Homophily aka Birds of a Feather

Homophily, or homo (same) - phily (love), is the love of the same, referring to our tendency to bond and associate with people who are a lot like ourselves. We're comfortable with people who are similar to ourselves, they share our deities and demons, they're invested in the same status quo that we are, and they don't challenge our assumptions.

Recognizing that there's very little new under the sun, let me point out that we learned this in school. Please complete this sentence: "birds of a feather, _______ _______".

Homophily can be expressed geographically, intellectually, spiritually, politically, culturally, socially - it's all over the place. It's a (mal)-function of social networks.

Maybe that's why Pittsburgh BlogFest 17 was so comfortable.

It's Why everyone you know thinks the same as you - you've selected each other.

Homophily is a problem in social media, the new darling of Web 2.0. If you're building a social media space, homophily is both a feature and a bug. It helps build community, but then it limits growth and makes the conversation polarized and shrill.

Homophily is a problem in web information systems, too. If people are free to self-select content, they will select the content and sites that reinforce their homophily. Drudge / Koz, po-tay-to / po-tah-toe.

In an information economy, drawing most of your awareness from sources that comfortably reinforce your own Weltanschauung can lead to isolation, group think, and data corruption through inbred feedback. Bad decisions, bad investments, bad things all follow.

How do we combat homophilia in ourselves? Tryangulation blogs about a homophily self-exam. We can seek multiple sources of information (I read The Atlantic, The Economist, and Utne Reader, and I surf BBC.com for news just to seek outside perspectives - but I bet most of my friends are doing the same thing.)

How do we combat homophily in the information systems we build? It helps to include affordances that easily extend out of the comfort zone. It also helps to build in a certain amount of serendipity, which Ethan Zuckerman believes is a counter-force to homophily. So, for instance, if you're building a recommendation engine, instead of rejecting outlying points that don't fit the profile, you use them as bridges to a new potential cluster.

It's an interesting question that calls for a dynamic serendipity function in a content management or layout system. Can the site glean clues, serve temptations, build a new normal, then move on? How about a Serendipity-As-A-Service (SerAAS) server? That would truly be a better mousetrap.

More...

Sin Tax II : California Dreaming

I know that, at the end of my last post about taxing obnoxious behavior and becoming beholden to the tax revenue, I promised to "strive to refrain from moralistic posts for ninety days". Oops.

Perhaps this isn't a new post but rather a continuation of my last post. From Tuesday's LA Times:

Taxing pot could become a political toking point
An Assemblyman from San Francisco argues that it's time to tax and regulate the state's biggest cash crop in the same manner as alcohol. Opponents say it would create new costs for society. Buoyed by the widely held belief that cannabis is California's biggest cash crop, Assemblyman Tom Ammiano contends it is time to reap some state revenue from that harvest while putting a damper on drug use by teens, cutting police costs and even helping Mother Nature. more..
Going back to my pithy distillation from the previous post, "don't whore your mother": I wonder what Momma Ammiano will look like in stilletos and a boa?

Syntax of Sin Tax and the Goverment-Military-Industrial Complex

This is a rant, way off my normal beat (Bikes, Bytes, Burgh), but and I hope it works. I've been noodling for a while about the current trend of public revenue sources, and a recent post at Pgh is a City prompted me to take up the keyboard.

Once upon a time, some behaviors were recognized as inconsistent with the public good, and at various times we have made them illegal (which is what we do with such things). These activities have included pornography, prostitution, gambling, loan sharking, drinking, and Sunday shopping. Used to be, there were rules against these things.

Funny things happen over time. "New normals" evolve, and when too much strife is going on there's a tendency to "define deviancy down". (I miss DP Moynihan.)

Sunday used to be a different day than the rest of the week. Blue laws closed clothing and liquor stores. No beer at convenience stores. No shooting at the range before noon. Sunday was a day for Church and Family. (This was back before Sunday was a day for Custody and Visitation.)

Stores wanted to open on Sunday. The new shopping centers wanted the money; the malls got waivers, and then the mom-and-pops felt the pinch. The money reached out to the politicians, and the rules were changed. Now if you work in a store, you're working Sundays and you're not in church or with your family. Does anybody believe that the total amount of money spent in the mall increased by 1/6th when they went from six days to seven days? But We've given Sundays away, we'll never put Humpty Dumpty together again, and I'm at a loss to say how we've benefited. If a group advocated closing stores on Sunday, pundits would wag "oh no, can't do that, if we lose the tax receipts we'd have to change seniors more for their prescriptions, and Aunt Mary will be eating catfood and cutting her pills in half". Hoisted on our own petard.

