Train from NYC to DC

This morning I took Amtrak's Accela Express from New York's Penn Station to Washington D.C. This afternoon I will be taking it back again. Bottom line: it's as if your flight was 3 hours of turbulence, ugh.

I investigated the train option when I discovered that it is cheaper to fly to Lisbon from New York than to D.C. Really. I am not making this up. The front page of the US Airways website is promoting a roundtrip airfare to Lisbon for less than $600. The roundtrip airfare on the "shuttle" to Washington is almost $700.

So I was pleased that the train was around half that round trip. And I figured that I would be able to work on the train for three hours since, of course they must have WiFi by now. And if I compare the time it takes each -- even though the flight is short, getting to the airport early and getting through security and all that means that it would take just as much time to fly (Ok maybe a bit less, but the train time would be 100% productive time).

The first dissapointment -- no WiFi. Gosh, I even have WiFi on the bus in San Francisco. What is wrong with people out here? Is Verizon paying Amtrak to keep WiFi off the train so that they can sell more EV-DO cards?

But the biggest dissapointment -- the ridiculous bumpy ride. Really -- like sitting on a plane with bad turbulence and bouncing for 3 hours. Why do people put up with this? Next time? Maybe I'll drive. Or buy my shuttle ticket far enough in advance to qualify for a reasonably priced ticket. But not the train. I can't even stand the thought of taking it back to NYC this afternoon.

Boarding Virgin America

Boarding Virgin America
Originally uploaded by Ted Shelton

Today I flew on Virgin America from SFO to JFK. Everyone I mentioned this trip to was excited -- Virgin seems to have some great press out there. "I hear the service is fantastic" people said. Well, let me tell you something. Its just an airplane. Sure, when you get on it is purple and blue and the soundtrack is playing a dance club beat... but once it takes off it still is just an airplane. It really doesn't have anything over Jet Blue.

A New Era at Technorati

I have spent a lot of time in the San Francisco offices of Technorati over the past 8 months. As a result I have had an opportunity to observe this company from a unique perspective -- on the one hand, having sold them my company (The Personal Bee), I had a stake in what was happening and had a chance to be involved in conversations about the future of the company and I had the chance to get to know Dave and his team. I am impressed with the group's ability to make hard decisions about the best way to move forward in revenue, growth opportunities, and how to get the team focused on execution.

For the past couple of months I've been working with Peter Hirshberg and his team at Technorati on the opportunities in conversational marketing and I'm exciteD -- there is a lot of momentum, they remain a great brand and at the end of the day their ability to adapt and make tough decisons is a mature thing to see from a start up. I expect great things from Technorati in the near future; change is never easy, but its often necessary to keeps growth companies vibrant.

AT&T: Sick and wrong

I know other people have written about this but I just need to vent -- 27 PAGES?! WTF!? Why do I need a bill from you, AT&T, that has 27 pages of "data transfer cost $0.00" ?! Who benefits from this? Are you guys on crack? I wouldn't be an AT&T customer except that it was the only way to get an iPhone (thanks Apple). And as soon as it is possible to have an iPhone and STOP being an AT&T customer I will.

By the way, $0.35 per minute for overage minutes and a 1 minute minimum for a call that doesn't even connect us usurious.

I can't wait to DUMP AT&T

Linkedin vs. Facebook

About a month ago Jeff Pulver wrote a blog post on why he was ditching Facebook in favor of Facebook. Then to add insult to injury he wrote "viewpoint" for Businessweek on the topic, Confessions of a LinkedIn Dropout. Having known Reid and LinkedIn for a very long time (I was an early beta tester, before the site was live) my investment in LinkedIn is considerable. I have invested in using the tool as a professional network (over 350 contacts) and as a resume (http://www.linkedin.com/in/tshelton) and used it successfully to recruit employees, do background checks, and stay in touch with old colleagues. On the facebook side, I had a login with no profile - just created as a holding place.

But at the same time that Jeff was writing his post and article, I was watching an interesting thing happen. While it had taken years of deliberate active effort to build my Linkedin network to 350 people, within 2 months my Facebook network grew to 60 people and is still growing - organically with no effort on my part. And as it has grown, I have gained significant benefits from being in closer touch with these 60 people -- I am finding out about events, interesting articles, and gaining insights into my friends lives.

In short, I am being drawn into Facebook and can also see a day when I might abandon LinkedIn. How did this happen? What did LinkedIn do wrong? And will Reid's recently announced attempt to launch his own open platform for applications on LinkedIn help save the company?

I believe that crux of the problem lies in the way each company looks at "first circle" uses (as Reid might call them). In LinkedIn terminology, you have different kinds of things that you would do with people depending upon whether you know them directly (first circle) or whether they are a friend of a friend (n circles). To me, this distinction is the primary strategic difference between these two social networks. Where LinkedIn focuses on things you might do to connect to people n circles away from you, Facebook is focused on first circle uses -- how do you stay connected with the people you already know.

For awhile now I have thought that this would mean that the two tools would have distinct uses and that I would continue to use both. But I am realizing that first circle uses absolutely trump n circle uses in a tool like this, and I think the reason may hold a lesson for all social media applications.

Because Facebook is alerting me now multiple times a day with interesting items from my friends, I am spending more and more time adding content to it myself, resulting in a positive network effect. As each of the people get more engaged, more value is created for all of the participants and each participant is encouraged to get more engaged. LinkedIn, by contrast, is a cold and distant planet that I might visit once in awhile if I have a very specific objective in mind.

So while LinkedIn becomes a more and more core part of my online existence, LinkedIn becomes a more and more peripheral part. I don't have to write a blog post and an article for Businessweek about abandoning LinkedIn in favor of Facebook - it is just happening without my even noticing.

It is definitely not too late for LinkedIn. There is still time to correct the problem. But the place to focus on product development is the daily experience with my first circle, not the application platform. While the open API will eventually be useful, developers will only write applications for a platform that people use. That problem must be solved first.

The Future of Publishing

Long time friend Sean Wolfe has launched Red Herring TV (http://www.redherring.tv) and is, IMHO, showing the way for print publishers to take their brand value and make it relevant and exciting for web consumers. Sean's interviews with leading VCs for example, make great viewing and MUST viewing for anyone planning on pitching their business plans to these leading folks. Take this example, Kef Kasdin of Battelle Ventures -- I love Sean's opening question "...what do you think, broken or not?" with respect to the early stage VC model.

Check it out!

Apple: Best Customer Service Ever

The USB power adapter from my iPhone was acting flakey -- sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't. Seemed to me to be a short. So I went to the Apple store and told them of my problem. They said, "normally we'd like you to go to the Genius bar so that they can confirm your problem, but the line is really long today so lets just swap it out for you." Wow. In 5 minutes I was out of there with a new adapter. THANK YOU APPLE. Imagine that happening at an AT&T store! Hah! Tell me again why you partnered with them? Oh, that's right. Because King George the Decider and his government decided to give AT&T a monopoly. Sigh. Oh well, soon everything will work over WiFi, right Apple? ;-)

With the Many

Great article from about 7 months ago by my friend and colleague Giovanni Rodriguez on social media and its adoption by larger companies -- read more on his blog. Giovanni explains his use of the word "peer" in framing the discussion about why some social media projects are succeeding. Having spent the last few months trying to explain this concept to companies, advertising agencies, and PR firms, Giovanni's clear thinking on the subject is very welcome. I have been boiling down a similar set of thoughts to the following equation:

Public Relations has been about communication WITH the FEW

Advertising has been about communication TO the MANY

Social media demands communication WITH the MANY

Giovanni's "peer" is a deeper look at this challenge and I encourage you to read both his shorter blog post and the longer version on the Journal of New Communications Research, here.

