Before Plaxo Pulse

Once I got through the slightly hard to use website to actually pay Plaxo for a premium account (there is a 15 day trial offer BTW), I managed to get Premium services turned on. The process to get there was not pretty and looked like this:

• try to find Plaxo pulse on Plaxo site  – if I didn’t already know about it, I never would have looked;
• find their “premium service” link buried in a page
• sign up for premium service
• connect blog
• connect Twitter
• connect Facebook (this took 5 tries ande vetnaully I gave up and tried it in Safari instead of Firefox and it finally worked.)
• download and run sync tool for Mac OS X – it works;
• de-dupe contacts – also seemed to work;
• connect personal Gmail account – FAIL 3x
• export all Gmail contacts into vCard format and import into Address Book
• sync up to Plaxo
• de-dupe again
• try to resync to Google now; it now works since there are no Google contacts…but the sync is one way so nothing goes up to Google. Argh.
• Download and use A to G to export Address Book enties into a file that Google can parse;
• Re-run de-dupe. It works.
• Contact syncing to personal Gmail is also syncing
• Just for the heck of it, attach old unused MSN account. It too syncs up.
• Add in work client A’s Google Contacts (again, one-way sync only.)
• turned off the broken Apple Address Book sync connection to Google contacts

Now I have this:

After Plaxo Pulse

Things I’ve noticed:

• Plaxo doesn’t know what it is as a company;
• They have some amazing technology. If they had a focused team leading it, I think they could stop being so confused about their identity and just be the one player in the system that keeps all this crap conneted properly. But it doesn’t seem like it’s in their DNA.
• Their de-duper tool looks way better than the Address Book built-in version.
• They have a really cool thingy that appears in Mail.app that tells you when somebody is not in your Address Book. Apple should have added this about 10 years ago. Thank you Plaxo.
• Skype is still an island but I barely use it these days as I mostly live in Facebook and Google chat.

Overall, not the world’s worst process, not the best – probably a 5 on the scale of ugly things you really want to avoid. But it probably went faster because I have done about 1000 contact and calendar import and exports for other systems ver the years so I get the process and understand sync chains well.

But so far it doesn’t seem to have caused a new singularity or black hole to come into being. Good first step. I’ll let you all know how it goes. Feel free to comment below.

UPDATE: June 2, 2009

• Plaxo Pulse’s sync is only one way from Google contacts into Address Book and that’s useless so I’ve added Spanning Sync back into the mix.
• Also Plaxo had (but then abandoned) LinkedIn sync – a feature I had originally wanted  but now it’s dead and gone.
• So with Spanning Sync managing my Address Book <–> Google Contacts and hopefully not borking them too much (I had problems with Spanning syn in the past), Plaxo is now relegated to just keeping my Facebook contacts and status updates in sync and doing more powerful de-duping than Mac’s Address Book.

It now looks like this, (adding in calendars and IM networks):

It remains to be seen whether Plaxo is worthwhile. I’m fine with losing access to my old MSN account and if at the end of the day it’s just a $65/year de-duper, I’ll pass.

Thanks Brendon for making me look at Spanning Sync again. I had left it when Apple and Google built their sync tool…which then stopped working. Hopefully SS will do the trick.

This seems like an awful lot of complexity. I may just turn off all of my networks and become Amish.

Update: September 8, 2009: Goodbye Plaxo

I finally killed Plaxo today. I had duped my mac into another machine and booted it and Plaxo went all nuts trying to sync, then resync all of the contacts and it was just annoying enough that I uninstalled it on the cloned machine, questioned the entire value of Plaxo, and uninstalled it on my primary computer and then deleted my account. Goodbye Plaxo. I wish I had gotten more value out of that $65USD. That was a hard lesson.

They asked me for my reasons for leaving. I only had a minute so I jotted down as many as I could:
- it adds no value
- most of my friends are not in it
- I don’t need or want another social network aggregator;
- Comcast should not have bought you
- your product management team doesn’t know what the hell you’re building
- your annual licensing model is stupid (it should be monthly)
- your development stalled out a LONG time ago
- your de-duper isn’t really that much better than just doing it in Address Book after all.

Good bye Plaxo.

• Day 1
• Enterprise 2.0
• SMB Session
• Launch Pad
• Keynote with Eric Schmidt
• Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft
• Ben Trott of Six Apart, talking about Vox
• Discussion with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (Washington Post) and Barry Diller (IAC)
• Day 2:
• A Conversation with Jeff Bezos
• A Conversation with Bruce Chizen, Adobe.com
• Net Neutrality Debate with Vint Cerf and Robert Pepper
• Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker on the State of the Internet
• Fedex’s CIO talks about logistics
• Microsoft’s Debra Chrapaty “It’s all about the infrastructure”
• Korea’s MySpace Challenger: CyWorld Revealed
• Enterprise 2.0 mashups, with Marc Benioff
• Jeff Jonas explains how to give your company a Brain
• Don Tapscott discusses Wikinomics – his new theory of the global plant floor
  
• Meet Ning
• What GoDaddy knows, with Bob Parsons
• A Conversation with Ray Ozzie
• Day 3:
• The Database in the sky, with MySQL
• Yahoo! Technology Preview
• Disruption & Opportunity: Venture Capital
• From the eBay Labs
• Alumni Report: How did 2005s Launchpad companies do?
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence
• My Summary of the Summit

[My notes are in this square brackets.]

