Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

I guess it's been awhile since Nick Carr got some blogosphere love - today, he's calling Wikipedia "dead":

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," was a nice experiment in the "democratization" of publishing, but it didn't quite work out. Wikipedia is dead. It died the way the pure products of idealism always do, slowly and quietly and largely in secret, through the corrosive process of compromise.

Right. Apparently, restricted editing rights on some of the more controversial pages signals the end times. Here's his point, such as it is:

The end came last Friday. That's when Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, proposed "that we eliminate the requirement that semi-protected articles have to announce themselves as such to the general public." The "general public," you see, is now an entity separate and distinct from those who actually control the creation of Wikipedia. As Vaughan-Nichols says, "And the difference between Wikipedia and a conventionally edited publication is what exactly?"

Sure Nick, sure. And blogs that moderate comments are dishonest, too. Maybe I should set up a chart, so I could plot Carr's needs for attention and see if there's a pattern.

As if "final" isn't bad enough, some people would like to make it the default:

I’ll say it one more time: final should be the default. Java’s mistake was not that it allowed classes to be final. It was making final a keyword you had to explicitly request rather than making finality the default and adding a subclassable keyword to change the default for those few classes that genuinely need to be nonfinal. The lack of finality has created a huge, brittle, dangerously breakable infrastructure in the world of Java class libraries.

Umm, sure. Because every library I've ever used was designed specifically with my needs in mind, and I've never, ever had to extend anything.

*Cough*

That must have been something coming up there. I guess the BS meter just went to infinity, and I couldn't take it anymore. He goes on:

One final point: final is the safe, conservative choice. Should you mark a class or method final, and later discover a need to subclass/override it, you can remove the finality without breaking anyone’s code. You cannot go the other way. Once you’ve published a class that’s non-final you have to consider the possibility that someone, somewhere is subclassing it. Marking it final now risks breaking people’s running code and working systems.

It's safe, just like a straitjacket. With all possible movement impossible, how much can you do? It's not about breaking someone else's code anyway. When I get a library from a vendor, I don't expect perfection - I expect a best effort, given the knowledge the engineers had at the time. I fully expect to have to subclass in some places, to delegate in others, and to override methods in subclasses in some cases. Heck, I'm using smalltalk, so my amp goes to 11 over here - I may even change code in existing classes in the library. I'm sure that concept will make his head explode, but my goal is to empower the developer - not to break his wrists because he folded the napkins wrong.

Whether Google like it or not, being in the media business (and Google News is a media outlet) requires some transparency on their part. Steve Rubel points to the problem:

Google is getting smacked for removing conservative e-zines and blogs from Google News. To date, Google has done a poor job of explaining why certain blogs are enshrined and others aren't. They need to publish some standards around who they are willing to include and why.

What content they are pulling isn't nearly so relevant as why it's being pulled. Like a newspaper, they have no requirement to publish anything they don't want to publish; it's their site, and they can do what they want. If, on the other hand, they want to retain actual credibility, they need to explain what standards they use for including (and not including) content.

Terry Heaton, via Doc Searls:

Because here's the deal. The tools available to everyday people that are turning the media world on its head are also available to professional organizations. You don't have to approach everything with a $100,000 solution when $10,000 will do just fine. If aggregation is where its at (and I believe that it is), then build aggregators. Let other people be the content creators and move yourself to the edge. Not only is it fun there, but that's where the profitability is going to be downstream.

Isn't that pretty much what Amanda Congdon and RocketBoom are doing right now? Over time, I expect that most news operations will look a lot more like movie productions - you'll have a small number of permanent employees who manage a wide range of stringers, whose expertise varies and is available as needed.

In News that should shock no one, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is dampening expectations about the release date for Vista:

The operating system was due to be launched this year but in March the company said it wouldn't get broad release until January 2007. Ballmer said Wednesday that the planned January launch may slip further based on feedback from a beta release program and the product road-maps of hardware vendors.

That's actually a smart move, getting out in front of a potential delay like that. With feature driven releases, timing is always hard. We do timeboxed releases of Cincom Smalltalk, but the consequence for that is that the delivery of any given feature is always up in the air. You get predictable features, or a predictable date - you don't get both. All too often in this business, you get neither :/

Spam has made email an unreliable mechanism. Witness this case of a lost bid:

There it was in the e-mail spam filter, along with offers to invigorate both your bank account and your sex life: an offer to save the Cobb County schools $250,000. But this message was for real.

School officials are blaming an overeager junk-mail filter for capturing and killing a Kennesaw businessman's bid to provide telephone services to the system. It seems the part of the filter that watches for pornographic material was offended by the use of terms such as "long distance."

I have to check my junk folder (both the corporate server-side one, and the local client-side one) regularly - otherwise, I end up missing quite a bit. This has tragedy of the commons written all over it.

Spotted in Scripting News

I love and admire Mike and Richard, and I'm glad they're welcomed by the owners of Web 2.0, but until they put out a welcome mat for everyone else, I'm going to keep looking to the future, because I think that kind of exclusivity belongs in the past.

And Mike, if you wanted to get rid of the problem, one call to O'Reilly or Battelle right now would probably take care of it. And mention it to Kevin Werbach as well. That you and so many others quietly acquiesce allows the exclusivity to continue. Until then, I'm going to keep looking for a route-around, and some day, hopefully soon, we'll find it.

Here, let me translate: "Wahhhhh - they won't invite me to their conferences. Wahhhhhhhh"

Who knew that Hacky Sack was a professional sport with a world championship? RocketBoom has the video.

I had a checkup this morning, and after seeing the cholesterol numbers, I'm motivated to go out for a jog now. I'll be back online this afternoon

There's an odd twist in the "iPod Nano Scratch" lawsuit - it looks like the lead plaintiff, one Jason Tomczak, never actually agreed to be a lead plaintiff. Via Digg, I ran across this open letter from him, where he says (in part - go read the whole thing):

The truth is that I never sought out nor did I ever hire David P. Meyer & Associates or Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro to represent me in any case, much less the iPod Nano Class Action suit.

Later in the post he mentions that he sued the law firm in question, in order to try and clear his name. The results of that demonstrate that even well intentioned laws can backfire. The law firm filed an Anti-SLAPP motion against him, using California's protections against SLAPP suits. Seems completely ridiculous to me, but dealing with that will chew up time and money - both of which are in greater supply for the law firm.

I googled Jason's name, and ran across something very curious - on the leading pages that turn up, he's not quoted. The lawfirm is, and his name comes up, but there are no direct quotes. That seemed fishy to me, and also seemed fishy to Couthouse News. It looks a lot like the lawyers who filed the suit against Apple went for an easy payday against a large firm (on the old "cheaper to settle than fight" theory of operations) - and they didn't even take the time to find a real plaintiff.

In the meantime, I'm going to try and contact Tomczak and get his side of this directly. There doesn't seem to be a working email address, but the open letter does have a snail mail address. I'll try that, and I'll post on this again when I know more.

Update: Slashdot picks up the story.

Well. This story about how many of the early adopters actually "count" could have a twist - have a look at fakezilla:

FakeZilla.com traffic simulators are designed to send as many unique hits to your server as it can handle. Web page requests are routed through a massive list of anonymous proxy servers which can be defined by you. Counters and banners "see" these fake hits just as if a real user was browsing your site. When used with the Web Server Log extractor the fake hits and traffic appear 100% realistic- you can't tell the difference between FakeZilla traffic and real traffic!

Your venture capitalists can't tell, either - at least not until it's too late. It's simply amazing how many tools exist to create spam or fake traffic now.

I added the same spam block system I'm using on the Wiki here, and turned trackbacks back on for some of the blogs as a test. Thus far, it seems to be working fairly well. If it gets overwhelming, I'll just turn them off again. If it stays sane, I'll enable them for all the blogs.