Good iPhone Wishlist

As the post says, I absolutely love my iPhone... But this is a good list of wishes for the next update. Some of them are unlikely -- the ring tone issue is apparently a dispute about whether AT&T is going to make money on selling us the right to have our songs as ring tones... but all of these should be on Apple's list for the next rev:

http://www.willotoons.com/2007/07/wishlist-for-iphone.php

It's Not Fair

"It's Not Fair." That seems to be the universal reaction. At least amongst those that don't have one. "I just got my new phone and I loved it. Until you showed me that iPhone. Go away, I don't want to see you again." That is what the lady with the brand new top of the line Nokia said. "What are all the problems?" asked the man hoping I would tell him something reassuring about hiw purchase of a new Samsung.

But I had to tell them the truth, that Apple really has done it right. The next group of people saying "it's not fair" will be the other phone manufacturers who don't get what is at the heart of this new device -- that it is about Apple being a USER EXPERIENCE company. Not a computer company. Not a consumer electronics company. Not an entertainment company.

While other mobile device manufacturers think about APIs for data integration, Apple is already moving the cheese and creating an incredible integrated experience.

I called my iPhone "Trinity" -- its about a phone, Internet access, and a media experience. And it does all three beautifully.

Naysayers May Now Stop Saying Nay

The iPhone. OK you are tired of the news. So I won't bore you with my first experiences. I'll just observe that it truly is wonderful. Apple has a huge hit. They really have redefined the cell phone experience. Other phone manufacturers should really think this through and not discount the impact that Apple will have in this segment.

My two complaints so far -- AT&T is stupid. But then again, they all are. It was fascinating watching how much Apple has done to make the integration of the AT&T part of the experience work in a smooth Apple way. But Apple can't cover for everything. So when I happened to type in my street address with the full word "Avenue," AT&T's computers responded that the didn't recognize the address but did have a similar one... it was my address but with the abbreviation AVE. This strikes me as the kind of user experience that Steve Jobs would never allow in an Apple product. It just screams "we are stupid!"

Second complaint is that I can't download software. I can't switch from the horrible Safari to the much better Firefox (or Opera or). I can't add in Adobe Flash (why did Apple leave it off the device!? it is part of the web stack!). I can't load my favorite apps...

But there are so many surprises lurking inside this device. There are fundamental changes in the way you think about your phone when it synchronizes seamlessly with your contacts, email, photos, videos, music, calendar... By the way I think it works incredibly well with the Mac but I have no idea how well it works with Windows.

The Internet as Creativity Driver

In the April issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, a group of authors published a paper (link to PDF) with some interesting scientific evidence supporting what a lot of us have known anecdotally -- as a city grows, its creative output also grows at a faster and faster rate. Or as Deborah Byrd writes in her EarthSky blog:

They found that the creative output of cities grows in a way that is superlinear, meaning as the city grew its creative output grew faster and faster.

Deborah also points to a longer popular article on the topic at physorg.com.

I started thinking about the dynamics underlying the increased creative output from people living in cities and how they might apply to understanding the Internet. In cities communications time is reduced, practitioners in like fields can more easily find each other and collaborate, and there is a regular introduction of diverse thinking into city dwellers activities. The Internet is even more effective at shortening communications and helping connect like minds. But does it provide the serendipitous introduction and exposure to new ideas and different ways of thinking? Or maybe another way to ask this is, how can our use of the Internet replicate the best aspects of living in cities so that it can be a super-enhancer of this "city-effect" on creativity?

Wharton West Bandwidth

wharton bandwidth
Originally uploaded by Ted Shelton

Here I am at Supernova2007, along with hundreds of other highly connected colleagues, all beating on the Wharton West network as hard as we can... And it is crumbling under the load. Maybe it isn't this bad when students are here trying to learn, but Internet Frog (http://www.internetfrog.com/mypc/speedtest/) tells me that network reliability is down to 19% and bandwidth... sucks. Hopefully Wharton West will get this problem fixed before Supernova2008!

A Second Life For All

I was privileged to be interviewed yesterday by Annette Moser-Wellman for a project she is doing for Northwestern University’s Media Management Center on innovation. She was very kind to put up with my rambling thoughts for an hour - I bet the audio is edited down to about 10 minutes! How much more efficient would I be if I could self edit down to the interesting 10 minutes ;-) But here I am rambling again and what I really wanted to write about this morning is Second Life.

One of the things that Annette asked me about was how to lead an organization to be innovative. In answering this question I observed that there are people that are more likely to be innovative and people that are less likely to be innovative -- so you can't just lead any given group of people to be innovative. As an example of this I went on a tangent (yes, too many tangents is why my 10 minutes took 60+ minutes...). The tangent was about how people deal with innovation. I mangled a quote from Douglas Adams which with the help of Google I can now bring you from the Douglas Adams website:

1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Then I went on a further tangent to reminisce about how I would argue with people when the fax machine first appeared in general business circles (only 30 years ago) about whether or not every business would ultimately have a fax machine. And then in the early 1990s I tried to convince people that eventually everyone would have an email address on their business cards ("just like we now have fax numbers"). And websites, and etc. At each step of the way, there were a set of people that said "no way, don't need 'em" -- my argument was that a sense of curiosity and imagination about the future is a key component to innovative people and some people have that and some people don't. You might be more likely to find this characteristic in younger people (Douglas Adams' point) although some young people are close minded and some older people are open minded.

This tangent of course led me to another tangent -- what is the example of something now that most of the business community rejects but, like fax machines and email addresses and websites, will be an accepted part of our business environment in 5-10 years? The example I came up with was virtual worlds, like Second Life.

Yep, a whole bunch of you out there are saying, huh? Second Life? That "game" thing? Yes, Second Life or something that looks like it is going to be an important part of your business life in the future. Don't believe me? I just saw my first business card two weeks ago with a second life ID on it. That made me start thinking about why this is going to become an important business tool. That made me go start spending time "in world" as the locals say, trying to understand what it is today and what it is going to become in the future.

Here is a really simple formula -- there are mediums to which people willingly give their attention. TV, Radio, the Internet, now Second Life. Anywhere people are willing to give their attention is a place that marketers will want to be with their marketing messages. Where marketers go, a whole service chain will follow. And when all of these parts of the service chain get involved, new market opportunities are created that go well beyond the initial impulse to participate in the medium.

Second Life creates a virtual space that facilitates interactions between physically distributed teams and introduces a set of tools that encourage innovation, creativity, and engaged collaboration. Already there are classes, press conferences, parties, financial transactions and a lot of entertainment (from G to XXX rated) going on all over the virtual space of Second Life. Just like in your first life, there are different times and places for different kinds of activities.

Go ahead, pooh-pooh the idea that you will be doing business in a virtual world. After all, its against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization.

Engagement: Does it Matter?

engagement
Originally uploaded by Ted Shelton

I have been thinking about the question of if and when companies and brands should engage in this thing we call "social media" and it occurred to me to apply that old favorite, Pascal's Wager, to this question.
You might remember that guy Pascal from a college philosophy course. He thought to apply logic to the question of whether or not to live as if God existed... to quote the Wikipedia article:



We are faced with the following possibilities:

1. You live as though God exists.


• If God exists, you go to heaven: your gain is infinite.


• If God does not exist, your loss is nothing.



2. You do not live as though God exists.


• If God exists, you go to hell: your loss is infinite.


• If God does not exist, you gain nothing & lose nothing.

So I wondered whether one could use this same logical system to address the question of whether or not a brand should engage (authentically!) with their audiences using social media. Here is the revised synopsis:

In his Wager, Pascal provides an analytical process for a person to evaluate options in regarding belief in God. This is often misinterpreted as simply believing in God or not. As Pascal sets it out, the options are two: live as if God exists, or do not live as if God exists. There is no third possibility.

Therefore, we are faced with the following possibilities:

1. You join in the conversation authentically.


• If engagement matters, you go to heaven: your gain is infinite.


• If engagement does not matter, your loss is nothing.



2. You fail to join in the conversation or do so in-authentically.


• If engagement matters, you go to hell: your loss is infinite.


• If engagement does not matter, you gain nothing & lose nothing.

I kind of liked leaving in the going to heaven or hell as the metaphorical equivalent of what happens when a brand screws this up. But here is the serious question:

Take all of the examples of social media engagement (or lack) and see if they fit into this grid? Can you find an example of a company that engaged authentically but still went to hell?

