird white balance problems I have...

I loved watching Lawrence Lessig on the Colbert Report, he was so articulate and impatient for things to make sense after so much stupidity. I liked his idea of the hybrid economy -- "read/write culture" and commercial culture in a symbiotic relationship, and wanted more. I have yet to receive the book, so I don't know where he goes with the "hybrid economy" idea. But, I want the tools of this read/write culture to be connected not just to commercial culture, but to the rest of the economy, so they don't go away in the tsunami that's sweeping away a great deal of the economy right now (man, I can only pray for the New York Times).

I don't think it's overstating the case to say that anything valuable to someone can be better if people have better information and more relationships to the people who make their living from it. If I work for, buy from, live around, or share a town with the workers in any industry, small company, or even just a gas station, that situation is better with more transparency, communication, and relationships between the people than what we have today.

A pharmaceutical company should be giving unmoderated web tools to patients who are dealing with a disease, so they can connect to each other and negotiate the completely dysfunctional health care system we have. A car company should design and build cars with the public, through open beta car designs, candid information about what the strengths and weaknesses of the company are, and total access to decisions executives make. Even the gas station should be posting the information it gets from its contacts about why the price is what it is, and what to expect next week. Government should be making the millions of decisions and policies it produces an ongoing, distributed dialogue with citizens, where the strong local opinions and experiences get rolled-up into the scorecards for massive programs.

Free-flow of information makes the people who have to buy things more powerful, and it makes those who want to sell something make better things. And it makes it much easier to see exploitation, avarice, and abuse. Ultimately, that's good stuff for everyone who shares a city, or a town, or a street. The wonderful sites that form the bases for these tools (Wordpress, Wikipedia, Facebook, Digg, Youtube, etc.) should be right in the middle of these real human needs, not just off to the side for entertainment (also, I don't know how they'll survive otherwise).

And the nice thing about all of this is that it's actually less money than what companies flush down the toilet today, in a process known as marketing. There's just not that much point in a game of using media to associate good feelings with a product when everyone can find out much more about it directly from real people. "Brand" is just not as valuable either; the products are it. Enough with the promises that a company is part of your family or people "love" a brand. It's corrosive and wrong to try to hijack our actual, human experiences and feelings to sell products. We don't have to do that anymore.

We do all have to make a living, pay for food, hopefully do work that's valuable to someone. There's nothing inherently sleazy in that, it's just practicality. These social web tools can make work, products, and business more honest and open. More socialist, in fact, and I am very comfortable with that.

Photowalking, originally uploaded by George.

George Oates (who I know some and whose work I like tremendously) was laid off in the latest round at Yahoo. Also, many extremely talented people from Brickhouse (Samantha Tripodi, Chis Martin, Jeannie Yang, Ben Ward, Ken Thornhill, Premshree Pillai, and Kevin Thornback, none of whom I knew well, I just saw and was awed by their work). Like Tom Coates ("Still reeling from the last few weeks"), I am still trying to get my head around the entire thing. I still don't understand how these people got cut. I can't imagine Flickr without a key part of its DNA. I have respect for Kakul, Heather, and the rest of the crew, but I think this shows that the decision making there has gone off the rails. I started using Flickr in 2005, and have loved it and the culture that has developed around it. But, I am going to move my photos off Flickr and find a new home for them, with many regrets.

In the larger context of Yahoo, it is doing yet more damage to itself. It simply won't survive as a commodity site or development platform alone. Mail, a front page, and news (all indications are that every other part of the company is flat or declining) are not enough to sustain the company at its current size, and focusing on advertising innovation while the entire structure goes through a recession seems wildly off-base. What they should do is do what other smart people did during the last bust: invent something really good. That's when people started Flickr, and Google, and Blogger, and on and on. Despite many assets and a lot of value, Yahoo's management would do better to improve the company's prospects by laying themselves off.

update: a couple of people have said that they don't understand the 'protest' I'm making; I should have been clearer. It's not a protest at all, Flickr is still a great thing and the people there are good, etc. I'm quitting it just because I had more of an emotional relationship with it than a practical one, and that's been changed. It's a purely personal thing, left over from the time when sites like Flickr were labors of love, built mostly from enthusiasm. That's rare these days, but that's why I do what I do, through booms and busts.