Fingers crossed...

Wired:

An online real estate developer sues gamemaker Linden Lab for allegedly repossessing his cyberproperty.

If you're going to have a virtual world, maybe you need a virtual court system?

Cincom's President, Tom Nies, will be speaking at the AIT InfoSec conference at the UN:

18th Annual InfoSec and IT Infrastructure Conference & Exhibit

Theme: Moving Forward at Light Speed, the Latest InfoSec Threats, IT Alternatives and Solutions

Venue: The International Conference Center in United Nations Headquarters, New York City

Dates: June 27-28, 2006

Event Partners: IDG Pubs (InfoWorld, CSO), UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development

This Week’s Featured Presenter:

Thomas M. Nies, Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Cincom Systems, Inc., is the longest-serving CEO in the Computer Industry. Tom will discuss, “I came. I saw. I simplified,” and explain how huge amounts of money are invested in InfoSec technology today. Tom will put into plain words the details needed to simplify information systems implementations, and will clarify how to maximize the impact of those investments.

Contact Steve Kayser for further details.

Dare Obasanjo points out that it's not a sign of the apocalypse when an MS site doesn't support Firefox (or Safari, etc):

Unlike Devanshu and Todd, I don't think there are sinister conspiracy theories for why two Microsoft products were released and ignored features of interest to the geek demographic. In every product release, you have a limited amount of resources and time in which to apply those resources to your next version. This means that you tend to focus on features that will provide the most bang for the buck and may ignore features that have limited appeal such as supporting a browser which is used by 8% of the market or a media subscription model is only used by 1% of internet users. I don't always agree with the practice of deciding on features based on market penetration statistics but I can understand when product teams make such decisions. I suspect that is more likely the cause of these omissions than some nefarious collusion between MTV and the Windows Media team or some plot to ensure IE's market dominance by having Windows Live services require only that browser.

Of course, it depends on who your market is. For some products, ignoring that 8% might be mostly irrelevant, while for others, it's going to be a killer. On the other hand, not supporting them will be an ongoing irritant. I was trying to use some award miles on USAirways. I normally use Firefox, so I logged in and went to the award pages. I got all the way to the end, credit card entered, seats selected, the whole thing. Submitted, and bam - tossed to the reservation page with no confirmation and no warning.

Hmm. I verified that no miles had been taken out, and tried again. Same result. Spent some time on the phone with an agent who couldn't figure out how to make the reservation for me (this has to go into the annals of bad service. She was apologetic, but could do nothing for me). Finally, I tried IE. At the point of submission, it slaps up some "please wait" page that must be IE specific.

Now, for the guy trying to cash in award miles, that's irritating, but it's no lost revenue for the airline. Had I been trying to buy tickets though? I would have been far more worried about the "did that go through" thing had each one involved a potential charge of a few hundred bucks.

So I agree with Dare - resources and inertia explain these things far better than some silly conspiracy theory. Having said that, the one taking the damage from this sort of thing is the vendor with the badly implemented site.

Troy mentioned that I should grab the latest version of the Javascript HTML editor we use here - it turns out that I was on a very old rev. I've updated to the latest, which just came out in May. They seem to be making progress on Safari support - not enough for me to make that the default for Safari though. I know some people have had trouble commenting with the editor - hopefully, this will be an improvement.

Sony settled the class action lawsuit that came out of their rootkit fiasco - they still have a Texas suit to deal with though:

The agreement ends one chapter in a public relations disaster for the entertainment company, which must still contend with a lawsuit brought against it by the state of Texas for violation of state antispyware laws.

DRM software is bad PR, and - if done stupidly enough - might even be illegal. meanwhile, proving that they've learned nothing from this, Microsoft continues to plow forward with PVP-OPM. Here's a tip: the "Aero" interface is not cool enough to cover up that stench.

Ian tried commenting here, but it apparently didn't work - that Javascript form may be more trouble than it's worth. Anyway, to the meat of his new post: he says that I missed his point, by assuming that by "resources" all he meant was memory. Based on his original post, that is how I took it. However, he explains further, and lists resources that GC doesn't typically handle: database connections, sockets, (etc, etc).

Here's why I didn't consider that - because all of that is at issue in any web app that maintains some kind of session state on the server. Whether you use continuations or cached data in some other form, you end up dealing with all of that (unless you re-open everything on each submit - which tends to get expensive). Typically, you use the finalization mechanisms of your language/library of choice to deal with that: the session times out, finalization kicks in, and you clean up. I fail to see how continuations make this more (or less) complex.

As to this on the back button amd continuations:

I'm not claiming that it's impossible to handle the back button this way. I'm just saying it's a bad idea, because you need to be able to write code that can tolerate being wound back and forth at the user's whim.

That's precisely the complexity that continuation based servers remove from your purview. In a "standard" we app, you tend to toss some kind of page key around, so that you can tell where you are (as opposed to where your app thinks it is on the server). How that's simpler, I have no idea. Having written a number of web apps in the standard way, I'm not prepared to call it simple.

Macy's is going to put vending machines with iPods in them in the stores:

Macy's plans to install 180 iPod vending machines -- made by a San Francisco company -- nationwide by fall, its chief executive said Friday.

"This brings most-wanted merchandise into our stores in a unique new way," chief executive Terry J. Lundgren announced at the annual meeting.

That's a lot of quarters :)

Seems that Glenn Reynolds has the same opinion about the paranoid "ban the surfing" companies that I do. He's even more harsh than I was:

Sell your stock in companies with policies like this one. The management is obviously stupid, and the only employees likely to stay, long-term, in the face of this kind of a policy are those who can't get a job someplace else, someplace where the management is brighter than a bag of hammers.

Pretty much.

I get periodic questions about the state of WS* compliance in Cincom Smalltalk; here's the answer at present from our lead WS* developer, Tamara Kogan:

We have implemented:

1. SOAP 1.1
2. HTTP 1.1 RFC2616
3. XML 1.0
4. WSDL 1.1. (Currently supported only SOAP over HTTP binding)
5. UDDI 1.0
6. Compliant with Basic Profile 1.1 (There is an open problem with identifying SOAP faults. We still create SOAP fault message as it was specified in WSDL 1.1. We hope to address this in the winter release)

If that's not specific enough, send me an email and I'll see what I can find out for you.

Via Don Box, I see that Ian Griffiths has a few issues with continuation based web applications. One issue he brings up is resource usage:

Sometimes the user just walks away. I might get part way through the purchasing sequence on a web site and then decide to stop. The web server never gets any positive indication that I closed the browser window. It merely stops hearing from me.

What does this mean in a world where I’m using continuations to help model user journeys as sequential code? It means that sometimes my functions just stop part way through without reaching the end.

On the plus side, it is predictable where this will happen: it can only occur at boundaries where I choose to construct a continuation and then relinquish control for now. But at every such boundary, I need to be aware that sometimes, the continuation will never execute.

This is very much not analogous to the function returning or throwing an exception. In the world of our chosen abstraction - that of sequential execution of a method - it looks like our thread has hung.

The problem with this is that a lot of the techniques we have learned for resource management stop working. Resource cleanup code may never execute because the function is abandoned mid-flow.

I don't know why this would be a problem, given a halfway decent GC system. The stale session will eventually time out, and take any lingering state down with it. I can see being worried about the memory required by this, in the face of a lot of users, but not in the basic mechanics. In a Smalltalk server - either VisualWorks or Squeak based - Ian's worry is a non-problem. Then he has an issue with thread affinity:

Traditionally, any particular invocation of a function runs on a single thread from start to finish. We’re not accustomed to mid-function thread switches, and it will render some hitherto safe practices unworkable. Using objects with thread affinity will become particularly hazardous, for example - we will need to be mindful of the potential switch points and make sure we never use such objects across such a boundary.