Drinking isn't a total evil; see the famous "If by whiskey" speech for the two sides of that coin. There's a lot of bad things that come from drinking: alcoholics, drunk driving, domestic violence, paychecks spent at the bar. There's money to be made, though; it's rare to see a bar or a distillery go out of business. There's an industry that has a stake in legal drinking, and they're not going to let the law mess with it. Prohibition tried once, but but the industry won in the end. And goverment makes money on it, especially in Allegheny County with the Onorato drink tax; we can't campaign against public drunkedness on the South Side, we need the tax receipts to keep the 35A bus from running out to Century Three Mall, even if they won't let the bus into the parking lot.

Cigarettes. Is there possibly any reason why these are legal, other than the money and the industry's influence? It kills our people, they die nasty extended deaths, the industry takes the profits and society pays for the hospitals and hospices, and we bemoan the tragedy of cancer without looking at root causes. Government taxes cigarettes heavily, which has the initial positive effect of making smoking somewhat more expensive, but while the long term effect is that government is dependent on tax receipts from smoking. We let this industry market death to our children because they let us put tax stamps on the cartons.



Gambling? Look at the state falling all over itself trying to figure out where to place the casinos. No community has benefited from casinos, which leach money out of the local population. But we don't want our people to go to Ohio or West Virginia, we want to abuse them right here because we want the tax receipts. There's a lot of money; casinos don't go out of business. Complete this sentence: The house always __________. The industry touches the politicians, and anybody who objects is a priggish moralist. We permit a once-illegal activity because of the money, justified by the artificial rhetoric of competition and tax receipts.

Prostitution? Too far out? Inconceivable, you say?? Illyrias' recent post describing a future Gov. Rendell legalizing and taxing NorthSide hookers North Shore sex workers is what prompted me to start writing this; it's the inevitable incremental step. Why are Burghers going to Vegas? What can they get there that they can't get here? Can't have them going to Morgantown for cash business, can we?

I thought about this topic, and I said to myself, this is a great evergreen story - I can jot this down on my list of things to blog about, and it's safe to let it sit for a few weeks until I get around to it, it's a timeless story that isn't going to be overcome by events (OBE'd). Then I read about the New York pornography tax crisis, and I realized that Illyrias' prediction was spot on.

New York has a funding crisis, and Governor Patterson proposes a tax on movie downloads - and not just the Sound of Music, mind you, but also Debbie Does Dallas. Porn industry spokesmen (just think about the existence of that phrase) complain that porn is part of the essence of New York, that tourists come to Times Square to buy these DVDs, and that taxing pornography is an attack upon the essence of New York. This unbelievable story makes Illerias' prediction seem all too inevitable.

Here's what I see: we've embraced things that were once unacceptable because of the tax receipts, and now we've got a vested interest in their survival, if not their success.

• I believe there are funding sources that are always unacceptable. Don't whore your mother.
• I think Thoreau would agree: what you tax, ends up owning you.
• If government (ie, us) wasn't paying for the cancer deaths, the blighted neighborhoods, and the corporate bailouts, and if industry wasn't taking huge amounts out of the population, we wouldn't have the expenses we're paying for, and we'd have more money to pursue the right priorities.
• I don't want to live in Las Vegas, New Orleans, or Amsterdam, and I don't mind missing their tax receipts.
• Here we go Steelers, here we...

I am reminded of the government-military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in his swansong speech.


Ike was right that the government-military-industrial complex is a powerful force in the federal system, but I think it's a sign of how far we've gone that the goverment-industry complex is also a persistent force in local government.

I will strive to avoid writing anything moralistic for the next ninety days.

Pittsburgh Blogfest 17 Report

I had the pleasure of attending Pittsburgh Blogfest 17 this evening at Finnegan's Wake on the North Side. It was a very nice session, well attended, a lot of good conversation.

I met Time Bastard and that's always a treat. Also met Cynthia, one of the hosts of the evening. I met a coder who blogs on aggregated code solutions, and another who's worked on face recognition software and now on computer storage systems.

