I care about… – Page 26

Robotize your Firefox

Ever need to execute repetitive tasks in Firefox? Now you don’t need to do it by hand — simply grab Selenium IDE. “It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests.” Take a look and then download it!

#2919 resolved; the fix is in

Lloyd‘s posted a solution to the disappearing favorites bug I reported on last week. Apparently it was a change on del.icio.us’s end that caused the problem.
Notes from Lloyd:

There are no negative effects to your favorites on del.icio.us. Unfortunately, the nature of this del.icio.us service bug, requires your manual correction.

Manual Correction

Shutdown Flock

Go into your profile folder

Delete files: flock_fq_default_in.rdf and flock_fq_default_out.rdf

Restart Flock

In other news, del.icio.us has finally added privacy to favorites! I know Joshua has his reservations about this feature and that it threatens the sharing focus of the community, but I actually would be willing to wager that more people are going start sharing now that they at least have the option to keep certain things private.

Flocktails for Flock

Calvin Yu has ported his Tails extension to work in Flock as a topbar. The extension, called Flocktails, reveals a micformats icon in the bottom right of the status bar to indicate the presence of hCards, hCalendars, hReviews and xFolk entries. This is the extension that I demoed at SXSW last week.

Take it for a spin and send bug reports to Calvin!

To be clear…

…Michael Arrington apparently jumped the gun when he blogged that a Firefox 2.0 alpha is available. According to Asa, they’ll announce it when it’s time.

Still, useful comments in the Crunch Gallery from Niall and Leonard, as well as a link to 2.0 feature overview.

And, an insightful demonstration of our media (yes, we the bloggerati) to self-correct and expand, given the discussion last night on media elitism at the monthly Cybersalon. Sorry Andrew, I just met you but I’m going to have to call bullshit on your whole premise. Blogs are the media (to invoke Steve Gillmor) and y’know what? We don’t need no fancy overhanging bureaucracy to ensure accountability or accuracy. We can handle it amongst ourselves thank you very much — because unlike many of you in the old MSM, we won’t sell out our audiences or dump crap on them because we can — indeed, with so much choice and the “millions and millions of blogs”, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy that good content will emerge, will be attended to, will be corrected, reblogged, excoriated and made better through the process of mutual censure and examination.

Realize finally that we are more than the media, that media is made to serve us, that if it fails to serve us, we will abandon it, route around it, find another way to connect and to communicate. So while Michael might have spoke too soon, the feedback loop that corrected his error is in effect for all of us who attempt to speak the truth, using media. And in that, never has there been a more open, transparent and robust form of media in the history of our civilization.

Sublimating

I’ve noticed a cycle in my workflow that runs back a long time, probably into high school, runs throughout college, has stuck with me to this day. See, I seem to be a creature of phases, of renewal and curiousity and exploration. I seek out new challenges, take the road not even noticed, make things harder for myself. I can’t explain it. It’s just how I operate. I don’t slow down. I jump sideways. I phase shift.

And whenever I’ve found myself within the boundaries of some kind of institution, be it school, be it a job, be it just about anything that slows me down, chemicals and ideas within me start reacting, my energy changes, I reorient to address what’s in front of me. Sometimes, change ensues.

And so it’s been that for the last nine months I’ve had a full time gig at Flock — stumbling a whole lot, learning all kinds of great stuff, meeting and working with tremendously insightful individuals, traveling the world, falling in love, working long nights and sleeping less than I did in college; I’ve been in constant motion, bouncing along in the cockpit, weathering turbulent times both within and without our stuttering startup. I’ve struggled to find my footing, landing some successes that I’m really proud of, other times disappointing my colleagues and myself with my output (or lack thereof). I’m human, hey, and I’ve still got so much — so much — to learn. But throughout, ya know, it’s been a thoroughly enthralling experience.

Ok, to get to it already: as of April 1, I’ll be a free agent. This is wholly my choice and at my own discretion. Indeed, I initiated it. And the good folks at Flock are supporting me in this decision. In fact, they’re going to be my first “client” as I return to the land of independent consulting (which is what I was doing when I first moved out to San Francisco).