I can certainly come up with examples of the opposite -- companies that have engaged authentically and reaped the rewards. And companies that have not engaged or have engaged in-authentically going to hell.

On this last point, Chris Heuer (a friend and someone I am working on a project with) and I were just discussing one such in-authentic participant which he just posted about on his Social Media Club blog -- Ragan. Will they "go to hell" for this?

I believe that the most powerful thing about this new "social media" is that the truth eventually comes out and the people that care enough (the ones who matter) learn the truth.

There is an axiom in the news business that the lie is on page one while the correction lands on page 23. That happens because mainstream news has, as a default, a short attention span. But the blogosphere has a very long attention span.

If you know of an example that shows my "pascal's wager" to be wrong -- especially in that upper quadrant, please let me know.

Whistle-Blowing Teen

OK, so perhaps the teen that filmed this video of his high school english teacher (MongZilla) didn't do it with the intention of being a whistle-blower. But the story that the Seattle PI is reporting misses the really interesting point here.

As a parent, I watched this video and thought, if my child was ever in this person's classroom I would be raising hell with the school. This person shouldn't be teaching. How is it that this person has apparently been behaving like this in the classroom for years and hasn't been terminated?

We should give the kids some credit for expressing their frustration that their education is being compromised because the system can't give them qualified teachers.

Singularity Part 2

This is a follow up post to the one I made on Tuesday about Vernor Vinge's 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity." In part one I lead with a quotation from the essay. Here it is again:

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

In part one I offered some thoughts on the first sentence of this quotation -- the time horizon for the development of superhuman intelligence. In this second part I will discuss the second sentence.

Vinge is wrong.

The human era has already ended.

And this points out an interesting fact about Singularities as a phenomenon. When you are in the midst of one, you can only see a little ahead and a little behind. So you don't really notice the gradual change underway. Only in hindsight can you look back and see that something fundamental changed at some point which made everything that came afterwards different.

Why do I say that the human era has already ended? Over the 40 years of my lifetime, humanity has developed a symbiotic relationship with computers -- a relationship which has now become a dependency. Over the 100 years before that we developed a dependency on industrialization and electricity, but this is fundamentally different. Imagine for a moment what would happen to our civilization if we were, for some reason, no longer able to use computers. Would the human race come to an end? No. Would hundreds of millions of people around the world perish? Almost certainly.

But leaving aside the obvious dependencies on computers for agriculture, transportation, safety and the like. And focus on one specific category of human endeavor, what economists like to call the "knowledge worker." The most productive category of our citizenry, the category that makes all of the advances in the rest of our society possible, is the knowledge worker. Scientist, engineer, designer, analyst, adviser... All of these people are dependent upon computers to do their jobs.

The next amazing medical breakthrough, the next computer chip, the next bridge or political campaign -- all of these things will be possible because a human being and a computer are working together. When you think about "superhuman intelligence" don't leave the human out of the equation. The very first superhuman intelligences are already here amongst us -- they are us, every time we use a computer to do something that, as a human, we couldn't have done on our own.

What is the most populous city on the planet? Mumbai, with over 13 million people. Am I so smart that I know this? No. Google told me about Wikipedia which has a page listing the most populous cities in the world.

Trying to understand Colony Collapse Disorder in which huge numbers of bees are dying? Scientists are using computerized DNA sequencing to uncover the reasons.

Designing a complex new product? You are probably using one of the many specialized Computer Aided Design software packages to make it possible.

Reading this post? Even if it is on paper, someone needed a computer to access it and print it out for you.

Our symbiotic relationship with computers has already made it possible for our generation to accomplish things that no previous human being could have done. We are already living in an age of "superhuman intelligence" -- one that will continue to accelerate as these computers continue to become more powerful and as they become more integrated into everything that we do.

The End of Flickr?

UPDATE: Stewart offers an apology and explanation and says it was a mistake...

On May 2nd, the Digg Community took control of Digg's editorial policy, ensuring that the encryption key for HD DVDs would be widely publicized.

Flickr may similarly remember May 15th as the day that their community rises up against an editorial policy decision which seems, to them, to be unfair.

On Monday, May 14th, respected photographer (and Zooomr CEO) Thomas Hawk published this post on his blog, relating the story of another Flickr photographer who alleged that her photographs were being ripped off. Along with this blog post, he posted this photo, which if you click on the link you will see is now missing, removed by Flickr staff.

So far, there are 8 other Technorati posts linking to Thomas Hawk's post.

And 18 comments on Flickr -- MOST FROM PRO USERS.

I predict that this is going to be an important moment for Flickr, which under Yahoo's watchful gaze has pretty much kept its independence since it was acquired a little over a year ago. But Yahoo (like Digg) would prefer not to be in the middle of a lawsuit. So they would rather remove content, on request, then get into the debate about who is right on the underlying issue. But what does it mean then to be the printing press for the citizenry?

That was the underlying test over at Digg, and Digg ended up giving in to the demands of the community. Yahoo is a bit bigger and more able to combat an angry audience. So will the audience rise up, as they did with Digg, and keep posting the photograph at the core of this conflict over and over again?

Half way to Vernor Vinge's Singularity

In 1993 Vernor Vinge wrote:

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

He didn't write this in a science fiction novel. This was not hyperbole. Vernor Vinge, a faculty member of the San Diego State University department of Mathematical Sciences is also a science fiction author. But his goal, in the non-fiction essay "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era," was to outline what he calls "The Singularity" -- defined as a course of events that would bring the human race to "...a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules."

We are now almost to the halfway point of his 30 year prediction. With 15 years behind us and 15 years to go, are we still enroute to the Singularity?


It is easy to think, living in the early 21st century, that human life goes on much as it has in the past. As Ray Kurzweil details in his book on this subject, The Singularity is Near, human beings are ill-equipped to evaluate the pace of change that they are experiencing. Our perceptions of the now are mired in our own personal memories of the past. We judge our surroundings according to the relatively limited knowledge that we each contain. Furthermore we have no historical or personal experience that prepares us to comprehend the speed of change which is now occurring.

Just the changes that have occurred in the short 41 years I have been alive are staggering. As Vinge points out in his essay, the core technical innovation necessary to bring about the Singularity is computational power. In 1966 nothing on the planet existed that we would think of as a computer. In 1993, when Vinge wrote his essay, there were only a handful of computers. Last week I walked into the co-location facility where a portion of Technorati's server farm lives -- the room (one room on one floor of an immense building) throbbed with power -- heat and light came from every rack. There was more computational power in that one room than has previously existed in the history of mankind... multiply that room by the dozens of such rooms in that one building and then the thousands of such buildings around the planet and the size and scope of the transformation begins to come into focus.

In reviewing his own essay, in a set of thoughts 10 years after his original prediction, Vinge writes (in 2003) of his prediction of sufficient technical progress to bring about the Singularity within 30 years:

Now in 2003, I still think this time range statement is reasonable.

The Intel website details the hypothesis proposed by Gordon Moore commonly known as Moore's Law:

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore saw the future. His prediction, now popularly known as Moore's Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years. This observation about silicon integration, made a reality by Intel, the world's largest silicon supplier, has fueled the worldwide technology revolution.

Amazingly, Moore's 1965 vision has continued to hold true to this day. So following this graph out to the 2023 date in Vinge's Singularity prediction, we can expect that the 1 trillion transistors available in 2006 will double roughly 8 times to 128 trillion transistors. The computing power that will fit into that Technorati server room will be roughly 128 times more powerful than it is today in just 15 years.

In Ray Kurzweil's 2001 essay The Law of Accelerating Returns, he provides an analysis of the computational power necessary to represent a functioning brain of a variety of different species -- insects, mice, humans... and when that computational power is likely to be available (again according to Moore's law). The date by which he has proposed modeling a mouse brain is right about now. And is if on cue, just last month a team was about to run a "simulated mouse brain at 1/10 time." From the team's write-up:

We deployed the simulator on a 4096-processor BlueGene/L supercomputer with 256 MB per CPU. We were able to represent 8,000,000 neurons (80% excitatory) and 6,300 synapses per neuron in the 1 TB main memory of the system. Using a synthetic pattern of neuronal interconnections, at a 1 ms resolution and an average firing rate of 1 Hz, we were able to run 1s of model time in 10s of real time!