I got to meet Dennis Roddy and compliment him on his Slate article about racism in southwestern Pennsylvania (I thought it was an excellent, courageous piece). I got to meet Illyrias and compliment her recent post where she speculated about the governor's sin tax program inevitably legalizing and taxing prostitutes to balance the budget.

I got to say hello to one of the principles of 2 Political Junkies, and I was pleased to get to say hello to Woy. I was completely outclassed when John Neill gave me a business card with his blog and contact info. Very nice.

I met three of the five bloggers of Mind Bling, (Cause brains are the new pretty). They were cool, and we had an intriguing discussion of multi-voice blogs; how do readers know there's really five bloggers, not just one writer blogging as five characters? I think that would be an interesting delivery for a novel. I met Nathan of PLCB_Power_User.

Things that pleasantly surprised me were (1) it wasn't a geek-guy throng, it was a very balanced room, and (2) the people weren't introverts.

Tour of California: Theft, A Debut, New Tech, Suffering

Someone stole Lance's time trial bike.

Lance Armstrong's time trial bike, which he rode to 10th place in the prologue, was stolen off a team truck along with three other bikes. The other bikes stolen belong to Janez Brajkovic, Steve Morabito and Yaroslav Popovych.

In a wonderful example of Social Media, Lance immediately Twitter'd an all-points-bulletin and offered a reward.

This bike doesn't even have a kickstand. If I ended up with it, I'd have to put racks and fenders on it.

Media presents the innocent savant, raised in the wild. Canada.

Svein Tuft makes his big-league cycling debut, promoted by the media as a Canadian youth who grew up in the mountains, spending seasons riding his bike with his dog. Tuft disdained cycling's drug culture so much that he left cycling; he was persuaded to come back because he was promised that (1) his team would be drug-free and (2) he was welcome to disappear back into the mountains in the off-season.

This is the best "noble savage" story in bicycling since the media introduced that Amish guy, what was his name, Floyd Landis. But Tuft is the story you want to believe even though you know you shouldn't - when they hired him to report to a Los Angeles training camp in 2003, he rode his bike there (from Canada). This fellow will be an interesting story, and time will tell if he's another Lance, another Floyd, or another Sidd Finch.

New technology introduced - electric gear shifting

Shimano’s electric shifting system, known as the Dura-Ace Di2 7970, is being used by three professional teams competing in California: Columbia High Road, Garmin Slipstream and Rabobank. This is a trial to see how the new gear holds up before the three Grand Tours (Tour de France, the Giro, and the Vuelta). For time trialists, the new system allows riders to maintain their aero tuck even when shifting.

Stage One : Riders in the Storm

This is what Francisco Mancebo looked like as he won Stage One. Let me say that when a guy who gets paid to show his sponsor's logo crosses the finish line looking like that, he hasn't had any fun, and neither has anybody trying to stay with him. Imagine doing that for 107.6 miles. That's a lot of suffering and work.

Stage Two : Monday

Thomas Peterson (Garmin-Slipstream) won today's stage - I love the argyle team kit! Last year's winner and California favorite Levi Leipheimer (Astana) grabs the yellow jersey as the overall leader. Fabian Cancellara, who won Saturday's prologue, withdrew from the race at the first feed zone.

Art Not Ads or Tivo My Web

One of the things that's very cool about open source software is that people can contribute things that they think are worthy, and the community decides. If you want a new feature on Firefox (the web browser), you can build it yourself and submit a plug-in. Firefox allows users to choose "plug-ins" that change the browsing experience. This is very significant; can you imagine Microsoft opening up the Internet Explorer API so that people could play around? Not likely.

Plug-ins for Firefox are consistent with web standards; nobody re-writes a web page to leverage a Firefox plug-in. The plug-ins improve the browser, not the website.

My favorite Firefox plug-in is FastDial, which presents a visual favorites page -- thumbnail links in a flat menu. I still bookmark sites I find important, because (1) I think that our trails through the web are valuable, and (2) I hate feeling like I've come down with amnesia infonesia and can't find something that I know I've seen. FastDial is for the websites I routinely visit.

Who pays for the web? There's four primary cash sources for the internet - pornography, gambling, advertising, and online sales. Google, for instance, sells advertising. They do it brilliantly, they bring remarkable benefits, but (right now) they're an advertising company.