Actually, in this server, I've got requests that end up invoking new processes now, without continuations. They are managed with a class called Promise, but it's pretty simple - it's just a matter of delaying the waiting process and using a signal to inform the waiting process that results are ready. The pre-existing class makes that easy for me, but the code isn't hard to follow either way. Running multiple threads with shared objects is a comlex problem for any kind of application, whether continuations are involved or not.

Then he's got a long riff on how Continuations might break in the face of the Back button. Hmm - that was one of the problems that this approach was designed to solve. So far as I know, this simply isn't a problem in Seaside.

Our friend Dave was kind enough to invite us out on his boat today - it was cloudy, but the win wasn't bad - at least on the way out. On the way back, the sun came out, and so did the wind. There was a a pretty rough chop out there on the way back - the wind took the canopy off! Anyway, I got a few decent pictures. Here's an automated lighthouse we passed:

Then there's this - a little hard to see, but there was a tiny little spot of land, and on it was a crane:

Here's the same thing, different angle:

This one should have showed more, but it's just a cheap phone camera. On the shore there are some of the expensive houses with their own piers:

Here's what it looked like coming back - although, you can't see the wind. It was brutal! Notice the clear sky though? Compare that to the first crane shot, which I took on the way out. In the space of a few hours, it went from cloudy to clear, and windy as heck. Still a great day to be on the bay though!

Michael Feathers goes public with the idea that "final" is just a bad idea:

Well... no.. not really. Here's the problem: When you use final pervasively, you make unit testing nearly impossible. Believe me, I know. I encounter enough teams who are in that situation. Have a class A which uses a class B that is final? Well, you'd better like B when you are testing A because it's coming along for the ride.

Extract an interface for B? Sure, if you own B. If you don't, you have to wrap it to supply a mock. And.. here's the kicker: if you are going to wrap B, well, what about security? All final does for a class is guarantee that the class itself won't be the point of access, but what about your wrapper? If you use the interface of the wrapper everywhere, again, because you want to test, the developers of B haven't made your software more secure, they've merely pushed the problem onto your plate: they've forced you to choose between testability and security. It's rather interesting to consider that perhaps we truly can have security, but only if we can't really be sure our software works.

The suggestion he has is the one that has been used in Smalltalk since the beginning: conventions that explain to developers which parts of a class' API might change in the future. What "final" does is attempt to lock the door before anyone's been in the house to look around. It assumes perfect knowledge about future usage, and that's a bad assumption.

I just discovered Laura Ries' blog, after getting a copy of the book "The Origin of Brands". I'm still going through the older posts, which is why I'm hitting something from March. She highlighted a new store idea that WalMart is exploring - an attempt to move upscale:

In Texas, Wal-Mart opened a new store today to see if they can entice customers with a more glamorous layout, snazzy employee outfits and 1,500 new premium-priced goods. All this with the Wal-Mart brand name.

It’s true! The new store has hardwood floors, halogen lights, a sushi bar, and $500 bottles of wine. Employees will ditch aprons and don navy Polos and khakis.

She's skeptical about WalMart succeeding with that, and so am I - when you think WalMart, you simply don't think "high end". It reminds me of some of the confusion at ParcPlace-Digitalk and ObjectShare before the end back in the late 90's. After Java was released, management panicked, and decided that we had to have a Java toolset. I argued against that at the time, saying that it defocused us from our core product. That point was hammered home to me (and a sales manager who was stunned by this) on a customer visit. We went to an existing Smalltalk customer on Wall Street, and talked up our new Java tool. His response spoke volumes - "I may well be interested in java, but why would I buy it from you?"

The bottom line was, we were a Smalltalk company, and no one was going to take us as a "Java company" or as an "Object company". Which is where WalMart is going to fail with the attempt at a luxury position. No one sees them that way. Inexpensive clothing? WalMart. Expensive, marked up stuff that you buy to impress others? Nieman Marcus.

In short, the person who wants to boast about their conspicuous consumption isn't going to point at the new gadget in the kitchen and announce "I got that at WalMart!"

Avi weighs in on the topic Gilad Bracha brought up here, and references Tim Bray's post as well. He also brings in David Megginson. I posted on this here.

The wrong answer from management:

Companies are starting to ban Web access, block instant messaging services to squash discreet conversations among chatty co-workers and prohibit employees from watching sporting events on their computers.

"If you're watching video, you're probably not working," said Vimal Solanki, director of product marketing at McAfee Inc., a software vendor whose products to block Web access are selling briskly.

The correct answer from management:

Indeed, an employee for the New York City education department was recently fired for using the Web to read online news reports and visit travel sites while at work. He had been warned to stop.

That is not an isolated case. According to a survey conducted in 2005 by the ePolicy Institute and the American Management Association, 26 percent of employers have fired workers for misusing the Internet. A total of 526 companies responded to the survey.

The first example demonstrates a lack of work - by management. It's not really that hard to tell whether your employees are working or not; do they get their assigned tasks done? If they do, and they aren't violating any laws, why do you care what they are filling spare time with (yes, with some caveats :) )? If you do care, then you suck as a manager. Plain and simple.

The source of this - an article in the Chicago Tribune.

Spotted in digg:

In an interview with SciFi Wire, actor James Callis, who plays Gaius Baltar, says that the new season of Battlestar Galactica which is currently filming and set to start in October, will be much darker, remorseless and relentless.

I had thought that the season two ending was pretty much all the way down, but I guess I'm wrong.

Scoble on linky ads:

I don't mind this as much as I minded SmartTags when Microsoft was attempting to do them (before I was an employee I argued voiciferously against them, along with many other people in the community because we didn't want anyone to be able to use our own words for doing this style of advertising). Choosing to do it on your own blog only gets rid of most of my objection. I still don't like these kinds of ads, though, cause for someone who doesn't know the Web very well you can't tell these are ads at first.

Hmm. Seriously, how many people are there in the developed world who aren't familiar with the web? What's the actual possibility of confusion at this point?

It's things like this, from SDTimes, that explain why I call Sun's OSS plans utterly insane. Last week, Jonathan Schwartz felt compelled to link here and try to explain how they can make money by not ever charging any. Well. In his long and rambling explanation, he Schwartz might have taken a stab at this:

In addition to the company’s reported losses, Sun announced an 8 percent drop in SPARC-based server sales, year-over-year. The company’s x86-based servers accounted for all of the company’s growth in this sector, and for 27 percent of the company’s overall server sales. Despite this, Sun saw a 12 percent increase in revenues in the United States, the first time that the company has seen growth in this country in two years.

Gee, what a shocker - after Java commoditized development tools, and after championing Solaris on x86 - and not charging for it - Sun's server sales dropped. Hmm. Doesn't take a rocket scientist to connect the dots there. Sadly, Schwartz can't find the dots, much less connect them.

InformationWeek has an article about the rising tide of splogs out there. Splogs are spam blogs - and with so many free services (MS Spaces, BlogSpot, etc) out there, they are easy to put up. Heck, you can buy tools for it now. It's all pretty simple: you get one of the tools (or script one; automating the creation of blogs is not particularly hard), and then send your bot off to scrape content. Presto: Instant Splog. The purpose?

The people who create splogs--or, more accurately, the people who write the programs that create splogs--rarely intend for anyone to actually read their posts, which are often poorly written or even strings of nonsensical words. They're just building a giant clump of links that refer back to other sites, perhaps those that promote gambling or sell Viagra. When people click on those links, they increase the page rank of those sites on various search engines. Splog creators also sometimes include on their splogs ads that generate a small commission, usually a fraction of a dollar, for every click.