So the motivation? Well, first off, I thrive in small teams — where collaboration includes everyone, from top to bottom. This is how things started out at Flock, but due to the crazy demands of building a browser, just isn’t as feasible any more as we’ve grown to take on new and more diverse talent. Second, I want to focus more on the ambassadorial part of the position I’ve held at Flock (Barcamp, coworking, Mashpit, WineCamp, Microformats and all the rest). And to do that, I need more independence and the ability to flow between projects — to grow into some sort of an open source “editor at large”. Third, the timing is right. With Flock having just completed its move to Flock World HQ II and a number of internal reshufflings, I figure it’s time to exit stage left while things are really just getting off the ground and Flock’s internal culture is being formed. The past nine months have been getting us down the runway, and now that we’ve taken to flight, the next nine will determine what Flock is going to look like. And really, I’m going to be most effective out in the field, liasoning between projects and doing focused design work on the browser. So it’s all good — we’ve discussed this and it really does make sense.

So this bit about sublimating… here’s what convinced me that this is the right thing for me right now: the cycle that I go through with jobs and structure and so on is like the ice â†’ vapor sublimation process. I started out at Flock as vapor, all energy, busting with ideas and ready to take on the world. Over time, I learned the ropes, slowed down a bit, condensed into water: amorphous and flowing, moving from one thing to the next. And now, as has happened with previous projects, I’ve turned to an idle form of ice, ready to sublimate into a new form of volatility, ready to take on the next challenges, to surface the next horizon, my next big thing.

Under the Economist’s microscope

Title and Registration

The Economist has a very interesting article on its perceptions of open source from the old skool monetize-your-poo world. Tara puts it best: “There was a study that came out advising against buying small cars, what with all these SUVs on the roads today.”

Hmm. Yeah, you’ll notice that depending on how you frame the question (and depending on which ones you ask), the conversation will take on a vastly different character. Another way to put it: YOMV (your “objectivity” may vary).

So the Economist usually is pretty fair and balanced, so I’ll give them some credit. And I’ll cite some gems:

However, it is unclear how innovative and sustainable open source can ultimately be. The open-source method has vulnerabilities that must be overcome if it is to live up to its promise. For example, it lacks ways of ensuring quality and it is still working out better ways to handle intellectual property.

On describing the open source community ecosystem (similar to my own map of the Mozilla Universe from my Spread Firefox days):

From that core group, the open-source method lets a series of concentric circles form. First, there are around 400 contributors trusted to offer code into the source tree, usually after a two-stage review. Farther out, thousands of people submit software patches to be sized up (a useful way to establish yourself as new programming talent). An even larger ring includes the tens of thousands of people who download the full source code each week to scrutinise bits of it. Finally, more than 500,000 people use test versions of forthcoming releases (one-fifth of them take the time to report problems in bug reports).

On IP woes (with which we’re all familiar):

The question of accountability is a vital one, not just for quality but also for intellectual-property concerns. Patents are deadly to open source since they block new techniques from spreading freely. But more troubling is copyright: if the code comes from many authors, who really owns it?

The reason why CivicForge is necessary:

Rather than a democracy, open source looks like a Darwinian meritocracy. …even though open-source is egalitarian at the contributor level it can nevertheless be elitist when it comes to accepting contributions.

And challenges for the future of open source… can it create a wellspring of sustainable innovation or simply rip off proprietary products’ concepts and interfaces?

Even if the cracks in the management of open source can be plugged by some fairly straightforward organisational controls, might it nevertheless remain only a niche activityâ€”occupying, essentially, the space between a corporation and a commune? There are two doubts about its staying power. The first is how innovative it can remain in the long run. Indeed, open source might already have reached a self-limiting state, says Steven Weber, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of â€œThe Success of Open Sourceâ€? (Harvard University Press, 2004). â€œLinux is good at doing what other things already have done, but more cheaplyâ€”but can it do anything new? Wikipedia is an assembly of already-known knowledge,â€? he says.