Some people don't like ads on their websites. It's especially problematic if you don't have a high-speed connection, and the bandwidth to get the ad through the internet pipes slows down your surfing. If you're paying for your web connection, you're paying to download advertisements. Plugins called ad blockers let you do something about that.

Tivo is to Television, what ad blockers are to the Internet. Think about the phrase "tivo the web" - fifteen years ago that didn't mean anything to anybody.

If you're a company selling ad space on your website (hello, New York Times, losing money on the print side and betting the company on profiting on the web side) this is a strategic threat that cannot be understated. Some key sites have considered blocking Firefox users as a second front in the ad-blocker wars.

Advertisers unintentionally helped the ad-blockers by implementing standard sizes for web advertisements - if you're trying to block ads, you can be pretty sure that an image that's 468x60 pixels is an advertisement. The standard ad sizes were developed because it saved the industry from negotiating each individual ad placement. At the time, they probably thought it was a great idea. It's killing them now.

I believe that one of the main reasons Google invested in developing Chrome is that they recognize the threat of ad-blockers and Firefox plugins. Google Chrome hopes to present an experience so nifty that you won't care about the ads - which is their core competency. If you sell advertising, you need to make sure people see the ads.

Usually, ad blockers will present white space in the area where the advertisement would have been.

There's a new plug-in, Add-Art that offers to replace the advertisements on the sites you visit with artwork. They've provided bits of art that match the standard ad sizes, and their plugin replaces the ads with artwork.


AdBlock Plus presents white space where the ads go, saving the bandwidth and minimizing distractions. Add-Art puts art there, using some bandwidth to download the art work, and presenting a more pleasant distraction.

One of the tricky things about art is that we all like A-R-T as a concept at the 30,000 feet view, but when it gets to individual servings, art may offend. One of the Add-Art shows is Making Arabs Fun, and others are potentially controversial. There's potential problems there.

Newspapers across America are dying. Print advertising revenues were decreasing before the economy went sour, and they're plummeting now. Some newspapers are trying to monetize their web operation as a lifeboat, and ad blockers are a direct challenge to that. It's very David and Goliath, and I don't think Goliath is going to win this one, either.

Mapping a Drive Letter to a Folder

Probably several times a day, I need to open a file - an image, some code - that's in a folder on my hard drive. The name of my favorite folder is C:\Inetpub\wwwroot .

So let me point out that I'm conflicted about punctuation in close proximity to URLs or IP addresses at the end of a published sentence. It's too easy to have the period at the grammatical endOfSentence misunderstood as part of the URL or IP address. I'm not the only one who's recognized this tension inherent in our system.

Several times a day, when I need to open a website file, it's Open, File, Pick the C: drive, pick Inetpub, pick WWWROOT, and then proceed. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to map C:\Inetpub\wwwroot as the W:\ drive (for Web)?

You may recognize that folder as the "localhost" for an IIS web server, which is equivalent to IP address 127.0.0.1, which brings us to this geek pun at the right:


I'm in Windows XP Pro, because I need to run IIS and the thought of Vista makes me want to cry. It seems like this virtual mapping is not that difficult a trick to accomplish. From a command prompt, you enter
    SUBST W: C:\inetpub\wwwroot (enter)

The command to delete the substitution is:
    SUBST w: /D (enter)

To find out what substitutions are in effect, type:
    SUBST (enter)

Caveat 1: When you reboot, the substitution is lost. Go to your C:/ drive and find autoexec.bat, and add the SUBST command there. Then save that file in your C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder. It amazes me that all these years after DOS "went away", we're still fooling with autoexec.bat files. That noise in the distance are voices chanting, "wouldn't have to do that if you had a Mac".

Caveat2: if you delete a file by referring to the virtual drive, it does not go to the recycling bin; it's just gone.

A tweak like this is one of the little things that makes a geek very happy.

Another geek sidebar- isn't it amazing that even after Windows 95 "did away with" DOS, when you want to do something with a WinTel computer you still use DOS commands? Is it possible they were disingenuous about this?

Pittsburgh Blogfest 17

This post copied from I Heart Pgh.

It's back: Pittsburgh Blogfest 17, February 20th, 2009. 5:30 to 9:30 pm.

Every couple of months, a group of Pittsburgh bloggers gathers for an informal chat at Finnegan’s Wake on the North Side. It is a laid back event - just show up and grab a name tag. Great opportunity to chat with some of your favorite bloggers and meet other bloggers.