Harnessing Collective Intelligence with Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), Owen Van Natta (Facebook), Toni Schneider (Automattic), and Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media)

• On the panel:
• Jim Buckmaster / CEO, Craigslist
• Owen Van Natta, COO of Facebook
• Toni Schneider, CEO of Automatic
• Richard Rosenblatt, cofounder, chairman, CEO of Demand Media
• Buckmaster:
• We have made major business decisions (do we have sales people, do we get funding, do we expand the site) based on our customers discussions.
• We keep having people tell us we should be running text-ads. In theory we would make tens of millions of dollars. But so far…(in a deadpan voice)…none of our users are requesting those ads be there so we haven’t done it.
• [This got a great response from the audience. It's funny. As audience members, we all want to monetize the web, but as users of Craigslist, we appreciate his user-centricity!]
• We have taken no VC money at all.
• Rosenblatt:
• Demand Media is going to build tools that will let people embed their knowledge and share it with like-minded people and then get paid for it. We’re moving into all sorts of niches: hiking, outdoor sports, gradening,
• Question: You raised $220M. You bought 9 companies and rolled them into one big platform to start off with a solid base. So they bought “Trails” – that documents the 50,000 “professional trails” that are out there.
• Answer: Yes, we saw an opportunity and we moved to dominate it quickly and massively.
• Schneider:
• We only took a little bit of money (from Polaris)
• “User generated content” is too narrow of a term. It doesn’t capture the ranking/sorting/sifting functions.
• Spam is a huge problem for blogs. We have seen a doubling on the blogs in THE PAST THREE WEEKS alone. We built a completely adaptive spam system. When you mark something spam, that goes back to the server and the server learns going forward. That isn’t user generated content but it certainly is collective intelligence or community based ranking/marking/flagging.
• Van Natta:
•  We built some new stuff and our customers got very mad. We had to adjust very quickly. That’s good. It’s good to have your customers hammer you once in a while to make you realize how adaptable you need to be.
• Question: It sounds like you can be very adaptive. Talk about that.
• Rosenblatt: We consider product features as marketing. “Feature roll-out IS marketing.”
• [I **LOVE** that!!! What's our marketing budget? What marketing budget? You mean the money we're spending on talking with customers and making this product "kick ass?"]
• Question: what about giving up control. How do you do it?
• Schneider: We let our users do the language translation. We set up WordPress so that our users could hit the button and translate the page and post it directly and it went live that second. We reviewed thousands of lines of translation later and tweaked only a very few things and found only one intentional swap and it was a guy announcing his wedding date in German! It was BRILLIANT and allowed us to do a full language translation in 24 hours!!
• [That is a very powerful story!!]
• What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs?
  
• Schneider: Don’t build a business that people think is a good idea. People will always tell you that it is a bad idea. Focus on what you think is important and ignore the advice.
• Rosenblatt: Follow the users. Early.
• Question: There is a difference between knowledge and opinion; How do you deal with the fact that a large audience can say a lot of stuff that isn’t true?
• O’Reilly: Have you ever heard of Sturgeon’s Law? A science fiction writer named Theodore Sturgeon had an audience member once say to him, “95% of all science fiction is crap”, to which Sturgeon replied, “yes, but 95% of EVERYTHING is crap. So what?”
• [This parallells the comment in The Long Tail by Chris Anderson where he says: "The Long Tail is indeed full of crap. Yet it's also full of works of refined brilliance and depth and an awful lot in between." (p.116, The Long Tail)]
• Question: All of you have big communities. What is your role? Leader? Cop? Good guy? Bad guy?
• Rosenblatt: you are a guide most of the time but you also have the ability to police it to remove/sanction the damaging elements of the community. Your moderators need to have that ability to do that.
• Schneider: Your most involved people will begin to feel that they are helping you build your COMPANY, not just your product. You need to realize that ownership feeling is there and treat those people accordingly. You might not actually give them shares but you definitely need to let them be involved in your business.

What a joke. Why are Americans putting up with this? WAKE UP. Unbelievable.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. They should have been hauled off the plane if he was threatening the staff, but charge them with mischief, not under the fracking terrorism act.

Craig Ferguson had a funny episode on this story: “When the other passengers saw these goings-on, they were surprised and thought….’What, entertainment on a Southwest Airlines flight?’” Funny. But not.

• Session 1: Enterprise 2.0
  
  • Mayfield had talked about SLATES – (search, linking, authoring, tagging, extensions, and signals) finally being possible on Socialtext’s new platform that they have formed with Six Apart, and a bunch of other companies called the Intel Suite.
    
    • [I side with Matthew Ingram who wrote "Is it just me, or is Intel desperate?"]
    • I get the concept of the suite. That makes sense. And some of the components are good. Newsgator is rich and fully-featured for example. And Six Apart has Movable Type which is a good solid blogging platform. But Socialtext? (see previous wiki review here). I like Ross Mayfield (founder of Socialtext) but their product is unuseable by most normal people I have tested it on. They should have gone with Jotspot or Confluence for this suite but perhaps Joe was already too far down the path with the Google acquisition.
    • And Intel states that they are not making any money on this venture. Did they back these companies? Is this a ploy to drive up the valuations of the partner companies? I don’t get it.
  • Michael McDerment, CEO of Freshbooks, an online billing system: we are able to do benchmarking of people’s companies without them even knowing it; then we connect them to those top-tier companies on our system so that they can share information on best practices.
    • [I like what Freshbooks is doing - they're building a very tightly focused little application and they do things like make it easy for people to use SNAIL MAIL to mail their invoices out to those people who can't receive them by email. THAT'S brilliant. Bridging the high tech and the low-tech is something that companies often forget to do. But it's good for business.]
  • Look at Etelos; rapid application development environment.
    
