Things I think about – Page 64

Observations on the perceived failure of community after Katrina

The more I read about the crisis in New Orleans, the more I am confused and saddened at what’s happening. And the more I see and hear of the US Government’s response, the more concerned I am for the general and ongoing wellbeing and protection of America’s citizenry.
What’s unfolding in New Orleans is being portrayed as utter chaos and what comes down to a failure of the community to take care of and fend for itself. Rather, it seems, individuals are ruining the relief efforts for everyone by apparently looking out only for themselves and their families:

“Hospitals are trying to evacuate,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Cheri Ben-Iesan, spokesman at the city emergency operations center. “At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in people are shooting at them. There are people just taking potshots at police and at helicopters, telling them, “You better come get my family.”

While I don’t believe that this behavior is true of everyone or even the majority, it is significant enough to be causing the relief efforts to fail or to become to dangerous for those administering them.

And in the midst of all this, our president has the gall to callously call for a crackdown on the looting:

“I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud,” Bush said. “And I’ve made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together.”

This from the man who sold us on a bogus war in a time when the last thing we as a people coming together needed was to crackdown on a minor madman. What we needed was community leadership that brought us together — and that helped us to see our common humanity. The more I hear and see of this president, the more my concerns are confirmed that he is not one who can lead us towards a greater empathic understanding of ourselves or our neighbors. Instead, his example will further encourage divisive behavior against our better nature.
Technorati Tags: hurricanekatrina, politics, george bush

What of this silly little invite-only idea?

I’ve received a couple invites from folks for Google Talk, Google’s new instant messaging service. The funny thing is that it requires a Gmail username and password to make use of the software, which, like other Google software, only runs on Windows. Now you’ll recall, too, that Gmail is an invite-only system. This would make for some rather troublesome exclusivity in the service if it weren’t for the fact that you can talk to your buddies on other IM services.

So here’s what’s interesting about this, and something I wonder about personally given Flock’s current “private beta”: what results are had by using such an invite-based system to grow your userbase and social network? What are the costs and benefits, and to whom? There are myriad reasons for busting out with a fully public beta but just as many for going private, which is, admittedly, different than exclusive (Flock is the former, Gmail the latter).

To limit your system to invited participants, you must certainly have something of both legitimate and substantial value to create demand… that actually incents invitees to sign up and login. But you also must not upset or invite the bitter ire of those who haven’t yet received invites.

And quite obviously, as we learned over the past week, once you’ve extended an invite, especially in the world of software where there is hardly such a thing as scarcity of resources, what you giveth, you nary can take away.

So what of all these invite-only (or formally invite-only) services where you have to know someone on the inside to get a golden ticket? Does it artificially increase desire? Does it help services grow organically and cut down on trolls and spam, creating more value for invitees? Does it create more investment from the user community and perhaps establish even minor connections between invitor and invitee? Or does it create a false hierarchy around an inner circle of well-connected geeks?

Who knows?

What I do know is that it’s a curious trend and happening rather profusely across the web. Good or bad? I can’t quite say — except that in the case of Flock, we’re using the invite system to start out slowly on purpose. We want to not only be able to scale up organically, but we also want to cultivate relationships with our brave early adopters so that we can build the best experience possible over time. And to that end — we want to make sure that when we do launch publicly, we’ve hammered out all the glaring issues — as well as minor ones — so that sum total Flock makes you more productive, more explorative, and more voraciously social on the web. So for now, Flock will remain available to few kindred souls with enough courage to shove through our bugs and dodge the sharp edges. In the meantime, do add yourself to our invite lottery so that your name will be there when the next round of invites go out!

Bar camp buzz builds; the story twists, turns, shouts!

I wanted to pipe up before this topic spiral out any further and I miss my chance to edge in my two cents.

In staging Bar camp, we, the original organizers, harbor no ill will towards Foo Camp, Tim O’Reilly or anything or anyone else associated with the project. Indeed, the original concept came to me and my roommate Andy from Tantek Celik, who suggested that there should be an alternative, non-exclusive, “open” alternative to Foo Camp. Sure, an interesting idea, but having little personal knowledge of the event, we shrugged it off to focus on more pressing things.

That was three weeks ago and Andy and I (with the Flock crew) had a browser to launch at OSCON (an O’Reilly event, mind you). Planning a second event was hardly something any of us had the bandwidth to take on, let alone the attention span to consider seriously. There was simply no time.

