Category: Imported

I watched Engadget’s coverage of the Apple announcements (and by “watched, I mean I contributed to the slowing of their servers by repeatedly hitting F5 the whole time), and I’m intrigued by the iTV announcement.  I actually went looking for something similar a few weeks back when Amazon’s UnBox launched.  While many folks are lauding Apple for this innovation, I disagree that this is really innovation, it’s just the next logical step.

There are devices out there already that provide a way to shove content to a TV wirelessly, but that are about as expensive as the proposed iTV, and much more difficult to work with.  The folks at Apple will probably make the iTV experience pretty user-friendly.

The interesting point of this whole thing is that during the iTV announcement, I had my first “Maybe I don’t really need cable or satellite anymore” moment.  If we get to the point (not far away now) where all the content I watch can be downloaded or streamed, then why should I keep paying DirecTV?  I can buy a lot of a la cart programming for what I pay in satellite bills each month.  If the local news channels get on board with this new form of content distribution, then I really won’t be missing anything.

It is a bit of a leap conceptually though.  People generally don’t feel bad about sitting down for an hour to watch a television show because we’re conforming to the TV’s schedule.  If all my content is on-demand, then I’m probably going to watch less TV because watching an hour long show means I’m more overtly committing that time.  Since the show can fit into my schedule now, it’ll get prioritized just like everything else, and many shows would probably fall off the bottom end of the priority stack.

Tonight I have something stuck in my eye.  I’m guessing it’s an eyelash, but I don’t know for sure because I can’t get it out.  I figured that the internet would yield some tips for me, so in between opening my eyes under water and dousing with saline drops, I decided to hit up Google and Windows Live Search.  I tried various combinations of “eyelash”, “eyelid”, “stuck”, “remove”. I even through some desperate pleas at the search engines with plain language queries.

Almost every result I found had to deal with fake eyelashes, makeup, or contact lenses.  The internet failed me tonight.  The problem is that the search engines still see my queries as keywords, and they don’t know what I really mean.  Either that, or there really are no tips on the internet for getting eyelashes out of your eye. I can’t really believe the latter.  The internet is supposed to know everything.

I know I’ve had several of these “the search engines are useless for this” moments in the past.  I’ll try to remember some more.  Does anyone else have any experiences with situations like this? 

 

Alex Barnett linked to Jason Kolb’s recent blog miniseries about online presence and identity.  

Here’s links to all of Jason’s posts (descriptions from Jason’s “Featured Posts” listing)

Reinventing the Internet, part one – How the evolution of social networks is going to fundamentally change the Internet and the way we use it to communicate.
Reinventing the Internet, part two – A domain name in every pot – Why and how our online identities will eventually revolve around our own personal domain names. 
Reinventing the Internet, part three – Unlocking the potential of the URI – this is really WHY everyone needs to have their own domain name.
Reinventing the Internet, part four – Connecting the dots – A look at the open peer-to-peer social network at various levels, and an overview of how it’s all hooked together.
Reinventing the Internet, part five – Decentralized network, centralized identity – Why and how our online identities should be nodes in a decentralized social network.

If you think you might someday want to have a part in the evolution of the internet, Jason’s posts are a great read.  He has some very interesting ideas that relate to how our personal data is stored and located on the internet.

After reading through these posts, I have a few thoughts to contribute.

1. DNS is not a solved problem.  Jason seems to think that since DNS has served him reliable for over a decade, it is sufficient.  There are many problems with DNS, and they mainly come down to trust.  The distributed nature of DNS makes it powerful and reliable, but it also makes it susceptible to many different attacks, including spoofing & cache poisoning.  Now this doesn’t really matter much for a lot of information, but what if we were relying on the security of DNS to verify the authenticity of stock tips coming from Warren Buffet?  As the payoff for fraud gets higher, we need to increase the security of the underlying systems.  The good news is that this problem has mostly been solved from a technology standpoint, check out http://www.dnssec.org/ for links to lots of resources, and this PDF specifically for a great overview on threats and mitigation details.  An alternative to this is requiring the personal server to have an authentication certificate from a reputable authority, and then relying on that to bootstrap any authentication.
   
2. Jason seems to focus on individuals, but this model could be applied to business entities as well.  Businesses have for the most part missed the social networking boat.  Yeah there are some entities that have set up shop on MySpace, or who publish company-focused blogs, but the value proposition hasn’t really taken off.  Jason’s model for publishing and consumption of information should apply to businesses as well, and it might be easier for early versions of it to gain traction in this space.
   
3. Something that will probably be critical in both the personal and business space is the idea of Views, or adapters that will convert the format and protocol of the data.  This way, I post some new family photos to my private data store, they get emailed to my email savvy relatives, they show up in a rss feed for those using newsreaders, they get published to a picture site for those who only want to occasionally browse my pics,  and possibly get sent off to kodak.com for printing and delivery to the grandparents. That way adoption isn’t held up because the folks on the receiving end aren’t living in the land of XMPP yet.  Of course with this last bit this beast would start overlapping with products like BizTalk.
   