Here's one scenario: You want to test out a new programming language, so you run a blog search on it, hoping to find out about others' experiences with it. You end up at a site that looks like a blog--including a supposed blogger's name, photo, and archive of postings--but click on a posting, and you end up at a site advertising hard drive repair.

The search providers - from Google on down to blog specific sites like Technorati - are fighting this. The fact that I still get plenty of spam in my email inbox doesn't fill me with confidence about the end results though. Some of my search feeds are getting to be as useless as email because of this.

Cincom's booth at LWNW made it onto a news segment called "Webmania". Check it out here.

Via Doc Searls, I started reading here (Terry Heaton) and kept going down. From there, I ran across this story on CBS' Sunday night schedule. Paging down, I came across the list of shows, and that's when I had an epiphany: I have no idea which network most of the shows I watch are on. I rarely watch live TV; we cache stuff on the (yes, it's decadent) 4 DVR platforms we have. We then watch whatever matches our mood each night, without regard to the schedule.

The funny thing is, the riff Heaton has on the football schedule wreaking havoc on DVR recordings is something my wife has mentioned more than once: she hates it when sports whacks a show off schedule that way. What she hates even worse though is a practice NBC engages in - starting a show at :59 or at :01, which is specifically designed to screw with DVRs. Here's a tip for the programming geniuses behind that at NBC: It's not making me watch more ER. Rather the opposite, actually. This kind of thing is just anti-viewer, and it's not a way to win friends and influence people. Or, I'll just quote my wife on this practice: "ER just isn't good enough for that".

Ultimately, the schedule screwing is just going to have to stop. An increasing number of people are using DVRs of one sort or another, and they tend to be the people the producers and advertisers want. At the same time, the amount of available bandwidth for sending shows into the home is increasing all the time. I expect to see a couple of things to happen:

• Sports will move off the "main feed" for a network, so as to not interfere with other scheduling
• The kind of idiotic schedule games being played by NBC will come to an end

However, there's going to be an awful lot of whining and fusspotting between here and there. To get an idea of just how much whining, have a look at this from Heaton - if he's right (and I think he is), then the next few years of TV history are going to be extremely disruptive.

If this kind of click fraud is as widespread as the article makes it sound, then the Google and Yahoo ad models are going to run into problems:

PandaLabs has detected a network of computers infected with the bot Clickbot.A, which is being used to defraud ‘pay per click’ systems, registering clicks automatically and providing lucrative returns for the creators. According to the data collected so far, the scam is exploiting a global network comprising more than 34,000 zombie computers (those infected by the bot).

The bots are controlled remotely through several Web servers. This allows the perpetrators to define, for example, the web pages on which the adverts are hosted or the maximum number of clicks from any one IP address in order not to arouse suspicions. Similarly, the number of clicks from the bot can be monitored as well as the computers online at any one time. The system used can evade fraud detection systems by sending click requests from different, unrelated IP addresses.

I understand that Google, Yahoo (etc) look for this kind of thing, and have systems in place to detect it. It sounds like those systems aren't working as well as they would like though - and if advertisers start to realize that, the rates that can be charged will drop. Given that all the air in Google's stock comes from advertising revenue... well, I'm visualizing a paper bag, just before the hand comes in. There could be a real explosion.

Jeff Jarvis has a long screed up on books. After the first paragraph I was ready to rant - but his conclusions are no paeon to digital books. This is the part I was ready to pounce on:

The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. They have no link to related knowledge, debates, and sources. They create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader. They try to teach readers but don’t teach authors. They tend to be too damned long because they have to be long enough to be books. As David Weinberger taught me, they limit how knowledge can be found because they have to sit on a shelf under one address; there’s only way way to get to it. They are expensive to produce. They depend on scarce shelf space. They depend on blockbuster economics. They can’t afford to serve the real mass of niches. They are subject to gatekeepers’ whims. They aren’t searchable. They aren’t linkable. They have no metadata. They carry no conversation. They are thrown out when there’s no space for them anymore. Print is where words go to die.

That's the opening though - it's meant to rile you up, so you'll read the rest. I had no idea that the number of new titles was declining, but Jeff has stats on that:

Publishing database Web site Bowker reported that there were more new book titles sold in Great Britain last year - 206,000 new titles, an increase of 28 percent - than in the United States -172,000 new titles, a decrease of 18 percent.

General adult fiction and children’s books both showed double-digit declines in new titles, Bowker found.

That gave me pause. Doc has written about how consolidation killed radio by making it universally bland; Dvorak has said the same about newspapers. I've generally liked the existence of big stores like Borders and B&N, simply because selection is better than it was at the tiny Waldenbooks that was the main bookstore where I grew up. However, we might be seeing the same thing in books that we see in radio and news: consolidation leading to a growing mass of same-ness.

I walked into the local Borders last night, in search of gift certificates. I should have taken a picture, because this point would be easier to illustrate that way. Right at the front, there's a table filled with new arrivals, and "The DaVinci Code" is still prominent there. That's not the weird part. The weird part is the next table, which is filled with books about "The DaVinci Code" - Which is a sign of the kind of growing blandness that killed radio, and is busily killing newspapers.

Thinking about this, I realized something about my own reading habits: I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately, and virtually no fiction. That's a change for me from my younger days; I used to devour science fiction and military thrillers. Now? I'm boning up on the past. I think there's a connection there - as the kinds of books I used to like have all blended into one meaningless melange, I've discovered a rich vein of far better stuff.

I'm not sure that I'm completely down with Jeff on the need to move beyond the book to something that can be updated and annotated; there's value in reading the original thoughts of an author and having them fixed in time. There's also value in having the physical book; I find it's easier to read paper than it is to read screens - at least for long content. I suspect that the problems in publishing have more to do with what Doc Searls has said about radio than they have to do with the format.

It's been another week of stats gathering, so it's time to look at the results. BottomFeeder downloads are up slightly, at 161 per day. The specifics:

Platform	BottomFeeder Downloads
Windows	508
Linux x86	124
Windows98/ME	111
Mac X	92
CE ARM	81
Update	53
Mac 8/9	51
HPUX	34
Solaris	26
AIX	17
Linux Sparc	16
Sources	8
SGI	2
CE x86	2
Linux PPC	2

Now a look at the HTML page accesses. Traffic levels stayed up last week, so there's been some gain due to the slashdotting. The tool details:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	66.3%
Internet Explorer	23.2%
Other	4.7%
MSN Bot	3.4%
Everest/Vulcan	1.4%
Megite	1%

The Firefox share is staying pretty high too - it should be interesting to see whether the launch of IE7 has any impact on that. On to the RSS logs:

Tool	Percentage of Accesses
Mozilla	26.5%
BottomFeeder	16.3%
Net News Wire	9.3%
BlogLines	8.6%
Other	8.7%
Internet Explorer	5.1%
Safari RSS	4%
Google Feed Fetcher	3.4%
BlogSearch	2.3%
NewsGator	2%
SharpReader	2%
Planet Smalltalk	1.9%
RSS Bandit	1.5%
Java	1.3%
JetBrains	1.1%
Liferea	1%
News Fire	1%
MSN Bot	1%
Jakarta	1%
Everest/Vulcan	1%
Attensa	1%

Not a lot of change there - still lots of different tools being used.

This guy likes what he sees in Smalltalk, after coming to it from Java. He has a few qualms too, which is fair. I really liked this bit:

Here is a good article on the advantages of dynamic typing. I am becoming convinced that the “advantage” of static typing is that it provides minor babysitting services for bad programmers. Try writing a Java package that performs all sorts of calculations with int, double, float, and long data types and has to go back and forth between them…. the need to cast, convert, and develop special ways of handling “loss of precision” will drive you nuts.

Heh. I love that phrase: "minor babysitting services".