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This is a good time to think about the identity of Barack Obama. Right now he's a blank screen that many different groups are projecting their wishes on to. He's not from any of their constituencies really, though it's clear he has his proclivities. When he came to Chicago, he was more "mutt" than anything else, searching for a sense of belonging. He pretty much made a choice to join black culture, to inhabit the identity and the role, just like he chose to go to an elite school and become a community organizer. But he did all that while staying removed from the visceral nature of some of the old crappy American fights (race, class, culture), a remove that let him see those fights more clearly (as his speech on race in Philadelphia attests).
So he's pretty much free of attachment to the old clashes, though he understands them. He can choose more intellectually what he wants to do. That could be dangerous (Robert McNamara was surely one of the smartest, most methodical people in the U.S. while he dragged the country into Viet Nam), but right now it is such a relief to have a president that doesn't seem trapped in any one corner.

Recently many commentators have blamed the current financial crisis on a law enacted under the Carter and Clinton administrations, the Community Reinvestment Act. They say that the law forced banks to issue loans to lower income an minority applicants that could not afford them. Usually there is some grain of truth to these things, but far as I can tell, not this time:

• The Community Reinvestment Act applies only to depository banks.
• 67% of 'subprime' mortgages were issued by non-depository investment banks or other firms that were not regulated by the CRA, not depository banks, which were.
• Of those issued by depository banks, only 54% were 'subprime.' That means that, according to a CATO study, only 17.4% of 'subprime' loans, or 2.3% of all mortgages issued in the U.S.
• Collateralized Debt securities (the drop in value of which caused the collapse of Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, AIG, etc. and the present uncertainty about credit) were created by combining regular and 'subprime' mortgages. These securities were issued only by investment banks. Doing the math, that means that about 89% of all the securities issued had no CRA-covered loans in them.

The CRA was a very minor player in the financial crisis, issuing a small percentage of all loans. It did not apply to any of the banks that issued about 89% of the risky mortgages in the U.S. The CRA was irrelevant to the investment banks and other firms that issued risky loans.

"There has been a tendency to conflate the current problems in the subprime market with CRA-motivated lending, or with lending to low-income families in general. I believe it is very important to make a distinction between the two. Most of the loans made by depository institutions examined under the CRA have not been higher-priced loans,16 and studies have shown that the CRA has increased the volume of responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households." -- Janet L. Yellen* President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, March 31, 2008.

The markets that collapsed had almost no regulation. In fact, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 explicitly barred their regulation; the law was written by Republicans and signed by Clinton -- there is plenty of blame to go around. One of the very few completely unregulated markets in the world stopped "functioning properly" (in Bush's words). I can't see why anyone would look further for the cause than that uncontroversial statement.

UPDATE: My brother Michael Clemens, a Harvard economics Ph.D, says no major mistakes! Whew. He also says to keep in mind that the "very simple fact is that no one completely understands the roots of the financial crisis, because it is a complex, emergent, chaotic phenomenon" (hope it was okay to quote you Michael). That is for sure.

*Some have said that as a Clinton appointee, Yellen is biased. She was appointed after his first choices were rejected by the Republican congress; Yellen was cited as a nominee the Senate Finance Committee could support, and they ratified her appointment unanimously.

There are lots of bits and pieces of information around that seem to tell you about what's going on in the world, but even the best of these are, finally, someone's subjective judgement call, what they think is happening. They may be professionals, etc., but I want to get a feel for myself of what's happening, not just accept the opinions of others-- for example, there is usually a pretty serious gap between the politics of Berkeley, California and the rest of the U.S. There's no easy way to get a sense of how big the gulf is, no easy road to figure out how anyone could conceivably want to have someone like Sarah Palin as Vice President.

Of course, I can immerse myself in firehoses of data of all kinds: populate my RSS reader with Republicans, watch 500 channels, visit 10,000 folksy web sites. But I really just want broad themes, changes, and trends. I want an engine that analyzes and summarizes lots of raw data into a few groups of things that are similar.