4. Many of these issues have been solved in very complicated ways in the past by CORBA, and more recently HLA implementations.  These are both distributed models that allow publishing and subscribing of information, based on some predetermined schema, although HLA calls the schema the Object Model Template, and CORBA uses its Interface Definition Language.  What Jason is proposing seems much simpler at first, but the lessons learned from HLA and CORBA, especially in terms of schema development probably apply.
   
5. Many folks see this idea as being at odds with the MySpace crowd, but really it just requires that the main players allow you to use your own domain name on their servers.  In reality, not too many people want to run a server in their basement (Unless it’s dirt-simple and provides real perceived value).  It’d be great if this framework was open enough that I could own my personal domain name and get access to all of the tools of Myspace, Youtube, Flickr, etc.  Ideally, they would just be service providers (format conversion, friendly interface, etc.) and the the data would be pushed back and stored on my personal server (which is hosted by yet another company).  Microsoft and Google are already getting into this space with Live Domains, Office Live, and Google Apps.
   
6. Social networking sites provide a hub for communities to form around.  The “social momentum” that these sites have is going to make implementing the distributed model more difficult.  Right now soandso.myspace.com equates to “cool” and soandso.com means you are a geek.  Unless the “cool factor” of the distributed model can be raised above MySpace, then there’s no chance it’ll get any traction.  All of us geeks see this personal server idea and think it’s a utopia because it plays to things we think are important, data ownership & verifiable authentication without sharing personal information.  Will it really matter to the teens who sign up on MySpace because it’s “cool”?

That’s it for now.  Cool ideas Jason, it’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here.

I’ve been reading lots of well written arguments in the Network Neutrality debate, but unfortunately most of them are missing the point.  Not to say that they aren’t factually correct (although some are a little shady), but they aren’t positioned properly to win the arguement.
 
For the record, I’m pro-neutrality.  I believe that the greater good of our economy and society is served by a neutral net.  Some more thoughts in that vein can be read here.
 
But for the sake of the debate, most of the pro-neutrality folks are attacking this from the wrong angle.  Most people, even politicians, don’t understand the economic and technological forces that keep the internet running, yet we keep offering more complex explanations supporting neutrality.  “Lets see, you didn’t understand my last complicated explanation, so let me offer an even more complicated explanation.”  It’s just not going to work that way.
 
Everyone likes to poke fun at Senator Stevens’ “Series of Tubes” analogy, but there’s a real lesson to be learned from the popularity of that gaff.  Simple analogies have traction.
 
If the pro-neutrality folks want to win this debate, they have to come up with simple analogies that will allow non-technical folks to grasp the reality of what neutrality means to the economy and society as a whole.  The telcos are doing a very good job of framing this argument in a way to make it seem that certain companies are exploiting neutrality at the expense of everyone.  They are doing this by putting up a smokescreen of complex explanations, and then offering simple but disingenuous analogies that support their position.  When faced with either struggling to understand the complex reality, or accepting the simple analogy, most non-geeks will accept the simple analogy.
 
The pro-neutrality camp needs to focus on developing simple, believable, and truthful analogies.
 
Want to get involved?  (I am not affiliated with this site, just found it while googling.)

After posting my troubles on the Newsgator Support Forum, it was determined that theres was a bug in the “Delete all posts on this page” function.  In less than three days, they fixed the bug, got the code into production, and they were able to restore all my lost clips.  My 300 lost clips were joined by about 400 other clippings that I had saved and subsequently deleted over the past year.  While I’m very happy to have my clippings back, it got me thinking about how Web 2.0 companies retain data.

Now Newsgator has mostly my attention data.  I consider this data to be fairly public, but some folks might disagree.  The fact that they were able to restore my data means that they are retaining it for some period of time.  Every company that stores user data on the web faces a choice.  What do they do with data that is “deleted” by users?  There’s an obvious value in keeping it, both for the customers, and for the business.  The customer might want the data restored.  The business might want it for historical analysis.

Now, I haven’t researched any of these companies, so I don’t know what the answers are.  Just food for thought.  If you remove a photo from Flickr, is it really gone?  What about the email you delete from Hotmail or Gmail?  The draft blog post on Blogger that you decided not to publish?

We’re used to data retention questions coming up in a work context, but more and more of our personal data is living in data farms operated by companies like Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft.  I’m sure if you dig, you can find most of the data retention policies.  Probably in the long legalese usage agreements that normal users click past without reading.  This probably won’t come to the public’s attention until some high profile criminal prosecution pulls out all the stops and subpoenas all this retained data.