I love some of the rationales for not doing continuations on the JVM. Like this, from LtU:

There are a variety of reasons why we haven’t implemented continuations in the JVM. High on the list: continuations are costly to implement, and they might reek havoc with Java SE security model. These arguments are pragmatic and a tad unsatisfying. If a feature is really important, shouldn’t we just bite the bullet?

I just had that conversation with a friend before he left for JavaOne. He's frustrated by a number of things in Java, which all go back to the needs of the security model - his point being that it has less relevance for a server side application. I'm running this application on a Smalltalk server, where arbitrary code could be loaded in at any time. Here's the catch though - only two people have permissions on the system. So in order to mount such a code loading attack, one of the two of us would have to do it. Hmm - seems unlikely.

Anyway, that led me to Tim Bray's post:

This notion, that the Web GUI is insufficiently interactive and we need something richer, is widely held among developers and almost never among actual users of computers, and it’s entirely wrong. I can remember when people were forced to use compiled Windows and X11 applications, and most of them were extremely bad because it’s really hard to design a good interactive UI; when the Web came along, more or less everyone abandoned those UIs in favor of the Web, almost instantly and with shrieks of glee.

I'm calling BS on that. I'm not sure which user base Tim has met that generated that reaction, but either it was an oddball bunch, or the client applications they had to start with sucked. A lot. I deal with sales staff all the time, and they absolutely despise the web based sales tools that have been forced on them. Heck, most of them still use ACT! (or something similar) for their own use, and use the web system as little as they can. In customer visits, I get the same kind of reactions from people about the web apps they've had rammed down their throats.

Here's the thing: web apps aren't useless, and in the right place they solve problems very well. However, no one should be deluded into thinking that this is being done "for the user" - it's being done for IT, which hates having to manage client system deployments across a diverse range of hardware and software. That's not an unreasonable reaction by IT, but no one should confuse the desires of IT with the desires of end users.

As if Microsoft didn't have enough problems of its own with getting Vista out - now Symantec is looking for an injunction:

Symantec has asked a U.S. court to order a halt to the development of Windows Vista, claiming that its rival is wrongfully incorporating Veritas storage technology into its next-generation OS.

Symantec sued Microsoft yesterday, seeking unspecified damages and also asking the court to remove Symantec's storage technology from a variety of Microsoft products, including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and the upcoming Vista and "Longhorn" Windows Server products.

This sort of thing makes the far fetched scenario here sound possible :/

This is the sort of thing that happens when you treat support as a cost center, and focus only on minimizing those costs:

"Hello. MCI. What is the trouble you are having?"

"There's a number in the UK that MCI won't connect to."

"And what is the trouble with that?"

"Well, I want to talk to this number in the UK and..." Then there was a click as the phone went dead at their end.

I'm glad I just left MCI. I'm happy I'm not an investor in MCI. I wonder if they hung up on me, or if they just aren't very good at this whole making telephone calls thing.

Many companies haven't really picked up on the sea change in word of mouth PR. A decade ago, you grumbled to your friends and acquaintances. If you knew someone influential, you might get some action - if not, you just got ignored. Now? The poor service provided by your support people gets publicized everywhere.

Support can be a cost center all right - just not in the same way most management seems to think.

I've updated the information page for the summer release.

Rogers points to James E. Robinson III, who explains why specs matter:

I used to think there was a virtue in less precise, more readable specs because they are much less intimidating to new implementers of a format. The success of XML-RPC has been driven in part by how easy the spec is to understand at first read.

But making software interoperate well is a hard job that becomes significantly harder when a spec lacks precision. An incredible amount of time can be burned on arguments over interpretation, especially when a programmer is told that his code doesn't meet a spec.

I came around to that point of view as well - interop is actively harmed by loose specs - regardless of the prominence of people who think otherwise.

The NYC STUG talks to Ruby:

I thought it would be an interesting idea to have a presentation where we compared Smalltalk to one of our dynamic language cousins. Of these next kin it seemed to me that from the most popular languages that Ruby was the closest. So I approached the NYC Ruby chairperson, Patrick May. We met at the cafe at the New Yorker Hotel , right around from Suite LLC where we hold our meetings and for a couple hours we chatted but mostly went through the VisualWorks IDE. I brought a copy of VW 7.4 NC which I let him have. Patrick apparently has been a fan of Smalltalk but did not know quite where to start.

Check Charles' blog for details; dynamic languages go better together :)

Vincent Foley-Bourgon asks about doing remote management of a Smalltalk application:

For instance, you’re at a friend’s home on a Saturday night when you cell rings, it’s work, there’s a pretty big bug in the software and they need it fixed ASAP. With a language that uses text source files, you could use your friend’s computer with Notepad.exe or what have you, make the fix, upload it back and go back to your Bailey’s.

I don't think the whole "works with text files" thing helps a lot. If a system runs into trouble, I seriously doubt that you'll want to try applying a fix by hacking some code in Notepad, and then uploading it. For one thing, how would you compile that for a mainstream application? Bottom line - you need access to your development tools - whatever they are - if you are going to fix a production app. As well, you need access to your test environment.

So, if you get that call Vince speaks of, you're heading back to the office (home or otherwise). Smalltalk images just don't enter into it. I've gone through my scheme for patching this server in place before - it involves coming up with a fix by working with the test server, and then uploading the changes to the server (in the form of a file-in). I then kick the server through a remote admin interface, and tell it to load the code. I also push new versions of the parcels up to the server, so that the next time I start the server, it loads the latest code from the get go.

I suppose I could hack a file-out by hand in notepad, but that's no more realistic than the Java guy doing it. In either case, you simply aren't going to try and apply a production fix that way.

The arguments in favor of net neutrality sound seductive - the idea is to allow a "level playing field" where no service stands above any other. However, stand back from that a minute, and ask yourself about the proposed solution: regulation of the network providers. Hmm. It's rarely the case that a regulated system provides optimum behavior. In fact, it usually provides LCD behavior, and stifles forward progress.

Which leads me to something an awful lot of smart people will consider to be heresy: to hell with net neutrality. Leave the market be, and let the network evolve. The world didn't come to an end when we got fast and slow lanes for parcel delivery - heck, we have "net neutrality" for standard postal service. Is anyone prepared to argue that we have the best possible mail delivery service as a result?

I think I'd rather leave the market alone and let it deliver than rely on the cognitive powers of the FCC.

In the spirit of Bob Newhart's old phone routines, here's Emperor Palpatine taking a call from Darth Vader - after the Death Star has been destroyed.

While coming home on the train yesterday, I finished off something I'd been letting hang - an interoperability demonstration between two Cincom products - Mantis and Cincom Smalltalk. There's a Mantis server running inside of our firewall for just this sort of demonstration, and it's got a Web Services interface available. So with a lot of help from our lead WS* developer, Tamara Kogan - and useful pointers from our lead Mantis guy, Tim Flick, I've got a screencast. Enjoy!

McGovern on why enterprisey types aren't at conferences:

Other attendees at conferences such as practitioners of Ruby would feel intimidated being in our presence.

This comes in the context of him answering this question he posed: "Why aren't more enterprise architects speaking at industry conferences?" I can't imagine anyone being intimidated by being in McGovern's presence. Plenty of other reactions come to mind though...

The RIAA wants to make technological progress illegal:

US satellite radio firm XM is being sued by record labels over a gadget that lets listeners record songs.

The recording industry said XM's Inno device, which stores music and divides it into tracks, infringes copyright.

The lawsuit seeks $150,000 (£79,537) in damages for every song copied by XM customers to an Inno gadget.

This is TiVO for radio, but with fewer features. With a DVR, I can not only record TV shows - and divide them into "tracks" (i.e., individual programs) - but I can also drop them to videotape. The Inno device doesn't allow that kind of copying - it's not unlike an iPod. Once the music is there, it can't move further.