And no, this isn't some smirky internet-age bullshit! Based on Ben Fry's recommendation in his book, I got a copy of Exploratory Data Analysis via inter-library loan. It was published in 1977, before most people knew what a PC was, and waaay before anything like the Internet. In the very first chapter, John Tukey starts with talking about making simple "stem and leaf" graphs with paper and pencil of the megawatts generated by hydroelectric dams in the U.S. Why? He wants to show you how to "write down a bunch of numbers in such a way as to give a general feel of 'what they are like.'" What a great thing! I don't care too much about the numbers, I just want to know if there's any rough pattern there, and there is: most of these dams either generate about 30 kilowatts, or around 1,100, two groups that tell me where to start if I want to know more about that (I don't).

In information retrieval land, this is known as clustering (one of my hobby horses that I usually talk about with anyone I know for longer than 30 minutes). Instead of a laundry list of thousands of things, I get a set of groups of the words that are used together often. I can get a feel for what's happening in the data without sorting through it myself.

For example: I vaguely know who Kenzaburō Ōe is, but I don't really know what his books are about. I just want a feel for that, with some idea of what the themes of his books were. I can either read a page of Google search results, or I could see derived clusters for those documents. To me, seeing the groups is a much better interface to start exploring if I want to know about him (and I do).

The motivation to get a sense of what's out there in the world is an old one-- it goes back farther than 1977, even. Now that more and more of the stuff of everyday life (cats, politics, hobbies, cancer, errands, religion, etc.) is in the form of data online, I can imagine doing that. I should heavily note that clustering techniques applied to social data still produce very uneven results, and a lot more work is needed. But it's becoming possible to think of a better interface to information than a search box.

Ok, I hate tag clouds. With a passion. Never again. But, since I was sorta happy with the term frequency normalization thing I was working on, I figured what the heck (the road to heck is paved with half-assed text analysis). And another thing, aren't there like, 2,810,000 (and one) twitter clouds out there?

But here it is anyway, twittercloud. It's slightly different than other clouds, in that you can generate a cloud from a query term (not just whatever is hot or an individual's tweets), and you can see what tweets are generating the term right in page. It auto-refereshes with ajax to give you that clean feeling. Also, I happen to think frequency normalization gives a nice weighting that makes more interesting words pop up. Anyway, it was fun!

UPDATE: Now includes Flickr photos (a tag search based on the query term and cloud word) and much better twitterbot detection.

The course has 2 phases: Network Structure and Network Dynamics. The first phase focuses on networks as static entities. It is based on the Graph Theory and concerned with the structure. The second phase focuses on the processes taking place in the networks. It is concerned with time, interaction, and multiple characteristics of the network elements.

Assuming that Ubiquity incorporates features to: a) add annotation elements to a page, b) stores annotations locally, c) lets me organize & collect annotated pages, and d) above all provides an easy way to share annotations socially, it seems like it could become my new bicycle! It would be:

• a standard XHTML container that works everywhere, on/offline
• a place to stash pages rather than remembering links
• a notebook with bits and pieces of other pages
• host an annotated page instead of drawing on a screenshot
• add video/images/media to a page, make snarky comments on it, and send it around
• make 2 or 3 pages into one page
• make a page into a wiki, an exquisite corpse, etc. etc.

And some cumbersome scenarios become really easy:

• I can email a web page that has a message, a highlighted portion, and a link to the original page, as an attachment that needs no internet connection.
• I can email a map that has text pointing to a place on the map
• I can choose and send 12 books for preschoolers from amazon (with titles, authors, thumbnail, price, and link) via an email
• I can turn the NL east division part of the MLB standings into a widget that appears on my blog, with the erratic Mets highlighted and have it update as they surge, then collapse again.

(I know there are ways to do all these things now via other services and tools. But most of them require a good chunk of time, an account on something, etc. The thing that will make web pages into a medium for sharing stuff (instead of just a url) is making it easy, three-four clicks, simple, etc.)

I love all the other features of Ubiquity (I'm an old Quicksilver user). And there are plenty of no so great aspects of this. But I think this part of Ubiquity has the most potential to make sharing things on the web a whole order of magnitude easier, in a way that no bookmarklet, plug-in, greasemonkey script, or single-purpose site could.

UPDATE Belay that. FireEagle not figured out :(

Damn, that was hard (for me). I finally have my tiny scratch of a twitter & location Web app ("twiphlo") updating not only twitter's profile location, but also fire eagle. It's still hacky, but it works. If you are one of my 12 4 regular users and that interests you, send me mail and I will enable it. It really is the Charlie Brown Christmas tree of fire eagle apps tho.