Yet upon returning from Portland, and with our launch out of the way, our conversations suddenly returned to the idea of the alternative conference. Listening to details of previous Foo Camps from Tantek, I decided that yes, he was on to something here… and the more I researched and discussed Foo Camp, the more we believed that O’Reilly’s ad hoc model would work beyond the limited boundaries of Sebastapol. And would not only work — but needed to be freed!

And so this past Saturday, over IRC, we initiated a face to face meeting of the BarPlanners and got the ball rolling.

When we embarked on this strange and fantastic journey, we knew that we had a week. We had no money, no sponsors, no venue and no idea if just the five of us or 50 random folks would show. But we knew that we had to stage BAR Camp and that, among other things, it would serve as a demonstration of the decentralized organizing potential of the Web2.0 Generation. We set out to prove that what the good folks at O’Reilly could pull off in a year with a couple years’ experience and tens of thousands of dollars, could be cobbled together in a week by a crazy gaggle of savvy geeks, leveraging only the web and the our reach into our social networks.

So here we are, five days later and two days from the event. We’ve had a venue donated to us. We’ve got a fabulous logo (thanks Eris!). We’ve got some sponsors lining up up and a bunch of great advisors. And we’ve got buzz. This is turning out to be the exact kind of unprecedented success we were hoping for — and from here it can only get better as we lead up to the kickoff.

Tomorrow I’m planning on giving Tim O’Reilly a ring to see what we can do to join forces (hopefully beyond coordinating on FooBarCrawl). I’d love to see the ideas he’s baked in Foo Camp spread even beyond Bar Camp. Next year I expect to see multiple satellite Bar Camps happening the world over, loosely joined via the web, bringing distributed collaboration and culture building to a much, much wider audience. Podcasted, Flickered, wikified, videographied and blogged like mad. At the very least.

Whaddya say, Tim, think we can do it?

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamp05, foocamp

BAR, the alternative to FOO

Today a bunch of us met to plan out Barcamp, an open invite alternative to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. We don’t have much time, money or space at the moment, but we’re scrappy and committed to making this happen.

So check out the wiki and go sign up. While we’re not doing the whole invite thing, we are asking for RSVP’s in advance.

And yes, this should be a seriously good time. Really.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamp05

New Internet Explorer logo… and product name?

Scant on details, the IEBlog announced that they’re updating the Internet Explorer logo for version 7: As part of this update, weâ€™re refreshing our icon and logotype.

What’s most interesting about this “refresh” is the change from”Microsoft Internet Explorer” to the ominously embedded “Windows Internet Explorer”. The marketing folks will probably tell you that they changed it simply to “better reflect the fact that IE is so nicely integrated into the desktop” but I have strong doubts that the world’s largest software manufacturer makes such a change on a whim. What do you think this means?

More than likely there’s some legal reason for this, about which I can speculate little. However, while I’m pointing out curiosities, I noticed that the new typeface is anything but a normal font. I’m sure someone will point me in the right direction, but it’s none of the new Vista faces, so I have no idea what it might be. Seems to be some Helvetica/Calibri combination, but more than likely it’s something entirely different.

What’s so interesting about this â€” similar to Mozilla’s use of Font Shop’s proprietary Meta â€“ is that it becomes nearly impossible for the community at large to make derivative works that look anything like the official logo. Convenient for the trademark holder, but rather inconvenient for folks wanting to promote the brand, non?

Technorati Tags: internet explorer, microsoft, branding, ie7

Why microformats are the glue between web content and a richer online experience

In response to my introduction, Andy Hume asked me on the Microformats-discuss list:

What kind of microformat support are you looking to get in to these publishing tools? Obviously wordpress has built in support for XFN. What else are you trying to get happening?

So now it’s time for me to put on my visionary cap and mention a couple ideas I’ve been stewing on about why microformats make good sense for web publishers and web tool builders. I won’t get too pedantic or preach to the choir. Rather, I’m just gunna outline some of the obvious things to me that make creating the lowercase “semantic web” worthwhile, assuming, of course, that certain enabling technologies and innovations occur.

First, let me point out that the cost of implementing microformats is less than minimal and in fact, in some cases, can give you a net gain given the reduction on time spent figuring out what CSS classes to use. As a former-web-developer-junkie, it was my job to come up with unoriginal ways of identity bits of content on webpages so that I or someone else could come back later and figure out what the heck I was doing.