Never mind all that though - the RIAA wants to forbid any possible use that doesn't involve them getting paid (never mind the artists though). I have a visual of the morons back at RIAA HQ; deep in the bowels of the building, they are trying to build a weapon that will make anything but vinyl LP's stop working. The image: Doc Brown from "Back to the Future", but without the brains.

Open Source advocates are stunned, just stunned, that large users of OSS contribute very little back into the pool:

Chase Phillips used to spend up to 100 hours a week writing code for the Firefox browser. Bruce Momjian, a former teacher, manages the E-mail list for contributors to the PostgreSQL database. Brian McCallister spends evenings and weekends working on projects for the Apache Software Foundation. Swedish engineer Peter Lundblad labors over Subversion, a change management system for distributed development, at night "when the children are sleeping and my wife watches TV."

This spirit of volunteerism is alive and well in the world of open source software. Thousands of people donate their time and expertise to the benefit of all. But not everyone is giving as much as they're getting. Large companies, those with the greatest wherewithal to help, are surprisingly minor players in the roll-up-your-sleeves work of open source development.

Big companies are "great consumers of open source. They're very good at pushing the limits of what open source code can do," says Carl Drisko, leader of the data center consulting practice at Novell, which distributes SUSE Linux. But when it comes to pounding out code, Drisko says, "they don't have a lot of people contributing back."

I think a big round of "Duhhh" is in order here. Corporate software development is about solving business problems, not about writing extra code. Sure, there are plenty of shops that have gotten into death marches, where tons of useless code got written - but even there, the code was allegedly useful to the business. Releasing code back out to OSS projects runs into two big hurdles:

• The "who owns it?" dilemma. Most companies operate under the assumption that code written at work belongs to the company. That means that releasing code out to the public requires signoff from legal (and likely, management). Most people shake their heads and think - "not going there"
• IT developers are trying hard to get their projects done. Doing extra work to make code accessible (and available) to external projects isn't in the budget or timeline

This isn't specific to Open Source. Most IT shops don't do blue sky work for any set of tools they use, open source or proprietary. There's always a small community of interested parties willing to commit code back to a vendor or project - but it's a small community. There are reasons for that, which I'll illustrate with another quote:

But contributions from businesses are small, partly because of a cultural divide between the open source crowd and corporate software developers, says Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server project and CTO at software company CollabNet. In contrast to the bottom line business world, Behlendorf says, open source developers exhibit a "willingness to challenge authority, the passion to work on an interesting problem well past the end of the workday, and the time and space to be able to build the right solution to a problem rather than just the most expedient."

It has very little to do with the "bottom line business world" in terms of extra work. Stuff done on the job - sure, there are hurdles, which I outlined above. After work? Most developers have these things called "lives". Maybe Behlendorf should look into that before he comes up with silly explanations. Most people who work in software are not into software to the exclusion of all else. Contrary to the TV stereotypes, most of them have other interests and activities that fill their non-working hours.

The bottom line is, don't expect more than a relative handful of people to contribute non-paid hours to projects, open source or otherwise.

The rest of Doc Searl's title is "Reading some writing on the web's wall". Here's a side observation, while we wait for the ending keynote - there are a lot of Mac's here, a truly disproportionate share. An awful lot of "thought leaders" are - and have been - moving to them. There's something Microsoft should pay attention to.

The title reflects something Doc's been writing about for awhile on his blog. By showing a Google search for "syndicate", he says that search isn't dead, it just isn't live. However - a search for "syndicateNY" turns up a lot better results... ). There are live searches on Yahoo and Google, but they aren't primary (and Doc calls them hidden). Hey, my blog shows up near the top on that Yahoo search :)

So Technorati is the "live" web as far as Doc is concerned - their default search results are the live stuff. I don't know - the main problem with the example, to my mind, is the term "syndicate" - it's way to general, so the results are likely to suck. The point is good, but it's a bad example. Anyway, back to Doc - he's stating that Google and Yahoo search the whole haystack, as opposed to just syndicated feeds ([ed] although - those two are converging, and that convergence will only grow).

"On the Live Web, the demand side is supplying itself". He's relating this to the growth of Linux (Torvalds and open sourcers supplying the demand and the supply). Umm, no, not so much. The real growth started when IBM and a few other old line firms started tossing real money at it. It's a blind spot that fools a lot of people. Including the Sun executive team, but I repeat myself.

Back to the presentation. "The best blogging is provisional, not finished. It's about rolling snowballs downhill". You can watch that rollout on sites like techmeme. You can be be an "alpha blogger" by being quotable. I like this - there's no "new economy" - it's the same one, but networked. The power isn't redistributed, it's re-originated. The most connected will be those taking advantage of the Live Web.

"The value chain is being replaced by the value constellation". The wide open space around the constellations is freedom. Heh - with apologies to Gillmor, he says that we it's more about intention than attention. The intention? It's about customers who are ready to buy. To Doc's mind, a lot of marketers, PR people (etc, etc) are back in the original web bubble - trying to get eyeballs and attention to sell to. His notion is that people are now coming with intention - ready to buy - and they need to find a willing seller. So he wants vendors to come to the customers, not vice-versa.

An example - renting a car without shopping around.

The Live Web exposes many of advertising's flaws. Zapped by mute and fast forward, inattention to the message, etc. etc. Top-down advertising is just noise, and it's very inefficient. AdSense is a start at fixing the problem, but it's not done. Doc thinks money will be spent fast in the intention economy, because it matches willing buyers and sellers quickly. He also thinks that the stuff that Gillmor is talking about plays into this, as a way of getting that matching built up.

Large vendors are going to have to adapt, and resist the urge to build silos. Consumers are coming in educated about what they want to buy already. So some more stuff:

A free market is not "your choice of silo" - a great example being the various carriers that want to ditch net neutrality and let the ISP's build out their own silos. Another: "no one wants an experience". People want to make, find, understand, or buy stuff. They don't want crap. Another: "The Consumer" is a relic of the industrial economy. We need to gag when we say "consumer" rather than "customer" - or "listener" or "viewer". More: The net is not a place where "consumers" "access" "content". For instance, I'm producing right now...

"Branding is for cattle, not for products or people". Playing into this, everything and everyone is being unbundled. This is impacting local TV already. The current distribution mechanisms are outdated - we need a la carte, but as we design it, not as "they" design it. TV as we think we know it is already dead. One in three teens cannot identify the top four networks. Meanwhile, the FCC is busy mandating HDTV and moving the existing channels off the air.

"Clear Channel killed Radio. Listeners are resurrecting it". The same thing happened to newspapers, as they standardized and stopped being local. Doc says that Podcasting is bringing back local radio. Hi-Def TV will be cheap and available by the end of the year. Neither cable nor satellite can carry (much) of it. Neither can ISPs, who have left the last mile for delivery only. However, you can buy cheap production tools for it (cameras, etc). [ed] - I don't see a small timer putting together something like "Battlestar Galactica" anytime soon though.

"Email marketing is creepy. So is SEO" - I heartily agree with that.

The "livest" part of the web is on mobile phones (etc). Everyone is now an influencer, or can be.

"Closed Formats are Doomed" - Heh - he thinks that the majority of desktops and Laptops will run Linux in 5 years. he's very wrong about that, for reasons I've blogged about before. Hand a Linux box to any nearby non-technical person, and watch them try to get audio and video (or printing) working. I don't see any of that being fixed, either - none of the outfits promoting Linux are interested in that stuff at all, and - to be blunt - uncompensated developers don't do that kind of "finishing" work. None of which has anything to do with stability or safety, btw.