WHAT: Pittsburgh Blogfest 17
WHEN: Friday, February 20th, 2009, 5:30 PM to 9:30 PM and beyond!
WHERE: Finnegan’s Wake (near PNC Park, 20 General Robinson St., North Shore, 412-325-2601), in the Pub Room
WHO: All local bloggers/podcasters (and their friends… even if they don’t blog!)
AND: Ephemera Ephemerae, My Brilliant Mistakes, and Have a Good Sandwich. And Vannevar.

As always, if you plan to attend, please send an e-mail to blogfest AT closkey.com.

Perfect Office Skylights for Pittsburgh

I have decided on lighting for my office. Or rather, I have seen what would be perfect lighting for any office, but I can't possibly justify it, and I couldn't talk anybody into it, either. The Sky Factory makes very, very high-end ceiling panels that look like the sky and generate enough full-spectrum light to sustain the illusion. On their standard products you get a fixed image, but on the higher end, oh my, you can have clouds rolling by, the trees will flex gently in the wind, etc. You can even choose to have the ceiling represent sunrise and sunset, with regional variations.

You'd have Lake Wobegon weather; never overcast, never raining. I'd like to have an airplane fly by on the downwind every hour or so, but with the way the airline industry's going it would be risky to paint any particular company's livery on the plane. In truth, I couldn't justify it to myself. The only places that seem to be installing this are medical suites, and I think they can make the argument that a relaxing atmosphere is beneficial. But It is a magnificent concept, though.

Tour of California Lance, Floyd, Levi, and George

In one week (February 14th), the Tour of California kicks off. It's a bicycle race on public roads, contested by teams of bicyclists.

Bicycle racing by itself is a funny kind of sport in the way that Wrestling or Arena Football are funny - there's athletes, scandal, hokey drama, but usually there's enough apparently virtuous contenders to make you want to believe it's plausible.

When bicycle racing happens with teams of riders, crammed into a pack (the peloton) of elbows and knees, the sport gains all the strategy and purity of Roller Derby. The costumes are pretty similar, too.

There are big names among the riders, and big-money companies sponsoring teams in hopes of burning their logos into the national consciousness. The main sponsor of the event is Amgen, a biopharmaceutical company. One of Amgen's products is EPO, which is the blood-doping agent most often seen in cycling scandals, and Amgen is sponsoring the ride, proving that somebody at Corporate has a sense of humor.

Each day, these jerseys will be awarded:

Points Leader	Most Courageous	King of the Mountains	Best Sprinter	Best Young Rider

One key bit of drama will be Team Astana. Johan Bruyneel is the Director, and the riders include Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador, Andreas Klöden and Levi Leipheimer. Levi Leipheimer is a favorite of mine, he seems a quiet guy that works at it, the ToC is in his backyard, and he's never failed a drug test. Lance's return will provide a spectacle, especially with his former Postal teammates now on opposing teams.

Team Columbia Highroad features George Hincapie, Lance's former domestique (subordinate). Always the bridesmaid rarely the bride, George is getting long in the tooth.


Team Ouch (formerly HealthNet) features Floyd Landis' return to pro cycling. He won the inaugural 2006 ToC, and has had a new hip installed since his 2006 Tour de France win and debacle. Team Ouch is sponsored by Floyd's physician, and seems more like a vehicle for Floyd's reintroduction than a serious team.


Let us not forget that Lance made his name by winning the Thrift Drug Classic in Pittsburgh in 1992, '93, and '94. In the 1995 photo below, Andrea Peron (L) leads Lance Armstrong (R) across the crest of Mt. Washington. Ah, the things that used to be here.
(photo credit: Doug Pen)


The ToC will be on television via Versus.

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By the way, I'd like to rollout my favorite jersey, which I received as a Christmas gift and hope to get a lot of use out of in the spring: The Old Guys Who Get Fat In Winter team jersey.

Cloud Computing, Freemium Storage, and the Business Cycle

It's 10 pm, do you know where your kids files are?

When the economy is growing and new technology and applications are explored because they're nifty, rather than significant, a lot of people are geniuses. When the business cycles turns, which is a certainty, all the kicky little ephemeral things are blown away by reality. Fluff dies; very few people are geniuses in hard times.

Think about a concept like FaceBook, Twitter, Digg, Blogger, Flickr, Picasa, Google (gasp!) -- let's talk about a new startup, Vapor. A couple of hungry young classmates start it off as a cool project in the garage. They can do it on a shoestring, because all they've got is shoestrings, and they don't have dependents.