    • [I went to a session with Danny Hoyle from Etelos later and am not sure I get their concept. They have built their own high-level language that allows power users to build their own applications (which assumes they want to do that), but also allows people to download applications from Etelos and host them on one of their partner ISPs. I just don't know what problem they are solving and for whom?]
  • Kedrosky: people are lazy and have work to do; they won’t change behaviours; extract data from their existing actions so that you can serve them better without them even knowing about it.
  • [Session was kind of thin and not very focussed.]
• Session 2: SMB session:
  
  • SMB is something like 2-24 million companies; >100 employees; 50% of European workforce (IDC); highly fragmented;
  • ESD Survey 2005 said that 80% are looking to expand their web site, and connect it to their backoffice applications
  • 50% of small businesses aren’t even online!
  • [I like this space but think that the route to success would be through the Kiyosakis / Abrahams of the world]
  • [This also explains the Microsoft Live approach of giving businesses web sites which I hadn't really understood until now. I had figured that anybody who wanted a site already had one but apparently that's not the case.]
  • these small businesses only make changes when they’re in extreme pain.
  • if most small businesses don’t know what web stuff is, then what communication channels could be used to reach them? You need to go look at small business publications.
  • [there's a big gap between this conference set of attendees and a standard small business conference list of attendees. The people in this room are all bleeding edge early adopters. NONE of the laggards in SMB are here.]
  • Adobe has seen a HUGE increase in “create PDF online”.
  • There is one company that has 100,000 POS systems. Etelos connected them to the web. So that vendor’s customers were now “using the web”, but not “having a presence on the web” – two different things.
  • Etelos guy Danny Kolke: they go get 50 restaurants and then rapidly develop an application that allows them to do email marketing, contact management, etc. and so they can rapidly
    develop a horizontal app that is equally applicable to all 50 restaurants.
    • [But that could have been done before for Access or Filemaker or FoxPro...is THAT the value add of Etelos? That with the push to move online, they will be able to aggregate potential buyers of a solution so that they can cost-share development? Still not getting it.]
• Session 4: Launchpad
  • In The Chair – Allows people to learn how to play music by “playing along with the band” and making it more like a videogame. http://www.inthechair.com/web2beta
  • Instructables: awesome website concept that ties into passionate users. Have 30,000 users already on the site. [Cool site. Passionate entrepreneur.]
  • Klostu: These guys have Boardtracker (a search engine for Forums). The boardscape is HUGE and very active. 300 million members generating 50 Billion posts. But the boards are all
    islands and you can’t communicate with people on other boards. Klostu is a way of connecting all boards to each other. Post on as many boards as you want and people can track your activities across the boardscape. Search across all forums. Keep track of all conversations across boards. Klostu allows you to bring your 2.0 services into the boards (bring your flickr account) to the boardscape. 300M people, 3B discussions.
  • Sharpcast: The coolest feature in Project Hummingbird was a multiple file type sync tool that allowed you to write a Word file on your PC, save it to OD, open it on the web using Zimbra’s editing tool, make more changes, save it again, then open it on the Mac. Perfectly fluid online/offline/multi-device experience. Nice.
  • Stikkit: smart sticky notes that you type into and it interprets what you want and dumps the data into your regular  applications. Not currently connected to any other applications though. Still early stage. Tried to be “smart, not clever”
  • Turn:
    AWESOME. these guys have taken massive complexity (what type/size/shape/content of ad do I place where when and why?) and made it possible for publishers and advertisers to maximize their revenues. They have a bidding network for cost-per-action, no risk, and automatic process improvement (revenue maximization.)
  • Sphere = “find blogs and similar content to this article” – connects traditional media to other bloggers. Embeds a button at the end of normal news stories that gives choices such as “find blogs writing about this story”
  • OmniDrive: storage aggregator. it allows you to have local copies of all of your data stored in every single location. It looks like a local drive on your PC and on your Mac but any file that is saved into it is automatically synced in the background to the other machines and also up to the website where the files are all available as well.
  • Adify: (larry@adify.com) build a network of niche sites underneath you and then flow ads through that network.
    
    • sportsyndicator: this guy went from zero to a huge network in a month – he works for himself.
    • adify is a way to consolidate fragmented tiny niches
    • matchbin = aggregating small newspapers
    • ready to rare = aggregating comic advertisers
    • washingtonpost.com is aggregating 1500 bloggers and then running ads through that network using the Adify back-end.
    • “Let 1000 networks bloom”
    • [**there is something very important here but I'm not sure what to connect it to. It's something to do with Pena's insistence on "bringing order to chaos" and "consolidation of fragmented industries and domains."]
  • oDesk: a tool to find developers and manage those relationships. (online HR talent database + mgmt tool + payment engine). [I heard a couple of people nearby who were using the system and who were happy with it.]
  • Venyo: a universal reputation tool that works across all systems (Vindex – the global trust index by Venyo). They partnered with every web 2.0 (sort of the thin edge of the wedge of the Sxip or People Aggregator approach.)
    • [but reputation points are contextual - there are two degrees. The reputation of the ranker and the reputation they assign to the target. It doesn't seem to address that at all.]
  • Timebridge: Outlook tool-bar; easy to put proposed meetings into Outlook; proposed times are saved as tentative spots on the TimeBridge server;  If I delete one of the proposed times from Outlook, it’s deleted as an option on the TB server; For other non-outlook users, they get the web client list of optional times and he can specify availability to the server. When I go back to my calendar, all of the proposed times are now gone, leaving only the remaining confirmed appt.
    • [This is an AWESOME little application, well-designed and well-executed!]
• Session 5: Keynote
  • HARNESSING COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: (look up the “Top sites on the internet -2005″ Craigslist at #7 with 18 employees. Great slide on how they disrupted the $15B classifieds industry…with 18 employees. Oh, now they have **21** employees.