Deep in the depths of the dot-com bust, when I was lucky enough to have work of any kind (in my case it was commuting 200 miles each day contracting for Cisco), the people I worked with were fatalistic about the future of the work we did. Many people thought the money had been drained out of the exploratory culture of the boom, and that we were in a very conservative time.

The truth was the opposite in fact; much of the boom was spent doing variations on e-commerce ventures and content sites, with the idea that each vertical or market segment would need it's own one of those. Counter also to the conventional wisdom, these sites were not created because their entrepreneurs thought that business logic had been suspended, but instead because the tiny community of venture capitalists were funding only specific things. The 'bust' came not out of the sites' lack of income (it was no secret that very few ever had enough business to survive), but in the withdrawal of venture funds.

After the bust, many people left the business for school, or other jobs. A few people (who couldn't do anything else) kept creating new things however, and many of them were more creative than anything that came before (and set the stage for the current boom). Google, Blogger, Napster, and Friendster (a non-semantic search engine, easy blogging tool, media sharing tool, and social network, the hallmarks of today's Web) were all created in 1999 or 2000 in the shade of obscurity. The examplars of the successful social media Web were born in 2001 and 2002, when little venture capital flowed: Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us, and Facebook.

In retrospect, it's easy to see that it's more possible (though harder of course) to create something new when no one is watching and no one cares, out of shear love of an idea. But it's not something that many seem to remember these days. Instead, it feels like 1999 all over again, with companies launching sites with the same functionality and ideas, venture-funded start-ups doing variations on social media ventures and aggregation sites, with the idea that each vertical or market segment will need it's own one of them. In fact, I can't think of a single company that's launched since 2002 that isn't a derivative of one of the bust's labors of love.

The complete lack of creativity and new ideas is typical today. I guess we all have something to protect: the market funding, the high-paying jobs, the advertising revenue. The more to protect, the more conservative it gets. I hope that someone, or some company, somewhere, will think back to the first boom and remember what happened. The business cycle will happen, the money will evaporate, and only those that have made something truly new will survive that.

China is going through huge growth, about 10% a year. While there remains a huge part of the country to lift out of poverty, one would think that this amount of growth would result in plenty of opportunity for everyone to make a good deal of money with less competitive pressure than in 'mature' markets. But apparently in some areas, the opposite is true; since the plants are partly owned by the government (and the managers not entirely responsible for keeping costs below income), they will sell products below costs in order to compete with other plants. This is, according to the article I read ("Ownership Distortion, Low Level Technology, and Excessive Competition," by Jie Ma and Weiying Zhang), the economic state of "over-competition," where too many competitors end up compromising the market and their own viability.

This rings a bell, because in a venture-capital fueled, social-media start-up frenzy much the same condition exists. 35 life streaming apps. 4,324 photo/video sharing sites. 321 twitter clones. Countless business-vertical mashups (102 travel business mashups alone). Why will any of these gain enough traction to garner general use (and "change the world" as their entrepreneurs like to say) if the market is in this crowded state and the owners are not risking their own money? Is this lottery-like state really an ok but brutal winnowing process, or more like the airline industry's race to the bottom?

For example, two competing commenting platforms in the same market causes some upset as one tries to market to the others' users. When so many blogs are being added all the time and the phenomenon is going mainstream, there should be plenty of room for at least two products. Instead, there are an overwhelming number of choices (who has time to sort through 14 options?). Decision theory says that "more choices may lead to a poorer decision or a failure to make a decision at all", losing situation for all these creative, hardworking start-ups.

So what's the alternative? I think the collections of start-ups in overlapping spaces should, as quickly as feasible, abandon the idea that they can create the be-all, end-all (e.g.) social shopping user base and content silo that will crush competing sites. Instead, they can open-source the basic containers and objects (much as Open Social and OAuth have done in one discreet area). That way, the personal data is by definition portable and owned by no company, and start-ups that aren't really, functionally different will have a shorter life (and I will never have to upload my profile picture again, ugh), and the viable sites will have a clearer shot at being viable businesses. What is the likelihood of this happening? Probably not so great, but these are the same geeks who advocate the Linux model for operating systems (where an app can be easily recompiled in the different distributions, and each distribution can use parts of others). There's really no reason other than a kind of protectionism not to extend this to Web applications.