The second doubt is whether the motivation of contributors can be sustained. …Once the early successes are established, it is not clear that the projects can maintain their momentum, says Christian Alhert, the director of Openbusiness.cc, which examines the feasibility of applying open-source practices to commercial ventures.

And so what I’m left with is uncertainty; yet filled with hope. Clearly they’re on the outside looking in. They’ve grabbed a few butterflies, stuck them to a board and declared that these beautiful little self-organizing creatures are interesting but in all probability, impractical. Not interesting to our captains of industry.
“It just won’t work”, goes the refrain. “How could it?”

â†’ Begin rant.

And that’s all well and good because it won’t. Not with the old models in tact. Not with DRM fucking everything up. Not with opaque institutions coveting their intellectual property like it was a birthright. Not with your laws that stifle innovation, with your education system that keeps kids thinking in narrow rectangles, keeps down the free flow of work, of play, of curiousity.

What this article fails to do — purposefully — is to recount the story of open source from the perspective of the inhabitants of the bazaar. This is clearly the cathedral view on the open source phenomenon, asking, “How can we learn from their successes and monetize the fuck out of them?” Why not ask about how the proliferation of SUVs made our streets and highways unsafe?

Well, that would expose the fallacy of our faux-capitalist system. It’s not open, not free (enough), not a level playing field. Corruption is the grease on the axles that drive the wheels powered by the diesel of the sovereign state. When you come to our town, we invite you in, we see what you’ve done everywhere you’ve gone, everywhere you’ve been. Yet being open, we let you in. We even sit down and share scotch. But you won’t get it without becoming a part of it.

Not just like that. And not just by opening us up on an examination table, by poking at our vital organs, by studying our work, quantifying our behavior. To benefit from open, you’ve got to be open, believe open, see open, live open, want open.

So thanks, Econ, for stopping through; you’re welcome to return. I’ve always thought that you’ve done good work — but hey, realize that you can’t coopt this by writing about it as though it’s a company to be acquired or business practices to be assimilated. Keep at it, hopefully you’ll get it over time. I wish you well back at the altar.

The microformats-API assembly lines

I was trying to put this point in history into some context and it dawned on me that Ford’s assembly line, which had a great influence on production and essentially precipitated the industrial revolution, is somewhat of a precursor to what we have today with open APIs and the potential proliferation of microformats.

Except that, with this combination of remixable and repurposeable data, the whole web community stands to benefit. The interesting issue — is that we must build tools that can interact with and leverage this technological coupling. Ford was no dummy: he sold cars to the people who made them, and put the cost at a level that his employees could afford.

Now if we could spread tools that can make use of microformats as well as produce them invisibly to the end users, this whole assembly line thing might actually take off. Yeh, just mebbe.

Mashpit II coming to South San Francisco

Mashpit II will take place on April 15 at France Telecom’s South San Francisco offices (thanks, Sean!). I’m hoping to see a lot of microformats mashing and extension building, though obviously working on previous and new projects is encouraged as well.

So let me backup and explain a little about Mashpit and how it works (you can also read up on the first one):

First, Mashpit is unrelated to Mashup Camp. David Berlind and Doug Gold organized the first one not long ago and will be holding a second soon. Mashpit’s off on its own. 😉
Second, our focus is to stay modest and nimble — the first Mashpit had around 12 participants. Mashpit Dallas I had a similarly small number. We like small teams and keeping ‘pits manageable and high productivity is paramount to running a successful event.
Third, we focus on human problems. Though the context is certainly high tech geekery, we spec out our work as it relates to some human difficulty (i.e. sharing video with a wide audience or sending someone a message over multiple mediums) rather than expressing a problem in tech terms (i.e. “let’s improve the AJAX performance in the Rails stack”). This enables other ‘pits to carry forward the work begun at our event later on, regardless of technology. We want solutions, after all, to be effective in many circumastances. When you’re mashing, it matters less what tools you use than with the quality and how well your solution works for people.

For Mashpit II (II as in the second ‘pit in San Francisco), we’re hoping to get between 12-44 folks (kind of random, but based on space).

Here’s how I’m thinking it should work:

Sign yourself up on the wiki and then add yourself to the Upcoming page (yes, we need a mashup for that!).
Propose human problems that you’d like to work on on the wiki (and yes, you can be thinking about a particular mashup that you want to work on — just don’t describe it from a technology-centric perspective)
Depending on your interest and availability, get yourself to South San Francisco April 15!
We’ll convene, review our options, break out into teams and hack the whole day, reporting back on our progress some time in the evening — documenting everything on the wiki.
…Plan the next event?

Food and other good stuff will be provided — and we’d love to have some sponsors who want to pitch in and maybe provide a meal or snacks or coffee or take care of one of our other needs — drop me email at barcamp -at- gmail dot com and we’ll hook something up. It’s totally great to have a partner like France Telecom R&D supporting us — and it’d be great to have other passionate folks getting behind this too (wherever you are — like Barcamp, Mashpit is free to be copied, immitated and spread far and wide!).

Because of open source

I was honored to serve on a panel on open source with such greats as Doc Searls, Matt Mullenweg, Simon Phipps and William Hurley at Barcamp Austin. Organized and moderated by Raven Zachary, we touched on a number of facets of open source development, from the difficulty that Sun’s having open sourcing Java to the impending need for more usability and accessibility design in open source.

Doc’s done quite a bit of blogging after the fact and posted a very interesting and didactic chapter (in draft form) from his book, Open Sources 2.0, called Making a New World:

Note that podcasting became a hot category without the help of a large company. Instead, it began with the demand side supplying itself.

Now watch for big companies to jump in, and for businesses of all sizes to start making money. And watch for most of that money being made because of podcasting’s open standards and open source components, rather than with them.

It will eventually become clear to everybody that there is far more money being made because of open source than with open source. This is what we have to remember every time somebody asks, “How can you make money with (open source product)?” The answer is, “You don’t make money with it. You make money because of it.”

The because of principle is old hat in mature business categories, but it’s new to the software business. Too many of us still want to see “business models” for all kinds of goods that don’t belong on the income sides of balance sheets. Would you ask your telephone what its business model is? How about your front porch? Your driveway? Your clothes? Those things may help us make money; but they are not how we make money. Well, the same goes for open source products. They are means to ends. You make money because of them, not with them.

This line of reasoning smacks at why we need to open source all infrastructure, including OS’, including our economic system, including education, including government and of course, including supplementary enablers like phone networks, WiFi, IP and the entire legal system.

Utopic? Hardly.

So while, sure, it’s hard to imagine where we are today independent of where we’ve been, truly there’s never been a time in history when things have been so different, when anything has been so possible to so many, when the world, quite literally, is at our collective and individual fingertips. And yet we treat infrastructure — which is akin to our modern day waterways and subterranean sewer networks — as proprietary conduits for tranferring “privileged” data.

Think about it this way: if the water that’s piped into your house had DRM on it and only allowed you to use it for showers, how would you wash your clothes? If you were only allowed to make ice cubes, how would you make iced tea? If you had to pay $0.99 everytime you wanted a glass of water?

The whole lot of proprietary infrastructure needs to be open sourced and given back to people. To people over companies. To those who believe in self-determination.

Listen, here’s what’s at stake:

Ideas and hope need to flow like water if a civilization is to continue its ascension toward greatness. Impediments to that flow will stall growth. Fortunately, like a solvent, the culture of open source will continue to expand, will wear away at these impediments, to restore the natural flow of social capital, of ideas, of hope. Those who get this first will rise, and rise quickly.

Don’t think that the owners of the 21st century have been preselected. It may seem that the power brokers controlling the media, the government, our place inÂ world affairs, will continue to maintain their grip on the plight of our civilization. But I can assure you that that’s not a certainty. That which represented power in the previous century will come to represent weakness, repression, isolation — irrelevance. Civilization will advance not with open source, but because of it.