"The net should be as fast as your hard drive" - and he says someday it will be, although the carriers will fight it. People want real bandwidth, and will fight for it. The funny thing is, Verizon is laying fiber in my neighborhood, and they charge $45 for the 15mbits connection - and $145 for the 30 mbit one. Which means, they'll sell very little of the latter, and will have to drop that price. Who knows - this one, the market will sort out. What will likely happen - anyone who can convince their company to pay for the upper end connection will get it, and anyone who can't, won't.

Question: What social changes do you see? The end of the couch potato (not sure of that one). Education will change, as it's now on an old style industrial model. I hope he's right about that, but there are a lot of people standing in the way of real change (regardless of how you define real change) in that field.

And that's it - end of the show.

Up front question after intros for the panel (which I missed) - have PR people picked up on the change in the media relations model? Do they get the idea that "the users are in charge?" yet? The panel thinks that clients of PR firms are picking up on this faster, and that west coast firms are further along than east coast firms. I'm not sure about the latter, but I buy the former. The push model of marketing messages is pretty much dead.

Interesting - there aren't many PR people here in the room (or at the show, for that matter). Hmm - is that evidence that PR firms still haven't picked up on this stuff? The old agency model is still in place, and the "up and coming" generation of people haven't made an impact yet. The agencies don't think that they have time to get involved ([ed] - they need to make time).

Good observation from the panel here - the agencies are still in early days in understanding this (and the ones that aren't paying attention yet are falling behind). The ones that aren't paying attention will be utterly oblivious to nascent negative PR events - and with that obliviousness comes an inability to respond early.

These guys are very interested in the activity surrounding Digg, Techmeme (et. al.). These sites allow you to follow an ongoing conversation - and, depending on the conversation, it may well be of interest to a client. This is more useful to PR than tagging. A lot of this is just basic fubdamentals: Can you write well, can you listen. The difference now is, there's more to listen to.

Heh - good comment: "There are a lot of tools out there that will tell you you're on fire, but not many that will tell you how to put it out". You need tools to learn that you're on fire, but you need PR skills to put it out.

Pitching a reporter vs. pitching a blogger. Before blogs, you would read previous writings and know the ground rules. With bloggers, getting those interests/sphere of influence is every bit as important, but the rules of engagement (i.e. - what will get published) are different. Another take: don't pitch them, ping them (link to them, comment on their blog, be part of their community).

It's after lunch, and time for a breakout session on attention - Craig Barnes and Seth Goldstein are running this one. I had some less than charitable words for Goldstein's ideas here. Barnes is with Attensa - no moderator, so it looks like the two of them will give their views. Craig is speaking first.

What does Attensa do? It observes behavior (RSS), prioritizes, and attempts to give you mor of what you want - all the while mitigating overload. This is all based on what they call predictive ranking. They rank things for you based on observing your behavior while you read RSS - more than just links. They give you a manual ranking stream as well, letting you push things up or down (which itself modifies the automated rankings). They are in the process of adding things "from the cloud "(or behind the firewall for intranets).

So what is attention? Most people are talking about browser clickstream behavior. They aren't doing that in the browser - they are following behavior with RSS. That can include group behavior. Heh - they've been talking to Steve Gillmor for quite awhile, and don't really like the attention.xml path to get there. They think it's too heavyweight. Like Steve, they believe that "the user is in charge", but they've come to different conclusions based on that. They don't view this as being for the targeting of ads (they are mostly going after the enterprise). So what do they target?

• Blog Posts, News Headlines
• Alerts for BI (Business Intelligence) - what I use search feeds for
• Business Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts
• RSS Enabled Enterprise apps - they are seeing more of these all the time

The bottom, bottom line - RSS overload will dwarf email overload (don't I know it :) ). So this all goes to what they call Attention Streams - where people are spending attention (in the Enterprise). So:

• Business RSS for now
• Email Implications - nothing done yet, nor do they have firm plans. But they think that attention as it applies to RSS applies to email as well.
• Other stuff - PDF, docs, etc.
• Structured Blog Templates (microformats?)

Sounds to me like they are trying to create tools that people will use for prioritizing their attention in the enterprise. Ahh - Attensa is another Outlook plugin thing. That explains why Greg Reinacker walked into the room :)

Seth Goldstein has the title "Selling Attention" on his slides. To start with, Seth thinks Attensa is doing good work for the Enterprise, but says this: we are all touching different parts of the elephant, but it's still one elephant. Seth is involved in attentiontrust.org with Gillmor, et. al.

His evolution in this area - from Josh Schachter/del.icio.us: "Tags are crystallized attention". hadn't thought of it that way, but it makes sense. Attentiontrust.org with Gillmor. He calls attentiontrust a consumer advocacy group, interested in making sure that you have access to the attention that you are giving things. With all that data being electronic, recording it is easier, and that you as an individual should, at the very least, be able to keep track of that.

So what is this all about? He's trying to create a marketplace for clickstreams. The idea would be to reverse the selling situation - allow people to market themselves to companies. He thinks it could become a new kind of credit bureau. Hmm. Color me skeptical. The idea is that you toggle some settings in a browser, and then let their servers gather your clickstream data for potential sharing. The reporting is interesting - it gives back details on what I've visited. You can share this data with other users of their system.

One thing just became clear to me - the potential for extreme embarrassment is huge. Sure, you can turn the tracking off, but imagine that you forgot and visited an, umm, "not safe for work" site. Here's the end question I have - what's the business model? How do these folks intend to monetize this? Ah - he says that there will be opportunities down the road via leads. Hmm. I think the VC guys were skeptical of that kind of thing :)

I decided to attend this talk even though there are two more obviously technically oriented talks going on - I'm curious as to how the legal people see this field. So from their standpoint - the good news is, the subscription model gives people the content they want, when they want it. It's driven new business models, etc.

The bad news? heh - he says Lawyers (he is one). All of the traditional risks of copyright are still around, and fair use really hasn't been hashed out in this area. For that matter, free expression and libel hasn't been hashed out either. The existing rules - those hashed out in the past - still apply (trademark, copyright, libel, etc.).

Copyrights - Good quote - "The law is always struggling to catch up to the technology" - and the problem is not new. Old law is being applied to new situations all the time. Copyright is any original work that is fixed in tangible form. Generally speaking, copyrighted works cannot be used in whole or in part (copied, etc) without permission. This causes problems with the standard rip and paste culture we live in.

Things fall into the public domain after life + 70 years (95 years for an entity). Way back when, copyright was 14 years + a renewable 14 years. It's gone up and up steadily since then. Discovering whether a given work is or is not in the public domain is not always easy to determine. For instance - the book "The Wizard of Oz" is public, but the film by MGM is not. Things get more complex when you cross borders - which law applies? Which treaty obligations? In the US, there's the 1909 act, and then there's the newer regime.

Works of the Federal Government are in the public domain as well, so any publications from there are public (moon photos, for instance). There may be other issues beyond copyright though. There's also data publication that has been contracted out to a private entity, which may make it copyrighted. Take postal stamps - some of them are licensed by the PO, and the PO itself is in a quasi-public state anyway.

Fair Use - the bottom line is, it's complex and the right answer is often no better than "it depends" :/ It's a risky doctrine to rely on if you are trying to make use of copyrighted material. A lot can depend on the potential market value of the copyrighted work. So quoting a book (newspaper, magazine, etc) is fair use - the hard question is where you have taken too much to fall under fair use (quantitative and qualitative). All of this impacts bloggers - not via linking, but when we quote people, the same rules apply to us as apply to any other form of writing. A comment here from Julie Fenster (on the panel) - media players are most interested in whether the use impacts the economic value for the copyright owner.

Don't rely on how big players do it either - the "Perfect Ten" decision hit Google, for instance.