"Twiphlo" (yeah, twitter iphone location... can't have a fake startup without a cutesy name) is my tiny contribution to making one particular activity easier: combining twitter with location updating, as an iPhone web app (yeah, I know web apps are dead on iPhone). The idea is that you can replicate some of the functions of brightkite and myloki without dealing with multiple services by just updating Twitter's location field in your profile. And, when having a history of your twitters with location information is interesting, you can see your past locations and tweets on a map. It also generates a geoRSS feed and a KML feed (Google Earth).

Of course, I only made this for myself, but it's there to try and to use if anyone finds it useful:

http://practicalist.com/twiphlo

It's functional in a web browser, but it works best in Safari or on an iPhone.

Disclaimers & Details: This is a test app. It gathers personal information. Use at your own risk. You may lose data, it may not work, Twitter may be down, etc. This application saves your Twitter password to a cookie on your local device only, mildly encrypted. Your username, locations, and tweets are stored on my secure database, to draw the map. If you are uncomfortable with this, bookmark this link and the app will not store any information locally or remotely. I will never have access to your Twitter account, and all the information stored is public already (unless you've set your tweets to private by default).

As I approach the singularity (doing the whole spectral clustering thing on my own, rather than relying on genius kids for the heavy lifting), this caught my eye as a great rationale for doing the semantics-free work:

An interesting property of corpus-based theories of cognition (such as Latent Semantic Analysis) is that they cannot be tested independently of the corpus. Imagine that we collect a corpus, run and Single Value Decomposition on it, and use the resulting space to predict human similarity judgments between certain words. Imagine that the model does not explain the data very well. Is it that the model's processes are unrealistic, or is it that the corpus is not very representative? In this situation, those two factors are confounded. A possible solution is to test the same model with different corpora and different tasks. If the models explains the judgments' variance across different situations, we have more convincing evidence of the psychological reality of the model. ("Creating Your Own LSA Space," Jose Quesada, Carnegie Mellon University 2002.)

Chris Anderson's article "The End of Theory" takes this to a overwrought extreme:

Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them (given equal corpus data, Google can translate Klingon into Farsi as easily as it can translate French into German). And why it can match ads to content without any knowledge or assumptions about the ads or the content.

Clustering as an interface, by contrast, doesn't care about semantics, and doesn't even try for a strict ranking. Groups and rough hierarchy fit human models of organization much better than a long list (much as piles remain the usual way people organize). Loose piles don't have to be semantically understood, a set of items is easier to take in and choose from (with two dimensions -- item and group -- rather than one). And when the algorithm is based on purely on user activity analysis, a better interface for presenting results, solving the interface problem (and thus engendering and capturing more user interaction) is really solving the whole problem of giving people information in ways they can understand it and use it.

UPDATE: Taking this further, it's been seen for a long time that changes in behavior often happen when a few people that are part of a small group cause that entire group to adopt the change (like buying a kind of shoe, or phone, etc.). This is called the "cluster effect":

"The cluster effect is similar to (but not the same as) the network effect. It is similar in the sense that the price-independent preferences of both the market and its participants are based on each ones perception of the other rather than the market simply being the sum of all its participants actions as is usually the case. Thus, by being an effect greater than the sum of its causes, and as it occurs spontaneously, the cluster effect is a usually cited example of emergence."

At my job they use a more elaborate setup for development than I've been used to (the Very Special engineer that I am). It has some advantages over the quick 'n dirty approach I've used, but it has proved to be extremely tricky to set up. So I thought I would share the set of solutions I gathered that make a working setup, in case it helps anyone else. (In advance I should say that these aren't the über geek ways of doing these things; for that, learn to love the Linux command-line and tip forums. They are stripped down and simplified.) I do mainly design, so I don't want to spend that much time getting things perfect, just workable. I run Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. I've been doing a lot of one-person development with Textmate, Fetch, and Terminal. If that sounds similar to your speed, this setup might be interesting.