Vapor starts out as a concept, a logo, a web site and a server. They build a Web 2.0 application as a startup, then they get some venture capital (VC) money and begin to ramp up. Users come in because it's free and start contributing to the network. The connections among the users become valuable to them, and Vapor starts to fill a perceived need the audience never knew they had.

Soon, all the people in your (college class, family, soccer league) are on Vapor. Vapor gets its third round of VC funding. They're selling ads on their website, and Tshirts. There's no physical product, the value is in the accumulated network and the presence of so many people.

Vapor gets bought out by MegaCorp (which was the founder's fantasy all along). MegaCorp still lets you store your (pictures, diary, blog, contact info, travel plans) for free, and you can upgrade to premium services (hence freemium) like a concierge travel service, and a database listing the must-see's at the towns you're about to visit.

Businesses will offer these free services, these audacious proposals, because the barriers to entry are so low as to be non-existing, the marginal cost of storing data (photos, calendars, contacts, diaries, itineraries) approaches zero, the potential lifetime value of a customer is enormous, and the value of a relationship with a large group of web-accessing Americans is significant.

In other words, it costs almost nothing to store data, and if you can provide a little free service in a freemium model you might end up with a very valuable database. If it doesn't work you really haven't lost that much money, and you and your startup buddies have had fun, gained experience, and made contacts. There's a small likelihood of fantastic wealth, no risk or downside.

Ah, finally, the word appears: risk. What would happen if you kept a person's diary, and it was very important to somebody (like a publisher) and then your server blew up and you lost the data? That would be a bad thing; it doesn't fit the business plan. So the Vapor lawyer writes Terms of Service (TOS) that says, we're not responsible for any loss of files/data, and we're not responsible for any impact of your files/data. The audience is getting this for free, and they're getting what they've paid for.

But Then the economy goes through a prolonged bad patch. At first a little bit of bad times is a good thing for the sharks; the competitors with good ideas and shaky financing sell their concept cheap, and the sharks snatch them up and increase their odds of MegaCorp buyout Nirvana. But if the tough times get really serious and the funding dries up, all of a sudden the freemium companies can't keep storing your data for free; there is a bill that becomes due. It might not cost much per user but now they've got 30 million users, and they're not hungry youngsters in a garage anymore; they've got a building and whiteboards and Herman Miller chairs and kids, and all their stock options are underwater.

So what does Vapor 2.1 do? Hire an old-school CEO, update the logo, re-organize, fire people, and cut expenses. They calculate their burn rate vs. cash available, and hope that the world changes before the cash is gone. About halfway to the zero-cash date, they start shutting down free services in an attempt to delay the inevitable, in hopes of a savior.

And - I'm sorry to have gone on so long - what does this matter? Isn't this the American way? Why should a Pittsburgher care?

Because your photos are all on Flickr or Picasa, and if they fold you really don't have a copy anymore because your old laptop died in October, and there aren't any more copies of that picture of you giving Big Ben advice in training camp.

The freemium online storage companies (and that's what they are, really, is storage companies - storing your data online) have no obligation to preserve or back up your files. Their financial plan doesn't provide for treating your blog entries like future literature, or treating those photos of your kid and your grandmother like they're important.

So the first question of this post is a play on the old public service announcement: Do you know where your children are? Except today's slogan is: Do you know where your data is? Do you have backup copies of all your information that somebody's storing for free for you? Is there anything out there that you'd hate to lose?

There's a tendency to say, well those social services weren't serious business anyway, they weren't (harrumph!) Business-to-Business B2B endeavors, it'll never effect the important things (business).

The problem is that businesses are moving to Cloud Computing, where your servers aren't in your building or your data center - they're out there (somewhere), being run by an outsourcing vendor. These are rigorous systems with robust capabilities, but they're run as a commodity, on razor-thin margins, in a must-profit world. There have been some problems with the cloud. If some of these enterprise cloud storage outfits go poof, any business that relied upon them will probably follow suit.

(more1) , (more2)

Eye-Fi : Another Solution with its own Problems

There's a problem with digital cameras (for people who don't own Apple's): how do you get the pictures out of the camera and make use of them? You could connect the camera to your computer with the mini-USB cable (where is that?) and then connect to Shutterfly (Flickr, etc.) and upload the images to the (slow) internet. You could take the memory stick out, stick it in your printer, and work it that way. You could take the memory stick to Walmart and get prints.