This lead to me to do things like code lists of people with a container that specified that, indeed, I was working with a list of people and not dates, dogs or envelopes. Why would this be useful? Well, what if you wanted to use a different icon to denote a person, date, dog or envelope? You’d need to know what class of object you were working with. (Just bear with me here.) This becomes a pain when you have to do this over and over again and or work on someone else’s code. However, with a sufficient store of standard microformats at our disposal, such situations could theoretically be avoided. Rather than having to reinvent a classing system everytime, I could simply turn to the related microformat standard and call it a day.

So that’s great and all, but why do you bother touching code anymore anyway with such able CMS and blog tools available? Why not just bake it into those publishing tools and be done with it?

The short answer is that that’s happening, and we need to see more of this work get done. The problem seems to be related to chickens, eggs, carts and horses, in no particular order. And until they all get sorted out, there’s a great deal of developer apathy best captured in lines like, “Why should I care?”

Well, better than just spouting out about the practical benefits for web developers, there are functional benefits which I expect to see available in the coming months. As a prelimary example, check this out:

I created a Greasemonkey user script that will find those hCalendar events and provide a link to import them into any calendar program that supports the iCalendar format (most notably Apple’s iCal and Mozilla’s Sunbird). What does this mean? Well any time you see an event on the web that has hCalendar information, you can click a link and it’ll be added to your calendar so you don’t have to copy the information by hand.

unmediated: Greasemonkey and Microformats

So just imagine once this kind of support becomes native in the browser… that’s when really interesting things start to become possible. And soon, I’ll outline just how I see this happening.

Understanding in the modern world

I found out about the London attacks this morning when my roommate told me about them on the way into work. Truth be told, I was out with friends last night and didn’t have direct access to any kind of news sources, so I was quite surprised when he explained what’d happened.

So today, when I started exploring what had been posted online, I was struck by how I went about looking for information versus how I ultimate found anything of substance. I started at a major news outlet earlier in the day and was disappointed by not only the detachment in the writing (“objective” journalism, they call it) but by the meager pictures available. I mean, I’m a visual person and I thrive on being able to see things — in order that I might gain a better understanding of what actually happened.

Only this evening when I sought to understand things more completely did I turn, almost accidently, to Flickr. I hadn’t really considered Flickr a citizen journalism site, but as I landed on the tags page, I realized that this community of people, equipped with cameras and living in the open could be my eyes on the scene — and would help me comprehend what happened with their photos. And beyond what Reuters could provide, I could go back before the attacks and learn about the very individual lives of each witness in their photostreams.

In addition to that, I stumbled upon an ad-hoc community of well-wishers setup within Flickr, called the 7/7 Community, whose specific focus is on the bombings.

What’s interesting in all of this and in my discovery process is that these various technologies and tools that are able to bring me so much closer to such a foreign reality are starting to become more widely used and disseminated throughout the general public. People are not only coming to web to share, to communicate and to understand, but there are finally there are tools to help express and capture reality as it unfolds. Even a year ago, this kind of local civic engagement over the web would have been very hard to pull off.

An uncertain result, however, as pointed out in this post on Radio Open Source (discovered in one of the Flickr groups) concerns how a number of Flickr photos are turning up across the world in the mass media. While I am a strong believer in participatory culture and citizen reportage, the mass media seems to be coopting this emerging trend by reappropriating such content without, in my view, being a good contributing citizen itself. Let’s face it: the media doesn’t “do” open source and yet they’re greedily snatching up the contributions of regular folks to sell their papers, magazines and so on… I know that this material needs to get out there and the more people who see it the better, but something about it simply doesn’t sit well with me.

I guess until initiatives like Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere or media “escrow” repositories like morgueFile become more ubitquitous and well known, citizen journalists will have to tough it out on their own, finding a voice that stands out starkly against the lulling hum of the industrial megamedia machine and developing an organic community of readers who are themselves active participants in creating, telling and retelling the stories that matter to them, and to us all.

The cult of the vagabond hacker

With the success of hacker meetups like SuperHappyDevHouse and HackNight, it dawned on me that there need not be a specific, pre-planned event in order for hacker-types to converge in a physical location to hack on problems that are of interest them. This can, and perhaps should, happen in a much more ad-hoc, spur-of-the-moment manner and be just as successful and integrative. Additionally, there is a role for folks (like David Weekly, host of SHDH) who want to encourage this kind of behavior, especially those who understand that they can benefit from it.