The idea is that you run a local Web server, manage code revisions in a shared repository, and set up a virtual host for each project. This has the advantages of:

• Giving you a fast, private, local environment to see and test your work
• Having code that can will work on a public server with no changes
• Letting you roll back to a previous version before you screwed everything up
• Collaborating with others or working on more than one machine, effortlessly
• Use a bloated-but-pretty-good development application with idiot-proof debugging, code hints, docs, variable name lists, and function tracking

It has a disadvantages of:

• Being complex to maintain
• Requiring more steps to do simple things
• Being wrong for small projects

So, anyway...

Eclipse is a coding tool, a completely free Textmate or Coda replacement that has 18,423,521 features. It takes a lot of getting used-to, but in the end I do like it better than simpler tools. Projects can get complex really fast, and it's much better for that than any tools I've used. Plus it has a lot users, plugins, and developers.

1. Eclipse

Eclipse is mainly for Java development, so it needs a plugin to function well for PHP coding. The easiest way to get that is to download a free, pre-configured version of Eclipse 3.3.2 that's maintained by the PDT project.

• Download the PDT "all in one" build (Mac DMG file, gzip)
• Double click on the file to uncompress it, then copy the folder to Applications. Open the 'Eclipse' application inside the folder
• Make a 'workspace' folder when the application starts up that is not in a system folder (like Library or Applications). I use Macintosh HD/dev/workspace in all the below steps

2. Subversion

Subversion is a version management tool that lets you go back to previous versions of files and collaborate with others really easily. Happily, Mac OS X ships with it pre-installed.

• First, set up a repository (where your code will be tracked)
• Open the Terminal (Applications » Utilities) and enter:
  sudo mkdir /dev/svn
  sudo mkdir /dev/svn/repository
  sudo svnadmin create /dev/svn/repository
  sudo chown -R www:www /dev/svn/repository
• Then, if you want to get the most out of Subversion, continue following the instructions in the excellent documentation, setting up a trunk and branch for each project. Or, you can just create a new repository for each project like I do, and continue to the next part right now.

The simplest way to use Subversion is an Eclipse plugin called Subclipse. To get it, open Eclipse, then:

• Go to the menu Help » Software Updates » Find and Install
• Select "Search for New Features to Install"
• Click "New Remote Site" and enter a name for the site (e.g. "Subclipse")
• Enter http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.2.x for the url and click 'Ok'
• On the 'Update Sites to Visit' screen, make sure the checkbox next to 'Subclipse' is checked, then click 'Next'
• On the Updates screen, expand the 'Subclipse' item and uncheck the 'Integrations' item
• Click next and accept all the following dialog's defaults
• Create a new project (File » New » Other... » SVN Folder » Checkout Projects from SVN)
• Choose 'Enter a new Repository' and enter http://localhost/dev/svn/repository/, select the item created, and click 'Finish'
• On the next screen, set up the project as PHP by finding the PHP folder, opening it, and choosing PHP Project. Then give it a name, and code away
• Be sure to read about how to use Subversion, and Eclipse either at their sites or from within Eclipse Help.

3. Apache

Both Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and 10.5 Leopard come with Apache already installed. Turn it on in the System Preferences » Sharing preference pane. To configure it for this setup:

• Open the Terminal application (in the Applications->Utilities folder) and:
• for Tiger enter sudo nano /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, then your password
• for Leopard enter sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf then your password
• Scroll down (cntrl-v) until you find the line:
  # Virtual hosts
  # Include /private/etc/[apache2 or httpd]/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
  and change it to:
  # Virtual hosts
  Include /private/etc/[apache2 or httpd]/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
  
• Then add a 'Directory' block, entering these lines below the lines above (use what ever folder path you made for your workspace in the first line):
  <Directory "/dev/workspace/">
     Order allow,deny
     Allow from all
  </Directory>
• Next, set up Subversion for Apache. Enter in the same document, after the above lines:
  LoadModule dav_svn_module /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_dav_svn.so
  <Location /dev/svn>
     DAV svn
     SVNParentPath /dev/svn
  </Location>
• Save the file (cntrl-o) and exit (cntrl-x).