The scientific team working on this research noted that there were numerous problems that they encountered in trying to provide a realistic simulation of a mouse brain in this test. But the news bulletin for the rest of us is simple -- the supposedly radical suggestion that Vinge made way back in 1993 is now coming to pass. 15 years into his 30 year time horizon, the milestones are being achieved, on schedule.

What does this mean for all of us alive today who are still likely to be around in 15 years? Stay tuned for part 2 of this post...

Business Blogging

Recently I have been speaking to executives about getting involved in the conversations about their companies and products that are already happening in the blogosphere. Everyone wants a shorthand for thinking about the "best practices" and so I have been working on boiling down my recommendations to a few simple and easy-to-remember guidelines. I thought I'd throw them into the blog here and perhaps generate some interest in a conversation -- can we as a community together refine a set of messages to use in speaking with folks that really should be involved in blogging but aren't yet because they need help understanding the why, how, etc?

First, I talk about how the blogosphere is about peers and that the challenge any company has in joining the conversation is that they start out by being something other than a peer. So the first key is that joining the conversation has to be perceived as authentic. Here is my simplified equation:

access + accountability = authenticity

The point I am trying to communicate is that real executives have to join the conversation so that the other participants in the conversation feel like they are talking to a real person who actually can speak for the company and influence outcomes.

Secondly I talk about what it takes to be a good citizen in the blogosphere:

1. Listen

2. Engage -- correct inaccuracies, respond to issues

3. Be a conversation leader

Participation means joining the whole conversation not just the parts you want to join.

I make the point that there will typically be a whole range of voices out there -- from supporters to detractors and everything in between. Most people are in the middle but you can't ever hope to win these people over in a conversation if you merely ignore detractors. Certainly some of the most extreme will never listen and never change their views and there is typically nothing that can be done to change those people's minds. But their issues left un-addressed will capture mindshare amongst the middle in the conversation. So it is always worthwhile to pay attention and provide reasonable responses (and corrections) for those extreme voices - even if the point isn't to win those people over.

This is just a start -- very interested to hear from other folks also struggling with how to explain this medium to others.

An Innocuos String of Characters

A very interesting drama has been playing out over the last 24 hours amongst the technical sophisticates of the Internet economy. Digg, which allows it users to post and vote for stories has come under enormous pressure to cease censorship of a simple string of characters.

As this article in UK magazine "Computing" explains, the key is part of a battle over the future of digital rights management (DRM). Google now finds 297,000 references to this hexadecimal sequence, a key to unlocking certain copy protection systems.

The Advanced Access Content System (AACS) which developed the affected DRM system has been attempting to use legal strong arm techniques to prevent the distribution of this string. The result has been an enormous increase in attention to what otherwise would have been a minor matter ignored by almost everyone.

Digg has become ground zero for the conflict because it attempted to comply with the cease and desist order sent to them by AACS. But an enormous portion of the sites community began to repeatedly post and vote for the offending information, incensed by the imposition of their free speech rights. Finally, on the Digg blog, CEO Kevin Rose wrote that the community cannot survive if all of the members are at odds with the sites staff:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

This is an important day for the people's Internet. A company bowed to the possibility of an expensive lawsuit, testing first amendment rights of free speech. The company's customers then said "NO!" and forced the company to reverse course.

This kind of first amendment test has happened before. In an earlier case a math professor was pursued by the US government (under Clinton) for violating export controls when he wished to publish cryptography code on his website. Ultimately Daniel Bernstein won this case, with a federal panel determining that software source code is a language, and therefore export controls violated his first amendment rights.

This case is somewhat more complicated, in part because of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Here is a copy of the AACS complaint letter to Google. As the above link explains in the notes below the complaint, there is a substantial conflict between the first amendment and the DMCA:

The tension between the DMCA and the First Amendment is at the heart of several ongoing lawsuits. [Felten v. RIAA; Universal v. Corley] The mere posting of a link to a computer program that can be used to circumvent technical protection measures was held to be a violation of the DMCA. [Universal v. Corley (2d Ciruit cite)] The Recording Industry Association of America used the threat of a DMCA action to silence a professor whose research paper discussed circumvention of a technical protection measure. The professor subsequently mounted a legal challenge to the DMCA on First Amendment grounds and presented his paper. While courts in both of these cases have found in favor of the copyright industries, these cases are being appealed and the state of the law is yet to be determined.

Mission Possible

A friend sent a link to this Daniel Pinchbeck article, Mission Possible, after a long conversation about mainstream media and how it is being affected by the blogosphere. Pinchbeck calls for us to "...deepen our commitment to transformation..." rather than flinch away from the disaster looming in our future. But the "transformation" he calls for is a spiritual one, not a technological one. Indeed Pinchbeck seems to have greater faith in the possibility that mainstream media can be used to change the way people think and live on this planet, then that technology can help correct or mediate the imbalances that we have created on our planet.

I found this disturbing for a number of reasons. First, and perhaps most importantly, I don't believe that we as a species have enough time left to convince people to think and live differently. There are too many of us, we are too dependent upon destructive technologies just to eat every day (much less everything else we need and want to do), and the underlying compulsion to consume is too powerful. Thus I believe that for us to save ourselves, we have to invest in and use technology to fix our world.

But I also found it to be paradoxical that Pinchbeck is arguing that using one of the tools that humans have invented (mass media) can be a successful strategy to correcting the worlds problems while using other tools (science, technology) will fail. I tracked Pinchbeck down to ask him about this. As a side note, shame on the Seattle Conscious Choice website for not making this easier. But I did find an email address by simply googling him.

Pinchbeck writes back "Every potent new technology has unleashed a deeper level of damage. The law of unintended consequences: biotech now kills the honeybees, what will nanotech destroy?"

Well, the latest news out (LA Times article) suggests that it is actually a fungus affecting bees, not biotech. And we wouldn't know this without science, much less have the ability to find a way of solving the problem.

Let's face facts -- we have already passed a key tipping point. Human beings now have the responsibility to manage the ecosystem, it is no longer self managing in a way that will sustain the health and well being of our species. We need more technology and more management of the ecosystem, not less. Just arguing that we should all become earth friendly in the way we live will not pull us back from disaster that is now brewing in our future.

Engaging the Author

Having tracked down Thomas Claburn -- the author of "Media Companies Confront Mortality" -- I have engaged in a spirited conversation with him about CMP, his article, blogging vs. journalism, etc. With his permission, I repeat some of that conversation here.

Claburn points out that it is CMP and not he (or any individual writer) who (1) doesn't provide "community" tools and (2) and does spread articles around their network without attribution to the original author. So to be clear - my criticism on this point was not of Thomas or of his article -- but it was of CMP.

Regarding the specific comment, Thomas writes: "Your point is well-taken. It was certainly snarky and perhaps an unfair characterization of the state of the companies present."

But he goes on to point out that I was snarky back in calling his comment "ugly." We then debated whether there is a difference between blogging (which I characterized as editorial) and writing a news article for Information Week. I contend that there is a difference -- my expectation is that something labeled "news" will be presented with an attempt at conveying an objective perspective. Snarkiness is fine in an editorial, where it is clearly an individual's perspective. This blog, for example, is unapologetically my own perspective. And while I recognize that journalists are people too and have their own perspectives and biases - I expect that news will be written in a way that doesn't broadcast those perspectives.

But the most important part of this for me is that when I did track down the author, he did reply, was accountable, was engaged with the topic and the audience. So kudos to Thomas for being the kind of journalist that can make a difference in the media 2.0 world -- even if his company is following far behind in supporting him.

Here's What's Wrong

UPDATE - See bottom of article...

Dear CMP Media, thank you for your recent coverage of the Web 2.0 Expo. I enjoyed your article covering the panel I spoke on. Your article, "Media Companies Confront Mortality" demonstrated what is wrong with mainstream media very effectively.