  • A PLATFORM BEATS AN APPLICATION EVERY SINGLE TIME. Quote from Debra _____, VP of Operations, Windows Live,  “Being on someone’s platform” will mean being hosted on their infrastructure.
  • Google has hundreds of thousands of servers. Skype has 12 servers for 5 million users.
  • Conversation with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google:
    
    • QUESTION: At what point does Google tip over and get more enemies? ANSWER: we stay focused on making sure that we keep the users’ best interests at heart. Most big enterprises stop caring about interests and begin to work for themselves first and their customers second.
      • [This supports my general dislike of companies that employ disrepectful
        practices with their customers like putting in switching barriers and creating lock-in.]
    • PORTABILITY OF DATA: Audience QUESTION: We want “portabiity” of people’s data. Like the ability for people to carry their search data with them to Yahoo. ANSWER: “We want this to happen because we see that as a safety valve on bad business practices on our part.”
      • [I LOVE this idea. It fits with my concept that by building in a mechanism that lets your customers walk away from you, you create self-correcting structure - that will keep you honest and customer-respecting.  Since structure drives behaviour, if you use standard enterprise "lock-in" you can then screw your customers, knowing that they have nowhere else to go anyway.]
    • It’s a mistake to “bet against the internet”. It rolls over industries that hide/protect/lock down information.
    • SAAS IS GOOD FOR USERS AND DEVELOPERS: If your software is in a data center, it MUST work 24×7. That drives more reliability by all coders building those apps. In the old days, they would ship software, users would install it, and it would break down in data centers all over the place but not at the same time. When it’s all in a data center, it means that when it breaks, you have 10,000 angry customers yelling at you to fix it NOW. This drives an entirely different level of rigor in your software design and coding. It also means that the users are now focused on doing their work – not on fixing theirsoftware. So moving to SaaS is good for your developers and good for your users.
    • TIPPING POINT OF SAAS: It’s “fundamentally better to keep your money in a bank than in your pocket. It’s (now) fundamentally better to run apps centrally than on the desktop. This is the beginning of a very important period.”
      • [This is a GREAT quote - I will remember the moment I heard that.]
    • 20% RULE: 70/10/20: It continues to scale well. We’re going to keep going with this model. 70% is their core work; 10% is (?) and 20% is projects of their own choosing. This model works very well for us.
    • INNOVATION: Innovation classification: We have a ton of people making suggestions, so we have a system in place to manage that explosion of innovation.
      • [I think that every single company should have an innovation pipeline process internally that allows all employees to submit innovation ideas (remembering that innovation can take place in any aspect of the business from product design to development to production to support/service, to operations, to finance, and to business models, marketing, pricing, and selling.]
      • [Good links on this include: Eric Von Hippel's Democratization of Innovation (pdf download at his site , Amazon link )
    • PARTNERING: We realized we didn't know how to work with partners. Now we have decided to begin working with them to make money for both of us. Working towards a more mature model there finally.
    • OFFLINE ADVERTISING: We're moving into newsaper and traditional advertising so that we can make those markets more efficient and to to enable people to do cross-media spend planning. We're bridging the two worlds and making it possible to work across offline and online in one cohesive way.
    • PEOPLE: Question: How do you keep the smartest people? Answer: People don't work for money. We have group-based consensus decision making. We did our strategy for next year by asking 29 questions to teams distributed across the entire
      company and letting them figure out answers to those questions.... "what are the limits of technoogy?" "how do we deal with running out of power?", etc. Ask your very smart people the questions!!!
      • [Awesome. Every company could emulate this. Even if 90% of the material that comes back from your people isn't used, surely there would be some incredibly valuable input on the market, the economic landscape, disruptive forces to watch out for and potential offerings.]
    • SCALE: QUESTION: Will another YouTube develop? ANSWER: Of course. All network effect companies have to create a product with a huge set of trade-offs and priorities and some will end up at one end of the power law distribution, others will end up at the other end. That’s just basic economics.
• Session 6: High Order Bits: Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft
  • $300M/yr next year; $500M ancillary economic market surrounding it.
  • HOLY COW!!!
  • The four pillars of gaming: strategy, achievement, narrative, community.
  • Each person has a different balance of what they’re interested in.
  • Here is the paper that John Seely Brown and Douglas wrote about multi-player games.
  • [This "movement" is stunning. This game takes 100 hours just to do some basic stuff. Then hundreds of hours to get to an "endgame" (like a quest) where people can work together to achieve a goal (like finding and slaying a dragon together.)
  • [This is tying together some very deep-rooted human drives - sharing, learning, teaching, self-development, coaching/mentoring, creating, building community, creative instinct, building economies, establishing reputations, building identity, and many more.]
  • The distinction between real and immersive is over
  • Here is a clip of South park playing World of Warcraft that is pretty funny (if you don’t like South Park and don’t know anything about World of Warcraft, the humour will be lost on you.)
• Session 7 / High Order Bit: Ben Trott, Six Apart
  
  • Talking about Vox
  • “open data is as important as open source”
  • it should be easy for people to get their data in and out of your service.
  • Vox is a place to aggregate people’s identit, pulling from google, youtube, amazon.com, yahoo, etc.
  • GData, + OpenSearch + Media RSS = Open Media Profile (a new service that allows people to access all media at any service.)
  • [Vox is an example of what Boris Mann and I were calling the "me-sphere" - the place that aggregates all of my stuff from all of the other sites into one larger identity.]
  • It can pull your existing blog items from your existing services.
  • [I checked out the site afterwards - not sure I "get it". You can only have private, familiy, and public. No ad-hoc groups. Most people would live in ad-hoc groups. It has obviously been designed to aim at the family crowd but it will be interesting to see if they get any take-up there. And the no ad-hoc groups settings simply makes their pool of potential users smaller without adding anything of value to the ones that sign up.]
• Session 8/ Discussion with Arthur Sulzberger Jr.,  NY Times, and Barry Diller, News Corp:
  
  • Question: Is Google friend or foe? Diller: You can work together on the one hand and then go into a room and beat the hell out of each other and that’s okay. That’s the way of the world.
  • Question: what if Google dominates your industry and you become just inventory supply for Google? Diller: the media industry has been 6-7 companies switching positions over time. Who cares who is leading?
  • Question: Where is the growth? Diller: advertising properties for sure, but there are other properties that are growing faster.
  • Question: Where are you going to get content? Diller: The time has come (finally) to begin CREATING content sometime in the next couple of years. I’m not talking 2 minute shorts, and not feature films but something in the middle. You can create something in the middle.
  • Question: what do you want to say about politicians? Diller: Net neutrality is a joke. Who’s on the other side?? It would be insane to let the net fragmentation people win. It’s a magic box – the first time in history that we can push a button and publish something across the world. Why would we screw that up?
  • Audience question: NYTimes isn’t capitalizing on citizen journalism the way that BBC or others are doing? Why not? Answer: We’re continuing to go that direction but have had to balance against the fact that we have our name on that post once it’s posted.
  • Audience question: I’m building a social media network. How do I keep building value? Diller: Don’t sell it to private equity for god’s sake. Equity is built by holding on. You may have to sell a bit of it. If you want to build equity, hold onto it if you want to create equity value. If I was buying you, I would have a different story but you’re asking me for advice here in this session and that’s my real advice.

What were the highlights of the day? Here are some of the most interesting things that come to mind in no particular order:

• I met Rich Levandov, General Partner at Masthead Venture Partners and got to hear all about Chumby, the coolest little device I have heard of in a long while. It is a small touch screen device that has wi-fi built in and that can display flash widgets, exchange and display photos from your friends, and which could have a ton of uses. BRILLIANT! I wish the team all the best. This
  has so many applications, their biggest challenge will be staying focused!
• Watching Eric Schmidt speak was a real treat. He was sharp, incisive, didn’t go for the fake bait that was offered up by John Battelle, and answered the questions in a very forthright manner. I particularly liked his comments on the recent Department of Justice
  subpoena issue. Battelle questioned him on how Google would comply (or not) with the Patriot Act and unfortunately Schmidt said, “We would comply with the law” which means that even though the law is too far-reaching and draconian, they would have to follow it. (That atrocious piece of legal police state infrastructure says that companies that are required to provide information under the act are not allowed to tell the public that they are being forced to give up their data.)
• Barry Diller was entertaining and seemed like he “gets it”.
• Sulzberger looked like he was trying to convey the message, “Hey, we’re really part of the cool kids – can we hang out?” and came across really lame.
• My other overwhelming impression of the day was that the spectrum of understanding of web 2.0 is still very broad. I would describe it as a standard power law diagram. A few people who know a LOT, some people in the middle who know some, and the rest of the universe that knows very little and the tail goes a LOOOOONNNGG way out. Consider that 50% of U.S. businesses are not even on the web yet. We’ll be having “Blogging 101″ conversations for YEARS.

That’s about it. Interesting day, but I suspect that tomorrow will be the meat of the event.

This is appalling.

I urge everybody to watch this:

QUOTE

The survey showed that 27 percent of respondents supported requiring all Muslim Americans to register where they lived with the federal government. Twenty-two percent favored racial profiling to identify potential terrorist threats. And 29 percent thought undercover agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations to keep tabs on their activities and fund-raising.

UNQUOTE

The original Cornell press release link is here.

Currently listening to (ironically) Robin S – Show Me Love (Stonebridge mix) from the album “Club Sounds Vol. 27 CD2″

(Thanks to William Gibson’s blog for the link)

QUOTE

December 10, 2004

A Taste of the System

02:07 AM | Current Affairs/ Drugs/ Politics

Since the election, as you’ve doubtless noticed, I haven’t had much to say here.

Having lost that crusade – and I do think we lost, election skullduggery notwithstanding – I have been quietly gathering myself up for the countless smaller contests arrayed before us that, taken collectively, will determine the future of freedom in America. We can’t afford to lose many of those, and we will have to emulate our authoritarian adversaries’ disciplined resolve if we are are to prevail.

As it happens, I am already personally engaged in one of these battles, and it has been testing my resolve for over a year. Now that it seems to be coming to a head, I want to tell you about it. My own liberty is at stake, but so, I think, is the liberty of anyone who wishes to travel in America without fear of humiliation or arrest.

On September 15, 2003, shortly after Burning Man, I was hauled off an airplane that was about to depart San Francisco for New York and charged with the misdemeanor possession of controlled substances that had allegedly been discovered during a search of my checked baggage.

I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to relate this event. Embarrassment certainly played no part. Generally, I like to be fully disclosed, no matter how far I may wander beyond the normative fringe. I suppose that, for legal reasons, I wanted to avoid any apparent admission of guilt, and only now do I realize that it’s possible to tell this tale without making one. This is because, in most cases – and this is almost certainly one of them – contraband that is illegally discovered does not legally exist. If that seems a technicality to you, you may want to re-read the 4th Amendment, as well as the subsequent case law (notably Mapp v. Ohio) which sets forth the “exclusionary rule.” However shredded by the War on Some Drugs, the 4th Amendment remains part of the Constitution. In order to see that it goes on meaning something, I decided to fight this charge and have spent the last 14 months doing so.

Now I will tell you my story.

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The plan underlying Fallujah’s ID scheme and phased return may be an effort to stop it reverting to a hostile no-go area for security forces, but it’s doubtful that this could entirely work. It won’t be possible to stop arms and insurgents who haven’t been issued with ID from infiltrating an area of this size, nor (once they have) will it be feasible to operate intensive ID checks that could maintain a ‘clean’ population. By keeping sufficient forces there and keeping a tight lid on the movement of the inhabitants it may be possible to stop Fallujah from blowing up again, but that isn’t of major significance against the backdrop of the rest of Iraq, and most of the things governments anticipate they could do with biometric ID in a peaceful society aren’t going to be particularly relevant.

At the moment, however, the biometric factor has a relevance in terms of producing some kind of local census backed up by a difficult to forge ID that can be tied to the individual. In areas that have been secured, it will be possible to do a local check on the ID, but that clearly only applies in secured areas where the population has submitted to the ID programme. And as the marines are not going to be able to secure, Fallujah-style, the whole of Iraq, it’s difficult to see this one as anything other than a weird experiment without any obvious long-term pay-off.

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Listening to Karunesh / Alibaba from the album “Buddha Bar II – Dinner” by Claude Challe

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Three “bored” German teenagers blew a staggering £80 million (₠130 million) in just two hours after they ran amok in an online spending spree.

Using stolen credit card details the trio bought airplanes, works of art, designer clothes, restaurants, industrial machinery, patents and sound systems.

They were arrested by police on Friday more than six weeks after carrying out their astonishing haul.

According to Reuters, when police asked them why they had done, they said they were bored. ®

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Something says to me that the systems we are building are fundamentally flawed when this can just “happen.” In the meantime, make sure your teenager signs up for every sport and club you can find. Oh, and while you’re at it, you might want to have a few discussions about basic morality. Yikes.

Listening to Halcyon from the album “Behind The Sun” by Chicane

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The Massive Change project encompasses a variety of media including a book, an international exhibition, public events, a radio program. The online forum and film are in the process of being created.

I had the good fortune to be given, as a present for completing my 35th year outside of the womb, a ticket to attend a day long series of panel discussions with some very brilliant minds of the day including such visionaries as Esther Dyson (Chairman of EDVenture Holdings – a venture capital firm, and author of Release 1.0), and Dean Kamen (creator of the Segway.)

The day was broken up into five separate conversations on a theme with a moderator and two panelists. The subject matter included the continued exponential expansion of the “global mind”; wealth & politics; evolution’s designs (biology as template); urban design, space, and transportation; and finally military applications of design and the transfer of technology from the military to the public sector and also in reverse.

I did not take a lot of notes as I did not have a laptop with me so this posting contains some overall impressions, a few specific notes, and a few of my own thoughts on some of the discussion points.

Session 1: Information and Image: Building the Global Mind
With: Bill Buxton: human/computer interface researcher and designer and Esther Dyson: venture capitalist, and general techno-diva.

Interestingly Esther has no phone at home, nor does she drive a car. I figured that if she doesn’t drive a car, she must live in New York. I checked the address of EDventure holdings and sure enough, that’s where it is. I’m not sure that’s where she lives, but where else could somebody with her schedule get by without a car?

I was really expecting a lot from this session but Esther couldn’t seem to connect to Bill’s conversation at all. Bill on the other hand was engaging, energetic, and driven. I could have listened to or talked with him for hours.

Esther gave the audience a long explanation of her work with ICANN over the past couple of years and if I may be so bold as to summarize it, it was this:

It sounded like she had been through a war.

Bill Buxton, having for the most part, his own conversation on his side of the stage waxed poetic about why Alvin Toffler’s ideas were wrong the night before, how humans can’t think on large timescales (or was that Dyson?), and how it is impossible to be a renaissance person but that the way to handle that is to build renaissance teams.

One of the interesting points of his conversation was where he talked about James Murray, one of the key editors of the Oxford dictionary, perhaps the single largest open-source off-line project in the world, where every word in every book in the history of the English language had to be found, traced, and documented. A fascinating history can be found over here at Wikipedia.  According to Buxton, this type of document exists in no other language in the world.

Unfortunately for this session and two others, Bruce Mau moderated it and while I think he did a superlative job with organizing the whole Massive Change project, he is not a moderator and that role should have been handled all day by somebody like Charlie Rose who moderated sessions 2 and 4. Without a strong moderator, the conversations did not connect, the panelists were often left trying to fill the space on their own, and a lot less real content was delivered in the end.

Session 2: Wealth and Politics: Is the World Getting Better?
With: Andrew Zolli, founder of Z+Partners, specializing in analyzing cultural and economic shifts, design innovations and strategies for ethical leadership and Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, worldwide syndicated columnist and sustainable development consultant.

My take-away from Andrew was that there are serious demographic changes that will drive severe global economic changes and that those forces are different in different countries. He gave a brief tutorial on the work that he does with the Demographics Society, showing the various demographic bell-curves of various countries. He showed a normal curve (looks like a bell); the U.S. curve (lots of kids at the bottom makes it like bell-bottomed pants); and terrorist  states (lots of young men, no economic middle class, very few old people to lead the society).

The fundamental message from Hazel and from the work that she has been so passionately involved in for many years was that the currently used metrics of capitalist economies around the world, are wrong. GDP and GNP are measuring the wrong thing. What gets measured (pure economic output), improves. Therefore we increase efficiency to bump up the numbers but we end up with high outputs and a lousy society. So her goal is to build a new set of measurements and then disseminate those far and wide in the hope that if countries were measuring quality of life rather than just pure economic outputs, they would at least have a useful measuring stick.

This was a topic of frequent conversation when I attended the Environmental Studies department at UVic a decade ago. For example, if you introduce a set of policies and environmental carcinogens that end up causing a higher incidence of cancer, which in turn requires more expensive doctor visits….voilá…higher GDP. Often, extremely negative real-world results translate into higher GDP rankings.

One of the new measurement systems that Hazel discussed is the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators:

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Helen managed to bring up a few more issues noted here:

• Her friend Jeremy Rifkin has just launched his new book titled The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream.

[I have another of Jeremy Rifkin's books titled The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World and it is an incredible read. I am also interested in his book The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth but have not yet had a chance to read it.]

• Another interesting website/project that is currently underway is Freecycle.org, an international free + recycling project where people can give and receive things that they have to other people in their local community. So rather than keeping that old box of cables, many of which you probably paid $10-30 for, you can list them on Freecycle. Then somebody else who happens to need that thing can come by and get it from you – for free. There is no bartering, all of the items listed must be given free of charge.

[I subscribed to their site which actually runs the listings using Yahoo Groups with notifications that come into your mailbox of your mail client which you can set up a rule for to siphon off into a Freecycle folder. I would prefer to see it done via something like Craigslist and using RSS feeds, but hopefully they'll get there.]

Session 3: Designing Evolution
With: Janine M. Benyus, author of Biomimicry and advocate of nature based design innovation and John Todd, biologist and designer of Eco Machines for the treatment of waste, food production, generation of fuel and water treatment.

Janine began the session with an overview of biomimetic design principles by examining the stage furniture (chair, table, water jug) and explained the differences between how nature would make a material and how we make that same material using toxic, ecologically wasteful processes.

Then John Todd discussed his eco-machines, large greenhouses that contain a few thousand species of creatures and plants from all five bio-kingdoms – monera, protista, plantae, fungi, animalia – a classification that has recently been usurped by a three domain model.

Some notes from his waste-water Eco-machine:

• to build an eco-machine, you combine ecologies and direct them towards a goal; to do this, he combines ecologies in order to solve particular problems;

• he can build systems that require only 1/10 of the inputs of a traditional man-made system;

• his sewage treatment Eco-Machine treats 100,000 gallons / day of sewage and outputs perfectly clean water. The input speed has no effect on the output quality.

• in order to build something of this complexity, he can’t plan it. He can only build them by combining several thousand species from all five kingdoms and then let them self-select out until they find their balance equilibrium at which point there are usually still around 300 unique species left in the Eco-Machine.

Back to Janine Benyus, she discussed her new project called “Google for Biodiversity.”

She started by getting a bunch of biologists together with a bunch of industrial designers. She then had the designers say things like, “I would like to build a pump.” Then the biologists would go away, compile all the information on the 24 pumps found across 68 creatures (I made those numbers up) and then present that to the designer. The designer would find the one that was the best fit, replicate it using other materials, and then voila – biomimetically inspired pump design! However, this was very labour intensive. The biologists and designers didn’t speak the same language. And the biological data was not organized by function, but by animal.  So, “Google for Biodiversity” was formed.

The goal of this project is to catalog all biological data by function rather than by animal and then to build a translator between the biology world and the design world, such that a designer working on a project can say, “I need a solar desalinization device” and then the website will identify all of the potential possibilities that exist in the world’s creatures and allow the designer to pick and choose from that of the mango for example, and try to replicate the function in his design.

The problem is a difficult one. The two ontologies do not connect and have to be mapped to each other. The biological data is currently referenced by creature, not by function. And having biologists and designers sit side by side is expensive and not very scaleable.

Janine and her students are currently building a proof of concept of this system where they have tagged 12 species of creature appropriately and can now search the animals using designer language.

I asked Janine whether or not she was using Semantic Web tools to build her system, and surprisingly she wasn’t and in fact, had never heard of the semantic web at all. I suggested to her that she should look into it as it would help her with the ontological mapping and tagging. It would also be interesting to see if you could deploy something like Axonwave‘s NLP-based tools to assist the humans by applying the semantic tags or else aiding in the re-categorization of biological data by function.

My favourite quote of Janine’s was: “Limits [of resources] should be considered by designers as a design contest – an opportunity to exercise their skill in designing efficient mechanisms.”

However, I personally believe that the best way to ensure that this happens in any particular area is for constraints to be quantified, clarified, and made explicit. And in those cases where they don’t exist, make them up if you have to. Humans rarely if ever design efficiently for the sheer challenge of it. Design is hard enough as it is. They wait until they are pushed into it. That is why the best thing that could happen to alternative energy development would be for something horrendous to occur that jacks oil up to $500/barrel – a 10x multiple over its current Fall 2004 price. THAT would boost spending and ingenuity in the energy/transportation sector like nothing else. Designers the world over would engage their efficiency creativity and you can be darned sure that automobiles would be getting 100mph in about 12 months.

Session 4: Urban Space, Movement, and Energy
With: Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, entrepreneur, founder of DEKA Research that builds the stair-climbing wheelchair; and Jaime Lerner, architect and former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, where he revolutionized transit and recycling programs.

Lerner spoke on the history of Curitiba, Brazil and his mayoralty there. When he first became mayor and the city was at 600,000 people and approaching a million, he was advised by mayors of all of the other major cities of the world that he absolutely HAD to build a light rail transit system. Fortunately for Curitiba, they did not have the money to do so. So he built a bus system that ended up surpassing most if not all LRT systems in the world, that is self-funding (it pays for itself and requires no subsidies) and that moves more people than LRT systems at 1/8 of the cost. It has been hailed the world over as a transportation model to be applied to many of the world’s cities as they face increased density, and mounting LRT construction and legal costs and timelines.

He talked about how New York has been talking for FIFTY years about putting an LRT line on 2nd Avenue. They have finally approved it. But it will take twenty years to build. Seventy years of not moving people because the solution is so drastically expensive and difficult to execute!!

Here were some of Lerner’s notes:

• live work and play in one part of the city. Separating functions is an economic and ecological disaster in the making.

• when you build transit, stay on the surface – don’t tunnel and don’t go above ground – both are expensive in terms of land-buy-backs and both are slow in terms of actual people moved across distances because of having to go underground and then above. Most of all, stay on the surface to minimize the costs of building underground or above ground on raised platforms.

• Ignore the peer pressure that says you need an LRT. You don’t. No city does.

• Curitiba moves 2 million people per day by bus. It pays for itself from ticket revenue.

• if a regular bus can move X people per day through the city, there are a couple of things you can do to get higher multiples. If you have a dedicated lane, that bus can move 2x the people. If that bus is articulated, then you can move another 1.7x the people. If that bus is a double-bus, it can move 2.5x the people. Add that all up and they are getting an 8.5x multiple over using a regular stand-alone bus! Because they are using double-decker articulated buses that get their own dedicated bus lanes all through the city. BRILLIANT.

• another awesome part of their buses is that to get on a bus you enter a bus-tube that is a tube-shaped building at the bus-stop. You pay to go into the tube, and then when the bus arrives five sets of doors on the bus open into the tube platform. It’s like an LRT but only two bus-lengths long. So the people can move in/out of the bus in 5 or 10 seconds and then all of the doors shut and the bus moves off again. When you leave the bus, you then exit the tube from the opposite end you entered from. This tube-platform minimizes idle time and keeps the passengers sheltered from the weather.

• Their buses arrive at the tube every 30 seconds. As he noted, many people do not like taking the bus because they have to learn the routes and the timing or they waste a lot of time. Well, if a bus is coming by every 30 seconds, that’s not an issue!