Next, set up a virtual host so that you can type in the url for your domain and see your project almost exactly as on the final server. Open the Terminal application (in the Applications->Utilities folder) and:

• for Tiger enter sudo nano /etc/httpd/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf, then your password
• for Leopard enter sudo nano /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf, then your password
• Delete all the lines in the file that don't have a '#' at the beginning
• Enter, at the end (replace www.domain.com with your server domain):
  NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1
  <VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
     DocumentRoot "/dev/workspace/www.domain.com"
     ServerName www.dev.domain.com
  </VirtualHost>

4. php5

On Mac OS X 10.5, you can use the existing PHP5 installation:

• Open Terminal and enter sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
• Find the line #LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so
• Remove the # and save the file
• Restart Apache (System Preferences » Sharing).

On Mac OS X 10.4, the existing PHP install doesn't seem to work reliably. Easiest is just to use Marc Liyanage's install packages with Apache 1.3 that comes installed:

• Download the installer (gzip)
• Follow the fantastic instructions

5. MYSQL

On Mac OS X 10.4:

• Marc Liyanage's great post has the best instructions for setup

On Mac OS X 10.5:

• Download MySQL 5 (dmg)
• Run Installers for MySQL, the startup item and preference pane
• Make sure the preference pane (in System Preferences) indicates it's running
• Open the Terminal application and enter /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root
• Remove a big security hole by adding a MySQL root account password. Enter:
  update mysql.user SET password=PASSWORD('yourpasswordhere');
• Enter EXIT to leave MySQL

6. phpmyadmin

Phpmyadmin lets you use a Web-based interface to MySQL instead of the command-line. For most tasks, this is drastically slower but far easier than the command-line.

• Download and uncompress phpmyadmin
• Copy to /Library/WebServer/Documents and rename the folder "phpmyadmin"
• Open Terminal and enter sudo cp /private/etc/php.ini.default php.ini
• Open the php.ini file and change the lines
  mysql.default_socket = and mysqli.default_socket =
  to:
  mysql.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
  mysqli.default_socket = /private/tmp/mysql.sock
• In your Web browser, go to localhost/phpmyadmin/scripts/setup.php and click 'add' in server section, then:
• Leave all defaults as they are, except for...
• set config user as root
• set config password as the one you set above in MySQL section
• Click the 'Save' button
• Go to the folder Macintosh HD/Library/WebServer/phpmyadmin/config/config.inc.php
• move config.inc.php up one directory level and delete the 'config' directory
• Go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin to use your database

You're done! Whew. Now, as long as you don't code any absolute paths, you can develop in Eclipse, save as you go, and see your site in its final form by going to www.dev.domainname.com. When it's time to deploy, you can move your files as they are to the production server and avoid all the last-minute path-fixing (at the very least).

(Thanks hugely to Jeff Reiecke and Yixu Lin for various pieces of help with this.)

In an article about Flickr by Virginia Heffernan ("Sepia No More" in the New York Times Magazine), she bemoans what she sees as the dominant aesthetic on Flickr:

As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. ...the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site's members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that "pop" with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

To me, the site's most popular photos are as good as or better than most magazine photography. Flickr members have created large amounts of quality work from the willingness to love and critique each other's work and newly available decent equipment. This is work that would otherwise not exist if not for the site, a strong contribution to popular culture.

It's hard to believe that Ms. Heffernan would confuse popular culture with incandescent art in the offline world; why does she try to mix the two up on the Web?

In a recent post on Hitwise by Heather Hopkins, "Content Aggregation is King?," the bind that existing news media is in is highlighted again:

"Aggregators are taking a larger piece of the pie but the size of the pie is growing with visits to content creators and all News and Media websites growing. The trouble is - creating all that content is expensive. It's tough to justify the cost of content creation if those that sift and sort are gaining on those that create."

The deal between the a consortium of newspapers and Yahoo to outsource listings functions to Yahoo in return for a cut of revenue was predicated on the idea that there is a way to do some basic arbitrage on this situation, but even that doesn't work over the longer term. News media simply can't justify the cost of their content creation staffs, even if they get rid of the printing presses and costs of classifieds businesses. And they have yet to really deal with this (probably because they are still much larger than the aggregator sites even now).

Maybe, as the news media starts seriously shrinking the content pool, the aggregators will start to strike deals like Yahoo did, but more expansive and lucrative. Done right, such deals could raise all boats. For example, rather than aggregating traffic on one domain, Yahoo (or Google, etc.) could drive traffic to news media sites that federated their news with aggregated content from all over the Internet. A network of these sites, served by a single ad engine, could broaden the ad inventory far beyond what Yahoo would ever be able to support on its own and save some amount of a business model for content creators.

It may take a risk by someone on the scale of the 2001 AOL-Google deal, which similarly tied a content network to advertising engine. Marissa Meyer talked about it as "a very big bet, a revenue guarantee" to AOL:

"It caused a huge amount of controversy at the time because by some of the models that we had run, the deal was going to bankrupt Google. Like Jonathan Rosenberg actually got up on the table and jumped up and down about how much we shouldn't do this deal because Google was going to go bankrupt. We had models, one said that we were going to go bankrupt, one which said we might break even... and one year into the deal what we saw was that by signing AOL and broadening the reach of our advertising network we attracted so many more advertisers, and RPMs (revenue per thousand pageviews) went up across the network and we outperformed our expectations by a factor of two, maybe even three times."

Many of the good ideas below came in talking about personal information with Doug Fritz, the bad parts are my own ideas.

When Friendster and Flickr started getting traction (2002 and 2004 respectively), I wasn't a huge fan of the functionality, but the social aspect was totally addictive. I got seriously into each (and even got comfortable with the photostream concept eventually, though the fact that I can't easily control the order of the photos without using the organizr still bothers me). These sites ability to connect me with other people blew away all other shortcomings. At the time, the fact that I was putting so much personal information into a public space didn't bother me at all; I assumed a that the Web made old ideas of privacy kind of obsolete, and we would all eventually adapt and make new social norms to cope.

But now that social networks are taking on large chunks of people, I am not so sure. Facebook with a dozen real friends is a much different thing than Facebook with 140 "friends." The information I post there is, to me, the things that define me personally as I choose to represent myself. In the social network context however, the sites ultimately have more control over how I get represented than I do.

I had an experience with that when my story about a stolen cellphone and pictures from the thief unintentionally uploaded to Flickr briefly became news. There were some wrinkles in the story that caused people to be suspicious that I was doing marketing, or lying about the phone being stolen (as opposed to lost). I knew the facts of the matter and was not looking for any large amount of attention in posting the story. But once there was that attention, the people who read the story simply did not believe it and couldn't be convinced otherwise. They used personal information about me that was publicly available (on Flickr, my blog, and other sites) to make the case that I was perpetrating a hoax (for example the fact that I worked at Yahoo was used to say that I was marketing the Flickr service). Even the Reuters reporter that interviewed me asked "how can I know you're not deceiving me?" I didn't have an answer for her. The effortless flow of personal information (flow that I started) did not lead to anything like the truth, and caused some people to think that I was not a real person at all. Privacy as we knew may be gone, but the idea that everyone is now a public figure (with none of the protections of public figures) strikes me as wrong.

We can say that in the context of computer networks "information wants to be free," and I support the idea that copyright is an outmoded framework for intellectual property. But when it comes to representing ourselves, how can it be that personal information should flow everywhere and be used by anyone however they want? Open Social and the Data Portability initiatives are good starts for independent mechanisms, but I still have to give these systems a truckload of personal information, with no way to take it back after it's out there.

An alternate solution would be to allow people to own their personal information store, and choose to allow social network sites access to this store. Sites that behaved badly could be banned. This is much like OpenID and Oauth in concept, where one's identity is tied to a DNS-like way of creating a single namespace for unique user identifiers. It could take the form of a fancier version of an "Attention Profile Markup Language" file; a "Social Profile Markup Language" file, say. It would be stored on my own web server and under my direct control. If I wanted to share with Friendfeed or mybloglog (for example) what sites I've been posting to, saving, liking, or reading, I could allow them to access my SPML file under the condition that it be removed if I decided not to use the application any longer. (This is a geeky solution, but that's usually where these things start.) There should be a better solution to the new portability of social data than exists today, or my own understanding of my personal information will mean less and less.

• - Extraction of thumbnails, descriptions, and tags for Flickr images, Amazon products, and Vimeo videos.
• - Extraction of media embeds for YouTube, Current TV, and Vimeo videos.
• - Tagging and collections for all saved items
• - Up to 10 email lists of 10 recipients each