These options are all good for Geeks Like Me™, but they're not good options for your Aunt Mary, who likes the internet but isn't technically adept.

Enter the Eye-Fi wireless memory card. You're on vaction and take some photos, it stores them. You go to a coffee shop and turn your camera on, your Eye-Fi card senses the cafe's WiFi hotspot and automatically uploads your photos to Shutterfly. By the time you get home, Aunt Mary has already seen the photos of your vacation and ordered her prints of Little Betsy at Six Flags.

Not only that, but the Eye-Fi attempts to put "geo-tags" on your photos. A geo-tab is embedded location information, tucked into the format of your image file. The problem is, true geo-tagging requires a GPS connection, and there isn't any GPS on the Eye-Fi - instead, it attempts to triangulate a position based on received and identified WiFi hotspots. No wifi hotspots, no ersatz geotagging - which is too bad, because that would have been very cool.

So I said to my SOⁱ, who dreads the tedious connect-the-camera-to-the-laptop-and-upload-pics-to-Shutterfly shuffle, Hey this is great, it'll automatically upload your photos via Wifi, wherever we go. And my SO said, What? And have strangers with Wifi sniffers seeing and copying our photos of Little Betsy at Six Flags?

And so, another almost elegant implementation of a new technology was relegated to the dustbin of early non-adoption, along with the Roomba 1.0 and the Betamax.

Cognitive Capital in a Zero-Sum Timebox

I haven't blogged in a week because I needed to spend time updating my website. I haven't overhauled my site in eight years, although I've updated all sorts of other people's websites. My monthly self-loathing at repeatedly carrying over "update biz site" from month to month in my planner finally overwhelmed my core competencies of procrastination and inertia, and now I've got it done.

It was apparent to me that I couldn't work the website and keep up the blog entries. There's a tradeoff. Keeping a blog, just like keeping a journal, takes time. Time's a precious resource.

Where does the time spent blogging come from? Not only in my own puny life, but from across the whole blogosphere?

A timebox is a project management phrase used to express strict time boundaries around a task - you can wiggle with the scope/accomplishments but you can't change the total time, which is a lot like Life, now that I think about it.

My timebox is fixed -- any time spent on This occurs at the cost of That. It's a zero-sum constraint. To the extent that we are able to make decisions about time, and to the extent that they're good decisions, we're effective.

I remember LBB (Life Before Blogs) and there weren't a lot of people sitting around with an extra 3.5 hours each week wondering, gosh what to do with this time? Now there are a lot of people spending 3.5 hours each week blogging. That's a change. This new activity happens at the cost of displaced activities. What wins, what loses?

It's not just time, although that's the easiest metric; it's also our thoughtfulness, it's our mindshare, it's that we spend time thinking about This rather than That. It's an allocation of cognitive capital, which opens the door to economic analysis. Which makes me wonder: Are we as rational with our time and mindshare as we are with our money?

What are we doing less of? If the blogs and the web are winning the battle for time, what is losing the battle? What is suffering from reduced attention that may have moved to the internet? I would suggest (1) newspapers and (2) television and maybe (3) novels are losing mindshare.


The intellectual arguments of the Revolutionary Way were inspired by pamphleteers. Later newspapers came to be the place where public discourse was found, and so at times we grant newspapers special status as the Fourth Estate, the bulwark of democracy, and we even toy with giving journalists "rights" that are not enumerated in the Constitution. Newspapers are just advertising with stories and opinions printed on the back, in order to get you to scan the ads. Now you don't have to put up with the ads to read stories of interest.

But If the papers die when the ads go away, then maybe their essential nature is that they're shills for the ad budgets. Have you seen any one-star movie ratings in a newspaper lately? In the same way, television is a series of advertisements embedded in stories and pictures, and people aren't going to KDKA or WPXI the way they used to.

I used to feel a bit smug about how little television gets watched in my house, and then I saw us each sitting with our laptops and I wondering if we haven't just substituted laptop screens for the TV screen. Even on potential "snow delay" days, where my generation went to TV and radio, today my kids are on the web.

The question I'd like to ask bloggers is: what have you stopped doing in order to have blog time?

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Best take-away from the Super Bowl: