Tangent From My Aside

What would constitute a "jaw-dropper" in Final Cut Pro?

2011-04-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

This is based on complete speculation, but gathering the "Who's Who of leaders in the post-production community" would be important if you were going to turn that switch that Alex Lindsay has been advocating over at MacBreak Weekly. If FCP had a "Publish for Sale on iTunes" button, you would want to get post-production gurus on board. And more than any other change in how video is edited, this would be worthy of dropping your jaw. After all, direct access to a marketplace of that size by independent content producers would put the industry on its head.... which is the best reason why it's not what is happening.

Read about it here: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/04/05/apple-to-introduce-new-final-cut-pro-on-april-12th/.

Independent Filmmakers Join the Club

2010-09-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

According to the Los Angeles Times Business Section today, Independent Filmmakers do not "get it" any more than big studios. Richard Verrier interviewed two film creators who believe that people watching their films is bad... OK, that's not exactly what they said, but the irony is clear.

Gary Carter, the creator of Gangland Love Story, believes that he lost $100,000 from people watching copies of his small film online. Unfortunately, he makes no mention of how many viewers he thinks would have chosen to purchase the video, selling for $18 on Amazon.com.

But the true ridiculousness comes later in the article. As support for the proposition that internet viewing is harming independent films, the article cites The Hurt Locker, which won six Oscar awards despite making only $16.4 million in box office. The article states that more persons saw the film without paying than actually paid for it, yet nobody mentions that this volume of viewers might have been necessary to generate the level of attention necessary to be considered for an Oscar. It is assumed by everyone involved with the article that without internet views the movie would have made more money, but the more realistic reality is that without internet views, the movie would probably never have risen to the cultural radar at all.

While LA Times states that independent filmmakers are unable to deal with "internet piracy", it leaves out the fact that independent filmmakers are also least able to independently generate buzz about a film. For artists who make their work with the hope of people watching it, the position is odd. Let's hope that independent filmmakers catch on quickly that the Internet is the friend of the small film, not the enemy that this article seems bent on painting.

Yes, the market as it exists changes the way that people make money on content, but by embracing this reality, the great ideas of independent filmmakers stand a better chance than ever of being judged on the merits, maybe even judged by the Oscar voters.

Remote Access is Easy (sometimes)

2009-06-25T17:12:00.000-07:00

The New York Times just posted an answer to a question regarding remote access for helping someone troubleshoot their computer. I have to admit that a few years ago I tried using Windows Remote Desktop and VNC. I never had good results with these solutions. The setup is too difficult, even for someone reasonably tech savvy. The worst part was getting everything configured properly on the remote computer, then having the settings change by the time I wanted to use it. I do not log into my mother's computer regularly, only when she is having an issue and I am not visiting soon.

But recently I found a better solution, and it was almost by accident. One function I do use regularly is automatic syncing for backup in the background. I was very impressed with what Microsoft Live Sync did and it actually worked on Mac OSX Tiger before they broke it. However, when it left Beta and stopped working on Tiger, I heard about Microsoft Live Mesh. I do not think anybody understands why Live Sync and Live Mesh are separate products, but the point is that Live Mesh accomplishes the same syncing features plus some more. I switched over to Mesh in order to take advantage of the Online Backup feature. Up to 2 gigs can be sync'ed between computers AND a copy is stored on the web. Very useful! And you cannot beat the price (that would be zero dollars and zero cents!)

However, Live Mesh also has a Device Connect feature that is absolutely worth trying. What it does is basically take away all of the setup hassles. If the computer is turned on and connected to the internet, you click the Connect button and wait while it makes sure nobody is actively working on the computer at the moment. Next thing you know you are looking at the screen as though you were sitting in front of that computer. That in itself would be enough to make this worthwhile. However, Microsoft added a few nice touches that I have not seen elsewhere (though I am not an expert, this might be standard in remote utilities today). First, you can hide the display on the local computer. This is great because I used this feature to log into a computer for the purpose of updating billing records. Even when I feel pretty confident that nobody is standing at the location looking at the screen, this is still a perfect check. Second, you can literally copy a file on the remote computer, switch to a local window and paste and the file copies over the internet. Obviously programs have offered FTP like interfaces for copying files, but removing all of the overhead by making it look like a standard copy paste is brilliant.

What is the catch? Well, it only works if the remote computer is a Windows PC, no love for Macs at this point. Second, it only works when the browser used to connect is Internet Explorer (because it uses ActiveX to do the magic). So basically, it only works from a Windows machine to a Windows machine. However, it works between versions of Windows. So my XP machine can connect to a Vista and vice-versa. Although I would love to bring my MacMini back into this party, there is still enough to like that I use it despite that restriction.

So in closing, I tend to be reluctant to give Microsoft much praise, but here is a place where they are doing great work. Now we just have to get the word out, because New York Times recommending people use programs with heavy configuration needed instead is creating work.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Worry, Don't Rush Them

2009-01-25T00:56:00.000-08:00

I was lucky to get to participate in the UCLA Williams Moot Court Competition as part of a team of three students from University of La Verne, College of Law this year. We just turned in our brief earlier this week and oral arguments are coming in late February.

When I first found out that our school was assigned to write a brief in support of the Navy's position, I thought I was in big trouble. On one hand, writing an argument that is opposite of your own point of view is always a useful intellectual exercise. But how on earth was I going to be able to justify a policy that is so clearly discriminatory?

With everything going on around California Proposition 8, I think this is a really important time to have this discussion. Homosexual equality is almost certainly going to be the major civil rights issue of my lifetime. So participating in an event structured around this topic is really important, but since most people that sign up to participate in this event are sensitive to the importance of equality for homosexuals, how can half of them write a brief in support of discrimination? The answer revealed two important revelations, one about the law and one about issues of equality.

The first thing I realized is that the law is sometimes blind to morality. Just because it's wrong to discriminate against a certain class of people, does NOT mean that a law doing so will be held unconstitutional. The law moves slowly and haltingly. Sometimes it is out in front of public trends and sometimes it lags far behind them, but it does so on its own terms. To assume that because something is "right" or "wrong" has any impact on the legal status of the issue is to miss a greater truth about the law itself. This is probably the biggest lesson I could possibly glean from an experience like this one. Regardless of what type of law I practice I will try to remember to separate my moral judgments from my legal conclusions.

The second thing that I realized is that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy is really on borrowed time, but not for reasons of law. The courts have shown very little desire to challenge the military on their policy. The concept of military deference has amazing power to stop a constitutional challenge (be it due process, equal protection, or free speech) in its tracks. But the reason that "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" won't survive is because it's a bad policy for the military. At a time when the military is in desperate need of recruits, the policy is discharging large numbers of perfectly capable men and women based solely on their sexual orientation in connection with some conduct or declaration based on it. Apparently the education requirements have been lowered to increase recruitment as well as lowering the standards for a relatively clean criminal record. Eventually some person high up in the chain of command is going to look at this situation and say enough is enough. Every day two forces of greater need for soldiers and greater acceptance of homosexuals is going to move the discussion towards reversing the policy from the inside. Once this happens, there will be no need to challenge it from the outside.

One final tangential thought is that President George W. Bush created a lot of this demand for soldiers by extending the "War on Terror" from Afghanistan to Iraq, which requires a much larger force. Ironic that Bush might have accomplished what Clinton was unable to do, end the ban on homosexuals in the military!

Optomism Magnetism

2009-01-16T23:56:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in my first meeting of Appellate Advocacy all students were asked to tell the class why we are in law school and what you want to do with our legal education. I was very thankful that Andrea has been encouraging me to think through this question for other reasons, because I felt somewhat prepared.

I spoke about my background in Software Engineering and my desire to pursue ideas over details. I talked about the natural pull of patent law and my passion for new media. I kept it short, but mentioned that I would someday like to work with the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF). This is were I left off in class.

As I was driving home I started thinking about what else I might have said to the class. Another student mentioned her extreme liberalism regarding Constitutional law. I might have described myself as extremely liberal regarding intellectual property law. At this point I generally regard copyright law in the United States as either (a) fundamentally broken or (b) unfortunately outdated. I might have mentioned that the fear of allowing Mickey Mouse to slip into the public domain has created an enormous orphan works problem. I also might have talked about my desire to help little companies fight off big companies with more lawyers than they have employees! I could have pointed out that Appellate Advocacy will be a very important skill if I am lucky enough to practice in the way I would like to. This is because I'll constantly be on the wrong side of the "law". I'll be appealing cases and trying to persuade judges to break from precedent and make "new law". Of course this is, by design, a slow process. The law intentionally moves at a galacial pace. As I pulled onto my street I was fired up to take on the world but also pessimistic about the state of affairs.

I started working on another project, but it hit me pretty suddenly that what I had thought of on the ride home was really only half the story. One of the reasons that I'm interested in Economics is because I do think that the market works. Legally you can hold on to outdated business models and sue copyright infringers until the cows come home, and this will create a lot of friction in the system that somebody needs to stand in court and point out, but ultimately there's a practical downside to suing your own customers. Eventually the market catches up and rewards the good ideas and punishes those that are sitting around trying to get the free lunch. So eventually I see my career moving into advising companies on how to keep their noses clean, prevent the letters from the big companies from coming, and add value to the system. That's really the key to the whole thing. If you keep putting value into the system, even if somebody steals some of the benefit from you, you still have a lot more by having the ability to add value then the other guy. So I'm also a conservative, a true conservative that wants everybody to let the market run it's course.