• Recycling is handled by exchanging items of value for the goods that need to be recycled. Even the poorest squatters are paid for their garbage with tickets for the buses, or food from outlying farms. Curitiba recycles 2/3 of its garbage, one of the highest urban recycling rates in the world.

• Even the fishermen are paid to clean up the ocean. They are paid if they catch fish, and they are paid by the city if they catch garbage like tires or car parts.

My favourite quote of Lerner’s was: “The city is not a problem; it is a solution.”

I loved this guy. He laughed quickly and easily and it was obvious that he was extremely passionate about the principles that they had used to build Curitiba. He was also pleased that at last count, 87 more cities had begun to build using these same principles. But it had taken 20 years for that to happen!

–

Dean Kamen spoke about his motivation to build the Segway 2 wheeled device.

• When Ford built the car, 9% of people lived in cities.

• As of 2000, >50% of the global population lived in cities (>3.2B of 6.4B).

• the average speed of the automobile in most cities is 9mph, the same speed of the Segway.

• he feels that the car is designed for the freeway and should absolutely be used to drive on the freeway, but then it should be left at the city gates in much the way that horses and carts were also left outside the ancient cities. We should be using other forms of transportation from the outer ring to the inner core of the city.

I have to say that as much as I like Dean Kamen and as cool as the Segway is, even I wouldn’t run around on one because they’re just so….geeky(?) I’m not sure what it is but something bugs me about them. Maybe it’s just the dorkiness factor. I can’t quite pin it down.

Also, bikes widely distributed by the city and covered bike routes would do more for commuters than expensive electric Segways everywhere, although Paris is trying an experiment with them.

I think the biggest difference between the panelists was the following. One had built an incredible city of 1.6 million people on ecological principles and the values of simple, cheap, and quick. Kamen was trying to solve the commute problem by adding a heavy, electricity-using scooter that was difficult to get up and down stairs and that would pretty much require putting a rack onto your vehicle in order to carry. It is the solution for cities that we don’t actually have. I mean, I give the guy points for long term fifty year vision, but I still don’t get it. And there are a lot of other things we can do that are cheap, quick, and simple like Lerner has done.

(To be continued…)

One section of the new proposed legislation:

Another section in the Senate legislation proposes setting up:

In other words, you will be required to carry your national ID card which contains biometric (finger-print or retina scan) data) and then show it at all checkpoints along your trip. What the f**k is going on here? How is this possible? What has happened to the wild west? What has happened to the fiery independence of the forefathers of your country who said, “No more Britain, no more Queen, no more taxes, no more control.” Your government has turned into one of the most Orwellian right-wing surveillance loving countries in the world all while saying, “and you will also have your civil liberties.” Your citizens continue to bend over and take it, because you’re trading your virginity for being kept safe from Witches, Communists, Pinkos, Terrorists.  With each degree that your government adds to the pot, the American frog citizens say:

Bullshit.

Your own government is keeping you terrified far more than anybody else would.

The sad thing is that from here in Canada, where we would rather spend money on healthcare and cheap submarines, we don’t have the money to spend tracking each and every person. In fact, I don’t think we actually care that much. Sure we have the CSE, our version of your NSA. But I’m betting it has 1/1000th of the black budget. Our CSE guys are probably lucky to get two-year old desktop computers and some spare servers from Revenue Canada. Even our Joint Task Force (the Canadian version of the Navy Seals) has only a few hundred soldiers on active duty.

We watch the American citizen’s march towards the abyss of complete and total surveillance but we can’ t look away. It’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion – horrible, yet so intriguing.

As I have said before, we Canadians love you Americans, we just despise your government of the day. Kind of like the rest of the world. Feel free to move up here anytime. In fact, we may even accept you as refugees if you have to dodge the new draft that may be on its way.

• outsourcing is a good thing and in the bigger picture not an issue because it’s not a zero-sum game – he gives a 200 year view of these similar trends;
• China is committed to building 50 MIT equivalent institutions;
• their move towards generating intellectual property may result in them actually caring about same;
• computer technology will disperse and become ubiquitous – routers, desktop computers and servers will disappear – [I have a hard time with the server part.]
• IT departments will become Information Departments, focused on privacy, data protection, and security against pathogens;
• humans and machines will merge through the application of nano-machinery and nano-computing intelligence added into the body and brain;
• culture shock won’t happen because of the boiling frog theory (my paraphrase);
• biotech is just beginning [I agree, we're only 36 years into what may well be another standard 80-100 year technology cycle.]
• we currently have the means through diet and supplementation (he takes 250 supplements per day) to slow down aging such that the person can still be around to take advantage of biotech discoveries that will allow them to rebuild their bodies and brains in order to live a longer life;

I love Ray Kurzweil because his interviews and writings are always so completely outrageous to most people.

And my favourite quote of all was when the interviewer, in response to the augmented intelligence comments, asked him, “Aren’t you smart enough already?”

Ray replied:

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I love this because I relate! I am interested in so many fields that I find it difficult to specialize and deepen my skillset in any one of them.

Bruce has been commenting a lot lately on the American government’s inept security practices, many of which are designed to make the government APPEAR to be doing something, while in fact doing little or worse, causing even more problems than they solve.

I highly recommend Bruce’s books as well:

Bruce also runs a really cool company called Counterpane Security in the U.S. that provides managed security services to enterprise and business customers. I believe that his model will eventually take over the entire security market for business.

As an aside, what is with all of the American security programs and their Orwellian names: The Trusted Traveller, SecureFlight, and the Trucker’s Spying Program called Highway Watch.

I don’t know about you but that seems to pretty clearly articulate that the attack will happen to Kerry and not Bush.

When I attended a Privacy conference about four years ago in Quebec, a Microsoft rep was there talking about how sender authentication and public-key infrastructure was the answer. He was roundly panned by every single one of the other panelists as being out of touch with reality and with confusing Identification with Authorization – two totally different concepts. Authorization does not rely on a positive identification of the sender/human.

Until email costs money to send, we will continue to be barraged with spam.