I envision cults of traveling hackers, venturing from one city to the next, war driving and shacking up at homes and offices, seeking caffeine, a decent work environment and space for sleeping bags. Such places need not be permanant destinations, but rather convenient, temporary quarters for such hacking gatherings. Stay-overs may last as little as a day or may carry on over a week; indeed, it’s doubtful that more than a fortnight would even work for such a situation (for that, perhaps we would need hacker hostels).

Results from these events would be contributed back to a “code trough” where other intrepid hackers could either pick up the work or could remix it towards other projects, following the open source model. And the hosts would of course get some kind of working product out of the exchange or could continue to offer space in order to encourage the completion of the work should it not be finished in time.

Would hackers actually work on projects that they themselves didn’t come up with? Well, given the free room (and board, potentially), supply of caffeine (or other hacking supplement) and connectivity, the tradeoff seems more than fair for those hackers who want to work but also want to explore the world.

If such a networked, Meetup-like system were developed and I knew that I could plan a trip across Europe just stopping off at such hacker havens and not pay for anything but transportation, I would surely do so! Indeed, by pushing the social component and randomness of this kind of situation, you would be exposed to new and interesting people with diverse ideas, approaches and experiences that, it would seem, would contribute to creating fundamentally more interesting and valid products that solve more than just your own personal peeves. And if you happen to take a project with you on your travels, you get the compound benefit of having a myriad cross-section of the hacker subculture looking at and refining the ideas in your project as well as contributing effort hours towards getting something done!

I’d love to see such a system emerge and if anyone wants to offer up their home, office or… backyard? for this kind of event, let me know. Perhaps we could see something like this off-shoot from OSCON in August?

Living the vida cognito

The Vida Cognito

It’s been a fairly gradual transition for me, and certainly many many have come before me, but I’m getting the hang of living dangerously in the open, or at least letting more “meta data” about me intentionally slip into the ether, even at a time when one’s identity and data are in increasing peril.

For example, I’m now sitting in a cafe somewhere in California. Like I’ve done many times before. The difference is that when I arrived here, two very interesting things happened.

First, I signed on to Plazes. As it turns out, no one had yet identified my geolocation to the service, so the little app was smart enough to know to take me to a “discovery” page so I could fill in info about where I am… here’s the result and a detailed map (in case you wanted to order a bombing run).

Next, I signed on to Adium. As Adium connected, a little AppleScript ran in the background and set my away status to the Plaze that I had just identified. Now my friends know where I am, in real time. Freaky!

So the other thing that happened occurred as I googled for a link for the Arc Cafe (apparently it doesn’t have a website of its own yet). The first result lead me to a review on a new service called Yelp. Ordinarily, I’d take the info that I need and go, completing the Plazes profile, content to have left some meta-breadcrumbs behind for the next Plazes participant to stumble upon.

But Yelp hooked me in, got me to create an account and even poke around a bit, leaving my first review! It seems only a matter of time before more and more of me will be trickling out in the web in interesting ways.

Consider this: even without Google, you can see my photos, read my blogs, see where I’ve been and what I’ll be doing next, read my reviews (more coming soon, I guess), see who’s talkin’ about me… what I’m listening to, what sites I’ve bookmarked… man, the list goes on and on!

Someone else has already made a page cataloging their extensions into the web. Perhaps it’s time I did the same…

The advent of cellular music services

Cellular Music: the iPod iTunes iPhone

Every now and then, I see the convergence of a number of technological innovations coinciding that leads me to certain conclusions about where the industry is headed. It seems quite logical, given the recent press, that your cellphone will soon sport more than cameras, but full-featured iPod-like digital music players. It’s true that some phones already have this ability, but it’s much more of an after-thought today than an actual iPod competitor. But I have a feeling that that’s all about to change in the not-too-distant future.

Let’s take a few things into consideration (even if Om was all over this last October). First, we hear that Motorola has an iTunes-compatible phone coming. Then we hear thatNokia is going to be using Apple’s WebCore in its phones. Next, Ericsson teams up with Napster to offer digital music downloads to directly compete with Apple et al. Obviously, Apple is beefing up its distribution mechanism over mobile devices with WebCore… and at the same time, dumping podcasts into iTunes 4.9, which itself uses WebCore a great deal. See where this is going?

It certainly seems that the combination of downloadable mobile music through an excellent interface is around the corner… how podcasts fit into the picture isn’t clear yet, nor is it clear whether Apple will actually be designing its own phone. It is certainly an exciting time to be watching this segment of the industry… and probably not a good time to invest in a new phone, yet.