A question from the audience - if you offer full text feeds, are you offering implied consent to republish (BlogLines, etc)? The panel says yes - your control over re-publishing is diminished based on your actions. It does not, however, diminish your copyright protections. Sounds to me like the debate a lot of the attendees need to have on this is based on what Dana VanDen Heuvel wrote this morning. What the panel thinks is going to happen is DRM applied to RSS feeds . Heh - that will go over well.

Another set of questions arise here - given the "implied consent" theory, RSS makes it easier to repurpose content (for instance, scraping a family cartoon and pushing it to a website that the copyright holder wouldn't want it on). To my mind, this is a technical non-issue - you can scrape HTML nearly as easily as you can scrape RSS. The copyright holder still has ownership either way. As the panel points out, given the smallness of many of the violators (or foreign location), it may not matter anyway. To my mind, if you want to derive value for your site, you need to give me a reason to visit it.

Risk Management - the core business you are in matters, and your size matters. For instance, media orgs and large orgs probably already have policies in place (insurance). For small organizations? Insurance companies move much more slowly than technology, and they are not excited about jumping into this kind of thing quickly (an example: protections given early on for P2P plays, before there was law in the area). Right now, you'll end up in the specialty insurance business if you are looking for coverage here.

Question - how does a blogger protect himself (comes to mind based on that WKPA stuff). Not easy to do, given the paucity of loss data on this (i.e., there haven't been many cases). So a great question - what liability is being assumed by anyone republishing content that could be slanderous (Google, BlogLines, etc) - the panel says "none", as they are seen to be in the same position as a book seller (as opposed to the publisher and writer). A manager who acts in an editorial fashion may well run into a problem (techmeme, et. al. ?). That's very gray at present. On the other hand, sites like Slashdot have been around a long time now.

Steven Schwartz from Reuters is up, discussing the changing nature of news, syndication, and publishing. Schwartz is from the Direct to Consumer portion of Reuters. One of the main things they are dealing with is the emergence of citizen journalists, who can be immediately on the spot when something happens.

Where this hits Reuters is right in the ad model - as alternative journalism rises, that revenue stream gets threatened. Internet advertising is growing, as is consumer spending online. The average consumer spent $100 online last year - and that's given that only 12% of the (US) population is confortable spending money online. Meaning, it's only going to get bigger.

What Reuters is really after is the influentials in the blogosphere. Now here's the interesting part to me - he's talking about how they are leading in RSS distribution. However, I dropped all my Reuters feeds recently. Why? Because they were all partial feeds, requiring me to click through to the site. I've dropped most of the bloggers who do that too. Now, I'm an edge case, since I use an aggregator. Will people who read RSS only via "My Yahoo" (etc) care? If the headline is in the browser, following the link may not seem like much. We'll see - but I dislike link blogs too. I really think that mass customization of ads (i.e., ads that we actually want to see) combined with full text (video, etc) feeds are the answer.

"Consumers as partners" and "everyone is a journalist". Hmm. He says that the issue with citizen journalism is that facts may be lacking. Interesting then that the mainstream media is bleeding subscribers. He's right that people want authority, but wrong in thinking that the MSM has it.

Huh - during Q&A, I ran across this via Dana VanDen Heuvel - from a Pheedo report:

As the RSS publishing and advertising marketplace evolves, it is important to monitor the indicators such as click-through rates, which are normalizing; RSS ad performance, which remains strong; and most importantly, how RSS consumers are interacting with feed content.

Advertisers and publishers need to engage the RSS consumer at the aggregator or feed reader level. That's where the relationship is -- not at the website. Hoping for a click-through by publishing summary feed content is not a viable content monetization strategy in an RSS-enabled publishing model. This is good news for publishers who are evaluating opportunities for RSS feed advertising, and good news for advertisers seeking to reach information consumers in this growing channel.

Full-Text Feeds and Summary Feeds Garner Similar Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Summary feeds (full content not shown in the feed item) average at 12% CTR while full-text feeds average 10% CTR. The report states that the median CTR for full-text feeds remains at 10% while summary feeds drop to 8% CTR due to extremely high CTR rates in certain categories and individual feeds.

If that data holds up, then the entire justification for summary feeds just falls flat. There are charts and more data over on Dana's site. Very interesting stuff. If summary feeds don't generate significantly more (or even less!) click throughs, it really calls the concept into question.

I was zoned out for the first keynote of the morning - not enough coffee to pay attention :) I'm coming around now that Gillmor is up (looks like he's moving his blog here soon). Heh - he's riffed the political slogan "It's the economy, stupid" into "It's the Gestures, stupid". Sounds like a key point of his talk is to get a simple point across: The user community is in charge and can no longer be effectively "talked at". There was a lot of talk about that yesterday, as well.

This goes back to attention.xml (something I've been ignoring, truth be told), which is a technology format that can be used to track what it is that you are paying attention to. Maybe I should look at it - I've had people ask for that kind of personal (not necessarily shared) information gathering in BottomFeeder, as a way of helping filter what they actually read as opposed to what they subscribe to.

Seems that some of the talk at last night's VC discussion, about business models that the VC's (here) don't believe in, has been the subject of some banter on the Gillmor Gang podcasts. I haven't been paying attention to those either, so I can't really express much of an opinion on that. I can say that I've been skeptical about Steve's gesture ideas though - see here, for instance. I spoke to Steve yesterday, and it sounds to me like he's thinking in public, and engaged in throwing ideas at the wall in public - so a lot of what he's writing about is forward looking cogitation. I'm still skeptical, but then again, so is he.

One thing he's got right is that there is a huge information glut. There are tons of sources for information, and current search engines return results based on a rough measure of relevance - pagerank/link results. Confusion over how that works was how WKPA got itself in trouble with their recent blog problem, for instance. Heck, whenever I need to link to that, I hit Google and take the second result - which is the Maine blogger they wrestled with. In a small way, I'm helping push the relevance of that result up.

"We are in a post search world" - the quality of what comes back from search results is questionable, from Steve's viewpoint. We are in the process of creating communities (Mike Arrington being an example of a self created publishing "somebody"). What Steve is looking for is this: RSS has transformed publishing, allowing people to subscribe to what they want, when they want it - but what's next, as a way of managing that? How do you "gesture" to the cloud and ask it to give you what you want? Gmail is a small scale version of that cloud (but in an email specific silo). What Steve wants is a mechanism better than current search that will find what you want and subscribe to it. Feed Discovery, if you will, but not limited to the page you happen to be looking at.

He's asking for smart use of history tracking in your browser. Google is doing this on a large scale, according to Steve. What he wants is a personal implementation that is aware of what you look at, and can then make sense of your future requests for "more like that" - sounds a lot like Amazon's "people who bought the book you are looking at also bought these other ones - would you like them too?" Google has something like that, in "find similar pages" - I don't think I've ever used that option though, so I have no idea how useful it is.

Question - are Techmeme (Digg, Reddit, etc) examples of this? Steve claims that techmeme isn't, as it's specifically what the site owner thinks is worthy of attention. Digg (and the others like it) are community based though. Heh - Steve doesn't pull punches either. He called the guy on the panel yesterday (Davidson) who was against full text feeds a pinhead who didn't realize that the truck was already half over him. Steve thinks that ad supported full text feeds are inevitable. There's a combination possible here - mass customization, offering relevant ads to people based on what their actual interests are.

Steve thinks that we'll get into a real lead generation economy. Hmm - sounds like personally selected middle men. No idea how that would work, but there's certainly no infrastructure for that now. He's pointing to GestureBank, which is building up that data. I'd be very curious to see what the response would be to a Google sponsored effort of this sort. Would people freak out over privacy concerns? That would be interesting to see. Steve thinks the revenue model should involve payment back to the people sharing gestures - and I think that's the part that breaks down right now. There's simply no convenient micropayment system around yet.