#1) There was no byline. The article was written by "Staff Writers" -- since it wasn't written by a specific person, there is no accountability, no ability to respond, no knowledge of whether the person writing the article actually knows anything about the topic that he/she is writing on... So this is just a pronouncement from on high -- big media saying "this is what you should believe about what happened and you should believe because we are in charge."

#2) There is no comment mechanism. I read the article and then I have no ability to discuss the article with other people reading it, no trackback mechanism so that I can link to the article from my blog and point out problems or discuss issues...

#3) With the appearance of objectivity, the article puts ugly opinions into the public sphere. Where does CMP Media get off saying that our opinions were "...coming from a panel full of poorly capitalized Web startups..." How do they know? Did they bother to inquire with any of the four of us about our capital structures?

No need to read CMP Media any more, they discredit themselves through their practices, behavior, and poor reporting.

UPDATE: It occurred to me that the version of the article I was seeing was picked up from somewhere else within CMP, and sure enough the original version is in Information Week -- here.

I have written to author Thomas Claburn - let's see if he replies!

Technorati

Over a year ago, when I was just thinking about starting The Personal Bee, I sat down with Dave Sifry (CEO of Technorati) to chat. I felt then that the work I wanted to do was a perfect complement to Technorati.

While the timing wasn't right then for us to bring these ideas to Technorati, Dave and I maintained a friendship and communication over the 9 months that we built the first beta version of Personal Bee. And after we launched that beta, in September of last year, Dave and I agreed that we should have another conversation about bringing the two companies together.

I am happy to announce, as Dave has on his blog, that as of today The Personal Bee is a part of Technorati.

All of us on the Bee team are excited about the opportunity to participate in the evolution of Technorati, and to Be of Service to Technorati's many constituents.

Grokking Twitter: Presence, Scope, and Permanence

Should we care about twitter? I addressed this question back in February over on my IP Inferno blog but I think I did a lousy job. Since then I have used (and thought about) the service a lot more. And I have increasingly found myself in conversations with my fellow over-40 digerati trying to explain why they should care about twitter...

And in the last week both the San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today have published articles about twitter and neither of them really get to the heart of why twitter is important and why we should care.

Stowe Boyd offers an amusing rant on the USA Today article but while he correctly points out that author Andrew Kantor does not "...understand the benefits -- or even the possibility -- of moving to a flow state of interaction..." Stowe doesn't explain what this means or why it is important.

So in the spirit of Time Magazine's Person of the Year I have taken it upon myself to explain twitter...

As the Internet has moved from obscurity to a staple of our society over the past two decades there has been an explosion in new communications tools. A useful way to think about this explosion is to think about communications around three characteristics: presence, scope, and permanence. Each of these characteristics, as I will go on to explain, has a continuum of modalities and each communication tool has optimized for performing within a particular part of that cube.

PRESENCE
Is it necessary for the participants in the communication to be present at the time the communication is created? For example if you are taking a class, you need to be present in the classroom to get value from the lecture. But you can read a book thousands of years after it was written. The recipient must be present to receive the lecture but is usually not present when a book is written. Similarly, a phone call is a synchronous form of communications -- both speaker and listener must be present. Voice mail is asynchronous -- the listener need not be present at the time the recording is made and the speaker need not be present at the time of listening.

SCOPE
Classrooms engage a defined group of people in a conversation, newspapers engage an undefined group, a phone call typically involves just two people. Scope is about the number of people involved, the relationship between those people, and the privacy of the communication.

PERMANENCE
Information has a shelf life (or even a half life). Some information is valuable for thousands of years, other information is valuable for only a moment.

Think about the kinds of communications tools that we commonly use, applying these three characteristics:

PHONE CALL
Synchronous communication (presence required), the scope is typically one-one, and (short of a recording) it is a medium best used for information of little permanence.

EMAIL
Email is asynchronous, allowing for long delays between exchanges. The scope can be one-one or one-many but there are few facilities for managing complex many-many communications on a topic. As information can be stored and retrieved for later use, it can be used for topics with some permanence though various limitations generally cause users to move to another medium for longer term storage of documents or issues of more permanence.

IM
Instant messaging is mostly synchronous, though it can have delays in replies. It is typically a one-one communication and the information usually has a very short period of value.

BLOG
Like email, a blog is asynchronous. The scope is typically one-many although commenting facilities can make them into more of a conversation. Information of value for a long time (though perhaps not decades) can be stored on blogs and accessed by a wide variety of readers.

So what is twitter? It is asynchronous (although there can be more value if both speaker and listener are present); the most valuable uses are when the communications are within a particular defined group (friends, a company); and the information has a very short term value.

Examples:
I might tweet "Headed out for a soy chai, anyone want to go?" -- this emphasizes the value of presence, the fact that I am broadcasting to people within a defined group (my office), and has a very momentary value (miss it by 5 minutes and I am already gone).

Another example (from Stowe Boyd) Chris Pirillo points to an article written by Paul Graham claiming Microsoft is dead: http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html -- this is completely asynchronous, anytime I find out about it, it is valuable to me. There is little definition in the group (other than perhaps interest), and the information has some permanence.

So two things that emerge in looking at twitter in this way -- First it has an interesting ability to be useful over a range of states but tends toward group communications that are impermanent and where presence can add value but isn't necessary. Second that it complements other communication types without replacing them -- indicating that there is a place in the ecosystem for this type of communication.

Another interesting thing that you can ask about twitter is whether you can compare the role it serves in online communications with some similar off-line communication. Within every social group there are adhoc communications that serve the same purposes that twitter serves in an online world. Announcing that I am going out to get a cup of chai tea, or people sharing an interest in an article happens all the time within social groups. The difference online is that time and space become less of a constraint for allowing these group communications to occur. This is the role that twitter is serving.

Cult Of The Amateur

Perhaps it is the poet lost inside me, aching to be free. But I find this post, at so many levels, to be the perfect response to Andrew Keen's hopeless "cult of the amateur" and a subtle message to the industrial media complex about what they don't get about how the Internet is changing everything...

http://illuminaught.livejournal.com/29278.html

Get it?

SF Chronicle You Have Our Attention

A case of cause and effect? Just a week ago, Tim O'Reilly was opining that the SF Chronicle was "in trouble." Noting that he hates to "...play Valleywag..." Tim goes on to say that Phil Bronstein (editor-in-chief at the Chron) held an emergency meeting with staff in which he stated that the "news business is broken, and no one knows how to fix it."

And then this week, he started to fix it.

What is it that local journalistic endeavors can do better than anyone else? Provide coverage of whatever makes their own local scene special and different. The San Jose Mercury News could have (but hasn't) made the tech industry their special beat. But in the last week, the SF Chronicle has been making this weird thing called "web 2.0" and what author Andrew Keen is calling "the cult of the amateur" their special beat.

Today it was a story about something just 11 days old -- justin.tv -- which is capturing the interest of the technorati but who would of thought that mainstream news readers would be interested? The Chronicle made their story on Justin and his fellow nerds front page news.

Crazy? Or brilliant? Sure, most San Franciscans are like people in the rest of the country -- interested in the Iraq war, local politics, and weekend sales. But what makes this area DIFFERENT from the rest of the country is people like Justin and the crazy new companies that get created from their ideas. This is the future of local journalism -- uncovering and writing about what is special and unique about their local area.

As one of my old journalist friends used to say "three is a trend" -- the article about Justin.tv wasn't the only interesting piece in the Chron this week.

On Monday it was Dan Fost's article on phenom twitter.

On Thursday it was Dan's coverage of Kathy Sierra.

For me, this kind of coverage makes the Chronicle relevant again. It makes me visit their website and talk about them and maybe even spend $.25 to buy the paper as I make my way onto BART in the morning (the current discount for BART morning commuters).

And I think it shows the way for other local papers -- dig into what YOUR region is known for, or what you think is special. Maybe you can build an online audience, maybe you can get your local readers interested again, maybe you can be relevant again in a world where you can no longer just re-run AP articles that we are already getting on our Blackberrys...

New Communications Forum

Listening to Shel Holtz wrap up the "New Communications Forum" event in Las Vegas. By all accounts the Society for New Communications Research has put on a great show -- numerous attendees have said to me that it is the most useful and interesting conference that they have attended in years.

A few attendees, however, have said to me "gee, not much new here." An observation -- there are two kinds of attendees at this conference: a group of people eager to learn about social media and a group of people who are already engaged in inventing social media. For the first group, this was a great conference and exactly what conferences should be about -- getting enthusiastic experts in front of eager learners. But the conference didn't do as well at serving people who are already engaged and who want to take ideas and debates deeper by interacting with their peers.

This last point does not detract in any way in my mind from the value of the conference and the high quality speakers, sessions, and organization of the event. But rather, it is an observation that as an industry we still are struggling with how to create the right kind of event for experts to cooperatively advance knowledge and initiatives in their industries.

FooCamp, BarCamp, and Social Media club are good experiments, but here is a challenge to conference organizers -- can a single show serve both audiences? I would argue that it HAS to in order to work -- because you need the experts in order to have interesting content for the learners. But the experts then have to derive value from their participation.

Elimination of Time and Space

Great post by Doc Searls on what he calls "giant zero journalism" but which might be better understood by saying that the Internet is in the process of eliminating time and space as issues for journalism, get used to it.

Ostensibly the piece is about citizen journalism -- is it good, bad, or just different. But really it is about the mechanism by which the Internet as a technology disrupts existing businesses by changing the very laws of physics by which they operate.

In other words, when time and space are issues in the gathering and dissemination of a news product, the role of professionals and institutions is much more important than in the world we are moving toward... one in which every person can report instantaneously to everyone else on the thing that is right in front of our faces.

So what is the role of the professional and the institution when space and time drifts into inconsequential inconvenience rather than defining dominance for an industry? At best, it is a role that will change dramatically...

China Basin

Just walked through the China Basin building down on Berry Street (down by AT&T Park in SF). The last time I was there was in 1996 when I was working for CMP Media on a project called NetGuide Live:

"Building off NetGuide Magazine's reputation for expert information and quality delivery, CMP launched the first true guide to the Internet, NetGuide Live..."

or as we fondly called it back in 1996 "Project Gulliver." Ah, a trip through memory lane indeed. Whatever did happen to Beth Haggerty? Google says... InfoSeek, president of InfoRocket, CEO of LiveAdvice, and then it sort of runs out... Newt Barrett? SCORE Volunteer, Senior Vice President of the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce... He had left CMP to buy and run Southwest Florida Business Magazine, which he apparently sold to Gulfshore Media in 2001. So many other folks from those days. Still in touch with Dan Ruby and Dan Brekke anyone else out there reading this?

2 Stars for Peace

Just heard about this incredible idea -- make Israel and Palestine into US States... Here is a brief article explaining the idea and pointing to a book by Martinne Rothblatt -- The Case for Using U.S. Statehood to Achieve Lasting Peace in the Middle East

Party like its 1999

Revision 3 @ Slide
Originally uploaded by valleywagprime.

One of the things that is different this time around is that Silicon Valley has its own party venues... during the bubble we had to crash established silicon valley or san francisco haunts with our Internet craze... now people like Jonathan Abrams have started bars like slide... leading to Internet parties like the one I attended last night for Revision 3 (some sort of "new" Internet TV thing)... But some things stay the same. A bunch of geeks standing around in a bar trying to talk about technology over loud music looks the same in 2007 as in 1999...

Matt Damon == Capt Kirk ?? WTF!

Please say its not so. Please say that they have it wrong... Could it really be true that they have cast Matt Damon as Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise!!?? Ahhh... he hasn't been cast yet! Shooting hasn't begun!! Its not too late for us to launch a "please not Matt!" campaign... IGN writes:

Confirming rumors that have been making the rounds for some months now, IGN has learned that Oscar winner Matt Damon is indeed in talks with Paramount about playing the role of Jim Kirk, previously immortalized onscreen by Emmy winner William Shatner.

In TALKS... ok. Deep breath. Titanic boy [oops Dan reminds me this is Leonardo...] Good Will Hunting Boy [doesn't have the same ring to it] doesn't necessarily get to sinkshoot [huh?] the Enterprise... and what else did they say? King Kong's Adrien Brody as Spock!? WTF!!?

For the part of Kirk's Vulcan first officer Mr. Spock, IGN has been told that none other than Oscar winner Adrien Brody (King Kong, The Pianist) is in talks with Paramount to play the role. If cast, Brody would succeed Leonard Nimoy in a role that forever marked Nimoy's career.

OK... "if cast" the said... deep breath... OK now the campaign is "Please NOT Damon and Adrien!"

Jim Zumbo Dixie Chick'd

I am not a hunter. But I respect their right to hunt. And to express their views about hunting. That seems to be what sets me apart from the "mainstream" of the gun culture in this country.

Jim Zumbo has been a lifelong hunter and a spokesperson for this sport. Recently he decided to express his opinion about assault rifles. On his blog (on Outdoor Magazine's website but here is a link since that site has been removed) he wrote:

I call them “assault” rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I’ll go so far as to call them “terrorist” rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are “tackdrivers.”

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I’ve always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don’t use assault rifles. We’ve always been proud of our “sporting firearms.”

Because of his comments, reports the Washington Post, Jim Zumbo has been attacked by the hunting community, he has lost his job as a writer for Outdoor Magazine, Remington has canceled their business relationship with him, the Outdoor Channel has canceled his show... and the NRA has severed its ties to him.

What happened to an America in which we are willing to accept differences of opinion, embrace diversity, defend each other's right to free speech?

This week my wife and I watched "Shut Up and Sing" - the documentary on how the Dixie Chicks were treated by the country music industry when Nicole, their lead singer, said on a stage in London that she "...was ashamed that our President is from Texas." The personal attacks included death threats. Worth watching, by the way, if you want to see an ugly side of America.

I am personally very disturbed by this lack of tolerance. I believe it is the greatest threat to our way of life -- not "terrorism."

Why People Wear Suits

Blog Maverick Mark Cuban has hit a nerve with his post "Why I Don't Wear a Suit and Can't Figure Out Why Anyone Does!" I know I couldn't help but respond but I was shocked to see that I was comment number 328... So I thought I'd post my comment here as well:

A few years ago, after the dot com bubble burst, I was in New York City and someone there said to me "I hear that people are wearing suits in Silicon Valley again." He said it in a very smug superior way, as if this was proof that some deviant culture (Internet, Silicon Valley, tech folks, etc) had been entirely wiped out by the civilized world. So I think you are dead-on that wearing a suit has become, for some of those that wear them, a symbol of superiority.

But there is another simpler explanation -- inertia. Suit wearing evolved in an age when most people had to do hard physical labor that would destroy nice clothes -- so people that wore them were saying "I don't have to do hard physical labor." Clothes as an indicator of class. Over time, suits became the uniform for office workers and as these ranks grew, the reason changed from the initial objective of differentiation to one of assimilation.

What is interesting is that in whatever culture you visit, people tend to dress alike -- Its what the anthrophologist Victor Turner calls liminality. Human beings want to be included. There is safety in being part of the pack. So we dress alike (speak alike, eat alike...) in order to show that we belong and are not dangerous outsiders.

I bet your employees dress like you.

Internet Explorer Losing Ground?

As someone who has struggled to make web pages look beautiful on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, I found this story on ars technica hard to avoid reading... "Internet Explorer loses ground to Firefox, Safari... but "the rest of the story" as Paul Harvey liked to say is that there are conflicting numbers from a variety of tracking efforts and so no one really knows...

Suffice to say that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is still somewhere around 80% of the market for browsers. The introduction of IE 7 hasn't helped them, but they are still the dominant player.

But in a related note on the ars technica site there is data that shows that Firefox isn't growing either. So who is gaining marketshare? Safari.

How could that be? The only people that use Safari are Macintosh users. Could this be an early indication that Apple is finally gaining marketshare? And how long before these users abandon Safari -- I like to complain about Internet Explorer but Safari's support for W3 standards is even more abysmal.

On a related note, I have some advice for people trying to decide which browser to support when working on their web site compatibility tests. Don't forget to test Firefox on Mac. Just testing Firefox on Windows isn't sufficient. And while the total number of users of Firefox on Mac OS X may be small - they are a very influential group. I just met with a company yesterday that has a very popular website and they have done NO testing on Firefox for Mac OS X. How can that be, I asked? And I showed them a very nasty bug that they have in their product -- just on that platform... They thought they were done when the tested on Windows. Don't get caught in the same trap!

Twitter: An interesting experiment

I have been playing with a new web service called "twitter" today -- http://www.twitter.com

The interesting (obvious?) idea behind this service is that people want to blather about what they are doing all through the day and that other people want to know... So you can create a stream of your comments, thoughts, or reports on your activities and this creates a stream. Here is mine:

http://www.twitter.com/tshelton

Then other people can subscribe to your stream and get reports on what you are up to... you can even "nudge" other people who haven't updated and find out what they are up to

The Road Ahead (Looking Back)

At Davos this week Bill Gates predicted that broadcast television as we know it today will be radically transformed over the next 5 years. It reminded me of something Bill said about technology and predictions...

"People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten."

So said Bill Gates at the beginning of the Afterword for the revised edition of his mid-1990s book "The Road Ahead." It was in part an apology that some of the things he had predicted in his book hadn't happened... yet.

Looking back at the book today is interesting though. Elsewhere in the book he wrote:

"Within twenty years virtually everything I've talked about in this book will be broadly available in developed countries..."

With few exceptions (electronic wallets anyone?) the predictions made by Bill turn out to be too timid 10 years later. So in half of the 20 years everything he predicted has come about.

Does this mean that 5 years is too short or too long? Either way, if I were in broadcast television today, comments like this from Bill Gates would scare the s** out of me. Even 10 years isn't very long to rethink your entire industry.

Berkeley Local News

At the Personal Bee we are experimenting with local news aggregation. Here is a first experiment, for Berkeley California:

http://www.personalbee.com/berkeley%20buzz

Pumpkin Launching: Time's Person of the Year

Since Time has named me (and You) the person of the year for all the great videos we have uploaded, I thought I'd better do my part, so here is a video of Andy's Halloween party:

http://one.revver.com/watch/123185

Yes, that is a trebuchet - we built it the weekend before the party. It is designed to have as much as a 1000 lb counterweight, able to hurl small pumpkins 700 feet! We never achieved the optimal configuration (couldn't get enough weight) but still were hurling pumpkins between 500 and 600 feet...

STOP CALLING ME

And I mean YOU Mr. Candidate! I am SO TIRED of having my phone ring with a recorded message from one candidate or another. DON PERATA YOU JUST LOST MY VOTE. And I am keeping track. Anyone who dares to use an automated message dialing machine to harass me LOSES MY VOTE. Join with me in this campaign. Let's send a message to these idiots that spamming us with phone calls doesn't pay!

Google Enters Another Market (Custom Search)

Everyone on the Internet fears the day that Google will enter their market. Today the fear was tangible for Rollyo and Swicki. The Financial Times reported that Google will launch tomorrow (Tuesday) "...a customisable search engine that users can carry on their own blogs and other websites..." and compares the new service to Rollyo.

Matthew Ingram carries the photo of a shark on his post about this development. Ingram points out that when Google entered the calendar market, competitor Kiko gave up and sold themselves. He asks whether or not this was the right decision -- pointing to Paul Graham's post at the time "Google Does Not Render Resistance Futile."

I find myself agreeing with Paul and Rex Hammock puts his finger on it when he writes:

There’s a social networking aspect of Rollyo that probably won’t be a part of the Google product, however the Google product will likely offer publishers, including bloggers, an instant way to monetize narrow search in the Adsense program they’re already participating in.

For all of the things that Google has done right in technology, they have done very little well in the category of social. It isn't too late for them to learn but if history is any guide, they will miss the importance of the social network in search as well.

And frankly having a strong competitor forces you to do the two things which you most need to do in any case when you are a small business -- innovate constantly and be 500% better than your larger competition. Then Google can educate the market about why the market needs your product and then you can deliver on the market's expectations. That is what YouTube did.

Please help with your critique

Stop what you are doing.

Click on this link to the Personal Bee home page:

http://www.personalbee.com

Then email or comment on this message with your thoughts about what we are doing right and wrong. Tell me, from looking at the home page, what business you think we are in. Tell me how you would use this and how you would get others to use it...

thanks!

Ted

Diebold Delivers Georgia for Republicans

In a follow up to his story on the 2004 election, "Was the 2004 Election Stolen," Robert Kennedy brings us, in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, specific details on how Diebold has rigged voting in Georgia, with the confessions of a Diebold employee, Chris Hood. "Will The Next Election Be Hacked," is a frightening article that shows exactly how far some corrupt politicians are willing to go to insure that they keep control of our government out of the hands of the people. Folks, our democracy is in danger.

Thailand Coup Special Report

This is the kind of thing I think the Bee will evolve to do very very well...

Thailand Special Report

Shake Rattle And Roll!

We spent the second quarter of 2006 testing the original "beta" concept site for the Personal Bee. We spent the summer implementing everything we had learned. Now we are ready and have released the Bee to the world.

http://www.personalbee.com

You Can Be A Media Mogul

The idea is simple. Anyone one the world can create their own news site. You choose the topic. You choose the content sources. You brand your site. You decide which stories are important and which to remove... You are the master of your topic domain and can build a base of subscribers into a media empire.

Enjoy the Bee. Send your comments and suggestions!

Ted Shelton, CEO
The Personal Bee, Inc.
tshelton @ personalbee.com

Bush Administration Immune from Whistleblowers...

Posted without comment for your consternation:

On Labor Day, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) issued a press release whose title summarizes its contents all too neatly: Bush Declares Eco-Whistleblower Law Void for EPA Employees. Here's some of it:

Washington, DC - The Bush administration has declared itself immune from whistleblower protections for federal workers under the Clean Water Act, according to legal documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). As a result of an opinion issued by a unit within the Office of the Attorney General, federal workers will have little protection from official retaliation for reporting water pollution enforcement breakdowns, manipulations of science or cleanup failures.

The rest of the post on the terrific blog Effect Measure

Got Voice?

For the past few weeks I have been testing a new service, GotVoice, from a company based in Kirkland Washington with an interesting idea -- how can you profit from the stupidity of the phone company? Now perhaps that isn't the way that company executives in Kirkland would describe their strategic plan, but its hard not to look at them and think, "this is yet more evidence of how stupid US telecommunications companies are."

The idea is simple (too simple, you'd think). How can I have access to my home and cell voice mail from the web and through email? If we had telephone companies that knew how to build services that customers wanted, this wouldn't even be a question. But there is NO innovation going on at the phone company (fill in your favorite one, or AT&T if you are reading this after they have bought everyone else). Thus companies like GotVoice can come along and fill in the niche.

Here's how it works -- You sign up for an account with GotVoice (basic service is free, but added features are available at $4.95 and $9.95 a month) and give them your phone company, phone number, and voicemail "PIN" -- they will then place a call on a regular basis to your voice mail box, record your messages, and send you an email letting you know you have a message (or email you the message as an MP3 with a premium plan).

But this is absurd! Why can't the phone company simply email me the message? Why do I need a third party to glue voice mail and email together? Perhaps someone in the finance department of AT&T found a study conducted in the early 1990s which said that none of their customers wanted voice mails in their email... or maybe they have a trial of voicemail to email right now but they are only rolling it out in 3 small test markets over the next two years... or maybe they don't actually care at all about their customers and never think about introducing new products that we actually want!

In the meantime, Got Voice?

Future of Warfare

Hope that you never meet Crusher. Watch this video to see what I mean. This is a robot. Entirely autonomous, programmed to get itself from point A to point B, and capable of "aggressive" behavior -- especially if it has weapons (which this one doesn't). Even without weapons, I wouldn't want to be chased by one of these... Of course sophisticated robotics will have military applications before they have civil ones.

How Republicans Plan to Steal 2006

Salon has published an interesting review of the six states where Republicans have schemed to "suppress" votes by traditional Democratic voters. Here is the article -- "Salon's Shameful Six" -- Here is an excerpt:

Opinion polls show that a majority of the public wants a Democratic Congress, but whether potential voters -- black and Latino voters in particular -- will be able to make their voices heard on Election Day is not assured. Across the country, they will have to contend with Republican-sponsored schemes to limit voting. In a series of laws passed since the 2004 elections, Republican legislators and officials have come up with measures to suppress the turnout of traditional Democratic voting blocs. This fall the favored GOP techniques are new photo I.D. laws, the criminalizing of voter registration drives, and database purges that have disqualified up to 40 percent of newly registered voters from voting in such jurisdictions as Los Angeles County.

Here are the six states that Salon calls on the carpet: Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and Ohio. What are people doing about it?

DNC Announces Expanded National Voter Protection Effort

Brennan Center Election Reform Resources

Common Cause Election Reform Agenda

Shameful Behavior (Your Tax Dollars At Work)

At the risk of becoming the target of government investigations myself, let me now go on the record as saying that, if these reports are true, our government is engaged in the worst kind of anti-democratic behaviour, activities I thought reserved for dictators (or the Nixon Whitehouse). Yes, I am talking about the latest ACLU report "The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern and Central California." The Berkeley Daily Planet has a story here which details a local incident on the UC Berkeley campus:

The local incident featured in the report was an April 2005 demonstration at UC Berkeley, sponsored by Berkeley Stop the War Coalition, aimed at military recruitment on campus.

The incident was described in an April 21, 2005, Department of Defense Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON) report released to the ACLU by the Department of Defense following a freedom of information request and subsequent lawsuit.

The information released describes the demonstration—the “incident type”—as “specific threats,” and describes the subject as “direct action planned against recruiters at University of California at Berkeley.”

The source, whose name has been redacted from the released report, is described as “a special agent of the Federal Protective Service, U.S. Department of Homeland Security.”

The full ACLU report can be found here: http://aclunc.org/surveillance_report/

I hope you will join me in supporting Jerry Brown as the next Attorney General for the state of California. Given the folks that currently control our national government, a strong liberal California AG may turn out to be suprisingly important for the future of Democracy in this country.

Participatory Consumption

The last couple of times I was listening to NPR on the radio I got angry. Why? Because I had a question, or a comment, or information about the discussion underway and there was no effective way to join the conversation. I thought about this and realized that since having converted my reading habits almost entirely to blogs I have been retraining my consumption habits from passive to participatory. I now expect to be able to leave a comment at the end of an article, or email the author to ask a question. I expect media consumption to be participatory! What a strange expectation...

The Evidence for Global Warming

David Isenberg has done a tremendous job of adding value to a recent (great) article in the New York Times about global warming -- he has gone through the article and created links to all of the sources to which the article refers. All in all it is a compelling and worrisome picture of an earth in turmoil. Worth reading in its entirety. Here is the link: The Evidence for Global Warming.

SD Forum Visionary Awards

98 degrees in Heidi Roizen's backyard but no one is complaining (we had
to wear sweaters last year). And the winners of this year's awards:

Vinton G. Cerf

Louis V. Gerstner

John L. Hennessy

Terry Semel

Quite a line-up this evening. Should be a lot of fun...

My Father's World, My World

In thinking about the death of my father last week, I have been comparing the world my father was born into (my grandfather's world) to the world I was born into (my father's world) and the one my daughter was born into (my world). Each of us as children enjoy and suffer from the decisions that our parents, and our parents' generations have made. And with the resulting "world order."

In 1938, the year my father was born, Hitler marched into Austria and declared that it was now part of the German Reich. Great Britian and France ceded Czechoslovakia to the Germans in a short-sighted attempt to avoid war. And on November 9th, in an event to be remembered as Kristallnacht, Nazis burned synagogues, destroyed Jewish shops, and killed Jews at random. 1938 was a dark year for the world.

The earliest years of my father's childhood were spent in an America fighting world war against governments unafraid of using their power to evil ends. In 1939 Hitler invaded both Czechoslavakia and Poland and entered into the axis agreement with Italy's Mussolini. In 1940 Paris falls and France surrenders to the Nazis. And in 1941, when my father was the age my daughter is today, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States into the war.

My father was almost the age my step daughter is now when, in 1945, Germany officially surrendered and the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshimi and Nagasaki, accelerating Japan's surrender. At the age of 7, my father had lived his entire life in a world at war. Of course the coming years were dark as well, with the constant cloud of conflict with Stalin's Soviet Union hanging over the head's of his generation as they came into adulthood.

By 1966 when I was born, the pattern of proxy wars between the West and the Soviet Union had been established with a war in Korea mostly behind the US (well... it still isn't entirely behind us) but with war in Vietnam escalating. Despite continued hostility between the world powers, a half century of American dominance in business and technical innovation was well underway by then, making my childhood much different from my father's. Where America had been a relatively weak player in an enormously fragmented and dangerous world, my father came of age in a world where America became a world power.

After first getting a law degree from Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley, my father entered the business world with an inheritence wrested away from his wealthy uncles and grandmother. His father had passed away while he was still a child and he had grown increasingly concerned that his grandmother and uncles would spend all of the money before he received any of it... so he spent it himself instead.

He created a company called Shopper's Plan - one of the first credit card companies in the country. Before we had Visa and Mastercard, stores had "charge plates" that were specific to a particular store or sometimes (rarely) a chain of stores. The 1960s idea of the credit card was a store-independent charge plate. Shopper's Plan could offer this innovation because of the power of this new-fangled invention, the computer.

It was an audacious business idea and it would have required incredible execution to succeed with the (relatively) limited financial resources my father had at his disposal - just a few million dollars (although that was 1960s dollars...). Unfortunately my father was not a terrific business person and the business was soon on the rocks. Complicating things my father got his secretary (my mother) pregnant.

He was already married, with two daughters. Yet he left his wife and began over again with my mother. Within four years he had left my mother and moved on to a string of girlfriends before settling down with his last partner, whom he stayed with until his death (almost 30 years).

to be continued...

World as Symbolic System

For the past 14 hours I have been staring at a computer screen, logged on to various linux systems, moving files, configuring servers, testing... Deeply enmeshed in a particular symbolic system. As I drove home I saw the world with different eyes - the world as its own kind of symbolic system. Some of it imposed by man on the environment (stop sign, crosswalk) some natural (tree, rock). Each blade of grass is a symbol - albeit many without obvious meaning. Like a file you might touch but is devoid of content. Or perhaps each has a very simple meaning like all of those devices in /dev... I should really stop looking at a computer screen about now.

My Father with My Daughter April 2005

My Father with My Daughter April 2005,
originally uploaded by Ted Shelton.

On a trip with the whole family down to Los Angeles a little over a year ago. The only time my daughter ever saw my father. He was still doing OK at that point, although the radiation treatments drained him of strength.

Charles Edward Shelton, RIP

I will be able to write more about this soon. But for now just the news. My father died today of cancer. My sister was with him in the Los Angeles hospital room.

He has been dying for 10 years of cancer - prostate cancer that was diagnosed too late to cure. The cancer spread throughout his body and fortunately for him, medical advances allowed him to live a good life over those 10 years. Only in the last 6 months or so had the disease progressed to far that his quality of life was diminished to the point where living was an enormous burden for him.

So it is with sadness, but also long expectation and relief that the living go on without him. He is survived by his long-time partner, his three daughters and me.

Memory Machine

What we write here may be much less important for who reads it today and more important as a record of our civilization at this time and place. The web is the collective memory of the millions of people that record their thoughts here. Hopefully we will find ways to record these transient memories into some more permanent form so that future researchers will have this treasure trove to draw from when trying to understand the insanity of our current times.