All these ideas were swirling in my head today as I thought more about the bailout. I really wish one of the candidates had questioned why the bailout was a foregone conclusion. I wish we had a national debate about taking the big hit now to fix the broken parts of our economy (like automakers that are so incredibly topheavy from pension obligations). If Obama is as serious about alternative energy as he claims he could have let the market decide if the US automakers would fail, and their resources be bought up cheap by more economically efficient and environmentally friendly automakers, or if they'd fight their way out of the hole they dug themselves. Ultimately I would have rather given 5% of that money to Tesla and let them run with it. But I digress (more than usual I mean).

And then today I finally read a blog post from a few days ago by Doc Searls commenting on people applying the Cluetrain Manifesto's principles to real scenarios. He talked about how the book was written before distribution, podcasting, and social media were even around to support it. The internet revolution is really in infancy. That's why I want tobe a lawyer, so I can have a say in guiding that progress both in courtrooms and meeting rooms. That's where I want to add value to the system with my ideas and hard work. Now I've just gotta finish law school...

Connect the dots... but do not assume

2008-10-22T00:16:00.000-07:00

So I finally had some time to consider (and write down my thoughts on) the implications of Apple claiming they "most likely would not continue to operate (the iTunes store) if it were no longer possible to do so profitably." (see Forbes story towards the bottom).

Let me say that I highly respect and admire the contributors to MacBreak Weekly, but here they (as well as TWIT that week) made a big jump. Not operating iTunes store at a loss does NOT mean they must shut down the store. There are alternative ways to run the store for a small profit.

Alex Lindsay has discussed on MacBreak Weekly the relationship between creators (musicians, filmmakers, etc) and Apple products. Take the example of iMovie's menu option, "Export to YouTube". Now make a paid version in Garage Band (or Soundtrack Pro) that says "Include in iTunes store". Then after the music revolution is running on all cylinders, Final Cut Pro gets the same type of option to sell movies or shows in the iTunes Store (do we call it Television when it looses all connection to classic television?).

OK, maybe you're thinking "That's a nice theory, but it's just a thought experiment". After all, Apple could have done this at any time, even before signing with the labels originally. Yes and no, Apple actually could not have done this type of deal before they settled their long running legal negotiations with Apple Corps, but they could have initiated a direct music service any time after Februrary 2007. Besides, Apple doesn't want to handle all the billing and accounting issues surrounding millions of content creators with a small number of sales, right?

If only there was a recent example of Apple cutting out layers of publishers and going straight to the creators... Maybe a store that sold little widgets or games that ran on Apple hardware. Wait, I think I've got it! The App Store. Rather than recruit a few big companies to develop applications for the App Store, Apple created a pipeline. They released the tools, published the enrollment process, and handled all of the fees, and standardized the rates for their share and the creators share.

And what would musicians get out of the deal. How many musicians would like to keep 70% of the proceeds of their creation and still have a shot at Apple's front page. All of them (except maybe the 3 or 4 who already have that kind of deal after decades in the industry, think NIN).

Why does Apple want to do this? Because even if they do not, somebody else will. They have the opportunity to have a big splashy announcement that takes everyone by surprise, or Steve Jobs can try to paint an "us too" announcement as revolutionary (which he's very good at doing, but why not just be first). No other company could do it with the kind of earth-shattering effect of Apple, but that does not mean it could not succeed. Amazon has the best chance to create the big marketplace version of it, but it will lack the style of an Apple offering.

Why did Apple start the ball rolling with the App Store? The software industry is already much more diversified than the Music and Movie/TV industry. Independent software developers have been swimming with the big boys before Apple brought their model to the App Store. It's a perfect way to work the kinks out of the pipeline. Once they add music submissions, they'll already know how to handle the billing issues, the application process, etc.

Now there is just one problem: old media. As I said at the top, I have no idea what kind of contract the music companies have made with Apple. What I do believe is that they all think Apple needs them more than they need Apple. The hole in the boat that may have alerted them to their folly was NBC walking away from Apple, only to walk right back the next year. But hopefully (for consumers) the big media companies will keep pushing Apple, keeping giving DRM-free music to Amazon instead of iTunes, keep pushing to raise the prices on the iTunes store. When one of the Record Companies declines to renew its contract with Apple, all the analysts will say this is a huge blow to Apple, not realizing that this is a huge win for Apple. Then when all the cards are turned over and Apple ends up transforming the industry, analysts will wonder if this was strategy or making lemonade from lemons.

And I will wonder to. If something remotely like this happens I will be able to pretend that I am prescient rather than lucky. But I will know (and admit) that I only connected the dots that others pointed out. And I will know that the best part of the whole thing is getting to be a consumer in that new age of consumption.

Which brings me to my final point. Did the financial crisis ruin the opportunity? Actually it might have made this scenario more plausible. After all, Apple does not make its money off of iTunes, it just does not want to lose a lot of money to it either. Ultimately, Apple makes money on iPods. With disposable income declining for the time being, the best way to stave off losses is to offer something fresh and interesting. Also, if it uses the next few years to position itself properly, it will be ready to blast through new heights when the next cycle starts to lift. Then again, it might be easier to just release some new shiny MacBooks!

Horrible is Wonderful

2008-07-17T00:37:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard about Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog, don't question it, just go now and watch it. It's funny, it's free, it's forward thinking. What more could you ask for? Watch it before July 20th!

Creative Systems Theory and Creative Lawyering

2008-06-04T00:07:00.001-07:00

For my Legal Analysis and Writing course I am reading about "Developing a Persuasive Theory" through the "six stages of the creative process". (Legal Reasoning and Legal Writing: Structure, Strategy, and Style by Richard K Neumann, Jr. Chapter 24 on pages 302 & 303).

I cannot help but notice the striking similarity between these six stages: Problem-identification, Gathering and evaluating information and raw materials, Solution-generation, Solution-evaluation, Decision, and Action, with the stages of the Creative Systems Theory: Pre-Axis, Early Axis, Middle Axis, Late Axis, and Integration. (See Charles M. Johnston MD work on the Creative Systems Theory).

The two are not completely analogous; there are not even the same number of steps/stages, but I find the underlying process compatible. In fact, the separation of Early Axis into two steps, Gathering and Solution-generation, is used as an example in the text (Neumann, pg 303) of how stages can overlap.

The biggest departure in my mind is the difference between Integration and Action. Action implies a destination, while Integration suggests the spiraling of previous stages into a better future. The production of a Memorandum or appellate brief seems so terminal, while Integration lasts a lifetime. And yet, the process of appellate advocacy can span a career (or more). Perhaps I am taking this microscopic example, the process of creating an appellate brief as the singular application of what should be a larger framework.

I will try to see this lesson as an inroad to a larger understanding, using these two creative processes to generate well reasoned thought on all levels. Creative Systems Theory is extremely relevant to every creative process. The wisdom of these truths transcends the language that is used to name and describe them.

So now I had better shut up and do it!

Not Mobile like phone, not Stable like horses

2008-06-03T16:55:00.000-07:00

The other theme (besides Function - Expression) that has been burbling in my thoughts recently is Mobility - Stability. If you don't know what that is, the simplest example is walking down the street, you plant one leg (Stability) to move the other forward (Mobility).

But like all of the other themes, Mobility & Stability not only apply to micro application, but also to macro application. Right now I am very aware of the flip-flop of our usual family dynamic. For almost ten years my occupation was very stable, dependable income and pretty set hours. Now I've tossed out all those rules. My income is not enough to support my family as I venture to create my new career in law. My schedule is variable by semester and at odds with a lot of the needs of my family. I'm as stable as it gets.

In response Andrea has felt the pressure to be te stabilizing force. She has put her continuing education on hold while I get underway, she's very aware of how many clients she carries and the income associated with that. For someone who was always the psychic stability in our relationship, I feel like I've put a huge burden on her. But she has been so amazing and supportive, through the transition period of figuring out what I wanted to do and now through the struggle of trying to establish myself in school. I am so grateful to her and hope that when I come out the other side of this, we will be able to strike a flexible balance of Mobility & Stability, flowing together or in balancing opposites as needed.

iPhone != i + Phone

2008-06-02T19:35:00.000-07:00

I thought iPhone hit critical mass when my Sensei bought one (he is a car head, not a tech head), but his impresion so far is "It's OK".

But then he said "I heard the new one is coming out soon". He wants to buy that one and give this one to his youngest instructor.

So maybe the iPhone has hit a type of critical mass where the experience itself is irrelevant.

Coffee Expression

2008-05-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

A few months ago Merlin Mann (of 43folders.com fame) talked on MacBreak Weekly (see pixelcorps.tv) about how some people get so involved in their productivity systems that they forget that the purpose is to actually make life more productive.

His analogy was brilliant. He said a productivity system is like a coffee cup. If there are cracks in the cup, then you have to fix the cup, but otherwise spending lots of time redesigning the cup is just overkill. You want to get on to actually enjoying some coffee in your cup.

Likewise, if your productivity system has holes in it, then important tasks fall through the cracks and get lost. However, if the important tasks are making it on your list, then any time spent adjusting the system is wasted. Spend that time doing the things on your list or enjoying recreation.

I was reminded of this last week when a lot of our final IMS weekend spiraled around function and expression. I realized that this was the Laban way of describing the same concept. Being intentional about what elements of your life are functional and which are expressive, allows efficiency and fuller expressivity. It also clarifies that things are not black and white. Many elements of our life have functional and expressive components. But just like the coffee cup, the point is not the analysis itself. The point is to live richly and fully because you spent the time making conscious decisions about how to go forward.

My personal productivity system is usually full of holes. Then I spend a few weeks focusing on it and it gets better for a little while. I hope that slowly but surely it's getting better as a whole, even with 10 steps forward and 9 steps back each time.

Voting by transaction

2007-12-02T10:59:00.000-08:00

This thought process started as a desire to vote on elections from my computer. This was not the first time I had wondered why electronic voting means having a machine at the polling center. Then I thought about the fact that we are comfortable banking online. What is so fundamentally different about banking online that makes this process more accountable? I pondered for a while the possibility of having regional servers and email confirmations to voters as a way to remove systematic gaps in trust, but then I returned to the model of money.

The reason why we feel comfortable banking or shopping online is because there is a natural duality to a transaction. I will complain if my account balance is too low, the other party will complain if their balance is too low. This assumes that money cannot be created or destroyed, only exchanged, which is tied to our understanding of physical currency and our mental abstraction of the real bills. In truth much of our economic resources exist solely as entries in a database, but we trust the system enough and the system has proven itself to be suitably monitored.

So if we base a hypothetical voting system on our existing monetary system, then we have to create some mirror of transactions. Essentially we have to bank our votes, and then transmit them directly to the candidate, who then presents his votes and the candidate with the highest totals will be awarded victory in the election.

So how do you receive votes in your voting bank? Unlike our economic system where you have to exchange your labor for currency, in the current system you are rewarded with votes for being a citizen, so I will propose that all citizens receive there votes before the election. During the election timespan, voters transmit there votes to the candidate they select, just like you can give money to support a candidate now. The bank makes sure that they subtract dollars from your bank account when they process your check. The candidates staff will complain if the bank fails to increase their account balance by the appropriate amount. This system works extremely well for transmitting resources.

As soon as I had created this system in my head I began thinking about the problem of differentiating a vote by each election. This combined with a seperate idea: would it be appropriate to exchange vote types. Let's say that one voter feels very strongly about a presidential candidate but has little knowledge about the senatorial election. Another voter in the same region feels very strongly about the senatorial candidate but is ambivalent about the presidential race. Could these two essentially swap their unwanted resources to increase their influence in their positions of passion? Of course I managed to blow my own assumptions apart when I looked back at my old friend the dollar. You don't have to exchange your food dollars for entertainment dollars to buy a movie ticket; there is just one type of currency. What if votes utilized the same type of flexibility. This would allow voters to spread there votes based on priority. Obviously this is a radical departure from our current voting system of one vote per person per election race, but it is an extremely common model in our economic lives.

Let's say that we take a step back technology-wise in order to pave the right future. What if the US Treasury department actually printed votes. They could be distributed to registered voters once per year and "spent" at polling centers on election day, where members of the candidates staff would greet voters and collect vote certificates from voters. Then the candidates turn in their votes, the votes get checked for counterfeits (something we cannot do so frequently with economic currency), and the winner is declared.

Pretty quickly vote banking institutions are going to be created to store your votes and get rid of the necessity to physically travel to the polling station. These may be extentions of existing banks or entirely new operations. The distribution of votes can be done by sending a "check" that you deposit and that process will go move to internet transfer incredibly quickly, like a direct deposit. Next you send a "check" to your candidates address to vote for them. This process will also go online without a lot of delay, but I think to transfer the process we would need to go through the intermediate step of having a physical vote currency so that the abstraction can have meaning for people that are seeing this for the first time. Once it becomes "normal" younger generations will simply accept the conventions as they do with the economic system they inherit.

A few questions arise out of this discussion. Firstly, where is the benefit for the vote banks, for industries do not rise out of complete altruism. Banks hold your money because they can make money with it through interest based loans. Vote banks could either charge a small monetary fee, or even a small vote fee. The first is easy to understand, a fee-based service is straight-forward. The second is a bit harder to wrap our heads around since we haven't spent our lives thinking about votes as a type of currency, but I can see an organization building around the idea of exchanging a service for political capital. My best guess is that some of each would arise and time would shake out what is the best situation for the market as a whole.

The second question that arises is related to the first because it also stems from the comparison to currency. If a voter feels uninspired by candidates in a particular year, can they save their votes? Furthermore, could they loan out their votes. Perhaps someone is willing to pay 1.03 votes next year for a vote this year, when their favorite candidate is fighting a tough opponent. How would this change the political landscape. It would certainly shake things up, although for better or worse I cannot say.

Out of all of this brainstorming a semi-coherant idea has emerged and as I look at it one thing strikes me: this could potentially be the answer to the negative campaign focus. After all, if a person is not required to vote for either you or your opponent, how does slinging mud at them really help you get people to send you votes? Think of advertising for companies that want your economic votes, they tend to focus on creating a positive brand image of themselves though they might occassionally toss in a negative comparison of the other guy. Maybe that is naivete, but I posulate that this may create an about-face in campaign strategy. Time would tell!

Brilliant Marketing

2007-03-14T18:17:00.000-07:00

Nine Inch Nails is offering GarageBand projects of songs on their new album. This is an example of understanding the music market in 2007. It's much easier to download the track for free somewhere else than to download the project and output the track. But encouraging fans to remix your music is a way to engage with the fan base. Once you've got them engaged you can make a lot of money from things that are not little pieces of plastic that do the same thing as that file I mentioned above.

Make money where your mouth is

2007-03-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

Old Stevie brought it up. Now I have to agree with Defective by Design, which wants him to PROVE IT! If you agree, please sign the petition.

Cracking the iCode

2006-09-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: My theory (see below) was discussed on CNet's Buzz Out Loud Podcast on Friday, September 29th. You can download the entire podcast here or you can use Podzinger to jump to the section that discusses the iTV/iPhone combo. Click the link and then click on the section that says "0:25:34" to start playing at that point.

I think I cracked the code:

So Apple will release the iTV in January 2007 with this mysterious 802.11, which will most likely be N, but they'll include a clause buried in the Terms of Service (because nobody pays attention to those) that says they have the right to transmit wireless data to the internet connection and back out. The clause won't seem that interesting at the time and they'll sell millions of these things (especially since the $299 price includes a hard drive). This will be a big incentive for people to upgrade to N and will create a network of Apple brand, high speed wireless nodes throughout residential areas.

THEN, in Q3 or Q4 they will release the long awaited iPhone, except they'll bypass the whole question of having to partner with a cellular carrier and create the iChat phone that uses wireless nodes. Urban and commercial districts tend to already have a decent amount of WiFi, and now they will have access to your internet connection through the millions of iTVs in residential areas, which could actually make the service broad enough (especially in densely populated areas, always the beachheads for this type of service) for early adopters to make calls.

Granted this is all speculation and I have no evidence except the presentation of iTV including 802.11 and the perpetual rumors of an iPhone combined with the fact that Apple likes to move into emerging markets, rather than established ones (think of the MP3 player market when they introduced the first iPod). However, the real question to ask yourself when evaluating this theory is: Would you buy one? I would.

Elmo Goes eXtreme

2006-09-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

Engadget is reporting here that the new Tickle Me Elmo will be "eXtreme"! I remember buying the original Tickle Me Elmo before it became the must have Christmas item. Apparently that was ten years ago!

BYO Overkill

2006-05-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

What is it about humans that makes us want to reinvent the wheel? I have noticed this trend many times before (even displayed it), but it still has the power to surprise me.

The current case entered my email as "Introducing BuyTV". It caught my attention enough for me to open the email. It was obvious from the email that they are trying to move in the direction that advertising is being pushed (though the old school is dragging it's heels), which is product placement as overt message. The commercial break is a dinosaur that shows off very sharp teeth, but is relegated to that obscure Jurassic Park island called network TV.

What some advertisers have come to embrace is that consumers don't have to swallow commercials like taking their medicine. In fact on Superbowl Sunday some people tune in to see the half-time commercials alone. But this example highlights the challenge of the next phase of advertising: quality is king! The reason that people tune in to those Superbowl commercials is because that time slot is known as a time when
advertisers put their best foot forward to get your attention. With the audience (and price) so large, the cost of demanding a clever script and higher production values, is acceptable to get the audiences attention.

It's pure economics, and the parameters are changing. As costs fall, the investment to get those higher production values becomes smaller, increasing competition. The bar has been raised to the point that you've got to target your audience to even get a foot in the door, because consumers will not accept less.

The great irony of the banner ads that accelerated the dot com bubble burst, is that we learned to filter out all that noise while searching the web for the products we actually wanted to buy, and advertisers kept throwing money into that pit... until they didn't.

So now Buy.com has joined the ranks of those that realize that consumers want commercials, they just want it on their terms. Light on boastful proclamations, heavy on real information.

I watched the first segment in the BuyTV episode and I think they got that portion right, but then they had to get another part so egregiously wrong, that it basically evaporated all the good will they had earned. At the bottom of the page there is a link: download the content in HD. Sounds good, I don't necessarily need it in high definition, but I will take it. And because this is a recurring "show", I expect to see a RSS feed so I can automatically download every episode, right?

I'll never know. The link brought me to a website where I had to register with their service to download the video. Why? I closed the browser tab right there. I'll never know what's on the other side of that registration page, and I feel 100% OK with that fact. I know that there are thousands of other advertisements with clever production that want my attention and some of them will give it to me without trying to lock me in to some registration based scheme.

I am curious how many people are like me. I would say that people break down into three groups: Group 1 spends minimal time online and won't understand what the registration page is all about, so they will leave without registering because of desire for simplicity. Group 2 spends moderate time online and will register because they want to download the movie. Group 3 spends the most time online and will refuse to register either because they are tired of everyone wanting their information or
because they have an objection to supporting this model of capturing your information. I'm placing myself in that third group... for both reasons!

What I see in this breakdown is that we will see a ripple shift. Group 1 is going to shrink, most likely causing an increase in Group 2, but as time marches on, Group 2 should shrink and convert over to Group 3. So what am I saying? It's going to get worse before it gets better, but those companies that look way ahead need to pay attention to what Group 3 is saying. If you want our attention, don't get greedy!

There's a reason David used a Sling

2005-11-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

It is hard for me to write a post about how I disagree with Doc Searls' Article, because I think the article is so well written and covers so many important topics and ideas. So I want to start this off by saying that it is a fantastic article. But I would not write a post just to say "me too" either. So the rest of this post is about how I agree 100% with his description of the problem, but disagree with his prescription for the future.

Let me summarize for anyone who does not have the time (or patience) to read the entire article. Doc breaks it down into three sections.

Scenario I: The Carriers Win - Doc describes how the phone carriers (SBC, Verizon, etc) are fighting with the Cable companies over who gets to own the Internet. Both want the government to pass regulations to limit competition so that they can charge consumers more. It includes great examples of how these companies play dirty.

Scenario II: The Public Workaround - Doc explores the possibility that another company, perhaps Google, could challenge both types of incumbants with a wireless solution that replaces the pipes that they are fighting to control. He also discusses how these laws that are supposed to be pro-market are really anti-market.

Scenario III: Fight with Words and Not Just Deeds - In the final section Doc discusses how to reframe the debate by promoting the metaphor that the Internet is a place rather than a transport system. He concludes with seven paragraphs that all begin with either "We need" or "We should", stressing the importance of fighting the big companies from taking over the Internet. My favorite two paragraphs of this section are the following:

"We need to remind policy makers that the Net's biggest success stories--Amazon, Google, eBay and Yahoo--are the stories of Bezos, Page, Brin, Omidyar, Yang and Filo."

"We need to make clear that the Net is the best public place ever created for private enterprise, and that the success of the Net owes infinitely more to personal initiative than to the mesh of pipes in the ground beneath it."

I agree with the premise behind these two strongly, that the people made the internet, not the technology or the wires. (In fact I was thinking of this from a more anecdotal position yesterday; I must have subconsciously anticipated reading this article today.) However, my perception of what comes next is almost the opposite of what Doc suggests.

"These are ideas, of course. I present them forcefully because I believe we--the technical community--are being called to fight for a world we made and continue to make. And one which is under grave threat."

It's not just under grave threat, it's doomed. It is absolutely inevitable, in my opinion, that the system of yesterday will get devoured by the big companies. But while Doc suggests we should fight against this process, I say don't waste the effort. Instead let's focus on the next generation, the next invention that big companies won't understand for a few years and therefore won't be able to spoil. Let them have the Internet, because just as Doc highlighted, the real value is in the PEOPLE. They can have the product, but they cannot have the people who made it. We're going to go build something new and better and if the big companies want to stay where they are, fighting over who gets to squeeze the last drop of revenue out of yesterday's accomplishment, so be it. That's what David did to Goliath; he didn't fight brute strength with brute strength, he calculated a precision attack against Goliath's weakness.

Doc quotes "World of Ends", by David Weinberger and himself, in a blockquote section titled "The Internet is Stupid". He brings up a brilliant point: "Adding value to the Internet Lowers its Value.". If the carriers are determined to lower the value of the Internet by "improving it", then they are going to push more people towards the next generation.

One of Doc's concerns is the rising tide of Digital Rights Management (DRM) hardware. Hollywood is fighting hard to get copy protection built into television tuners. This would control what and how you record or copy broadcast television. There is also a hardware DRM system going into High Definition Radio players. Doc's suggestion is to "contact your Congresspeople. Tell them to keep the Net open and free and to vote against any legislation meant to protect any industry from "threats" they see coming from a new world they refuse to understand.", but why waste the energy. If you want to effect real change you cannot go through the seemingly direct, but ultimately toothless, mechanism of writing to Congress. You've got to harness the power of all those lobbyist dollars by sending a signal to the companies that pay them (with your dollars, mind you). Can you imagine if the electronics companies complied with the new law, put broadcast protection in a new line of televisions, and nobody bought them... I know, it sounds crazy, but just imagine if everybody stopped buying televisions, opting instead for monitors (a television without the tuner) and watching a steady stream of video podcasts (if you need some non-MPAA entertainment, I highly recommend Red vs. Blue). Now I realize that it is unrealistic to expect every single person to participate, but let's start with everyone who reads Docs' blog. I humbly request that instead of spending time writing letters to Congress, that Doc make an extra podcast so that we have less reason to bother with the RIAA and MPAA. They don't own sound or video, they only own the content they've bought up. The more good content we put out there that does not conform to their rules, the more we undermine their position.

Not that they need help! Look at the current Sony snafu for evidence that consumers are not going to put up with whatever the studios do. Currently the population in general neither understands DRM nor knows what to do to avoid it. This particular instance with Sony will probably raise the level of consciousness because it is easy to describe: people bought the CD's with the rootkit included and their computers were infected with a virus that Sony included on the CDs. David Berlind writing about his DRM woes in Between the Lines speaks to a different crowd and his call to stop buying DRM music is along the right lines in my opinion. Not to beat a dead horse, but the message that no company can fail to hear is the message of consumer dollars.

Finally, reading through the comments in response to Docs' article, one from Jay struck me, "I'm tired of paying top-dollar for less than satisfactory services". My response... DON'T! You determine what you buy. If you are really tired of it, then make a change. My biggest problem with the post is that the language denies any responsibility for the purchasing decisions. Since I can assume that he is not talking about basic human necessities (people struggling to survive don't spend their time posting on blog comments, they spend it surviving), then he is making a choice to purchase these items, but refuses to own up to the responsibility. He continues, "As another commenter pointed out their dislike that everything in the US seems to have a price tag, and usually it's a premium price. I'm also tired of it as well". Everything has a price tag, capitalism simply puts it right in front of you. No matter what the economic system, there is a cost associated with everything. We take the sum total of the world's ability to produce goods, and it gets spread out among the people in the world. And regardless of the system, someone is placing a value on your time and exchanging it for equal value of goods. As far as the premium price goes, supply and demand are not some social experiment, they are names for forces that work in the system. Even when they are manipulated by governments or companies, supply and demand are still intrinsic forces. If you really believe that the price is too high, then don't pay it. Again, take responsibility for the purchasing decisions that YOU make.

Two Years Behind the Hype

2005-11-16T23:25:00.000-08:00

I imagine I am about the last geek in my age range to find Friendster for the first time, but when I heard about it, about a year ago, I just did not get it. But a friend of ours had sent me an invitation to join her "friends" and I decided to go ahead. I wasn't actually expecting to get any benefit myself, it was more like when I receive a request for my contact info. I respond so that the person will have accurate information about me. Boy, did I have a surprise coming.

So I signed up for friendster and became a friend. Immediately I noticed that a good friend that I had fallen out of touch with was listed as a "friend of a friend". Within a few minutes I had found another few old friends, but this first "friend of a friend" was the one who responded in minutes. We opened a chat and traded highlights from the past 4 years in about 10 minutes. I had this wonderful feeling afterwards.

That's the power of the Internet. Forget all of the marketing and the "web special" deals, the best thing about the Internet is how it connects people. Without it, I know the address for my friend's parents, who I'd have to bother to ask for a current phone number or address. Or I might bump into someone who has kept in touch with her at my high school reunion next year, but with the Internet I reconnected with her that day.

Another part that was a lot of fun was reading the profiles of people who I would call acquaintances. Especially in college, there were a great deal of people that I knew who they were, I shared classes with them, but I was not friends with them per se. However, six years removed, it's really fun to read who lives where, works where, and what they are doing.

I also must give friendster a big hand for making it so easy to use their service. I would guess that the chat function that I used is relatively new based on the "Beta" tag, although FlickR still says Beta and it is not a spring chicken. However, the fact that we were able to have an instant message conversation without worrying about installing software, or who's using which provider, made a huge impression. I may be the last person in the world to find it, but I think the timing was
perfect.

Is That Your Final Answer?

2005-11-14T22:51:00.000-08:00

On Saturday I witnessed a bit of unintended comedy. While I was helping our neighbor, Cy, set up his DSL connection he went through one of those standard setup questionaires: name, password, etc, and of course the very popular secret question. This form gave a fairly long but mundane set of potential secret questions. I am going to skip the discussion about how secret questions tend to not be all that secret, it is too easy of a target.

Cy decided to use the secret question "What was your mother's maiden name?", then he proceeded to type in the four letter family name from his mother's family. Upon clicking the "Next" button, an error message explained "Your Secret Answer must be 6 or more digits".

I started chuckling immediately. Fortunately Cy was able to find another secret question with an answer that was long enough. However, if his first pet was named Rex, and his first job was as a cook (or chef), and the first street he lived on was Oak, etc then it could have been a big problem! I understand making passwords be of a certain length, but when you answer a question, you do not have control over the length.

This could be the jumping off point for a whole discussion of identity: how broken the system (or lack thereof) is, but I would prefer to leave it for today at the simple point that requiring a certain length answer to a question is just plain dumb... uh, silly... wait, idiotic...

Locked in 16:9

2005-11-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

If you think about filming a single person, it seems strange that film and video are wider than tall. After all, humans are upright and taller than even the widest reach of their arms. However, the reason must be the influence of gravity, that pesky force, that says that we all walk around on essentially a plane. We interact with other people and objects in that horizontal plane, so we need a wider lens to capture a group of people.

With still pictures, people became very comfortable with turning a physical print on its side to see a long shot. Then when digital photography took hold, programs became adept at rotating the photograph 90 degrees.

With digital video, the standard of television, 4:3, or widescreen, 16:9, are the oonly available sizes. If the video will eventually be displayed on a television, including the new rage, widescreen monitors, then it makes sense to keep the video in the standard view. But for a computer video, like the type that I have posted to our family blog, it would be better to turn the camera on it's side, and then rotate the video in the computer by 90 degrees to show Garrett in the majority of the window. A choice of 9:16 or 3:4 would be a nice addition to video editing software in an age of video blogs and easy file exchange.

The World is Listening

2005-10-10T16:12:00.000-07:00

I got an unexpected answer to my question from the last post. As I was driving this weekend, I was listening to a CD of archived Gillmor Gang episodes. During this one, at about 15:20, John Udell answers the question "why do you care about Atom's release?" by explaining that Atom is able to carry XML data as a kind of attachment, which RSS was not intended to do. His example was that you could carry information like reviews.

So people are thinking about how you would represent structured data like reviews. I asked the blogosphere, and the answer was already cued up in my player.

Baby Steps to Smarter Consumer Experience

2005-10-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

If there was a theme to Tangent from my Asides, it would be that I usually post when two separate idea streams crash together. I supposed Connecting the Tangents from My Asides might be a better description of what I try to do. So here goes...

The irony of the digital age is how the process of changing the little things in life from analog to digital is changing the big things in life from digital to analog.

First let me say that I'm using loose definitions of digital and analog, where digital means there is an on/off, high/low, yes/no structure underneath. By analog I am describing anything that has a continuous spectrum underneath. The power of the digital world is harnessing the potential of the on/off representation.

Example: If you copy a section of VHS tape that has a "value" of 6, an analog signal may be 6.1 or 5.9, generation 3 could be 6.2 or 5.8, noise gets mixed with the signal, and this is the problem with analog: a copy of a copy is not like the original. But if you copy a byte from a CD that is low, high, high, low, you get exactly that: low, high, high, low (that's a digital 6 by the way). This is what I mean by the potential of digital, a copy of a copy exactly matches the original.

So what am I calling "little stuff"? They fall into two categories: devices (mp3 players, cell phones, high definition television monitors, etc) and services (digital cable television, digital radio and podcasts, voice over IP, etc). Both are giving the user more while costing the user less because of the use of advanced digital components. The effect of Moore's Law on computing has driven these improvements into computers and electronics.

However, the effect on electronics and services has become the cause of a second wave of changes, one that has taken the on/off structure out of some of the traditional industries where barriers of startup costs created a divide between "big media" and "independent" enthusiasts.

For example, podcasting has taken the barrier of entry out of audio programming, which radio dominated for so long. The format of radio was so incompatible with the continuous spectrum concept that the last decade brought massive consolidation in the form of companies like Clear Channel. Today's radio is the epitome of digital, where only a multi-billion dollar company could hope to join in any significant way. But podcasting has produced a wave of independent content providers, with the cost of entry plummeting to the cost of a computer and a web host. This allows a one person to create a program for a small group of friends, while Adam Curry creates a program for a mass audience. The fact that these two can sit side by side is the model of a continuous spectrum of choice, what I call an analog system.

And this process is transforming all kinds of areas. Journalism is transformed even more heavily by blogging because it has had longer to disrupt that media, videocasts are just starting to explore how they can transform television. Skype is redefining the telephone, especially where international calling is concerned. Even software has become more analog from the process. Rather than shrink wrapping software at a certain point in development, companies offer downloads, allowing distribution to a small number of users and less overhead for releasing versions. However, some companies have abandoned software distribution altogether, moving to a web service architecture where the software resides on the web server, updates never leave the building, but the benefits of an upgrade travel in small pieces every time a single page is requested.

While all these ideas have been percolating in my head I had a horrible experience with some workers who came to our house to lay laminate flooring. To make a long story short, the laminate itself is great, but the baseboards that the same company installed look terrible, with gaps, rough edges, and white caulking that zig zags on our green walls. The next day I was thinking about how I wished I would have spoken to some previous customers before selecting the company and how I'd like to share my negative experience with other prospective customers. I wish I had been a smart consumer and I wish that the web could bring together the data to make it easier to be a smart consumer.

The virtual extension of the friendly recommendation has evolved along with the internet. I read online reviews of most of the products that I buy, from electronics to crib mattresses. Many online retailers, a popular example is Amazon, allow users to review and rate items. Amazon averages the individual ratings into an overall rating, but allows the freeform text to describe why the person gave the numerical rating they did. The second level of this process is to rate the ratings with the
"Was this review helpful to you?" question. This process will continue
to evolve with the increasing development of attention so that the rating of a product is not the pure mathematical average of all reviews, but a weighted average giving more weight to reviews who I entrust with authority to direct my purchases. Beyond product reviews, there are systems that rate online retailers. For example, EBay tracks their sellers and encourages every buyer to
enter a rating for the transaction that creates a merchant rating. However, I don't know of an analogous service to find and share reviews on transactions that happen off the internet.

At first I thought I wanted a review site, a place to enter my reviews of local businesses and read other people's reviews before I frequent a business. But then I realized that there's never a single site to fill this type of void. By the time a company has built a successful user base, someone else has created a competitor site with other strengths and weaknesses and the users have to choose between them, or end up duplicating every review and search in order to connect with the users of both sites. Not only is this impractical, but it doesn't stop at two sites and the number of sites grows as long as there is potential in the marketplace to get your attention (and therefore sell some ads for you to look at).

It didn't take long for me to realize that what I was looking for does exist, but in a much broader sense. The recommendation service exists as blog entries. People are already making recommendations about companies or services that they like or dislike. Last week I got around to listening to Scoble's podcast Talking about Blogging and his guest Steve Broback told a story about a hotel using misleading advertising (to listen start at 10:01). His response was to take out a Google ad that pointed to his negative review of the hotel based on their misrepresentation. He explained that 10 days later he received a call from the hotel management, hoping to make amends in return for him turning off the Google ad. The spectrum of progress had provided access to the customer base, but he had to create his pathway to the customer base, at personal expense, using Google ads. I want to see two advances to this evolution. I want a service to reduce the barrier of entry for people to add their ratings into the system, and I want the business to dig their way out of a ditch like this one by improving their quality and receiving higher ratings, not by convincing the negative reviewers to remove their caveat from the system.

I think that blogs should continue to provide the reviews, but I would like to see a standardized format for ratings so that they can be aggregated and filtered. Eventually I can imagine a system where a large percentage of my neighbors are rating and reviewing their purchases and when I want to search for a place to make a purchase, for laminate floors, a car dealer or a nice dinner I can find average ratings based on hundreds or thousands of transactions. Also, I want to be able to put more weight in a person's reviews of restaurants if I like his taste in food (explicitly) or if our recommendations are in agreement for places we've both reviewed
(implicitly).

Building on that, I also would like options to filter by other factors. Perhaps I'd like to only see reviews of a restaurant by locals or by vegetarians or any other filter I can imagine. Obviously these last examples are advanced features that come after the initial system is in place. They also make sense in a world with federated identity because users are only going to answer specifics, like whether or not they are vegetarians, if they are building a persistent profile that they can share in part or whole with all the sites they participate in, rather than entering the minimum required information in hundreds of different site specific silos.

And what I realized is that this system does not need to be created in one event by one company, a digital event, but instead we're in the middle of the analog spectrum of increasing recommendation power through technology. The tools are growing and evolving out of the emergence of methods to share your thoughts about a transaction and then the growth of services that will combine and repurpose that metadata for other users. Blogs were not the beginning of this process, but Blogging represents a milestone in redefining who provides the data and who has access to the data. Now there's massive opportunity to build the tools that add value, which will encourage more users to take part, which will in turn open up more opportunities. The self perpetuating cycle is driving progress, and doing it in small increments every day, I just hate being patient...

Update: Since I wrote the section about our laminate floor, the sales representative came to our house and agreed to correct many of the problems we had. If I had reviewed the company in a rating service before this development, I would want to append my poor rating. Do they deserve as good of a rating as a company that does it right from the beginning, no. Do they deserve a higher rating than a company that refuses to fix their mistakes, absolutely. Finding a balance of how to append a poor review will need our collective wisdom. Ultimately the power of these services will not only be the collective wisdom rating the businesses, but also the collective wisdom rating the rating services. The service that adds the most value will receive the most traffic. The competition will drive innovation. That's when the consumer really wins. Let the games begin.

Playing with Fire

2005-09-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

Be careful Scoble, don't you know you're not allowed to use Google search to look up anything about Google.

Been There, Hosted That

2005-09-16T12:59:00.000-07:00

I'm late to the party on this topic, but I can pretend to be the cautious voice of reason that carefully crafted my response over the last two weeks, instead of the guy who did not see the original post and ensuing feedback until yesterday.

Robert Scoble thinks that "the thick client is coming back" and he responds to various critism with some reasons why he thinks so. For anyone not familiar with the term fat client, it means that the system you are working on has a relatively high amount of processor and memory capacity. This is contrasted with thin client where the power is mostly on a server somewhere, and the system you are using simply handles the display. OK, now we're all ready for the juicy part.

Scoble presents two arguments, but he should have quite while he was ahead, because the second is far less valid than the first. His invitation, "when you get Photoshop in your browser let me know", implying that Photoshop will not work on a browser, is simply myopic. XWindows was capable of hosting incredible complex applications in the early 1990's (and probably before, but I wasn't around to see it) because it decoupled the system preparing the screen from the system displaying the screen (and tracking input from keyboard or mouse). Technically this is not an example of running Photoshop in my browser, but consider it a proof of concept. Servers can process complex programs, receive and process the user interactions, and send the display to the client.

However, this brings me to my discussion of Scoble's first, and vastly more interesting, argument. You do not want a thin client on a two hour airplane ride. Let's set aside the discussion of 'who does major photo editing on an airplane', because one thing I've learned in the software industry is that there is always someone who wants to do the thing you cannot imagine them doing. "Won't" is not a useful design strategy, it's an excuse. Let's talk about how we got from the client/server architecture of XWindows to where we are today and where the signs are all pointing for tomorrow.

What happened to XWindows and how we got in this fat client world of today? I would posit, and I think I'd get a lot of agreement on this point, that the combination of the Internet explosion and the shrinking of devices killed the XWindows model. The place that I saw XWindows running beautifully was at Harvey Mudd, which is the ideal environment for the kind of thin client architecture that existed in the 90s. Departments bought large servers to host "enterprise" software that students would utilize for assignments or clinic projects. The students were all playing in a closed, trusted environment. There was a massive amount of setup to get a new user configured with logins for software and systems, much of it scripted but still initiated by a human administrator; however, the benefits to the students and faculty justified the expenditures and the cost/benefit analysis looked fine. However, when you move out of the closed environment, the world gets too scary and the administration gets too big to allow people to access your application server. There's too much risk involved and the administration costs are too high when you have to define what rights the users have and protect the data from the "bad guys". Furthermore, people were doing the type of computing that Scoble suggests, taking their notebooks on airplanes, places away from the landlines that were quickly connecting our digital experience. The cost reductions in manufacturing drove prices down, rates of computers in the home up, and the percentage of computer users affiliated with a closed system went way down.

These forces created the fat client world of today where "fast" computers were "cheap" and the problem of putting complex software on every workstation became a software engineering problem rather than an administration problem. That's because a software engineering problem, once solved, works for all users (when you hold certain things like operating system constant), but administration solutions only fix the particular system because it is dependent on infrastructure. So, for thousands of software products on millions of desktops, engineers solved the problem. Companies like InstallShield got big doing just that. We reduced user complexity without reducing capability, and all of this happened in a world of intermittant connections.

But things are still moving. The connectivity that moved us from closed networks to a big open "sometimes on" network is moving us to a truely global "always on" network. I've already seen wireless networking on airplanes, and I travel around town with an "always on" device in my pocket. Is the connection really "always on", no. But you have to look past tomorrow to what's coming. I love Steve Gillmor's statment that 'if it's going to be true, then it is true'. Granted, Scoble did hedge by saying "technologies like WinFS will keep thick clients relevant for more than a decade". He may see that eventually the thick client is going to give way but believes it will take a decade to get from here to total connectivity.

A DECADE! Think about how much can happen in a decade. Intel is talking about handtop PCs with built-in WiMAX in less than a year. Add in all the Sidekicks, Treos, and Blackberrys in the world, and there are a lot of people with truely mobile internet access, but on various hardware platforms. And the common ground, web access, will become the platform. The train has left the station!

The worst part of what Scoble is saying is the cause/effect relationship he's presented. He did not say 'lack of connectivity will keep the client thick, and WinFS will make that experience better'. Instead he said WinFS is going to "keep thick clients relevant". Even if this was not the intention, he's giving the impression that Microsoft is out in front of the train, trying to slow it down. That's the type of thing that people worry about from Microsoft and the type of thing that Scoble tends to have his radar out for. In this case, I think he got his signals crossed, but I bet we'll see more on this topic in the near future.

May I have your attention?

2005-09-14T12:37:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how you can come so close to coming to a conclusion, then have it blasted to pieces by some other pieces of information. However, here's what I'm thinking about now. For full background, you'd need to read the following thread: start with Deconstructing the "Conversation" (Part 1), then read Markets aren't conversations?, and finish with Talking markets. That's actually only a small bit of background, but I haven't even read the whole Cluetrain Manifesto, so I do not expect you to ;o)

In short the topic for today is markets as conversations. My main disagreement with Dave Rogers is not with his assertion that vendors are seeking to find advantage in a transaction; I think we could all agree with that. But Dave assumes that this inequality in the relationship precludes conversation. To suggest that conversations can only exist between two parties with matching objectives, is to negate the majority of conversations that occur. Transactions revolve around a conversation between parties with opposing objectives within the transaction, but a common interest in completing the transaction. Buyers communicate their preferences about product features and the price they are willing to pay for these products. Sellers communicate the price at which they will sell products with a particular feature set. Hopefully, a common interest point is found where supply and demand meet, and a transaction occurs.

I also think that he brings up a valid point about authority, but he exagerates the reasoning, which weakens his argument. People do not keep a job simply because they are worried that they would be 'considered "homeless"', they worry that they would be living on the street. Furthermore, I believe the post confuses two distinct types of authority. There is authority that is exerted and authority that is given. An army can exert authority through force, but this is the less common and less interesting form of authority. The other variety is the type of authority that a doctor holds over his patients. The patient who comes willing to the doctor and invests authority in the doctor is engaging in a conversation that communicates that there is a trust in the doctor's abilities. Whether this is because of faith in the doctor's ability or faith in the system that qualifies medical professionals, the point is that the patient cannot be forced to accept the authority of his doctor, but the patient finds it in his best interest to identify a doctor that he can invest authority in.

Finally, the post from Dave Rogers concludes with "And note that I'm not trying to sell you anything either". Of course he is! He's trying to sell us his ideas, so that he can gain authority in the ethereal sense. Blogger's Blog to be read. As readership increases, so does the quanitity of authority gained. But this is a mutually beneficial exchange. I consume his written perspective on the topic in exchange for granting him some measure of authority on the topic. Then I synthesize my own ideas to post back into my own blog. This way the collective wisdom of our combined intelligence is gaining authority through commentary. It is analogous to how scientific ideas gain authority through peer review.

However, my original seed of thought that ties this discussion with my previous thoughts on attention (I know I said specialization, but it was leading to attention already) is how attention and authority come together. I have been very aware of the limits of my attention recently. There is vast amounts of information that would hold my interest, but I am faced with the reality that I cannot consume it all. Obviously there are certain sources that I deem entertaining and humorous. But in addition to these items, there is a vast array of topics that I would like to stay informed on. Lately I have found that I have actually reduced the number of blogs that I subscribe to in order to make the number of entries managable. However, I use these subscriptions as both an information source and a jumping off point. I find interesting links within these items that can generate a thread for further consumption. Currently my subscriptions center around various members of the Gillmor Gang. I invest my authority in these people because I have found over a period of time that doing so increases my efficiency. However, at some point in the future my list of "trusted" sources might evolve to include new members, perhaps at the expense of one of these members.

But the difficulty that arises is that the number of posts or even the length of the posts does not necessarily reflect the authority of the post. I automatically go to any new entries from John Udell before any other items in my aggregator, because I know that I place more authority in these items than the length of time I spend there might suggest. This also is not dependent on the frequency of his posts. So, I assume that this type of preference would be lost in the attention model as I understand it. Maybe I am wrong, but the focus seems to be on mining frequency and time. I would suggest a very non-dynamic, non-sexy approach to this issue: user ranking. I'm not saying that you only rank, but you also rank. If I know that I give a particular source more authority, then I should be able to idenitify that fact in any attention system.

The Original Pet Peeve

2005-09-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

What is so great about sliced bread?

Crazy like a Fox

2005-09-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

I have been working on a post about specialization all week, but I feel the need to distill the ideas a bit more (even a tangent from an aside needs a throughline). However, hopefully early next week I will harvest at least one thread to make a post. As I type this, I am considering breaking the concept into several pieces to increase cohesion.

In the mean time, if you are a citizen of the democratized world and care about the future you must listen to Thomas Barnett's Emerging Worldview talk from Poptech that is hosted by IT Conversations. Download THIS FILE and listen to it. Now, if you are not in the class of people that I described above, then you should listen to it TWICE! There is not a single person in the world who would not benefit from hearing what this man has to say. If you are a citizen of the democratized world, this will explain what that world is trying to do (or should be focused on doing). If you are not, then you will be in the path of this policy, so it would benefit you to understand it. The great falacy of the United States is the call for bi-partisan discussion. What we need is NON-partisan discussion: clear, straight-forward, logical progressions brought to their inevitable ends. I admit that as an engineer, hearing the world political landscape described as an enormous engineering problem plays right into my natural bias, but it also makes sense. Engineering is not an social construct like politics, it's a human approximation of a natural process.

I discovered this brilliant recording after listening to the Gillmor Gang's Podcast from November 5, 2004 where John Udell brought up the topic for discussion. I highly recommend this Podcast as well, in fact you may prefer to listen to this first as it includes highlights and discussion that could enrich your listening of the full audio presentation.

You may ask, why post this now? The talk was given in October 2004, the Gillmor Gang discussed it in November 2004, what's the relevance in September 2005? Other than the fact that none of the facts behind his presentation have changed, a new event has brought new links. The discussion around President Bush's statement that "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levee's" is comparable to various statements by his administration that nobody could have predicted there would be such a strong insurgency an Iraq. I see only two possible conclusions: the President and his top officials are either a) apallingly uninformed or b) nefarious in their deceit. I would suggest that the former, while disturbing, is far less sickening than the latter. And yet evidence, such as learning that Thomas Barnett was working for Donald Rumsfeld's "Transformation Guru", reduces the validity of the former option. The information was not simply "out there", it was "in there", not just in the government, in the higher levels of government, where it really should have been consumed and persued. If you insist on holding onto the first excuse, then it must be transformed because the administration is no longer simply ignorant, they are now incompetant. As the picture becomes bleaker and bleaker, as you factor in domestic goals like dismantling... I'm sorry "saving" Social Security, I find that I'm driven towards the less palatable conclusion that Bush isn't bumbling fool I'd like to dismiss him as, he's the wolf in sheeps' clothing that I should not dismiss.

Plus, Barnett is gosh darn funny!

The design is intelligent, but the product has its moments...

2005-09-01T07:33:00.000-07:00

At the risk of this blog becoming "My Pet Peeves", I'm going to share with you why I think people need to take a step back. And let me just say for the record that "people" includes this person. I can attribute 99% of the arguments I have had with my wife to one small miscommunication, compounded by more and more miscommunications built on that fundamental misunderstanding. The times that we are able to step back, look at where we blew off the tracks, and clear up that initial misunderstanding, we've been able to come back and discuss the issue, rather than veer farther and father apart until we scream because the other person cannot hear us from that far away (off topic you say, look at this blog's title...).

So my real subject for today is the whole debate over Intelligent Design. Although I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a comical and worthwhile contribution to the debate; I want to take a step back to talk about where the two sides miscommunicated in my opinion, and why they are now so far apart that they cannot understand each others language.

In my view it boils down to a fundamental confusion of the concept of How and Who (same letters, but position is everything!). Science, including Evolutionary Science, is all about How. How did humans become the dominant species on Earth, How does light get from A to B, and How does the Sun produce so much energy. Intelligent design is all about Who. Now I happen to have a personal belief that there is a greater power in the universe, and in English we've given that concept a word, God. However, this single word has come to carry so much historical baggage that it's taken on a life of its own. The one thing that I feel 100% confident about asserting is that God is beyond human understanding. Everything else that I think or say about God is colored by that tenet. When I see evidence of something amazing in the world, for example that the human brain can understand, analyze, categorize, and theorize, I associate that with the category of things that are beyond my understanding. Not that I don't understand analysis and categorization from a conceptual standpoint. But I cannot teach a computer to categorize anywhere near the capacity of the human mind. It's an awe inspiring feat of engineering! So I look at that feat and I say, 'Wow, that's amazing', and I put it with that word I mentioned for things beyond my understanding, God.

Now here's the problem, the human brain does all of this analyzing and categorizing by reducing. It's fundamental to the problem. When you have tons of data to store and you want to be able to retrieve that information, even search on that information, you put it in a relational database. And when you create the database, you have to give it BOUNDARIES! You say "The data is going to look like this!" Then you take each piece of information, and you shape it so it looks like the boundaries you have set. It's not that you loose information so much as you put emphasis on certain parts of the information that fit the boundaries. And you use those emphasized pieces of information to make relationships between different rows of data. At some level the human brains works like this too. To draw conclusions across the enormous amounts of data we take in every day, we have to find commonalities to compare across. But the problem is that there is 1 and only 1 concept that is not reducible: God. By definition, these things that are beyond our understanding cannot be shaped.

So I want to tie this back into my comments about How and Who. Science is the attempt to understand the universe, to describe things that previously could not be described by humans, or to do a better job at describing things that we took a stab at once before. That means that science is the process of taking small bits from the "do not understand" category and putting them into the "understand" category. However, there will always be a "do not understand" category. At one time molecules were in the "do not understand" category, but we hypothesized, experimented, concluded until we could describe molecules. But atoms, quarks, and whatever makes up quarks were still in the "do not undertand" category. Scientific discovery is like dividing a fraction, half of 1/2 is 1/4, half of 1/4 is 1/8, and you can half to your hearts content, but you will NEVER get zero. (NOTE: I am NOT suggesting that the "do not understand" category is a small fraction, the halving example was to show infinite resolution, not to quantify the categories).

So if we have this word, God, that describes the "do not understand" category, then Science is the process of revealing information about God. It is NOT the process of attributing items to someone or something. Science is not particularly interested in the Who, which is not to say that Scientists don't think about the Who (not the band, stay with me here). Science is neutral on the subject of Who. Some people confuse neutrality with disagreement and believe they must discredit Science because it does not specifically name God as the Creator. I cannot describe how they make this connection because it completely eludes me. But what I can explain is that they want science to prove Who, which is not the purpose of science. They reduce the discoveries into things that are inside their understanding of God and things that are outside their understanding of God. Anything outside their understanding of God they think is in conflict with their understanding of God. It's the black or white, you're with us or you're against mentality that ends discussions, when we all should be expanding discussions. It also tends to put scientists who do believe in God on the defensive. Their personal spirituality should not influence their research, and forcing them to choose between one or the other, to be a How person or a Who person, just hurts both groups.

On top of this misunderstanding we must pile on years of miscommunications on top of the original split. Intelligent Design is the latest attempt in a campaign to obscure the fact that science reveals information about our world that we should all want to understand and then extend. Unfortunately, the sides are now so far apart that they can only scream at each other over the chasm of misunderstandings.

If the Kansas School Board really wanted to improve education, they should take a step back. If they realize that science is about How, not Who, then they will advance a curiculum that promotes questioning How. There are still deeper levels to uncover, halvings to be made, knowledge to be gained. Teach them not to accept what other people tell them about how the world works; teach them to test it for themselves. That's the kind of education that will enable our next generation to answer the questions of the universe. Confusing the How and the Who just adds noise.

Which Finger are they Pointing?

2005-08-30T11:21:00.000-07:00

Media companies really aren't getting it. The Proof (NYTimes.com Registration Required) continues to roll in.

I'll admit my views on this subject seem a bit radical. But I think it's imporant to analyze why exactly we accept that media has a right to control content, simply because they always have and they tell us that they have this right. There are two sides to this argument and I tend to focus on the loosing battle of the theoretical basis, and this is because fundamentally most people (and to some degree myself included) believe that people who create content have a right to control that content. I realize that record companies spend a lot of money to produce, distribute, and promote music. I don't think that I have a right to copy that music for free, but I do think that record companies have completely abused there position as content providers. I do NOT think that a CD should cost $20. I also do not think that record companies deserve unrestricted rights to capitalize music. But there is also a functional argument: that in a world of digital everything, suing everyone who copies a music file, just like they copy a text file, generates a lot of ill will. My biggest complaint about media companies is that they had showed no interest in moving to an internet distribution channel until after Napster showed the enormous interest of music via download. I know these guys are playing it safe, but if they want us as customers, they need to carry their weight as service providers. Sure, they CAN sit back and say "that's not fair, that's mine", but I respond much better to people out there saying "look what I can offer you". Those are the places I want to put my dollars, and my attention for that matter.

I look at my relationship with iTunes more as a service relationship than a goods relationship. Before iTunes, I had almost completely stopped buying music. As mentioned above the price seemed excessive to me, especially after several experiences of spending $15 or more dollars to discover that the single I liked was the only worthwhile song on an entire album. A few times a year I would spend money on a select group of artists that I felt I could trust to deliver an album of worthwhile music. However, iTunes does 2 things right: they make it easy for me to find and purchase music that I like in the right amounts (singles only), and they charge what I consider a fair price in return for the convenience of having the music I want download to my computer with no hassles. The musician delivers the goods, iTunes delivers the mechanism, they both receive revenue for the transaction, and the record company receives a cut because I cannot cut them out of the deal, plus the important thing is that I'm happy with what I receive for what I provide.

Why do I choose to pay for my music rather than download it for free? Is it because it is illegal? Actually no, it's because it's a pain in the butt. I have to spend hours of my time searching for the stuff I want, downloading what may or may not be the song I asked for, and opening my computer up to spyware and viruses. iTunes saves all those headaches, at a fair price. I only purchase a few tracks per month and the number has been steadly decreasing since I acquired some of my long lost favorites. However, with the current model I still find that iTunes is the best way to get music that I am willing to purchase.

Another thing that has decreased my desire to purchase music lately is my increasing consumption of podcasts. Things like The Gillmor Gang capture my attention more than the latest single. And to top it all off, they are FREE! Podcasters realize that to compete for your attention, paying for content becomes a hurdle rather than a revenue stream. Or to put it differently, pick any price you want and multiply it by zero customers and you get the same revenue as if you take zero dollars and multiply it by any number of customers. What's the difference between these two equations? The number of people you can reach, the viewpoints that you can advance, the way you can change the world one listener at a time is only in the second equation.

So, for those who don't have a NYTimes login, the short version is that the record companies are pushing to increase the price of popular songs on iTunes. This is a great way to go out of business! IF I decide to purchase any more music (remember I said I practically stopped buying CDs, I'm a fickle consumer), I will divide the amount I'm willing to spend by the price of songs. The revenue is flat and the amount of music I have is less, which makes me less likely to continue my end of the relationship, so eventually even that number declines. Corporate thinking at it's finest.

Quick Friday Update

2005-08-26T16:55:00.000-07:00

If you are a Geek and you haven't listened to The Gillmor Gang or haven't heard the Archives from IT Conversations, stop reading this and go listen to them. In fact, even if you aren't a Geek, go find out what's important to Geeks...

Finally in Geek News, Justin turned me on to Experts Exchange, which is going to save me hours of frustration. So far I've only been reading, but starting Monday I have a few questions for those so called experts!

Back in the US of A

2005-08-22T17:01:00.000-07:00

Home sweet home, I had a relatively easy and completely safe trip home.

To update on my previous post, I was able to solve all of the problems we were having and the wrap-up meeting concluded that we are ready to move to the next phase of development on the software.

I spent my last night in Germany with Georg and his wife, Agathe, enjoying a nice meal and then I drove to the airport. I woke up @ 5 to check-in, then returned to the hotel for breakfast a shower, the big benefit of staying next door to the terminal. I slept during the flight to London, then watched movies most of the flight to LA: The Interpreter (well done with limited violence and lots of thought provoking politics, B+), The Upside of Anger (good writing and acting, a few "over the top" moments, but not enough to ruin my enjoyment, A-), Cheaper by the Dozen (missed the very beginning, nothing special but cute, B-). Getting through the airport was easy and I didn't mind the traffic home because I was in the car with Andrea.

I slept 12 hours on Saturday night to get back on schedule and yesterday was a pretty quiet day. Now it's back to work and some design documents for new features. Tonight back to Martial Arts and try to work off some of that German food...

Not just a good idea...

2005-08-19T03:09:00.000-07:00

It must be a law of nature that regardless of the length of my stay in Germany, or the purpose of the trip, the last day that I am here everything breaks! Of course today was no different, except that things broke both here at Multitest and back at home.

First I checked my email because Tim agreed to be responsible for creating the Install package for the new (and improved) version of ProWorks. Instead of the expected "Here you go and have a safe trip home", I get an email that basically says "I put it on the server because I said I would, but we found a bunch of problems and I don't think you should install it anywhere...". Alrighty then. So I dive into fixing these problems and face the fact that I will not be here long enough to see the software rolled out to the rest of the company. Then I get pulled over to see some tests that they are running here involving a feature we spent a long time on recently (and was working in test versions). This feature is now broken again. It's the type of feature that takes specialized equipment to test and reproducing the Multitest environment in Pomona is practically impossible. So now I'm scrambling to try to debug and fix these problems while I'm still here.

But the good news is that even the broken stuff seems to be breaking in consistent ways [Pounds repeatedly and vigorously on wooden desk]. I've already fixed the list of bugs from Pomona and have a good idea about what is going wrong here.

With any luck I'll be able to wrap these items up within the hour and then Georg and I can have the two meetings that have been put off until today. If not, these meetings can be done over the phone. I choose to focus intensely on the bright side. And hey, I would never say the end of a trip was boring!

The More Things Change...

2005-08-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

It's Thursday Morning in Rosenheim and it looks like it's going to be another very productive day. We've made excellent progress on rolling out the latest version of software here and the final Release, with a few kinks smoothed out, will be distributed around starting tomorrow.

My big realization for the day is that the more technology can do, the more we expect! This is not the first time I've realized or pondered this fact, but I was reminded of it this morning as I struggled to make a reliable call home. Unfortunately the phone system at the hotel is not accepting the toll free number that allows me to use my company calling card. The only explanation from the front desk staff is "I'm sorry, you'll have to use a direct connection and pay the hotel rate".

I've been avoiding this all week by using an amazing program that's gotten a lot of press in the last year called Skype. This program allows you to connect 2 computers in a voice chat that is just like a phone call, just using the computer. Skype isn't the first company to offer a service like this, although I will say that they have been more successful than their predecessors at making the system work well. The biggest factor seems to be the quality of your internet connection. There is a time delay factor when we call the ECT facility in Hudson, NH, but when I connect to Multitest's wireless network and "call" my boss in Pomona, it sounds clear as a local telephone call. The best part... it's absolutely free. Or rather, there is no additional charge. You have to pay for a high quality internet connection like they have at Multitest or ECT Pomona, but no charge for using that internet connection to create a voice chat. As I said before the New Hampshire facility always has a slight delay when we call from Pomona. It's not bad every time, but there have been occasions when we've disconnected the Skype session and switched to a telephone, never a good sign for this type of technology, but so far it has not been bad enough on a consistent basis for us to turn away from it completely.

However, the advance that Skype has either made or made popular (I don't know if anyone could do this feature before, and that's my point), is called SkypeOut. It allows you to make a connection between 1 computer and 1 telephone. This means I can substitute the computer on my end, but call our house phone. There is a fee for this service because Skype is obviously paying the telephone company to connect from a computer near home to our home telephone. However, the rates are incredibly good. The cost for a call between Germany and the United States (either direction) is .017 Euro per minute. That's two Euro CENTS for a minute. Considering our corporate calling card rate is somewhere near a DOLLAR per minute, this is a huge savings.

Now if any of you are asking either a) why do I care about all this? or b) didn't he start off saying that he'd had a frustrating time, why is he rambling about software? then the answer is either a) maybe you don't, you don't have to read this or b) I'm telling you how far we've come, now I'll tell you about my disappointed higher expectations...

Tangent completed I'll jump back to the idea that I've been using Skype to sidestep the hotel telephone. The hotel offers a T-Mobile service that is wirelessly available in the hotel room for 2 Euros per 15 minutes. Even a 2 Euro overhead combined with paying cents per minute makes a 3 minute Skype call less expensive than a 3 minute telephone call and the savings gets better by the minute after that. However, the internet connection at the hotel is not what I was calling a "high quality internet connection". When I first got in to Rosenheim on Monday, the hotel telphone and internet system was down for an hour (just long enough to miss my chance to call Andrea before she went to work), then it took half an hour to configure, but then it worked and I left Andrea a message on our answering machine. Tuesday it worked OK for a SkypeOut call, although 3 or 4 times the sound would drop out for about 2 seconds and then come back. Wednesday I again spent about 30 minutes getting the wirless connection to work, but I was rewarded with another 15 minute "call" with only a few 2 second blanks. However, I must have run out of luck, because this morning it was horrible. I could hear Andrea just fine, but she could only hear every other word from my end. We fought with this for 15 minutes, closing and restarting the session every few minutes to try to get a better connection over the internet (unfortunately that wasn't the problem, the problem was the connection on my end). After hanging up the last time, I promptly switched to the telephone in the room and tried the calling card number one more time. With no luck, I broke down and dialed the international number directly and profusely apologized to Andrea for the frustrating time of trying to talk for 15 minutes when she could never hear a full sentence.

We kept the call short, having no idea what rate the hotel would charge, but fearing the worst. On my way to breakfast I asked the front desk to tell me the charge for our call. I didn't time the call, but it was probably between 2 and 3 minutes, and the cost was 3,30 Euro (the comma is a nod to the German convention, mentally substitute a decimal point). Basically one Euro per minute, which at the current exchange rate is only marginally worse than the calling card that I was insistent on using.

So what's the point! Now that I've experienced a crystal clear Skype call for no cost to me (our company is paying the internet line, but my usage isn't directly increasing the bill), I expect this. I want to talk without interruption without paying anything extra for it. I am willing to pay a few cents per minute for SkypeOut because of the convenience for Andrea to use the house phone rather than sit at our computer and it's so much less than before that my mind can justify it. But I will not accept a bad quality connection. I expect my bits and bytes to travel from Germany to California and back fast enough that I cannot tell it wasn't instant. And the funny thing is that in many cases, they do. But when they don't... well, let's just say that I'm going to stick to calling from the office at the end of the day and not deal with the hotel lines for anything but email for the rest of the trip.

I'm sure in 25 years, a sound exchange between any 2 points in the world will have become a trivial thing and my child will not understand how I could ever have struggled to make a call overseas. But my guess is, he or she will be frustrated because a videochat between 5 college friends in different states and countries dropped some frames. The more things change... you know the rest.